FRIDAY CATBLOGGING....Today it's all Domino, all the time. Last weekend Marian's sister brought up an antique bench doohickey she was no longer using, and it has quickly become the New Favorite Thing™ for both cats. Mostly, though, it's become Domino's property, as Inkblot has decided instead to take possession of the table that we moved out of the way to make room for the bench. It's exactly the same table we've always had, but it's now about three feet away from where it used to be, which of course makes it New and Fascinating.

Anyway, Domino loves the bench, and thanks to her humans' clever opposable thumbs she was also able to discover the Secret Hiding Place inside the bench — which she also loves. Turns out it also provides a nice, warm light for picture taking, so I figured I'd show everyone both the inside and the outside. That means no Inkblot picture this week, but them's the breaks. He'll be back next week.

WHY UNIONS MATTER....Mark Thoma hosts a conversation over at Economist's View today. First, Stephen Gordon writes about the effect of unions on income inequality:

It's hard to conclude from this chart that union density matters much when it comes to reducing inequality. For example, look at Germany (where unions play a crucial role in setting wages) and the US (where they are decidedly less important): both have identical levels of inequality of market income. The distribution of disposable income [i.e., income after taxes and government benefits] is lower in Germany because of its redistributive policies, not because unions are more powerful.

Commenter Anne is aghast:

Rubbish, complete rubbish. Unions in Germany are both a reflection of social-economic attitudes and reinforce those attitudes. Unions have been continually and successfully active politically in Germany, continually shaping policy.

"Rubbish" is a little harsh — and as another commenter says, the data here is a little tricky because reunification probably increased German income inequality after 1989 for reasons unrelated to unionization. (If you look only at the former West Germany, inequality in market income is probably lower than in the U.S.) Still, Anne makes a good point: the bulk of the evidence suggests that unionization raises wages modestly, but not immensely. However, if you're interested in government policies that actively favor the working and middle classes, you need to have some kind of substantial political interest group fighting on their side. That's Politics 101, and right now unions are pretty much all we've got. They aren't perfect, and they frequently act only in their own narrow self-interest, but without them there's no organized opposition to the agenda of corporations and the rich. Warts and all, they're worth supporting until something better comes along.

THE PR SURGE....Last Tuesday I wrote about the effectiveness of Gen. David Petraeus's PR efforts in support of the surge:

Petraeus has been very shrewd about providing dog-and-pony shows to as many analysts, pundits, reporters, and members of Congress as he could cram into the military jets criss-crossing the Atlantic to Baghdad on a seemingly daily basis this summer. And those dog-and-pony shows don't seem to have been subtle....He's obviously been treating the September report like a military operation, trying to generate as much good press and congressional change of heart as he possibly can in the weeks leading up to 9/11.

In the Washington Post today, Jonathan Weisman confirms the nature of Petraeus's briefings:

More than two dozen House members and senators have used the August recess to travel to Iraq in the hope of getting a firsthand view of the war ahead of commanding Gen. David H. Petraeus's progress report in two weeks on Capitol Hill. But it appears that the trips have been as much about Iraqi and U.S. officials sizing up Congress as the members of Congress sizing up the war.

Brief, choreographed and carefully controlled, the codels (short for congressional delegations) often have showed only what the Pentagon and the Bush administration have wanted the lawmakers to see. At one point, as Moran, Tauscher and Rep. Jon Porter (R-Nev.) were heading to lunch in the fortified Green Zone, an American urgently tried to get their attention, apparently to voice concerns about the war effort, the participants said. Security whisked the man away before he could make his point.

Tauscher called it "the Green Zone fog."

"Spin City," Moran grumbled. "The Iraqis and the Americans were all singing from the same song sheet, and it was deliberately manipulated."

There's an interesting story waiting to be written about how much time and effort Petraeus has spent whipping the Army's press office and congressional liaison office into the lean, mean fighting machines they obviously are today. It's pretty clear that this was a high priority concern from the day he took over, as he planned his PR offensive to coincide with the surge itself. It'll be too late, of course, but I imagine that story will get written eventually.

UP IS DOWN AND VICE-VERSA....Juan Cole is pissed:

I saw on CNN this smarmy Bush administration official come and and say that US troop deaths had fallen because of the surge, which is why we should support it. Just read the following chart bottom to top and compare 2006 month by month to 2007. US troop deaths haven't fallen. They are way up.

....How brain dead do the Bushies think we are, peddling this horse manure that US troop deaths have fallen? (There are always seasonal variations because in the summer it is 120 F. in the shade and guerrillas are too heat-exhausted to fight; but the summer 2007 numbers are much greater than those for summer 2006; that isn't progress.) And why does our corporate media keep repeating this Goebbels-like propaganda? Do we really live in an Orwellian state?

I'll leave that last question to Atrios, who, if memory serves, is pretty good at answering questions like that. My part in this is simpler. Prof. Cole wants someone to turn his troop fatality numbers into a graph to make it clear exactly what he's talking about, and obviously I'm your man for that kind of grunt work. So here it is. Pictorial evidence that troop fatalities in Iraq are down¹ this year, just like surge proponents are saying. Pay attention, Congress.

¹See post title for clarification of commonly accepted surge terminology conventions.

"WE SHOULD START OVER"....Another draft report has been leaked to the press, this one a detailed look at the Iraqi police force in the wake of 2006's "year of the police":

The commission, headed by Gen. James L. Jones, the former top United States commander in Europe, concludes that the rampant sectarianism that has existed since the formation of the police force requires that its current units "be scrapped" and reshaped into a smaller, more elite organization, according to one senior official familiar with the findings. The recommendation is that "we should start over," the official said.

....However, a new attempt to disband an Iraqi force would also be risky, given the armed backlash that followed the American decision to dissolve the Iraqi Army soon after the invasion of 2003.

This is becoming a comedy of the absurd. Scrap the Iraqi police force? Start over from scratch? Is this a joke? Even if we could do it, it means (a) putting 26,000 armed and pissed off Iraqis back on the street, (b) running the country without a police force until a new one is recruited and trained, and (c) spending two or three years building a replacement. And that's the good news. The bad news is that there's no reason to think the shiny new police force would be any better than the old one. It didn't improve after all our efforts in 2006, after all. The unpleasant truth is that there's a reason the police force acts essentially as an extension of the Shiite militias — namely that that's exactly how the Shiite government wants it — and no reason to think that's going to change anytime in the near future.

So let's take stock. Pretty much everyone has lost confidence in Nouri al-Maliki, though there's no replacement in sight who seems like a better bet. The police force is so corrupt that the best advice the Jones commission can offer is to disband it completely and start over from scratch. And the Iraqi army, after three years of intensive training designed by one Gen. David Petraeus, has a grand total of six battalions capable of operating on their own.

In other words, except for the fact that Iraq has a disfunctional government, a disfunctional police force, and a barely functional army, things are going great. I can't wait to see how Crocker and Petraeus spin this into an argument for staying another four years.

REVISIONS....The National Security Network has a good rundown today of all the book-cooking that may be surrounding reports of declining violence in Iraq. Note this in particular:

There were significant revisions to the way the Pentagon's reports measure sectarian violence between its March 2007 report and its June 2007 report. The original data for the five months before the surge began (September 2006 through January 2007) indicated approximately 5,500 sectarian killings. In the revised data in the June 2007 report, those numbers had been adjusted to roughly 7,400 killings — a 25% increase. These discrepancies have the impact of making the sectarian violence appear significantly worse during the fall and winter of 2006 before the President's "surge" began.

Read the rest here. Congressional Democrats need to muster up the backbone (and staff work) to press Petraeus and Crocker really hard on this issue. They can't afford to get suckered by slippery numbers. Conversely, if the violence figures are genuinely solid, Petraeus and Crocker ought to be able to provide solid evidence for them.

PRINCIPLES....Jonah Goldberg complains about the notion that conservatives are more warmly disposed to farm subsidies than liberals:

This always puzzled me because I think Yglesias and countless others are basically right when they complain that subsides are a bipartisan phenomenon of appropriators (though I would argue that liberalism is philosophically more conducive to this sort of thing because it offers no principled objection to lavish spending of this sort beyond a crude argument that there are others more deserving of welfare).

All the worse for conservative philosophy, then, since it certainly doesn't seem to have made a lick of difference when it comes to real-life legislating. If conservatives are philosophically opposed to farm pork — and Jonah offers a creditable argument that they're not only philosophically opposed but almost universally opposed in practice as well — and yet Republicans all merrily and enthusiastically support ag subsidies anyway, then what good are conservative principles in the first place?

MULTIPLE CHOICE QUIZ....Rep. Jon Porter, who recently hopped the Baghdad Shuttle to chat with our guys on the ground, reports back:

The Nevada Republican, who returned Tuesday from his fourth trip to Iraq, met with U.S. Army Gen. David Petraeus, U.S. Ambassador Ryan Crocker, Iraqi Deputy President Tariq al-Hashimi and Iraqi Deputy Prime Minister Barham Saleh.

"To a person, they said there would be genocide, gas prices in the U.S. would rise to eight or nine dollars a gallon, al-Qaida would continue its expansion, and Iran would take over that portion of the world if we leave," Porter said Wednesday in a phone interview from Las Vegas.

There are two possibilities here: (a) Petraeus and Crocker really did say that stuff, or (b) Porter is lying. If it's the former, then Petraeus and Crocker have pretty plainly decided to become frothing administration attack dogs on Iraq, not honest brokers. If it's the latter, Petraeus and Crocker ought to be plenty pissed. Which is it?

GETTING THE MESSAGE OUT....After reading a Washington Post article about Democrats who are afraid to stand up to President Bush on terror legislation, Hilzoy says:

Oh, come on. As I said above, the Republican party is not very popular these days. Moreover, it's not as though it's hard to craft a really inspiring message on these issues. We're not talking about some arcane feature of patent law that it's genuinely difficult to get people to care about; we're talking about the freedoms we all claim to cherish. Honestly, if Democrats can't figure out how to make a winning issue of keeping the government from being able to throw you in jail without having to explain themselves to anyone, or at least to prevent it from outweighing what looks to be their pretty serious electoral advantage in 2008, they must be brain dead. And if they can't be bothered to support our Constitution if there's any possibility that it might cost them politically, then their love of their country must be dead as well.

Look, I agree completely with Hilzoy on substantive grounds. But that doesn't mean we should minimize the political side of this. The fact is that it is hard to craft an inspiring message on these issues. The vast, vast majority of Americans don't feel affected in any way by Guantanamo or NSA eavesdropping or enemy combatant laws. And when people don't feel personally affected, it's hard to get them to care, especially when your opponents are screaming about how it's going to be your fault if terrorists attack this summer and kill thousands of people because you neutered the NSA's ability to listen in on Osama's cell phone conversations.

By way of analogy, the census bureau announced yesterday that 47 million Americans don't have health insurance. A lot more either have lousy insurance, are afraid of losing their insurance coverage, or are swamped with medical bills even though they're supposedly fully covered. That's a lot of Americans who are very personally affected by the malfunctioning of our healthcare system. And yet, Clintoncare failed in 1994 anyway and we're no closer to healthcare reform today than we ever have been. It's just too easy to create oppositional political campaigns that scare the hell out of people.

I'm not really arguing with Hilzoy here. Democrats do need to get a spine. I'm just saying that the right political message for our side really is fundamentally more difficult than it is for the fear merchants, especially when the fear merchants have a kernel of truth on their side. After all, there really are terrorist groups out there who'd happily kill us in vast quantities if they could just muster up the means to do it.

On the NSA wiretapping bill, Democrats got outplayed. They negotiated badly, they got suckered by Mike McConnell, they were splintered, they didn't have the right message, and they panicked. They need to raise their game on all these fronts, and none of them are slam dunks. This is tough stuff.

FOOT TAPPING AND BATHROOM CRUISING....Yesterday one of my readers emailed to say he was annoyed by all the ignorant blog commentary emanating from straight young whippersnappers on the subject of Larry Craig's restroom shenanigans in Minnesota:

Here's what set me off: Craig's actions have been considered ample grounds for arrest for decades. Tens of thousands of gay men have gotten permanent records (quite often a fourth or fifth-degree felony), frequently losing jobs and going onto "sex offender" lists. Gay rights advocates have been furious about this for a long time.

If lefty bloggers feel the Minnesota police behaved outrageously, why haven't they said anything before? If Craig's arrest marks their introduction to this heinous practice, where's the outrage for all the victims? Writing "I don't see how he broke any laws," without understanding that society criminalized those actions long ago sounds naive. Do they really think no one has ever come to that conclusion before — or tried to change the practice and failed?

Today, non-whippersnapper blogger and cultural critic David Ehrenstein writes in the LA Times to provide a bit of related historical background. In 1964, LBJ aide Walter Jenkins was arrested for soliciting sex in the men's room of a Washington D.C. YMCA in what was then one of the few ways gay men could hook up. Five years later the Stonewall riots kicked off the gay rights movement:

That movement, with its defiant insistence on being free to be as gay as all-get-out, quickly left the likes of Walter Jenkins and, if the cops were right, Larry Craig in the dust. They're part of a subculture within a subculture that was memorably identified by the daring sociologist Laud Humphreys in a landmark sociological study titled "Tearoom Trade."

Taking his cue from Kinsey, Humphreys was fascinated with married-with-children men who didn't self-identify as gay or bisexual, yet still sought clandestine sex with other men on the side. Humphreys, when he began his research, was one of these I'm-not-gay(s) himself, though he eventually came out.

Published in 1970, "Tearoom Trade" is full of useful information about foot tapping, shoe touching, hand signaling and all the other rituals those so inclined use to make contact with one another in such places. Clearly no media outlet should be without a copy — especially Slate.com, whose editors revealed their cluelessness on the subject this week in a "real time conversation" rife with unintentional hilarity: "I can't believe it's a crime to tap your foot." "Can someone explain the mechanics of how two people are supposed to commit a sex act in a stall where legs are visible from the knee down?"

Who knows? Maybe the Larry Craig incident will have a silver lining, prompting states to begin questioning all their solicitation laws. And if not that, maybe at least the stupider and most antique ones. A guy can dream.

SKULLDUGGERY IN CALIFORNIA....Matt Yglesias, after a bit of throat clearing about the current attempt by Republicans to finagle a chunk of California's electoral college vote via a new initiative, says:

At any rate, after I posted on it various Californians piped up pretty confident that there's nothing to worry about.

Since I was one of those Californians he mentions, I should revise and extend here. What I meant was that the GOP initiative is almost certain to fail if Democrats and liberal interest groups mount the kind of campaign they usually do against partisan initiatives like this. It wasn't a counsel to sit around and do nothing. In fact, I suspect that California Republicans know perfectly well that their scheme has little chance of passing, and that getting Democrats and liberal interest groups to waste time and energy on this thing was pretty much the whole idea from the get-go.

And while we're on the subject, I should mention that I am in favor of electing presidents via direct popular vote. Several states have passed (or are considering passing) an initiative that would do just that by promising to deliver all their state's electoral votes to whoever won the popular vote — but only if states with a majority of electoral votes had joined in and agreed to do the same. I don't favor this because I think a 2000-style election is all that likely to happen again in the near future, but because I'm tired of presidential campaigns that essentially take place in only a dozen states or so. I say, make 'em campaign everywhere. I want to see all the attack ads too.

PREEMPTING PETRAEUS....In perhaps its least surprising report ever, the GAO reports that things are not going so well in Mesopotamia:

Iraq has failed to meet all but three of 18 congressionally mandated benchmarks for political and military progress, according to a draft of a Government Accountability Office report.

What's slightly more surprising is that the GAO all but calls the administration and the Pentagon liars. Politely, of course:

The draft provides a stark assessment of the tactical effects of the current U.S.-led counteroffensive to secure Baghdad. "While the Baghdad security plan was intended to reduce sectarian violence, U.S. agencies differ on whether such violence has been reduced," it states. While there have been fewer attacks against U.S. forces, it notes, the number of attacks against Iraqi civilians remains unchanged. It also finds that "the capabilities of Iraqi security forces have not improved."

"Overall," the report concludes, "key legislation has not been passed, violence remains high, and it is unclear whether the Iraqi government will spend $10 billion in reconstruction funds," as promised. While it makes no policy recommendations, the draft suggests that future administration assessments "would be more useful" if they backed up their judgments with more details and "provided data on broader measures of violence from all relevant U.S. agencies."

Yes, it would be useful if Petraeus and the White House provided actual credible data to back up their assertions of tactical triumph, wouldn't it? The fact that they don't most likely means they know exactly what would happen if their methodology ever saw the light of day: it would get laughed off the stage before the noise machine even had a chance to clear its throat.

One more interesting thing: the Post actually explains why someone leaked a draft copy of the report to them: the leaker was afraid it would get watered down before final publication and wanted to make sure that someone knew what the GAO really thinks. Considering what happens to most reports that go through the DoD wringer, I'd say that shows considerable foresight.

SEND THEM ALL TO A COLD AND DESOLATE PLACE AND THEN STRAND THEM....Air Greenland finally solves the wingnut pundit problem! Thanks guys!

SKYROCKETING!....Over the next ten years, which is a bigger hit to the budget deficit: (a) out-of-control entitlement spending or (b) the Bush tax cuts? Answer here. Be sure to keep this in mind the next time Robert Samuelson or some likeminded "centrist" pundit wails about bipartisan cowardice on entitlement spending but somehow doesn't find the time to mention unipartisan lunacy on taxes.

And with that, sayonara Max. We're going to miss you.

UPDATE: Yes, yes, it's Robert, not Paul. Robert, not Paul. Jeez. You'd think I'd stop making this mistake eventually.

POLITICAL UPDATE....A couple of days ago I wrote about an announcement from the Iraqi government that it had reached consensus on several political issues, including de-Baathification, oil laws, and provincial elections. The announcement didn't get much play, though, and the reason seems to be that nobody really believes it's for real. Today, Time's feature editor emails to recommend his magazine's take:

Why Baghdad's Latest Deal is No Deal

....Sunday's deal was more notable for who wasn't involved than who was. The agreement didn't include representatives from the bloc loyal to Shi'ite politician and militia chieftain Moqtada al-Sadr....As a practical matter, an agreement to reconcile with former Baathists is next to meaningless without Sadr's acquiescence. And the Sadrists weren't absent simply from Sunday's deal. At the moment they are not even part of the government; like their Sunni adversaries they are engaged in a boycott.

Sunni political leaders have a similar problem. As the same Western diplomat put it, there is "the question of the connection between national politics and what's happening on the local level." With the U.S. military cutting deals with Sunni tribes and ex-insurgents to help battle al-Qaeda in Iraq, the influence of the Sunnis' national political leadership becomes more and more questionable.

Time's piece goes on to note that "The agreement may give Ambassador Crocker some rare and much-needed good news to highlight when he delivers his surge status report to Congress next month." Marc Lynch agrees and goes further:

This agreement was likely produced for the sole purpose of giving Ryan Crocker something to bring back to Congress (and is what I expected weeks ago). But it doesn't actually solve anything: [Sunni leader Tareq al-Hashimi] has made very clear that he has no intention of rejoining Maliki's government, the agreements exist only on paper at this point, and nothing has been done about the deeply sectarian nature of what passes for the Iraqi state.

For now, that seems to be something of a consensus view: Sunday's announcement is notable mostly because it gives Crocker and Petraeus something positive to point to during their September testimony, not because it signals real progress. As Ilan Goldenberg points out, we've been down this road before when there was political pressure to show a "breakthrough," and it hasn't meant much once it served its PR purpose. Probably the same thing is happening this time around.

FOLLOW THE MONEY....The census report yesterday that documented a rise in the number of people without health insurance also reported an increase in median earnings. So at least there was some good news, right? Not quite:

Experts said the rise in income was mainly a reflection of an increase in the number of family members entering the workplace or working longer hours. Average wages for men and women actually declined for the third consecutive year.

Italics mine. Among full-time workers, income declined 1.1% for men and 1.2% for women. And — this will come as a shock, so be sure you're sitting down — incomes decreased a bit at the low end and increased a bit at the high end, causing the Gini index of income inequality to go up yet again. But it wasn't a statistically significant increase, so no need to worry. Except that these statistically insignificant annual changes do add up:

The Gini index has increased 1.7 percent since 2002 (0.462) and 3.3 percent over the past 10 years (from 0.455 to 0.470). There have not been any statistically significant annual changes in the Gini index over the past 10 years.

This is some economic expansion we're having, isn't it? It's really kicked the market economy into high gear.

UPDATE: Bonus Kaus bashing here. When are you going to teach this punk a lesson, Mickey?

$50 BILLION....The Washington Post reports that President Bush plans to ask for an additional $50 billion to fund the surge:

The request is being prepared now in the belief that Congress will be unlikely to balk so soon after hearing [David Petraeus and Ryan Crocker] argue that there are promising developments in Iraq but that they need more time to solidify the progress they have made, a congressional aide said.

So that's that, I guess. The White House already knows what Petraeus and Crocker are going to say and they figure it's going to be $50 billion of good news. And with that, the Kabuki show continues.

INSIDE THE HIGHER ED LOBBY....As part of our September education issue, Ben Adler takes a look at the higher education lobby to find out what they like and what they don't. Which category do you think this falls under?

For decades, education experts have been concerned about declining teacher quality in K–12 schools, and in the late 1990s the Clinton administration tried to address the problem by improving colleges' notoriously lackluster teacher-training programs. The Education Department put together a proposal requiring states to report the percentage of teacher-training-program graduates from each school who pass the state licensure exam, and to report which of their education schools, many of which are affiliated with major universities, were underperforming. Schools that consistently failed to produce graduates capable of passing the exams would lose their eligibility to receive federal aid for teacher training.

So what happened next? Read the story and find out!

THE SOUTH....Speaking of civil war in the south of Iraq — and we were just speaking of it, weren't we? — here's the latest:

Clashes between rival Shiite Muslim militias in the holy city of Karbala today killed at least 50 people, torched three hotels and prompted Iraqi authorities to order the evacuation of more than 1 million pilgrims from the shrine where they had gathered.

More than 150 people were injured in the helter-skelter panic that followed random gunfire by militants in the Mahdi Army loyal to anti-American cleric Muqtada Sadr and those of the Badr Organization, the armed wing of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq.

....The death toll threatened to climb, with witnesses reporting dozens of bodies in the streets surrounding the Imam Hussein shrine and amid the smoldering rubble of the three buildings set on fire during the rampage.

I don't know about you, but I'm sure glad we're sticking it out in Iraq in order to referee a fight between the country's two leading Shiite political blocs. Pretty shrewd use of American power projection, isn't it?

CRAIG vs. VITTER....Lots of conservative bloggers, following Hugh Hewitt's lead, have called for Larry Craig to resign even though they didn't call for David Vitter to resign when he was outed for visiting prostitutes last month. Is this because Craig was trolling for gay sex and Vitter was trolling for straight sex? Probably, but before we go too far down that road I think Scott Lemieux is merely stating the obvious with his alternative explanation:

In the specific case of Hewitt, though, there's probably a more important factor: Louisiana's governor is a Democrat, and Idaho's is a Republican. Craig resigning would mean a Republican incumbent going into the 2008 election; Vitter resigning would mean another Democratic Senator. So no conservative pundit should get credit for standing on principle for demanding that Craig resign, and that goes triple if they haven't made the same call for Vitter (who actually violated the law, although he did so in a more heterosexual way that will help to earn forgiveness from conservatives.)

Does anyone seriously want to argue that Scott is off base here? Of course conservatives are turning against Craig secure in the knowledge that they're running no actual political risk. We're not children, are we?

HEALTHCARE IN AMERICA....The latest news from the healthcare front:

The nation's poverty rate declined for the first time this decade, but the number of Americans without health insurance rose to a record high of 47 million in 2006, according to Census figures released today.

....The addition of 2.2 million people to the roster of the uninsured was attributed largely to continuing declines in employer-sponsored insurance coverage.

Cue an avalanche of blog posts, op-eds, TV rants, and floor speeches insisting that (a) the census figure is unreliable for one reason or another, (b) uninsured people get all the healthcare they need anyway, (c) it's all the fault of liberals who have driven up the cost of healthcare with pointless regulations about doctors washing their hands and so forth, (d) Canadians have longer wait times for hip replacements than we do, (e) the media only reports this stuff when Republicans are in office, (f) poor people ought to exercise more and eat better, (g) Michael Moore is fat, or (h) all of the above. I can't wait.

THE PETRAEUS REPORT....The Washington Post reports that Gen. David Petraeus managed to get the recent intelligence assessment of Iraq toned down:

The NIE, requested by the White House Iraq coordinator, Lt. Gen. Douglas E. Lute, in preparation for the testimony, met with resistance from U.S. military officials in Baghdad, according to a senior U.S. military intelligence officer there. Presented with a draft of the conclusions, Petraeus succeeded in having the security judgments softened to reflect improvements in recent months, the official said.

This reminds me of something. I don't remember if I've ever blogged about this before, but until recently my guess was that Petraeus's September report to Congress would be pretty sober. My thinking was that he's a smart guy, and realizes that trying to paint too pretty a picture would ruin his credibility. So instead he'd present a basically realistic assessment, but stud it with just enough signs of progress to convince everyone that he deserved more time to make the surge work.

Now I'm not so sure. Petraeus has been very shrewd about providing dog-and-pony shows to as many analysts, pundits, reporters, and members of Congress as he could cram into the military jets criss-crossing the Atlantic to Baghdad on a seemingly daily basis this summer. And those dog-and-pony shows don't seem to have been subtle: rather, they've been hard-sell propositions complete with "classified" PowerPoint presentations (always a winner for people with more ego than common sense); visits to a handpicked selection of the most successful reconstruction teams in the country; a plainly deceptive implication that the surge played a role in the Anbar Awakening; feel-good stories about how local power generation is a good thing; the recent insistence that civilian casualties are down, which increasingly looks like a book-cooking scam that wouldn't stand the light of day if Petraeus allowed independent agencies access to his data; and, of course, the ongoing campaign to scare everyone by kinda sorta claiming that Iran and al-Qaeda are ramping up their activities and then getting suddenly slippery whenever anyone asks if they have any real evidence for this.

Petraeus is still a smart guy. He won't go too far overboard. But he's obviously been treating the September report like a military operation, trying to generate as much good press and congressional change of heart as he possibly can in the weeks leading up to 9/11. I now expect him to provide just the opposite of what I thought before: a consistently upbeat report studded with just enough accomodations to reality to keep him from seeming completely ridiculous.

And the question is: Will everyone swoon? Or will they demand more than just anecdotal evidence and unsupported statistics? I hope for the latter, but I fear for the former.

MORNING RANT....In the LA Times today, L.J. Williamson is upset that part-time cafeteria workers in Los Angeles schools want the district to provide them with healthcare benefits:

Part-time food service employees are seeking the same health benefits — including coverage for their families — that their full-time counterparts enjoy. Extending these benefits to cafeteria staff who currently work only three hours a day would cost an estimated $40 million a year, according to school board calculations.

....This is fat that the food service's too-lean budget simply doesn't have. If health benefits were extended to these part-time workers, the CFPA estimates it would mean that the per-plate meal budget would be reduced from 85 cents to 49 cents. Making healthy food available for that amount would take a miracle of biblical proportions. So we'd be improving the healthcare of nearly 2,000 part-time workers at the expense of the 500,000 children who eat in public school cafeterias every day.

I would happily pay for universal healthcare just so I never had to read an op-ed like this again. It's not that Williamson doesn't have a point, it's just that this beggar-thy-neighbor attitude is enough to make me retch, and I see it all the time. I don't get dental coverage, so why should grocery workers? My copay went up last year, so why shouldn't everyone else's? I don't pay for healthcare for my housecleaners, so why should I pay it for school cafeteria workers? Our wretched private healthcare system has turned us into a nation of spiteful and small-minded misanthropes.

It's true that the growing gap between public workers and private workers is a real problem. In the past, there was something of a tradeoff: public sector workers generally got paid less than private sector workers but made up for it with job security and benefits. Today, though, public workers generally get higher salaries and better benefits and more vacation and earlier retirement and more lucrative pension packages compared to comparable private sector workers. And private sector workers are understandably annoyed by this. But their annoyance would be better directed not at the lucky public sector workers, but at the mahogany row executives and conservative politicians who pretend that the only possible use for the mountains of cash generated by decades of economic growth is to give it all to mahogany row executives and the billionaires who contribute to conservative politicians. Maybe they should listen to John Edwards instead.

End of rant. Time to go check and see if there's any titillating new Larry Craig news this morning.

GREAT MINDS ETC.....Bizarrely enough, my wife said exactly the same thing yesterday, though perhaps in tones more of regret then of faux conspiracy theorizing. But still.

WISHFUL THINKING WATCH....Maura Reynolds and James Gerstenzang of the LA Times write that Alberto Gonzales's resignation may have a "silver lining" for George Bush:

"The Texas mafia is leaving," said Ron Kaufman, a longtime political advisor to the Bush family. "There's a shift in the philosophies of the appointees you have [around the president]. They are much more creatures of Washington, D.C., and not Austin, Texas."

But therein may lie an opportunity for Bush. In two weeks, the president has accepted the resignations of the two members of his staff who have drawn the most ire from the Democrats who now control Congress: Gonzales and political advisor Karl Rove. And that may give Bush a chance to salvage his relationship with Capitol Hill and the legacy of his second term.

Uh huh. I'm sure he's so looking forward to mending relationships with Democrats in Congress. Because, you know, he's a uniter, not a divider.

Come on, people. You're playing in the big leagues. Are you seriously trying to tell us that Bush's problems with Congress are due to recalcitrant aides? You do know who the cossacks work for, don't you?

IRAQ POLITICAL UPDATE....I noticed this last night at the Beirut Daily Star but didn't get around to blogging it:

Iraq's top Shiite, Sunni Arab and Kurdish leaders announced on Sunday they had reached consensus on some key laws that Washington views as vital to fostering national reconciliation....The appearance of Maliki on Iraqi television with the other leaders was a rare show of public unity amid crumbling support for the prime minister's government.

....Iraqi officials said the leaders had signed an agreement on easing restrictions on former members of Saddam Hussein's Baath party joining the civil service and military.

"They signed a new draft on de-Baathification," said Yasin Majid, an adviser to Maliki.

Other officials said consensus had been reached on holding provincial elections and releasing many detainees who have been held without charge, a key demand of Sunni Arabs since the majority are members of their sect.

Majid said the leaders endorsed a draft oil law, which has been agreed by the Cabinet but has not gone to Parliament.

I can't tell if this is meaningful or not, and a quick scan of the front pages of CNN, the LA Times, the Washington Post, and the New York Times reveals nothing. Juan Cole mentions it but doesn't provide an opinion one way or the other.

This is possibly good news, but I imagine, as usual, the devil is in the details. For now, just take it as raw data that might or might not pan out.

A SURGE REPORT CARD....So why have I been doing so much surge blogging lately? It's simple: guilt. A couple of weeks ago I mentioned that a friend had told me I should pay more attention to the daily news from Iraq, but that I had declined on the grounds that Iraq's problems are deep and fundamental, not things that are truly affected by either daily setbacks or short-term successes. Worrying over every new car bomb or every new schoolhouse seemed pointless.

I still believe that, but the whole issue kept gnawing at me. I'm a professional blogger! The magazine pays me to care about stuff like this! Besides, maybe my friend was right. Maybe there really was some good news from the ground that I was overlooking.

I continue to believe that political reconciliation is what really matters in Iraq, and that it's all too easy to let day-to-day news distract you from that. For that reason, I don't plan to become a regular surge blogger. But for what it's worth, here's what I have to say about the situation on the ground:

• The revolt of the Sunni sheiks against al-Qaeda in Anbar and other Sunni strongholds is genuinely good news. And while the revolt had nothing to do with the surge (it began last September, well before the surge started), our quick support for the sheiks demonstrated welcome military flexibility. Link. On the downside, this is a strategy with obvious risks, since there's a good chance that the sheiks will turn against us as soon as they've finished off AQI.

• The civilian death toll in Iraq appears to be down from its peak earlier in the year, but still considerably higher than last summer. Link. My best guess is that we're just seeing the usual seasonal pattern here, in which violence peaks in the fall and then drops off over the summer. In any case, casualty stats these days are even vaguer and more unreliable than usual since the Pentagon refuses to release its figures and the Iraqi Health Ministry is no longer cooperating with the UN. Link.

• It appears that insurgents may have simply left Baghdad temporarily during the surge and increased their activity elsewhere. Again, figures are spotty, but violence appears to be on the rise in northern Iraq. Link.

• There are widespread reports that the Army under Gen. Petraeus has done a good job of improving its counterinsurgency tactics. However, the evidence so far is mostly anecdotal and based on carefully controlled visits. This makes it very difficult to determine whether this success is genuinely widespread.

• Reports of progress are considerably undermined by the apparently growing consensus that the U.S. will need to keep a significant military presence in Iraq for the better part of the next decade. This is hard to square with genuine confidence that the surge is reducing violence significantly. Link.

• Everyone agrees that the Iraqi police is still a disaster: corrupt, violent, and almost entirely infiltrated by Shiite militias. Link.

• The Iraqi army is doing a little better, according to the Pentagon, but the evidence on that score is thin and anecdotal. Link. Other anecdotal evidence suggests that the Iraqi army is nearly as thoroughly infiltrated by Shiite militias as the police. Link1. Link2.

• The British are leaving southern Iraq, which has already begun devolving into intra-Shiite civil war. Link.

• The Kirkuk election is still scheduled for later this year. Increased violence there seems almost certain regardless of whether the election is postponed or held on schedule. Link.

• With the exception of the telephone network, the infrastructure news is almost uniformly bad. Oil exports are down, fuel availability is lower, electricity generation is spottier, and attacks on pipelines are up. Link.

• The Brookings Iraq Index estimates that the size of the insurgency has grown from 20,000 last year to 70,000 this year. I don't know how seriously to take these estimates, but that's a helluva big jump. Link.
  

So that appears to be the state of affairs on the ground. Anbar is good news despite the long-term risk of arming Sunni tribal leaders. Petraeus seems to be doing a good job on the counterinsurgency front (though it's frankly hard to say how much of this is good PR based on a limited number of success stories and how much is genuine widespread progress). And it's possible that violence is down in Baghdad, though I'd rate the odds of that at no more than 50-50.

On the downside, most of the evidence suggests that violence is following seasonal patterns and is going up, not down. The insurgency seems to be getting worse in the north. Civil war is breaking out in the south. Anecdotal reports of progress are undercut by suggestions that we'll need to stay in Iraq for another decade. The Iraqi police force is a disaster and the army doesn't appears to be much better, despite the usual Pentagon claims of improvement. Kirkuk is a timebomb. Iraqi infrastructure is in a ruinous decline. And the insurgency is apparently bigger than it was a year ago.

The conventional wisdom this summer, after a steady round of dog-and-pony shows from the military, says that although political progress in Iraq is nil (or even in reverse), at least we're finally making some tactical progress on the security front. And maybe we are. But I'm trying to be as honest as I can be here, and it looks to me like the balance of the evidence suggests that this is more hype than reality. As near as I can tell, we're not making much progress on either front.

CRANKERY THAT REFUSES TO DIE....Bruce Bartlett shreds the idea of a national sales tax in the Wall Street Journal here. New things I learned: the idea orginally came from the Church of Scientology ("The Scientologists' idea was that since almost all states have sales taxes, replacing federal taxes with the same sort of tax would allow them to collect the federal government's revenue and thereby get rid of their hated enemy, the IRS") and public support for the idea is wobbly to say the least ("public opinion polls have long shown that support for flat-rate tax reforms is extremely sensitive to the proposed rate, with support dropping off sharply at a rate higher than 23%").

The upshot of this is that sales tax advocates universally claim that their plan can eliminate all federal taxes at a rate of — surprise! — 23%. The real number, you'll be unsurprised to learn, is north of 60%. But public opinion polls say it has to be 23%, so 23% it is.

This, of course, is the Mayberry Machiavelli theory of the modern Republican Party: policy analysis doesn't matter. Only politics matters. If the peepul support a rate of 23%, then who cares what the eggheads say? We're looking for votes here, not tax policy that actually works.

Of course, what's really amazing is that Bruce can write a thousand words on this subject and maintain a calm and even demeanor throughout. After all, among serious tax analysts a national sales tax ranks right up there with eliminating the Fed and putting the United States back on the gold standard. It's crankery. And yet it keeps rearing its ugly head, like a vampire that just won't die. Anybody got a silver bullet handy?

NEW WORD NEEDED, PLEASE....Roger Cohen writes today that the original plan back in 2003 was to have two U.S. envoys to Iraq: Jerry Bremer to run the CPA and Zalmay Khalilzad, a Farsi-speaking Sunni Muslim, to begin forming an interim Iraqi government. Then, suddenly, the plan changed on May 6th and Khalilzad was out:

Alluding to former Secretary of State Colin Powell and his successor, Condoleezza Rice, who was then national security adviser, Khalilzad continued: "Powell and Condi were incredulous. Powell called me and asked: 'What happened?' And I said, 'You're secretary of state and you're asking me what happened!' "

Powell confirmed his astonishment. "The plan was for Zal to go back," he said. "He was the one guy who knew this place better than anyone. I thought this was part of the deal with Bremer. But with no discussion, no debate, things changed. I was stunned."

The volte-face came at a Bush-Bremer lunch that day where Bremer made a unity of command argument to the Decider. "I put it very directly to the president: you can't have two presidential envoys running around Iraq," Bremer told me.

.... Nonsense, Khalilzad believes. "I feel strongly that the U.S. ruling was wrong. We could have had an interim Iraqi government. I argued, based on Afghanistan, that with forces, diplomacy and money, nothing can happen anyway without your support."

Powell agrees. "Everything was Bremer, the suit, the boots, the whole nine yards." It was a mistake not to move ''more rapidly to putting an Iraqi face on it.''

....And chosen over lunch. "Unfortunately, yes, the way that decision was taken was typical," Powell said. "Done! No full deliberations. And you suddenly discover, gee, maybe that wasn't so great, we should have thought about it a little longer."

It's stuff like this that's kept me from fully buying into Matt Yglesias's "incompetence dodge" theory, the notion that it's a copout to think that we failed in Iraq solely because we weren't competent enough. It's not that I'm convinced he's wrong, it's just that every month or so we discover yet another piece of Bushian incompetence so staggering that you really think the word itself is simply inadequate to the task. Frankly, given everything we've learned about the Bush administration's approach to Iraq over the past four years, it's remarkable that we aren't in even worse shape than we are.

On the meta side, of course, the interesting question is: why is Khalilzad speaking out now? Is this some subtle way of trying to get Bush to fire him? Or what?