A VERY SHORT V-LOG....In which Matt Yglesias shows us that his little brother is even smarter than he is.

MATTHEW DOWD SPEAKS....I would probably be sued for blogger malpractice if I didn't link to today's New York Times story about the Epiphany of Matthew Dowd:

In a wide-ranging interview here, Mr. Dowd called for a withdrawal from Iraq and expressed his disappointment in Mr. Bush's leadership....In speaking out, Mr. Dowd became the first member of Mr. Bush's inner circle to break so publicly with him.

....Mr. Dowd's journey from true believer to critic in some ways tracks the public arc of Mr. Bush's political fortunes....Mr. Dowd, 45, said he hoped in part that by coming forward he would be able to get a message through to a presidential inner sanctum that he views as increasingly isolated. But, he said, he holds out no great hope.

....He said he thought Mr. Bush handled the immediate aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks well but "missed a real opportunity to call the country to a shared sense of sacrifice." He was dumbfounded when Mr. Bush did not fire Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld after revelations that American soldiers had tortured prisoners at Abu Ghraib.

....He describes the administration's handling of Hurricane Katrina, and the president's refusal in the summer of 2005 to meet with the war protester Cindy Sheehan, whose son died fighting in Iraq, around the same time that Mr. Bush entertained the bicyclist Lance Armstrong at his Crawford ranch as further cause for doubt.

"I had finally come to the conclusion that maybe all these things along do add up," he said. "That it's not the same, it's not the person I thought."

Welcome to reality, Mr. Dowd. Like you, though, I hold out no great hope that Bush will come out of his cocoon. In fact, I expect just the opposite.

PURGEGATE FALLOUT....Hey, remember that local corruption case that Heather Wilson and Pete Domenici wanted the New Mexico U.S. Attorney to file before the November midterms? It would have been sweet. After all, there's nothing like a juicy corruption probe against the opposition party to help the good guys in a close election.

Well, indictments have finally been returned. Bud Cummins, one of the other fired U.S. Attorneys, writes about it in Salon today:

On Friday, a New Mexico federal grand jury returned an indictment against New Mexico Senate President Pro Tem Manny Aragon and others of conspiring to skim $4.2 million in public funds. This happens to be the culmination of an investigation supervised by my colleague David Iglesias, before he was forced to resign. It is also the same case that stimulated improper telephone calls to Mr. Iglesias from a U.S. senator and a congresswoman

It is almost a certainty that the talented and hardworking law enforcement agents and prosecutors working on this significant case will now have to battle accusations of improper political motivation behind the prosecution. There will be no real basis for it, but they will have to answer the allegations nonetheless. Before the U.S. attorneys scandal, the defense team never would have considered using those allegations. Now, it is almost a certainty that they will be raised because of the way the administration carried out the U.S. attorney dismissals.

Way to go, Republicans! Your sleazy partisanship has given the defense a great case. Proud days indeed.

(By the way, a note for you nonsubscribers: the daypass ad you have to sit through to read Salon content is shorter and less annoying than in the past. Only about ten seconds or so. If you haven't clicked through a Salon link lately because you didn't feel like sitting through the ad, you might want to give them another try.)

PARANOIA WATCH....This is not really news, but a couple of days ago the Navy announced the sailing date for that third carrier group heading to the gulf:

The Nimitz carrier strike group will sail from San Diego for the gulf on Monday, a navy spokesman said. It will replace the Dwight D. Eisenhower...."You are looking at the early part of May that you would have the transition. It would be without any overlap. There is no plan to overlap them at all," Lt. Cmdr. Jeff Davis said by telephone from naval headquarters in Washington.

"No overlap." OK. Though that's what they'd say whether they were planning some overlap or not, right? There was also this odd report coming out of Russia a few days ago:

Russian military intelligence services are reporting a flurry of activity by U.S. Armed Forces near Iran's borders, a high-ranking security source said Tuesday.

"The latest military intelligence data point to heightened U.S. military preparations for both an air and ground operation against Iran," the official said, adding that the Pentagon has probably not yet made a final decision as to when an attack will be launched.

It's probably nothing, and God knows I don't want to go all grassy knoll on you. Just passing along the latest rumors. One way or the other, though, we're sure putting a lot of naval firepower into a very small area where there are currently no particular naval threats.

FLAT MAXIMA....A couple of weekends ago I linked to an op-ed piece that mentioned something called the "principle of the flat maximum." The idea is that at the very top range of ability level, everyone is so highly qualified that it's almost impossible to predict who's really going to be the best at the next level of performance. The measured differences are just too small.

What would be a good test of this? How about the NFL draft? The players drafted in the first two rounds are the 64 best college football players in the country, and this is very elite territory indeed. The fact that pro scouts have a ton of information on each player makes this a very stringent test of the PotFM, but even so, if the principle is really true, the performance of these 64 players once they get to the pros ought to be fairly random.

So is it? If you compared the pro careers of, say, all the players drafted in the first round during the 1980s to those drafted in the second round, what would you find? Obviously this requires some consistent measure of pro performance, but it seems like there are thousands of sports geeks out there who have come up with performance metrics of various kinds, so this ought to be doable. Does anyone know if this kind of comparison has ever been done?

POSTSCRIPT: What might prevent this from being a good test? One thing that comes to mind is the possibility that first round draft picks are given more opportunity to prove themselves. If you're drafted #3 and have a multi-million dollar contract, your team will probably keep playing you even if you have a mediocre season or two. If you're drafted #58, you'll probably get cut.

What else would be a good test of the PotFM? Outside of sports, that is.

NO NEWS IS BAD NEWS....The Outrage Of The Day™ (Media Edition) appears to be Radar's report about the peculiar news judgment displayed in the new issue of Time magazine:

Is Time trying to bury the attorney general scandal that's seized Washington, D.C., for the past three months? In just the last week, new documents emerged contradicting Alberto Gonzales's account of his role in the firings, a low-level Department of Justice staffer announced her intent to plead the Fifth if asked to testify before Congress, and Justice officials admitted that it had misled Congress when it denied last month that Karl Rove played a role in deciding which U.S. attorneys got the boot. Yet the new issue of Time, on stands today, contains precisely zero stories on the scandal. Nothing. As though it's not happening.

Well, sure. But as near as I can tell Time barely reports political news at all these days. After all, the passage of a bill calling for a timeline to withdraw from Iraq -- seems like news to me! -- got the same amount of attention as Alberto Gonzales did: none. The only piece of hard political news in the entire magazine this week is a short piece about the Democratic healthcare debate last Saturday.

This trend is, if I can coin a phrase, hardly news. Time has been getting steadily less newsy for years, and for better or worse, they just don't cover breaking political events much anymore. That's CNN's job.

FRIDAY CATBLOGGING.... Here's yet another view of my frequently poor working conditions here at blog central. Worse than usual, actually, since Inkblot is generally not a lap cat. (And a good thing, too. Even on a diet his geometrodynamic spacetime warping ability is considerable.)

This week we've tried an experiment with Inkblot. Usually we open a can of cat food each night and split it between a couple of plates. Domino wolfs down her half in about a minute or so and then walks up behind Inkblot and starts staring at him. He quickly gets nervous and heads out to the living room, leaving half his dinner to the victorious Domino.

I got to feeling sorry for him, though, so for the past week I've been putting his plate up on the dining room table. Domino hasn't figured this out yet, and it turns out that without her eyes boring into the back of his neck Inkblot finishes up his dinner fine. He's just a little too sensitive to do it while someone else is hovering around.

So: is this a good thing or a bad thing? On the plus side, Inkblot gets to finish his dinner in peace, which seems only fair. On the downside, he's supposed to be losing weight, and Domino's fierce gaze is probably a positive thing diet-wise. Dither dither.

SCIENCE, SHMIENCE....The Washington Post reports today on another loyal Bushie: Julie MacDonald, deputy assistant secretary for fish and wildlife and parks. The Interior Department's inspector general has been looking into her actions for a few months and issued his report yesterday:

The IG noted that MacDonald "admitted that her degree is in civil engineering and that she has no formal educational background in natural sciences" but repeatedly instructed Fish and Wildlife scientists to change their recommendations on identifying "critical habitats," despite her lack of expertise.

At one point, according to Fish and Wildlife Service Director H. Dale Hall, MacDonald tangled with field personnel over designating habitat for the endangered Southwestern willow flycatcher, a bird whose range is from Arizona to New Mexico and Southern California. When scientists wrote that the bird had a "nesting range" of 2.1 miles, MacDonald told field personnel to change the number to 1.8 miles. Hall, a wildlife biologist who told the IG he had had a "running battle" with MacDonald, said she did not want the range to extend to California because her husband had a family ranch there.

Hey, nothing wrong with that. Give that woman a Presidential Medal of Freedom!

HILLARY AND THE INSURANCE COMPANIES....Hillary Clinton hasn't yet released details of her universal healthcare plan, but Karen Tumulty reports this line from the healthcare debate in Las Vegas last week:

Clinton warned that her plan will spark a "big political battle" because it will mean "taking money away from people who make out really well right now." And who might those people be? "Well," she answered, "let's start with the insurance companies."

Yes, let's! I like her plan already.

On the other hand, I'm not much of a fan of one of the other pillars of her upcoming plan: employer mandates, in which employers are required to either provide healthcare plans themselves or pay into a common fund of some kind. It seems like a mess, and it generates huge opposition among business groups. Just fund the thing with a VAT or an income tax increase and be done with it.

But I'm just dreaming here. If and when universal healthcare comes, it's almost certain to include an employer mandate. Probably lots of other clunky provisions that I don't like too. It's not easy passing a camel through the eye of a conference committee.

GOODLING....Via Max, the Washington Post has a short profile of Monica Goodling, the DOJ hack who rose through the ranks to become Alberto Gonzales's counsel:

Part of a generation of young religious conservatives who swept into the federal government after the election of President Bush in 2000, Goodling displayed unblinking devotion to the administration and expected others to do the same.

....To her detractors, Goodling was an enforcer of political loyalty who was not squeamish about firings -- of interns or of senior officials.

"She forced many very talented, career people out of main Justice so she could replace them with junior people that were either loyal to the administration or would score her some points," said a former career Justice official who spoke on the condition of anonymity, citing fear of reprisal.

That's only her detractors, though. Her admirers think she was great. After all, actual experience and subject area expertise are not qualities held in high esteem within the Bush administration.

Oh, and one other thing: Sheldon Whitehouse pointed out yesterday that, for some reason, Goodling is still employed at the Justice Department even though "the department encourages corporations to fire employees who refuse to cooperate with government investigations." I guess taking the 5th is OK as long as you're a loyal Bushie.

IRAN UPDATE....Why did Iran's Revolutionary Guard decide to seize 15 British sailors and marines last week? David Ignatius hazards a guess:

European officials note that the provocative move comes as speculation grows about new discussions between the United States and Iran -- a dialogue the Revolutionary Guard may oppose.

....U.S. Undersecretary of State Nicholas Burns said several weeks ago that the United States was getting "pinged all over the world" by Iranian intermediaries who wanted a resumption of talks. Iran's chief negotiator, Ali Larijani, hinted at such a message in his recent contacts with the European Union's top diplomat, Javier Solana. But the prospect of nuclear talks may have been blown out of the water, as it were, until the British issue is resolved.

Maybe that was the goal of seizing the sailors and marines. The Revolutionary Guard, after all, can't be happy about curbing the nuclear program that would allow it to project power even more aggressively.

It's as good a theory as any.

PURGEGATE UPDATE....I've been negligent in following up the latest in Purgegate. Sorry. Here's a quick summary of Kyle Sampson's testimony today:

Least surprising revelation: that Alberto Gonzales was indeed involved in discussions about firing those U.S. Attorneys. "I don't think the attorney general's statement that he was not involved in any discussions about U.S. attorney removals is accurate," Sampson said. In other words, Gonzales lied. Knock me over with a feather.

Most bizarre revelation: that Sampson recommended firing Patrick Fitzgerald in the middle of his investigation into Plamegate. "That was a piece of bad judgment on my behalf to even raise it," Sampson said. No kidding.

Most heartfelt revelation: that Sampson is all too aware he screwed up. "Looking back on all of this . . . in hindsight I wish the department hadn't gone down this road at all," he said. Roger that, Kyle.

But really, here's the single most remarkable thing about Sampson's testimony. Purgegate broke open ten weeks ago. As Sampson himself admitted, the Justice Department's explanations of the affair since then have been comically inept. Sampson himself has known for a couple of weeks that he was going to testify before Congress today.

And what's the single biggest question we all have? It's this: so why did you choose those particular eight prosecutors to fire, anyway?

And after all this time to prepare and finally get it right, what did Sampson say? Nothing. Almost literally, nothing. He still didn't have any plausible, documented reasons for firing the USA-8. He stumbled around a bit, eventually claiming that the process wasn't "scientific" but also wasn't "extensively documented." Here's his final explanation: "I don't remember keeping a very good file," he said. "It was a chart and notes that I would dump into my lower right desk drawer."

And that, supposedly, was that. There were two years of plans to fire these guys, but we're supposed to believe that no one really kept any notes and nobody really knows why these guys were selected. It was just a gestalt sort of thing.

Unbelievable. But which is worse: that he's lying or that he's telling the truth?

FLIP!....FLOP!....Apparently Republicans have given up on defending their favored candidates from charges of relentless pandering and flip-flopping. The evidence is just too stark. Instead they're reduced to arguing pathetically that at least their guy hasn't flip-flopped as much as the other guys. Jon Chait runs down the scorecard.

TAL AFAR....Last year, it seemed as if half the reporters in Baghdad made a pilgrimage to Ninewah province and filed glowing reports about how the relative calm in the city of Tal Afar demonstrated that counterinsurgency could work in Iraq if only it were planned and executed competently. This was always something of a mirage, but even with that in mind yesterday's news about the resurgence of violence there left me too discouraged to write anything about it. However, others are made of sterner stuff. Joe Klein gets the gist here:

The violence in Tal Afar is all the more depressing because that city was the site of the most recent, pre-Baghdad experiment in counter-insurgency tactics. The estimable scholar-warrior Col H.R. McMaster led the effort, and Bush praised it at the time...and it fell apart as soon as the Americans left.

Spencer Ackerman, who spent last week in Mosul (about 40 miles east of Tal Afar), says that without exception, every officer he talked to credited the relative peace of Ninewah province to "the competence and strength of the 2nd and 3rd Iraqi Army Divisions operating in Ninewah, as well as the Iraqi police." But that was last week. So what happened?

The depth of sectarian division in Ninewah is impressive to behold, even for a cynic or a pessimist....Yet for the most part, the political process in the province has held.

....What the Tal Afar massacre shows is how thin a tissue the process is. By Baghdad standards, the twin suicide bombings weren't that much pressure for the jihadists to apply, and they managed to spur a bloodbath that sucked at least some members of the security forces in....Yet Petraeus, Wiercinski, Twitty, etc, have a point. Ninewah does evince more normalcy than most Iraqi provinces. The trouble is that things like the Tal Afar massacre are part of normalcy in the new Iraq.

It's simply not possible for a political process to take even minimal hold in the middle of a tinderbox -- and this week's violence strongly suggests that even after two years of successful (!) counterinsurgency Tal Afar remains a tinderbox. So ask yourself: If the Army's showpiece of counterinsurgency -- in a city of modest size far away from the fury of the Sunni triangle -- breaks down at the first hint of violence, what does that say about Baghdad? That we would need 200,000 troops there for ten years to have even a modest hope of success? Probably. But we don't have either 200,000 troops or ten years.

Every day that we stay in Iraq does further damage to our long-range best interests in the Middle East. At best, that would be worth it only if our continued presence there were likely to bring a measure of peace to Iraq itself. The failure of Tal Afar suggests that we don't have either the manpower or the ability to do that, and that in turn means we're literally accomplishing nothing in Iraq except making things worse along almost every dimension.

The sooner we get out of Iraq, the sooner we can rethink our recklessly militaristic approach to the war on terror and instead start applying some common sense to the problem. Unfortunately, it looks like we still have a couple more years of digging ourselves deeper into a hole before that will happen. 2009 can't come soon enough.

McCAIN A DEMOCRAT?....Did John McCain seriously consider switching to the Democratic Party in 2001? Seriously enough to discuss it with Democratic leaders for two full months? That's what former Senator Tom Daschle and former Rep. Tom Downey say.

And McCain? After first saying he was preparing a response, he now says he's decided not to comment. Steve Benen has the full rundown.

Like everyone else who's commented on this, I have to assume that McCain's candidacy is toast if this story is verified -- or even if McCain doesn't produce a plausible rebuttal. He better start talking fast.

SAY IT, DON'T JUST SAY YOU'RE GOING TO SAY IT....In the New York Times today, Robin Toner quotes Matt Bennett of Third Way saying that Democrats need a positive national security plan that goes beyond mere opposition to the Iraq War. Matt Yglesias complains:

The only way for Democrats not to be defined entirely by opposition to the war is for the Bennett's of the world to say the things they think need to be said instead of saying that someone should say those things. If not Bennett, who? If not now, when? Quotations in major newspapers are a precious commodity; there's no point in wasting that space on not-very-original meta talk.

In fairness to Bennett, it's possible that he did say something about concrete strategy and Toner just didn't use it. But that aside, I think the real answer comes a few paragraphs later:

Ultimately, though, the party's foreign policy will be defined on the presidential campaign trail, by the candidates and eventually the nominee. "Congress can only take this so far," Senator Durbin said. "We deal with dollars and with votes."

I think that's basically right. There are 280 Democratic members of Congress, and they just don't all agree on what our foreign policy should look like. There's really no way around that, and if Al Gore had won the presidency in 2000 it's likely that Republicans would be having the same problem. (Although they have an advantage: "use more military force" is a nice, simple message that they all seem to agree on regardless of the problem at hand. Democrats have no such schoolyard approach to fall back on.)

Frankly, think tanks and bloggers and national security wonks don't have much to offer here except to the extent that they influence the Democratic presidential candidates. The real key to the resurgence of the Democratic Party is to nominate someone who has the good judgment to formulate a sane foreign policy in an age of jihad; the guts to stick to it even if AIPAC and Bill Kristol don't like it; and the rhetorical gifts to explain common sense so that it sounds like common sense. I think most of the top-tier Dem candidates at least have the potential to do this. Whether they actually do it is the $64 question.

OVERPAID....Here's the latest news from the non-unionized service sector:

Circuit City Stores Inc. has a message for some of its best-paid employees: Work for less or work somewhere else.

The electronics retailer on Wednesday laid off 3,400 people who earned "well above" the local market rate for the sort of jobs they held at its stores. In 11 weeks they'll be able to apply for their old positions -- which will come with lower hourly wages.

How charming. I wonder if any of Circuit City's executives are being laid off? Surely some of them are being overpaid too?

POLITICIZING THE JUSTICE DEPARTMENT....Joseph Rich was chief of the voting section in the Justice Department's civil right division from 1999 to 2005. Today he writes that ever since 2001 the division has been deliberately politicized in an effort to favor the prospects of Republican candidates:

I spent more than 35 years in the department enforcing federal civil rights laws -- particularly voting rights. Before leaving in 2005, I worked for attorneys general with dramatically different political philosophies -- from John Mitchell to Ed Meese to Janet Reno. Regardless of the administration, the political appointees had respect for the experience and judgment of longtime civil servants.

Under the Bush administration, however, all that changed. Over the last six years, this Justice Department has ignored the advice of its staff and skewed aspects of law enforcement in ways that clearly were intended to influence the outcome of elections.

The firing of John McKay and David Iglesias are two pieces of this puzzle, as is the hiring of Bradley Schlozman last year as interim USA for Missouri. The result?

Morale plummeted, resulting in an alarming exodus of career attorneys. In the last two years, 55% to 60% of attorneys in the voting section have transferred to other departments or left the Justice Department entirely.

At the same time, career staff were nearly cut out of the process of hiring lawyers. Control of hiring went to political appointees, so an applicant's fidelity to GOP interests replaced civil rights experience as the most important factor in hiring decisions.

All part of the grand plan. All part of the plan.

FEAR, FEAR, FEAR....In the LA Times today, L.J. Williamson writes about one of my all-time pet peeves: the insane fear that modern suburban parents have of sexual predators:

At a PTA meeting, during a discussion of traffic problems around the school campus, I asked what we could do to encourage families to walk or bike to school. Other parents looked at me as if I'd suggested we stuff the children into barrels and roll them into the nearest active volcano. One teacher looked at me in shock. "I wouldn't let my children walk to school alone ... would you?"

"Haven't you heard about all of the predators in this area?" asked a father.

"No, I haven't," I said. "I think this is a pretty safe neighborhood."

"You'd be surprised," he replied, lowering his eyebrows. "You should read the Megan's Law website." He continued: "You know how to solve the traffic problem around this school? Get rid of all the predators. Then you won't have any more traffic."

Huh?

"Huh" indeed. As Williamson says, child abduction by strangers is very, very rare. About as likely as being hit by lightning. "But it's not fear of lightning strikes that parents cite as the reason for keeping children indoors watching television instead of out on the sidewalk skipping rope."

Even at that, though, I don't understand the bit about her son's school having a rule that K-4 kids aren't allowed to ride bicycles to school. What's up with that?

UPDATE: For what it's worth, my mother the ex-schoolteacher writes in about the bicycle thing:

I think this is standard procedure among school distsricts. Legally the school district is responsible for children until they get home after school, and I suspect, though I never asked because I never cared, that they feel the chance of a younger child getting hurt bicycling on the streets to and from school is greater than with older children and they don't want to risk a lawsuit.

UPDATE 2: I also agree with Atrios' comment. Obviously this is all intertwined, but it's the fact that this fear has become practically a cultural norm that's the real problem. Don't give in to it and people think you're a bad parent. That's nuts.

UPDATE: INHOFE STILL A PRICK....We already know that James Inhofe is a scientific moron, and now we have further evidence that he's also the biggest prick in the Senate: Inhofe is single-handedly holding up permission for "Live Earth," a group associated with Al Gore, to use the National Mall for a concert on July 7. It's a point of personal privilege. Apparently he thinks the answer to global warming is more temper tantrums.

ALBERTO THE CLUELESS....The New York Times reports on Alberto Gonzales's nationwide trip to meet with U.S. Attorneys and mend fences:

Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales endured blunt criticism Tuesday from federal prosecutors who questioned the firings of eight United States attorneys, complained that the dismissals had undermined morale and expressed broader grievances about his leadership, according to people briefed on the discussion.

....He reacted unemotionally to the criticism in the private session, responding that he had not previously heard of their specific complaints, including the McNulty memorandum.

Gonzales has already told us he knew nothing about the two-year process to fire a bunch of U.S. Attorneys, and in this meeting he knew nothing about any of the specific grievances the USAs brought up. Sounds like a real hands-on kind of guy. What exactly does he think the job of Attorney General is all about?

VOTE FRAUD....Michael Waldman and Justin Levitt comment today on the apparent obsession the Justice Department had with U.S. Attorneys who failed to prosecute voter fraud cases. The problem, they say, is that despite the GOP's insistence that such cases must be widespread, in fact they're almost nonexistent:

Firing a prosecutor for failing to find wide voter fraud is like firing a park ranger for failing to find Sasquatch....Proven voter fraud, statistically, happens about as often as death by lightning strike.

....Alarmingly, the Supreme Court suggested in a ruling last year (Purcell v. Gonzalez) that fear of fraud might in some circumstances justify laws that have the consequence of disenfranchising voters....Identification requirements often sound simple. But some types of paperwork simply aren't available to many Americans. We saw this with the new Medicaid proof-of-citizenship requirement, which led to benefits being cut off for many longtime citizens. Some states insist that voters provide photo IDs such as driver's licenses. But at least 11 percent of voting-age Americans, disproportionately elderly and minority voters, lack the necessary papers. Required documentation such as naturalization paperwork can cost as much as $200.

As everyone knows -- but no one will say in public -- GOP strategists like voter ID laws not because they're truly afraid of fraud, but because experience tells them exactly which groups of people are most likely to vote less in places where such laws exist: the poor, the elderly, the disabled, and minorities. And guess what? Those groups are all disproportionately Democratic. Just a coincidence, I'm sure.

FREEDOMNOMICS....Kieran Healy has the latest on John Lott. What a loon.

THE META SCREW-UP....Eve Fairbanks writes today about the problem of keeping track of Bush administration scandals:

In the last couple of weeks, even in the minds of the lawmakers tasked with oversight, the administration's scandals and screw-ups have started to blur together into one Meta Screw-Up -- a situation in which every procedural safeguard, institutional norm, and carefully designed plan seems to have "just melted into oblivion with this sloppy administration," as Senator Dianne Feinstein put it at the Mueller hearing. The impression that we are, by now, witnessing the unfolding of one giant, undifferentiated scandal is compounded by the sense that this is some kind of watershed moment: The U.S. attorneys affair unleashed last Thursday's complaint that Bush partisans meddled with a Justice Department tobacco prosecution, which unleashed Monday's accusation that the General Services Administration was misused for political ends, and on and on.

Actually, that sounds about right to me. But does it mean there are serious scandals that aren't getting the individual attention they deserve? Fairbanks makes a case that that's what's happened to the FBI scandal, which is "arguably, just as serious as the U.S. attorneys scandal and the others." Read the rest.

EXECUTIVE PRIVILEGE....Last week we learned that Karl Rove and the White House staff have routinely used their RNC accounts to send email as a way of evading congressional oversight. "We knew E-mails could be subpoenaed," an aide told U.S. News & World Report. "We saw that with the Clintons but I don't think anybody saw that we were doing anything wrong."

So what does this mean? NYU law professor Daniel Shaviro says, "The easy and obvious point is that anything Rove sent out in an e-mail from his RNC address is not privileged." But then, drawing on an analogy with attorney-client privilege, he suggests it may mean even more:

A further interesting question is the extent to which using RNC e-mails to communicate stuff about meetings with Bush et al should be viewed as a further waiver of other executive privilege claims, at the limit on everything pertaining to the meetings and topics discussed in the RNC e-mails. On this point I would have to defer to those more knowledgeable than I am about how the attorney-client privilege is interpreted and applied.

In other words, if staffers were primarily discussing the U.S. Attorney firings on personal and RNC accounts, that implicitly means that they themselves weren't treating it as the kind of official business that would be protected by executive privilege. Alternatively, if they were using private accounts specifically to evade legitimate congressional oversight, then executive privilege claims might also fail for all their other communications as well.

So: too clever by half, as Josh Marshall asks? Is it possible that by using RNC accounts they've essentially waived executive privilege claims completely in this matter? It's an intriguing suggestion, isn't it?

"OPEN WARFARE"....Steve Benen on Purgegate:

It seems part of the administration's problem with this fiasco is an inability to find a convenient scapegoat. Gonzales blames Sampson, McNulty blames Goodling, the White House blames McNulty, Republicans on the Hill blame Gonzales, and no one on the right has figured out a way to blame Dems, the media, or MoveOn.org. It's a wild west, every-man-for-himself environment ... and these guys are yet to testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee.

According to the New York Daily News, it's "open warfare" over at the Justice Department. And the hearings haven't even started yet.

THE REEMERGENCE OF THE ERA....Every year the ERA gets re-introduced. Every year it goes nowhere. This year, though, the Democratic leadership promises to bring it to a vote. Shakespeare's Sister is dancing a jig: "I just feel deliriously happy at the mere possibility of the ERA at long last being ratified under the leadership of the first ever female Speaker."

There are, of course, some downsides to this. First, we're going to be seeing a lot more of Phyllis Schlafly. Second, we're going to hear endless prattling about unisex bathrooms and radical lesbians who have infiltrated the UN and are planning to take over the country with their black helicopters. In fact, we may even end up with ERA-themed versions of this. (Seriously, click on the link. It's off topic, but you really ought to treat yourself, even if all you do is look at the pictures. Page 21 is my favorite.)

But it'll be worth it. Let's have a vote. Even if it fails, it'll be nice to get everyone on the record.

STIFFED....Jim Hoagland reports today that Saudi Arabia has pulled out of a planned state dinner at the White House scheduled for April 17. The purported reason is that "it is not convenient," which, unsurprisingly, administration officials find somewhat unconvincing. Hoagland then goes on to note that our good friend King Abdullah of Jordan has also decided he can't make a state visit this year. Scheduling conflicts?

Hoagland manages to spin an entire column out of this, which just goes to show that he's a much older pro than I am. But pro or not, 800 words later he really doesn't have an explanation for this. Are the Saudis mad at us? Is there internal disarray among the princes? Do they just figure their intra-Arab negotiating position is better if they stay away from us for a while? He doesn't know. Neither do I.

FOCUSING ON THE PAST....On the Chris Matthews Show a couple of days ago, talking about the U.S. Attorney scandal, Time managing editor Rick Stengel said, "I am so uninterested in the Democrats wanting Karl Rove because it is so bad for them."

Today, Stengel says that he was "caught out speaking as a citizen rather than as editor of Time" and explains what he meant:

As a citizen, I think it's unfortunate and perhaps short-sighted for Democrats to be perceived as focusing on the past rather than the future.

OK. Fair enough. Except that this scandal only broke open eight weeks ago. Is the new rule that anything older than last week now counts as focusing on the past?

EGYPTIAN REFERENDUM UPDATE....Turnout was low for my pool about what winning margin would be announced for yesterday's Egyptian referendum, but it turns out that the Egyptian government eventually decided on 75.9%. That almost makes my 80% guess the winner, but Gussie barely beat me out with a guess of 73%.

Announced turnout was 27.1%, but Marc Lynch calls that "obviously absurd." The real number, he says, was between 1% and 8%, "and that, by the way, would include all of the government employees ordered to vote and the women ordered 'to go vote for the President.'" He's also got a short rundown of winners and losers.

NATIONAL HEALTHCARE....A few days ago, during an email exchange with a friend, I mentioned that I don't usually tout cost savings as a big argument in favor of universal healthcare. It's true that a national healthcare plan would almost certainly save money compared to our current Rube Goldberg system, but I suspect the savings would be modest. Rather, the real advantages of national healthcare are related to things like access (getting everyone covered), efficiency (cutting down on useless -- or even deliberately counterproductive -- administrative bureaucracies), choice (allowing people to choose and keep a family doctor instead of being jerked around everytime their employer decides to switch health providers), and social justice (providing decent, hassle-free healthcare for the poor).

Today, the LA Times has a story that sits at the intersection of several of these issues:

Health plans offered by professional associations were once havens for millions of people who couldn't get coverage anywhere else. But as medical costs have soared, groups representing professions as varied as law and golf have been forced to stop offering the benefit or been dropped by insurers.

....Although no one tracks association coverage to know how many plans have disappeared, the experience of Marsh Affinity Services is telling. A decade ago, Marsh, which brokers and administers the health plans, had 142 such clients. Today, all but three have shut down.

....Over the same period, the nation's uninsured population, now estimated at 45 million, rose dramatically, fueled in part by the dearth of affordable options for the self-employed, experts say. Among uninsured workers, nearly 63% are self-employed or work in small firms, Todd Stottlemyer, president of the National Federation of Independent Business, told Congress recently.

This shouldn't come as a surprise. For obvious reasons, health insurers have never been eager to write individual policies, and even in most group policies it's the employer who bears most of the risk. (If their claim rate goes up during the year, their premiums get bumped the next.) Even worse off are groups that allow its members the option of whether or not to join: they inevitably attract the sickest members in disproportionate numbers, leading to a "death spiral" that's explained well in the article.

So today, with healthcare costs rising and the population getting older, policies for professional groups are becoming a thing of the past -- and individual policies are disappearing along with them. And without that, a lot of people simply can't afford to start up a company, work for a small business, or become self-employed. They're stuck.

This is nuts, of course, but it's inevitable in any system of private healthcare. It's not that insurance companies are evil, it's just that they're in business to make money and you don't make any money insuring sick people. The fact that these are the people most in need of insurance doesn't matter.

But it's still nuts. And that's why we need national healthcare.

THE REPUBLICAN IMPLOSION....John Quiggin, commenting on that Pew poll that I highlighted the other day, offers an explanation for the Republican Party's cratering support:

Republican support is contracting to a base of about 25 per cent of the population whose views are getting more extreme, not merely because moderate conservatives are peeling off to become Independents, but also because of the party's success in constructing a parallel universe of news sources, thinktanks, blogs, pseudo-scientists and so on, which has led to the core becoming more tightly committed to an extremist ideology.

....The general liberalisation of thinking on social issues is unlikely to be reversed. Moreover, while American faith in military power bounced back after Vietnam, I doubt that the same will be true after Iraq. If you wanted a textbook lesson in why resort to violence is rarely a sensible choice, Bush's presentation of that lesson could hardly be bettered.

This is interesting for a couple of reasons. First is John's suggestion that the conservative infrastructure built up in the 70s and 80s has become one of the right's biggest weaknesses. I'm not sure I buy this, but it's an intriguing thought because American liberals have recently become pretty entranced by the success of all those right-wing thinktanks and radio bloviators John is talking about. If he's correct that their very success has now backfired on conservatives, what lessons does this hold for the left as we go about the task of recreating much of that infrastructure for our own side?

Second, has American faith in military power really been permanently damaged? I doubt this very much, but I'd be interested in hearing more discussion. I'd like to believe John -- that is, I'd like to believe that Iraq will serve as a permanent lesson about the limits of military power and what it can achieve, but I'm just not sure I do. This belief is very deeply embedded in American culture, after all, and I suspect that, just as with Vietnam, most people will simply conclude that Iraq was a bad war, not that it represented a fundamentally flawed worldview.

I hope I'm being too pessimistic, and Iraq really does lead to Americans taking a more sensible view of what we want to accomplish in the world and how we can most effectively accomplish it. For now, though, I'm skeptical. Comments?

TONY SNOW....Between Cathy Seipp, Elizabeth Edwards, and now Tony Snow, it suddenly seems as if everyone has cancer. Just an illusion, I know, but still a distressing one. Here's hoping he recovers.