EDITORS....Andrew Sullivan vents:

The publishing industry is one of the shallowest, dumbest and most archaic in the U.S. No one edits anything. The publishers do not care what is in their books and neither, by and large, do editors.

Is this really true? The reason I ask is that in virtually every book I read, the author praises the book's editor in glowing terms. It doesn't usually seem pro forma, either. It sounds genuine and heartfelt.

Of course, we are talking about writers here, and I suppose it's pretty easy for them to fake heartfelt acknowledgments if they want to. Is that what's going on? Are they just sucking up? Or are editors really unsung heroes?

POSTSCRIPT: And what about Andrew himself? It just so happens that I own four copies of The Conservative Soul (don't ask), and turning to the acknowledgments I see that his editor is practically the first person he thanks. Was this heartfelt? Inquiring minds want to know.

McCAFFREY AND THE SURGE....Matt Yglesias, blogging "curtly" from his iPhone, summarizes Barry McCaffrey's congressional testimony today:

General McCaffrey says we shouldn't even bother to ask whether or not the surge os working until petraeus — 'the most talented person I have ever met' — has had a year. He also says we need to give the iraq security forces many more resources. But he says we need to reduce the number of troops we have in iraq or the army will start unraveling in april. He says we can achieve that by leaving the cities. Acknowledges that this is inconsistent with pet's strategy.

This is crazy. It's completely incoherent. The whole point of the surge is to pacify the cities enough to allow some chance at political reconciliation. If you leave the cities, the whole thing falls apart. How can supposedly knowledgeable people say stuff like this?

EUGENICS....Can we get serious here? When Ross Douthat argues that "eugenics" is the right word to describe modern liberal attitudes toward abortion and gene therapy, he's not being "unfair" or "weird." He is, to use his own phrase, smearing people over a difference of opinion about bioethics.

Look: Ross is a smart guy. He knows perfectly well that modern liberals have no serious connection to eugenics advocates of the past. He knows perfectly well that abortion supporters aren't motivated by eugenicist theories. He's not using the word out of a dedication to scientific precision. Rather, he and his fellow conservatives are using the word "eugenics" because they also know perfectly well that it's (quite rightly) associated with racism, pseudo-science, and Adolf Hitler. As far as they're concerned, that's a feature, not a bug.

This is highbrow Rush Limbaugh-ism, not serious argument. Back to the sandbox with it.

BARK vs. BITE....Dan Drezner, commenting on the fact that the current crop of Democratic presidential candidates are passing up the centrist DLC's summer meeting in favor of speaking at YearlyKos, says:

The fact that YearlyKos matters more than the DLC seems like pretty damning and uncomplicated evidence to me of where the party has traveled over the last four years.

Actually, I think it is a little more complicated than the simple "left vs. centrist" spin that most people have put on this. In substantive terms, after all, the three main Democratic candidates this year are only slightly to the left of DLC big dog Bill Clinton himself.

Rather, it seems like this is mostly about optics. In the 90s, Democrats were still fighting the countercultural backlash of the 70s and needed ways to demonstrate their willingness to abandon old orthodoxies. Hanging with the DLC was a terrific way of signalling to both the press and the public that the party had reinvented itself.

But that reinvention is a done deal. As far as the optics are concerned, the DLC isn't really necessary anymore. YearlyKos is.

But it's not because the average Kossack is to the left of the average DLCer. The real difference is that the average Kossack is obsessed with Democrats having the stones to stand up to the modern Republican machine. Presidential candidates get trashed in the Kos diaries not so much when they take disfavored policy positions (though of course that happens too), but when they're viewed as backing down from a fight. The median Kossack may indeed be to the left of the median Democrat — it would be shocking if an activist group weren't — but mainly they just want their candidates to show some backbone.

I suppose in some sense this is a distinction without a difference. A median Democrat who stands up to the GOP and refuses to budge is, willy nilly, going to end up to the left of a median Democrat who looks for bipartisan compromise. But let's face it: if YearlyKos were genuinely more substantively powerful than the DLC, you'd see the big three candidates taking public positions considerably to the left of the party's positions ten years ago. If that's the case, though, I've missed it. No one's talking about rolling back welfare reform. No one's proposed a healthcare initiative even half as comprehensive as the 1994 Clinton plan. All three candidates continue to claim they're personally opposed to gay marriage. Their rhetoric on guns and abortion is much more muted than in the past. They mostly agree that some of the Bush tax cuts should be allowed to expire, but not much more. They want to get out of Iraq, but that's a thoroughly mainstream position, and none of them are willing to commit to a complete withdrawal in any case.

So has the Democratic Party moved to the left? Probably a bit. There are more misgivings about trade policy; more concern over rising income inequality; and, for obvious reasons, more skepticism about foreign military interventions. In policy terms, though, the response to all of these things has been pretty muted. Speechmaking at YearlyKos vs. the DLC is far more about bark than bite.

BEST IN THE WORLD....Andrew Tobias relates his partner's latest run-in with the American healthcare industry:

Charles went to his back surgeon in debilitating pain last month and his back surgeon told him to go for an MRI so they could see what was happening and Charles's assistant called his health insurer to get prior approval for the MRI but the health insurer said it would take three days to get approval so (did I mention Charles was in debilitating pain?) Charles got it anyway, at a cost of $2,480, which the health insurer will not pay because it was unapproved.

It's a good system.

Oh sure, carp all you want. But did you know that in France they're so impoverished that they only have one MRI machine for the whole country? And the waiting list is 15 years? And nobody knows how to operate it anyway because the instructions are in English and no one in France speaks English? So buck up, Charles.

BARKING MAD....The Nation provides a pithy explanation of why Ron Paul is a lunatic who shouldn't be allowed within a thousand yards of the White House:

Look at those policy positions! Abolish the IRS and Federal Reserve; balance the budget; go back to the gold standard; pull out of the U.N. and NATO;....fence the borders; deport illegals; stop lecturing foreign governments about human rights; let the Middle East go hang. What's not to like?

Wait. Did I say The Nation? Sorry. Actually, that was John Derbyshire writing in National Review about why Ron Paul would be absolutely brilliant as president of the United States.

Have I mentioned lately that these guys are barking mad? Consider it done.

R.I.P.....Very sad. Apparently the Bancrofts have decided to sell the Wall Street Journal to Rupert Murdoch.

UPDATE: Eric Alterman comments (in a column written several days ago):

It is rather shocking that so many people who care about the future of journalism remain silent or sanguine about his impact on one of democracy's most important professions. The news pages in the Wall Street Journal are about the smartest and bravest of any newspaper in America. Some people, like Dow Jones CEO Richard Zannino, enjoy stock holdings that offer roughly 20 million good reasons to believe that such journalism can continue unimpeded within the Murdoch empire. But the rest of us might as well believe in Peter Pan.

....The silver lining of this takeover is that when Murdoch destroys the credibility of the Journal — as he must if it is to fit in with his business plan — he will be removing the primary pillar of the editorial page's influence as well. In this regard his ownership is a kind of poisoned chalice.

CRAZIFICATION....According to Rasmussen, 28% of Americans hold a favorable opinion of Alberto Gonzales. It's yet more evidence for the John Rogers Theory of Crazification. I mean, it's one thing to argue that, technically, maybe Gonzales isn't quite guilty of perjury, but to actively approve of him? Why?

QUOTE OF THE DAY....President Bush on Monday, talking about new British prime minister Gordon Brown:

He's a problem solver. He's a glass-half-full man, not a glass-half-empty guy, you know. Some of these world leaders say, 'Oh, the problems are so significant, let us retreat, let us not take them on, they're too tough'.

Where does he come up with this stuff? Who are these foreign leaders who are so overwhelmed with their jobs that they want to go hide in a closet? I want names.

PROFESSIONALS STUDY LOGISTICS....An interesting point from Amory Lovins in an interview over at Grist:

About a third of our army's wartime fuel use is for generator sets, and nearly all of that electricity is used to air-condition tents in the desert, known as "space cooling by cooling outer space." We recently had a two-star Marine general commanding in western Iraq begging for efficiency and renewables to untether him from fuel convoys, so he could carry out his more important missions. This is a very teachable moment for the military. The costs, risks, and distractions of fuel convoys and power supplies in theater have focused a great deal of senior military attention on the need for not dragging around this fat fuel-logistics tail — therefore for making military equipment and operations several-fold more energy efficient.

The Apollo program gave us Tang, so why can't the Iraq war give us fuel-efficient vehicles? It would be nice to get some benefit out of it, after all.

FRED THOMPSON UPDATE....It turns out that Fred "The Great White Hope" Thompson managed to raise only a piddling $3 million in the second quarter of the year. Reaction has been swift:

Some are already saying a prospective Thompson run is a flop. "I just don't see it anymore," said a key Republican who had been extremely enthusiastic about a Thompson candidacy.

"That number is really underwhelming. There were indications it could be double that. They've been saying that people were waiting for Fred, and the money was going to pour in. He looks like he's already losing momentum."

And the Thompson camp's response? Hey, he's just testing the waters:

"There has been some criticism that the testing-the-waters committee is not such a testing-the-waters committee....He's raising enough to test the waters....It's a testing-the-waters-type number."

So, um, how does the water feel, Fred? Chilly?

FOR THE RECORD....Just to make sure there's no misunderstanding, Ross Douthat explains today that, yes, he really does believe that modern progressives favor a "new eugenics." Or, in any case, "eugenic-ish tendencies." Or, when we actually get down to the nub of the thing as it relates to actual progressives, "an unfettered right to abortion." So that explains that.

SERIOUS DEBATE....Matt Yglesias writes today about the media's treatment of last week's mini-fracas between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. Why, he asks, were pundits interested almost exclusively in the politics of the disagreement instead of the substance?

The first votes won't be cast until months from now. Why not cover what the candidates are saying about things and whether or not those things make sense? Why not let the issues play out a little bit and just wait and see who gains the advantage? Whether or not either Clinton or Obama ever intended to establish a sharp policy disagreement, there is an interesting issue here — should the United States abandon its policy of seeking to "isolate" countries we don't like by refusing to talk to them unless they first meet a series of preconditions?

This is a standard complaint about modern media coverage of politics, and God knows I'm sympathetic to it. I'd sure like the media to spend more time on substance.

On the other hand, Clinton and Obama themselves didn't exactly take the chance to elevate this into a scholarly colloquium themselves, did they? Instead we got Clinton calling Obama "naive" and "irresponsible," and Obama hitting back by accusing Clinton of endorsing a "Bush/Cheney lite" foreign policy. Enlightening stuff, no? Is it any wonder the press covered this as a food fight rather than a serious debate?

THE SAUDI ARMS DEAL....I've only been following the recently announced Saudi arms deal with half an eye and don't really have a strong opinion about it. However, William Arkin's rundown of the deal today sure sounds about right:

There isn't one weapon in the package that will enhance American interests or security — or Saudi security, for that matter — and there certainly isn't one that threatens Israel....The Saudi monarchy has methodically focused its military on pomp and equipment and spiffy uniforms, ensuring that it not acquire any real offensive capacity or the ability to operate as a coherent force. It does not want a competent, independent military contemplating a coup. These toys are really for the battalions of princes to play with.

....Want early warning of what will happen? Despite congressional opposition, Saudi Arabia will get its arms: the money is just too much and the lobbying will just be too intense. Israel will voice its concern but basically accept the deal; it knows fundamentally that there is no Saudi airplane that threatens it. The Saudis will pledge to rein in extremists supporting the insurgency and terror in Iraq, then basicallly do nothing. And Iran will protest (in fact, it already has), to no avail. Tehran, of course, needn't worry either, although American domination of the arms supply will solidify the American empire in the region, at least militarily.

....American contractors will train, maintain and even operate the new Saudi equipment. American military personnel will follow. We will buy nothing in terms of security, and we will just put our own people in danger. But most important, we will once again renew the cycle of American penetration into the heart of Islam, one of Osama bin Laden's original and most compelling rallying points. That's why the Saudi deal is so dangerous.

WANKER OF THE DAY....Chuck Schumer.

Look, I know Schumer's job is to raise money, and I know that Wall Street for a New York senator is the equivalent of the corn farming industry for an Iowa senator. But still. If you write a book about how much you love the middle class, the least you can do is have the gumption to support taxing hedge fund billionaires at the same rate as everyone else. Hell, even Robert Rubin supports changing the tax rate on carried interest.

Blecch. I really hate the Democratic leadership sometimes. It's a good thing for them I hate the Republican leadership so much more.

USAGE QUERY....A Washington Post story about an upcoming auction of wireless spectrum includes this sentence:

The auction is also testing the political might of Google, which has to this point been somewhat of an outsider in Washington.

Question: do you think the phrase "somewhat of" is correct in this context? I see this a lot, and it strikes me as flatly wrong. It should be "something of an outsider."

Agree? Disagree? Did "somewhat of" used to be incorrect but has since become standard usage? Or has it always been OK?

MEN ARE PIGS, PART 487....I've long counseled women I know to be more aggressive when it comes to negotiating salary and benefits on the job. My usual advice is, "Honest, no one will think the worse of you for trying. The worst that can happen is that they say no."

Sadly, Shankar Vedantam reports today on some recent research from Linda Babcock and Hannah Riley Bowles suggesting that that's not the worst that can happen. It all depends on which gender you're negotiating with:

Their study...found that women's reluctance [to negotiate] was based on an entirely reasonable and accurate view of how they were likely to be treated if they did. Both men and women were more likely to subtly penalize women who asked for more — the perception was that women who asked for more were "less nice".

"What we found across all the studies is men were always less willing to work with a woman who had attempted to negotiate than with a woman who did not," Bowles said. "They always preferred to work with a woman who stayed mum. But it made no difference to the men whether a guy had chosen to negotiate or not."

....Subsequent studies used actors who recorded videos of themselves asking for more money or accepting salaries they had been offered. A new group of 285 volunteers were again asked whether they would be willing to work with the candidates after viewing the videos. Men tended to rule against women who negotiated but were less likely to penalize men; women tended to penalize both men and women who negotiated, and preferred applicants who did not ask for more.

So: if you're dealing with a man, negotiating puts you at a disadvantage compared to men who are applying for the same position. Your choice, then, is to either negotiate and risk not getting the job at all, or to stay quiet and accept a lower offer than a man would get. On balance, I think I'd still offer the same advice I always have, since I suspect the downside of negotiating might be a fairly short-term thing. Still, "the worst that can happen is that they say no" is obviously a little too glib, especially if you're dealing with a seething biological sack of testosterone on the other side of the desk.

ALL ALONE....Wow. There's literally no one left who will come to Alberto Gonzales's defense anymore, even on Fox News. "We invited White House officials and Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee to defend Attorney General Gonzales," Chris Wallace said today on Fox News Sunday. "We had no takers."

And in other news, my liberal blogger license would probably be suspended if I didn't link to this story in the Washington Post today:

A surgeon general's report in 2006 that called on Americans to help tackle global health problems has been kept from the public by a Bush political appointee without any background or expertise in medicine or public health, chiefly because the report did not promote the administration's policy accomplishments, according to current and former public health officials.

The sad thing is that this kind of story doesn't even outrage me anymore. It just seems like baseline performance from the Bush administration. And there's still 541 days to go.....

SCIENCE....Yesterday I was scratching my chin over the accusation that a "new eugenics" had begun to rear its ugly head among modern progressives. Where had that come from, I wondered. Today, via Matt, I see that Rick Perlstein has shed some light on this question. Here's Glenn Beck at the end of a weird rant about the monstrousness of Al Gore's fight against global warming:

Then [i.e., in the 20s and 30s] you get the scientists — eugenics. You get the scientists — global warming. Then you have to discredit the scientists who say, 'That's not right.' And you must silence all dissenting voices. That's what Hitler did.

So that's the deal. A few old-time progressives touted eugenics as a "scientific" approach to improving human nature back in the early 20th century, and modern-day progressives tout "science" as evidence that global warming is real in the early 21st century. Our reliance on science, then, basically means that we're pining away for the days of legalized racism. Gotcha.

Now, here's the thing: Glenn Beck, Yuval Levin, and Ross Douthat didn't come up with this stuff themselves. But it didn't just pop up out of nowhere either. It's way too abstruse for that. Rather, some bright boy or girl in the conservative movement dreamed this up and now it's being run up the flagpole to see if anyone salutes. If it gets some attention, it'll be rolled out to a wider audience.

So whose bright idea was this? Is there a proud parent out there who wants to take credit?

UPDATE: By the way, I should note that this new meme apparently replaces the old meme, namely that liberals aren't any more dedicated to science than conservatives, they just have different blind spots. Oddly, one of the pieces of evidence for the old meme was liberal antipathy toward evolutionary psychology (aka sociobiology) and our concomitant unwillingness to accept the vast scientific evidence showing that IQ is primarily controlled by genetics. In other words, our supposedly irrational anti-eugenics stand.

Well, whatever. Consistency has never been a strong point among movement conservatives. If X doesn't work, try not-X!

UPDATE 2: Ah. A friend emails to say that Jonah Goldberg's new book, Liberal Fascism, links progressivism and eugenics. Of course it does. And various folks are probably just starting to get their advance reading copies. So this will soon be the topic du jour in conservative circles.

My heart leaps with joy at the thought.

OPEN THREAD....Topic of the day: carpool lanes. Are you for 'em or against 'em?

"DATA MINING" != "SURVEILLANCE"?....What was the big dispute about on March 10, 2004, when Alberto Gonzales paid a hospital visit to a doped-up John Ashcroft to try to persuade him to approve a controversial NSA program? Gonzales says the dispute wasn't over the NSA's "terrorist surveillance program," and today the New York Times takes a stab at explaining how he could say such a thing in the face of massive evidence to the contrary:

A 2004 dispute over the National Security Agency's secret surveillance program that led top Justice Department officials to threaten resignation involved computer searches through massive electronic databases, according to current and former officials briefed on the program.

....The N.S.A.'s data mining has previously been reported. But the disclosure that concerns about it figured in the March 2004 debate helps to clarify the clash this week between Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales and senators who accused him of misleading Congress and called for a perjury investigation.

....If the dispute chiefly involved data mining, rather than eavesdropping, Mr. Gonzales' defenders may maintain that his narrowly crafted answers, while legalistic, were technically correct.

Give me a break. Are these guys serious?

ORDER IN THE COURT....I guess maybe the American public is paying attention after all:

Nearly a third of the public — 31 percent — thinks the court is too far to the right, a noticeable jump since the question was last asked in July 2005. That's when Bush nominated John G. Roberts Jr. to the court and, in the six-month period that followed, the Senate approved Roberts as chief justice and confirmed Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr.

....The public seems to have noticed the shift. The percentage who said the court is "too conservative" grew from 19 percent to 31 percent in the past two years, while those who said it is "generally balanced in its decisions" declined from 55 percent to 47 percent.

Looks like Chuck Schumer picked a good time to announce his new "Just Say No" policy on Bush Supreme Court nominees.....

THE DECLINE OF THE DAILY NEWSPAPER....There's been lots of blog talk about the decline of newspapers over the past few days. A lot of it focuses on the fact that although the raw number of news outlets has decreased, in practical terms we all have access to far more news than we used to. And that's true for now. But here's the problem:

Serious, daily, national reporting is overwhelmingly the preserve of a tiny handful of big-city newspapers with large staffs and worldwide bureaus. Of these, the Los Angeles Times is under pressure to downsize by its parent company, as is the Washington Post. Knight Ridder was recently purchased by McClatchy. And every big-metro daily in the country, including the still-independent New York Times, is under relentless pressure from deteriorating circulation, poor demographics, loss of classified ad revenue to the Internet, and the decline of urban department stores — storms that private owners might have weathered but institutional investors have no stomach for.

When these dailies succumb, there's really nothing to replace them. Television news does very little in-depth daily reporting, most radio is hopeless, and blogs simply don't have the resources. Magazines do some good work but come out only weekly or monthly. So while the raw numbers of media consolidation may be the most dramatic symptom of the problem, it's the small number of national dailies at the core of today's MSM that ought to be the biggest cause for concern.

Unsurprisingly, since I wrote those words, I agree completely. If I had to guess, I'd say that upwards of two-thirds of serious, daily reporting on national and international topics in the U.S. press comes from five sources: the LA Times, New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, and McClatchy. If the Denver Post dies, that's bad for Denver, but what happens when the Big Five die? There's really nothing to replace them.

Now, sure, there are other sources of information. I can read the Guardian and the Financial Times anytime I want. There's plenty of good reporting in weekly and monthly magazines. Wire services and TV can provide basic coverage of press conferences and congressional hearings. It's not as if we'll be bereft of news.

But when it comes to daily reporting from Iraq; when it comes to uncovering things like the NSA's warrantless wiretapping program or the identity of Curveball; when it comes to serious investigations of federal corruption or corporate malfeasance — well, most of that is done by the Big Five. Not all of it. But most of it. And I'm not quite sure who's up to the task of doing the kind of very costly reporting that this stuff requires if these big dailies either go away or shrivel into mere local outlets.

Maybe I'm worrying over nothing. After all, if there's a demand for this kind of reporting, someone will provide it. And there is a demand for it. Right?

UPDATE: On the other hand, the New York Times reports today that Arizona State University is going to place a tuition surcharge on journalism majors starting next year. I guess the journalism profession can't be suffering too badly if there are so many aspiring reporters that ASU needs to beat them off with a stick. I wonder what all these kids are planning to do with their j-school training?

DIVIDE AND CONQUER....In a review/essay critiquing both the phraseology and the underlying reality of the "war on terror," Samantha Powers notes the following from Ian Shapiro's new book, Containment: Rebuilding a Strategy Against Global Terror:

Shapiro is at his most persuasive when he argues against lumping Islamic radical threats together. He points out that at the time of the cold war, George Kennan, the formulator of the containment policy, warned against treating Communism as a monolith. Policy makers, Kennan said, ought to emphasize the differences among and within Communist groups and "contribute to the widening of these rifts without assuming responsibility." The Bush administration, by contrast, has grouped together a hugely diverse band of violent actors as terrorists, failing to employ divide-and-conquer tactics.

Although it is tempting to feel overwhelmed by the diversity of the threats aligned against the United States, Shapiro says that very diversity presents us with opportunities, since it "creates tensions among our adversaries' agendas, as well as openings for competition among them." To pry apart violent Islamic radicals, the United States has to become knowledgeable about internal cleavages and be patient in exploiting them.

This is the serious side of dumb gaffes from people like Rudy Giuliani, who seem unable to distinguish between even simple divisions like Sunni and Shia. They're not just demonstrating a willfull ignorance, they're demonstrating an ignorance of one of the key levers we have for fighting violent jihadism. If you treat everyone who's ever said a salaat as an enemy, you've lost the battle before it's even started.

PROGRESSIVES....Holy cats. Are conservatives really gearing up to do the same thing to "progressive" that they've spent the last few decades doing to "liberal"? Over at The Corner, Yuval Levin takes a shot at it:

Progressivism, after all, has a very mixed history in American politics, which takes in not only efforts to reform labor laws, bust trusts, and create national parks but also some serious doses of racism, social Darwinism, eugenics, and a very strange mix of authoritarianism and out of control populism....Ross [Douthat] suggests it is no coincidence that the growing preference for the term "progressive" comes at a time when a new eugenics is rearing its head, and when the left is increasingly emphasizing its self-identification as the party of science.

Lovely, no? Did you know before now that a "new eugenics" was rearing its head? Did you even know there was a new eugenics? And that apparently us progressive types endorse it? And furthermore that if we call ourselves progressives we're implicitly endorsing every odious view of every person who's ever called himself a progressive?

Good gravy. These guys really don't know when to quit, do they?

BOMB, BOMB, BOMB IRAN....Nils Gilman reminds me of a recent Heritage Foundation study that I forgot to blog about. Basically, Heritage decided to model the economic effects of bombing Iran and concluded that those effects would be bad (oil prices up, GDP down, employment down, recession in the offing, etc.). However, since Heritage is institutionally committed to insane hawkery, they reran their model with a few changes and discovered that the results weren't so bad after all. In fact, bombing Iran might even be good for the economy!

Now, my first thought when I read this was: holy hell. Out of all the possible things they could spend their time doing, they decided to expend a substantial effort on torturing the data to come up with some plausible way of claiming that bombing Iran would be just peachy as far as the U.S. economy is concerned. Wow. That's dedication to the cause.

But it gets even better. Guess what policy actions we need to take in order to turn bombing Iran from a net negative to a net positive? You guessed it: policy actions that the Heritage Foundation prefers in the first place. Fund the military! Ease regulatory burdens! End tariffs on ethanol! Don't raise gasoline taxes! Approve drilling in ANWR! "The results were impressive," the Heritage folks tell us, beaming with pride. "The policy recommendations eliminated virtually all of the negative outcomes from the blockade." Nils comments: "Actually, the thing I found most surprising about the scenario was that these guys didn't seem to realize that another obvious consequence of bombing [Iran] is that it will require an abolition of the capital gains tax to tide us through the emergency."

The serious side to this, of course, is that Heritage now has this study sitting on their shelf just waiting for the next time Iran hawkery is again in the news. And when someone says that, among other things, it would be economically devastating, they'll be able to very soberly claim that a sophisticated economic model says we have nothing to worry about — as long as we do all the things Heritage says we ought to do. And sane people almost certainly won't have a comparable piece of claptrap to fight back with. Ugh.

YOUNG PEOPLE....Matt Yglesias notes something from that survey of young people that I missed earlier this morning:

White young people like the GOP just fine; the GOP has a two point advantage. The issue is that black and hispanic youth loathe Republicans and the younger demographic has disproportionately few non-Hispanic whites....The Democratic leanings of young people are driven by giant advantages among women (+28), people with no college education (+28), Hispanics (+42), and blacks (+76).

I don't have anything sparkling to add to this, but just thought it was worth pointing out.

And while we're on the subject of writing about young people, you know what's really hard about writing about young people? Coming up with synonyms for "young people." A couple of weeks ago I wrote an op-ed about the Republican collapse among our nation's youth, and the hardest part was figuring out ways to avoid saying "young people" about twice per paragraph. Eventually I came up with "Gen Y," "today's youth," "young voters," "twenty-somethings," and "18-29 year olds." Crikey.

FRIDAY CATBLOGGING....This is Domino's latest conquest, a wicker basket that we accidentally left out a few days ago. It's her new favorite thing. Any bets on how long it will take her to get bored with it?

And speaking of Domino: Yesterday Marian and I went to the Orange County Fair (type "Drum" in the search box here to see why) and saw Domino's twin. It was a goat at the petting zoo: jet black, white mark on its forehead, and a big pear-shaped butt just like D's. I suppose this describes lots of goats, but the first thought both of us had was, "Man, that looks just like a gigantic Domino." We're just easily amused city folks, I guess.

As for Inkblot, I thought a picture of him under the bench highlighted by streaks of light might be cool. Turns out I was wrong. But that's the picture you get anyway.

In other cat news, you've all seen the story of Oscar the amazing death cat, haven't you? If not, here it is. Also, a reminder: cat threads are for cat comments. (Example: "Aw, he's so cute!" Or: "Kitties!") No politics allowed. Them's the rules.

THE CREDIT BUBBLE....Steven Pearlstein writes today about the subprime mortgage meltdown and the more general credit bubble that it was a part of:

The nature of credit bubbles is that the difference in interest rates paid by risky borrowers and safe borrowers narrows. Never in history were they as narrow as they were just a few weeks ago.

....A credit bubble develops when there's too much money to lend and too few places to lend it. A world capital glut has been created by the impending retirement of the baby-boom generation and the globalization of finance, which has made the savings of billions of people in developing countries available for investment overseas.

But I wonder if there's more to it? A tax code that supports free and easy capital formation is a good thing, but when does it become too much of a good thing? Middle class workers generally spend most of their earnings on consumption while the rich, who can't spend it all, look for investment opportunities. So as income inequality spreads and the rich accumulate ever more money; as their top marginal tax rates go down; as capital gains taxes are reduced in order to spur investment; and as the Fed chairman actively supports dodgy loan practices — all of these things contribute to ever more cash looking for places to be invested. When there's too much of this cash floating around, you get a credit bubble.

If the only people hurt by this were the rich who created the bubble in the first place, it probably wouldn't be a big deal. But there's a price to be paid by all of us for a bubble created partly by policies that favor investment and capital to the exclusion of almost everything else. Conservative economics run amok hurts everyone.

But you already knew that.

THE KIDS ARE ALRIGHT....This is about what you'd expect, but Democracy Corps has released yet another survey demonstrating that the Republican Party is losing young people in droves. Among 18-29 year olds, 50% have a favorable view of the Democratic Party compared to only 35% for the Republican Party. There are plenty of reasons for this, but basically they hate George Bush, they hate the Iraq war, and they hate religious conservatives.

The good news, of course, is that people are brand loyal. Once they make up their minds in their twenties which party they like better, they generally stick with it for the rest of their lives. So the Republican Party's deal with the devil to embrace the Christian Right might have helped them out for a while, but in the long term it's a disaster. Sic transit etc.

The full report is here.

OBAMA vs. CLINTON....OK, so at Monday's YouTube debate Barack Obama was asked if he'd meet with assorted foreign baddies "without precondition" and he said he would. Hillary Clinton, sharp debater that she is, spied an opening and shot back that she wouldn't meet with anyone until the diplomatic groundwork had been set. Boo yah! Obama is naive! Point for Hillary!

Fine. Whatever. This seemed like a pretty minor gotcha to me, since it rises and falls on the assumption that Obama was saying he'd literally hop onto Air Force One and jet off to Caracas a couple of weeks after his inauguration. In other words, silly season stuff.

But no! Obama and Clinton have now spent the entire weeking exchanging barbs over this. And Brian Beutler thinks this is a good thing:

I think the escalating rhetorical battle the two senators is perhaps the only helpful instance of campaign jousting I've ever seen. At the same time, I only think I'll believe that as long as Barack Obama wins, or at least puts up a good show. Because what we are seeing is, in as close to an unfiltered way as possible, a standoff between a status quo foreign policy and a much more constructive (though I hesitate to say new) direction.

Certainly what you're hearing from Clinton and Obama is a healthier debate than what you're hearing from journalists. Clinton's basic position is that Obama has, by announcing his intent to engage enemy leaders, proven that he's too naive to set the country's foreign policy. Obama, on the other hand, contends that Clinton's foreign policy ideas are too similar to George Bush's for comfort. As far as I'm concerned, I think Obama's argument is basically correct and Hillary's argument is totally nuts, but in any case both arguments are pretty close facsimiles to what the two candidates actually believe about foreign policy.

Hmmm. So not silly season stuff after all? That's an interesting thought, though it's worth pointing out that Obama's original answer to the debate question included the following caveat: "One of the first things that I would do in terms of moving a diplomatic effort in the region forward is to send a signal that we need to talk to Iran and Syria because they're going to have responsibilities if Iraq collapses." Is there really a substantive difference between Obama's plan to "send a signal" and Clinton's plan to "use a lot of high-level presidential envoys to test the waters"? If there is, it's a mighty small one.

Still, I take Brian's point. It's rare to have a discussion about foreign policy that actually revolves around a concrete point, and by foreign policy standards this one counts as at least a mud brick point. Basically, do you think the United States should, as a routine part of its foreign policy, say that it's willing to talk to any country that's willing to talk to us? That the mere act of talking isn't a tacit capitulation to a rogue regime's demands?

I sure think so, and not just for the obvious reason that talking can sometimes lead to actual results. The bigger reason is that if you talk routinely, then the mere act of talking isn't a tacit capitulation to a rogue regime's demands and can't possibly be spun that way. It's just something we do.

So: not such a bad discussion after all. More heat than light, to be sure, but even a little bit of light is welcome in the darkness that defines American foreign policy these days.

WHY IS HE LYING?....About two minutes ago I got an email from a reader asking a question that's been on my mind too: Why is Alberto Gonzales lying?

I'm not talking about his stonewalling in the U.S. Attorney firings. His motivation is pretty obvious there. I'm talking about his insistence that the meetings he held on March 10, 2004, just before he buttonholed John Ashcroft in the hospital that evening, weren't about the NSA's warrantless wiretapping program. What am I missing here? Gonzales seems to think it's important to persuade the public that there was no internal dissension over the wiretapping program, but why? There's a huge amount of evidence from every major player that there was internal dissension, and an equally huge amount of evidence that that's exactly what the meetings were about.

So not only is Gonzales fighting an obviously losing battle, but it doesn't strike me as a battle that's even very important. So what if there was dissent? There's dissent about a lot of stuff. It's not that big a deal. In any case, certainly not a big enough deal to commit perjury over.

What am I missing?

CANCER AROUND THE WORLD....Over at TNR, Jon Cohn provides us with the latest dope from the Annals of Oncology. Exciting! The question at hand is whether the United States, with its awesome private healthcare system, is better at delivering new cancer drugs to patients than Europe, with its array of feeble and feckless public healthcare systems. At first, it looks like the United States is the winner, but when you dig a little deeper it turns out that this has a lot to do with the fact that the study includes lots of countries that have very low healthcare spending, like Great Britain and Eastern Europe. So what happens when you do an apples-to-apples comparison?

If you really want to know how universal health insurance per se affects the diffusion of cancer drugs, a much more logical comparison would be between the U.S. and some of the countries that more closely resemble us in terms of economic development — and that don't spent quite so little money on their own medical care systems. And guess what happens if you do that? A very different picture emerges: We may be atop the world when it comes to getting new cancer drugs to our patients, but we're hardly alone on that perch. Three other countries — Austria, France, and Switzerland — are right there with us.

....Admittedly, the paper is vague on one key point: It doesn't indicate whether, among those four world leaders, the U.S. stands out as the best. If it did, the argument against universal health care might still have some small merit. Fortunately, Jonsson and Wilking have e-mail addresses. And they were kind enough to respond when I contacted them. "Overall," I asked, "was one country significantly and consistently better than the other three?" Wilking's response: "Not really."

I suppose you're all getting tired of hearing this, but the conclusion here is pretty much the same as it is every time you look at the U.S. vs. Europe: the differences are almost entirely about money. If you have a national healthcare system but you spend way less than the United States (as Great Britain does), you can provide good but not great service. If you spend modestly less than the United States (as France does) you can provide healthcare every bit as good as ours — and cover every single citizen in the bargain.

And what if you actually spend as much as the