LA STORY....The LA Times reports that Los Angeles has experienced a huge drop in homicides this year:

The drop comes nine months after Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa and Los Angeles Police Chief William J. Bratton vowed to crack down on gangs. But though previous anti-gang campaigns have involved mass arrests and high-profile sweeps, this effort has been more targeted.

And in its most radical shift, the LAPD is putting aside decades of suspicion and turning for help to gang intervention workers, many of whom were gang members.

....Overall, Los Angeles has recorded [289] homicides so far this year, with Bratton saying he believes the city will end the year with the lowest number of killings in 37 years (in 1970, there were 394 homicides). Authorities believe the help of gang intervention workers has made a difference, but they acknowledge that they can't fully explain the drop.

Yes, this is the same William Bratton who was fired by Rudy Giuliani for reducing crime in New York City and then having the gall to take a share of the credit for it. Quite a guy, our Rudy.

WAL-MART....Megan McArdle applauds Wal-Mart's low prices on generic prescription drugs, and then adds this:

At the same time, they take a huge beating for the wages they pay their workers, and the alleged stinginess of their health care plans. But these two things are flip sides of the same coin: they can afford to provide cheap drugs in part because they have a flexible and inexpensive labor force.

It's the "in part" that critical here. Labor expenses only amount to about 10% of revenues for Wal-Mart. If you increased the pay of every single clerk, greeter, and stocker in the chain by two or three bucks an hour, it would only increase Wal-Mart's prices by about 2%. Their prices would still be the lowest around because it's not labor costs that account for most of their efficiency. It's world class logistics, aggressive offshoring, enormous sales volumes, and ruthless bargaining with suppliers that accounts for most of it.

If Wal-Mart had to offer low wages and lousy benefits just to stay in business, that would be one thing. But they don't. We should expect them to do better.

THE CLIMATE CHARADE....Apparently nobody outside the U.S. was fooled for a minute by George Bush's "climate summit." The Guardian reports:

European ministers, diplomats and officials attending the Washington conference were scathing, particularly in private, over Mr Bush's failure once again to commit to binding action on climate change.

....The conference, attended by more than 20 countries, including China, India, Britain, France and Germany, broke up with the US isolated, according to non-Americans attending. One of those present said even China and India, two of the biggest polluters, accepted that the voluntary approach proposed by the US was untenable and favoured binding measures, even though they disagreed with the Europeans over how this would be achieved.

A senior European diplomat attending the conference, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the meeting confirmed European suspicions that it had been intended by Mr Bush as a spoiler for a major UN conference on climate change in Bali in December.

"It was a total charade and has been exposed as a charade," the diplomat said. "I have never heard a more humiliating speech by a major leader. He [Mr Bush] was trying to present himself as a leader while showing no sign of leadership. It was a total failure."

Of course, there was an easier way to tell that nobody in the White House was taking this thing seriously: it was named the "Major Economies Meeting on Energy Security and Climate Change." When it's a real initiative they take the time to come up with a snappy name and a nifty acronym. This time, they didn't bother.

FUNDRAISER....Over at Comments From Left Field, they're holding a fundraiser in honor of Sgt. Yance Gray and Sgt. Omar Mora, two of the seven soldiers who wrote a recent op-ed about the war in the New York Times. Gray and Mora were killed in a vehicle accident while on patrol in Baghdad two weeks ago.

The money raised from the fund drive is going to Fisher House, a charity that builds houses near military medical facilities. Loved ones of those who have been injured in the line of duty can stay free of charge while their service member undergoes necessary treatment.

So far over $2,000 has been raised, and the organizers are trying to raise a total of $10,000. More details here. You can make donations here.

RUDY!....The money for that initiative to split up California's electoral votes may have been laundered through Missouri, but it originated in New York City. The LA Times identifies the initiative's main backer as Rudy Giuliani's biggest fundraiser:

He is New York hedge fund billionaire Paul Singer. He said he provided the $175,000 to initially finance the petition drive to get the measure on the June 2008 ballot....Singer oversees Elliott Associates, an $8 billion investment fund. He is also chairman of Giuliani's northeast fundraising operation that produced a third of the New Yorker's $33.5 million campaign war chest in the first six months of 2007. Singer and his employees have donated at least $182,000 to the Giuliani campaign so far this year.

"I made the contribution without any restrictions," Singer's statement said. Some Democrats have threatened legal action, complaining that federal campaign finance laws were violated if the Giuliani campaign was involved.

Tonight, Howard Dean, chairman of the Democratic National Committee, issued a statement demanding to know "the truth about Rudy's involvement in and knowledge about this shameful effort to disenfranchise voters."

I suspect that stonewalling will remain the name of the game at Giuliani HQ for as long as they can hold out.

FRIDAY CATBLOGGING....When we first got Domino, she decided that she wasn't really that thrilled with the whole water dish idea. So every night, when we set the table for dinner, she'd jump up and start lapping water out of Marian's glass. We'd toss her down, and she'd jump back up. Finally, we gave in to the inevitable and just gave her her own glass. It's a USC tumbler that now resides permanently on our coffee table, and as near as I can tell it's the only thing she drinks out of. She can only stuff her face about halfway down, of course, and knocks it over if it gets too empty. So we make sure to top it off every morning. We are well trained.

As for Inkblot, he'll drink out of anything. Puddles in the backyard are a favorite. Yesterday, though, he was just sitting on the bench showing off his vast expanse of tummy fur. Vast, I tell you.

THE BIDEN PLAN....Partition Iraq? Marc Lynch thinks not:

As meaningless, non-binding symbolic Senate resolutions go, Joe Biden just managed a doozy. By passing with 75 votes a meaningless, non-binding symbolic Senate resolution in favor of the partition of Iraq, Biden managed to simultaneously: infuriate nearly all Iraqis, who have virtually unanimously condemned the resolution (as have the Arab allies of the US, for that matter); let Senate Republicans off the hook by allowing them to say that they voted for change even though they continue to vote against anything real; and endorse an unworkable plan which would massively increase human suffering while working against American interests in the region and not actually solving the problems.

Come on, Marc, tell us what you really think.

EDWARDS ON IRAQ....Here's an excerpt from Wednesday's Democratic debate. It came after John Edwards said firmly that he would pull all combat troops out of Iraq and wouldn't continue combat missions there. "I believe this war needs to be brought to an end," he said. Then this:

MR. RUSSERT: Would you send combat troops back in if there was genocide?

MR. EDWARDS: I believe that America along with the rest of the world would have a responsibility to respond to genocide. It's not something we should do alone. In fact, if we do it alone, it could be counterproductive.

In fact, if I can go one step further beyond what you just asked, I think the president of the United States — and I as president — would have a responsibility, as we begin to bring our combat troops out of Iraq, to prepare for two possibilities. One is the possibility that — the worst possibility, which is that genocide breaks out, Shi'a try to systematically eliminate the Sunni. I think we need to be preparing for that with the international community now, not wait. And second, the possibility that this war starts to spill outside the borders of Iraq. And that's a very difficult thing to contain, because we know historically that it's difficult to contain a civil war.

An emailer wrote to suggest that Edwards is saying, yes, he'd send troops back in. I take the opposite view. The odds of getting the "international community" to send troops into Iraq to break up a Shia-Sunni war is exactly zero, and Edwards knows it perfectly well. By saying "It's not something we should do alone," he's effectively closing off the prospect of sending U.S. troops back into Iraq under any circumstances, but without quite saying so directly.

Comments? Which interpretation sounds most plausible to you?

UPDATE: cmdicely thinks that what Edwards is really saying is that we need to change the current reality:

Edwards is clearly saying here that the US needs, absolutely, to begin laying the groundwork now so that if genocide were to occur in Iraq, the current political reality that would make the international community unlikely to be willing and able to respond effectively would no longer hold, so that effective, productive international intervention to end any such genocide, which would have a US role, would be practical.

He is also saying that if that is not done, then it seems certain that the US would not be able to productively intervene if there were a genocide.

This doesn't match either your interpretation that Edwards views it as a static reality that there is no possibility of an international effort if needed, nor does it match your anonymous correspondent's interpretation that Edwards is committing unequivocally to send troops back in.

My take: I agree that Edwards said this, but I'm not sure it answers the question. I'd say the odds of the international community sending combat troops to Iraq is virtually zero no matter what Edwards or any other president does. It's just not gonna happen. For all practical purposes, then, Edwards is saying he wouldn't send troops back in under any circumstances that are even reasonably conceivable.

Also in comments, Catch22 says, "I think the most honest answer is that it would depend on a lot of things." That sounds about right.

OBAMA UPDATE....Barack Obama held a rally in New York City last night and wanted to make sure everyone knew it was big:

His staff had a scissors lift (a.k.a. a cherry-picker) and was taking photographers — and, by the end of the evening, print reporters as well — up in it to get crowd shots.

I guess that's pretty clever. Or is it old hat, but I've just never heard of it before?

In other Obama news, Bloomberg reports:

When the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation takes up the topic "What's at Stake in '08" at its annual legislative conference today, the group's only presidential candidate, Senator Barack Obama of Illinois, won't be leading the discussion.

Top billing will go to New York Senator Hillary Clinton, who will be joined by Caucus leaders in the main ballroom of the Washington Convention Center. Obama will speak later in the day, on climate change, in a much smaller conference room.

"I was shocked" by the program, said Ronald Walters, a political science professor at the University of Maryland in College Park who advised Reverend Jesse Jackson's presidential runs. "Environmentalism is important, but it's not one of the headline issues in the black community."

The rest of the story is a gloss on what's apparently become the newest buzz in Obama reporting: the belief that because Obama is black, he can't afford to be seen as too close to the black community. "He has to run what I would call a deracialized campaign," said Bruce Ransom, a political science professor at Clemson University in South Carolina. This has all the makings of being the latest Hot Topic™ on the campaign trail. Expect a Newsweek cover story soon.

FOLLOW THE MONEY....So what's the deal with that shadowy organization that was funding the initiative to split California's electoral votes? Oddly enough, the money trail leads back to Missouri. Show Me Progress has more.

WHY TUESDAY?....John Quiggin asks "Why Tuesday?" That is, why do Americans always vote on Tuesday? Luckily, John links to a site called Why Tuesday? that offers an answer:

We vote on Tuesday because of an 1845 federal law that was passed when 80% of Americans lived on farms. At the time it could often take a day or longer to get to the polls, and Congress did not want this travel to conflict with days of religious observance, which left Tuesday and Wednesday. Wednesday was market day. So: Tuesday.

Well, this is the story I've always heard too. But now the question is: is this story true? Or is it an urban legend that got started somewhere and has since conquered the world? Beats me. But it certainly sounds plausible, doesn't it?

POSTSCRIPT: By the way, Why Tuesday? is actually an organization trying to get voting day changed, perhaps to the weekend, perhaps to a national holiday. Check 'em out.

THE TRAP....Via email, Daniel Brook, author of The Trap: Selling Out to Stay Afloat in Winner-Take-All America, responds to my post about the book from earlier this week:

I'm often accused of being old-fashioned. I have the crazy notion that being a teacher or a district attorney is a real career that should provide enough for a middle-class life. And I still believe when people review books, they should have read them first.

I don't mind in the slightest Washington Monthly writer Doron Taussig making a few criticisms of my book in his thoughtful review, but I do mind Kevin Drum spouting off in a "review of the review."

What really irked me was Drum's "color me unconvinced" comment. Well, of course, a reviewer will be unconvinced by a book if he hasn't extended the author the chance to convince him by actually reading the book! Had Drum read The Trap, he would have learned facts like these:

1. In 1972, starting salaries at Manhattan corporate law firms were $16,000 while the federal government offered its newly minted lawyers $13,300 and Legal Aid of New York paid $12,500. Today, the public sector/private sector salary gap is $100,000 as shown by the latest figures from the National Association of Law Placement.

2. The teacher-lawyer comparison is similar: In 1970, starting New York City teachers made just $2,000 less than starting Wall Street lawyers. They now make $100,000 less. Today, teacher-headed households are priced out of more than 90% of the region's census tracts.

3. In 1980, the City of Chicago paid its starting teachers $13,770, more than two and a half times the annual tuition at the University of Chicago. Today, U of C tuition is almost equal to teacher pay, tuition having tripled in real dollars in a generation.
   

All I'm saying is that these considerations change the math of choosing a public service career and thus route talent in certain ways. As a progressive, I'm concerned that these are not ways that are most beneficial to society and, as I show in the book, many of the people routed this way feel "trapped" rather than liberated.

I don't ask that reviewers agree with me, but I do ask that they withhold judgment until they read the book.

VOTER ID....In the LA Times today, law professor Daniel Tokaji asks if voter ID laws, like the Indiana law that's being challenged in the Supreme Court, are "a new poll tax":

This burden that Indiana's law imposes might be defensible if the state had evidence that ID is needed to prevent polling place fraud, but that evidence simply doesn't exist. The state of Indiana couldn't document a single case of voter impersonation at the polls. In other words, voter ID is a solution in search of a problem.

....In challenging this law, voting rights advocates rely on a 1966 case that struck down poll taxes, which were used to disenfranchise African Americans in some Southern states. In that opinion, the Supreme Court held that even a $1.50 poll tax discriminated against voters based on their economic status. The court declared that restrictions on the right to vote must be "closely scrutinized and carefully confined."

Some are optimistic that the Supreme Court will follow this precedent and strike down Indiana's law, thereby placing comparably strict laws in jeopardy....[But] just last year, it lifted a court order against an Arizona voter ID law that required photo ID or two forms of non-photo ID. That opinion turned the right to vote on its head. The court suggested that the mere perception of voter fraud was equivalent to vote dilution. According to the court, citizens might "feel disenfranchised" if they believe, correctly or not, that others are committing vote fraud.

Indiana "couldn't document a single case of voter impersonation at the polls." And we're supposed to believe that voter fraud is the real reason behind these laws? Please.

ETHANOL....Thanks to the ethanol boom, the Washington Post reports that:

most farmers earned between $100 and $400 an acre on their 2006 crop after expenses, depending on whether they owned or rented their land. That translates into profits of $100,000 to $400,000 on a 1,000-acre farm. The USDA predicts that net farm income will be $87.1 billion this year, up nearly 50 percent over 2006.

Iowa farmland values are up 18 percent in the past 12 months, according to Federal Reserve Board surveys, making millionaires on paper out of any farmers owning 200 acres free and clear.

And what's our legislative resonse to this? "A House-passed farm bill would give corn growers $10.5 billion over the next five years, even if prices stay high."

Terrific. Let's see: (a) environmentally speaking, corn ethanol is a pretty dodgy idea in the first place, (b) we're subsidizing it anyway to the tune of $3 billion per year, (c) farmers, as you'd expect, are responding to the subsidies by reducing the amount of farmland used for food production, (d) this is driving up the price of staple food worldwide, and (e) we're going to toss another $10 billion in ag welfare to already-rich corn farmers on top of all that. Jeebus. Can anyone think of any other single policy that has as many simultaneous baneful effects? Are we complete morons?

No, don't answer that.

ELECTORAL COLLEGE HIJINKS....Remember that cute little piece of skullduggery Republicans have been backing that would split California's electoral votes by congressional district instead of awarding them all to a single candidate? Long story short, California is reliably blue and a Democratic presidential candidate could normally expect to win all 55 of the state's votes. Under the new proposal they'd probably split about 35-20. Democrats would instantly lose 20 electoral votes.

So clever. So sly. So dead:

The Times' Dan Morain reports that the proposal to change the winner-take-all electoral vote allocation to one by congressional district is virtually dead with the resignation of key supporters, internal disputes and a lack of funds.

....Opposition was lead by Democratic consultant Chris Lehane who received financial backing from donors such as Stephen Bing, like Lehane a Hillary Clinton backer who saw any threat to keeping all of California's electoral votes as unacceptable.

"We want to to make sure this is not the Freddie Kruger of initiatives," Lehane said today, "that comes back to life. We'll continue to monitor it."

The LA Times promises a full report on the debacle later tonight.

UPDATE: The full story is here:

The campaign received only one sizable donation — $175,000. That is less than one-tenth of the $2 million typically needed to gather sufficient signatures to qualify a measure for the California ballot.

The donation arrived on Sept. 11....But the individual donors to the organization were not known.

...."I am not willing to proceed under such circumstances," Hiltachk said. "Therefore, I am resigning my role in this campaign." Eckery added: "There's no reason to be cute on campaign contributions. We had nothing to hide, and the public has every right to know."

....Hurth did not return repeated calls seeking comment. His spokesman, Republican consultant Jonathan Wilcox, would not say who provided the $175,000. Wilcox said the group was planning to donate to other conservative causes around the country, including one in Utah to create school vouchers.

PUBLIC OPINION....Atrios, predicting a veto of the SCHIP children's healthcare bill followed by yet another dreary round of "Democrats can't get anything done," thinks Dems need a better media strategy:

I get the sense that Democrats craft these things behind closed doors, try to come up with palatable bipartisan agreements, and then show up on the teevee the day of the vote and announce that they passed it....The Republican version would've been to spend 6 months telling people that kids are GOING TO DIE RIGHT NOW UNLESS THIS BILL PASSES and beating the Democrats into submission. That isn't how our team works. Which is fine, if it achieves something. Not fine if it doesn't.

That's exactly right. Public opinion is key, and although there are conspicious exceptions to this general rule, conservatives are better at molding it than we are. It's the same reason that opposition to the war ran into a wall this summer: Petraeus spent all of July and August conducting a quiet media blitzkrieg selling the surge, while the rest of us twiddled our thumbs and waited for his September testimony. But by September the deed was done. Support for the war, which was beginning to crater even among Republicans earlier this year, had been successfully shored up before Petraeus ever set foot in a hearing room. Public sentiment for the war may not have increased after Petraeus's testimony, but its downward slide was halted, and that was enough. Mission accomplished.

Public opinion. Public opinion. Public opinion. That's what matters, and we have to get better at changing it. The first step is to understand it.

CORRUPTION....The State Department isn't impressed with anticorruption efforts in Iraq's government ministries:

The Ministry of Interior is seen by Iraqis as untouchable....Corruption investigations in Ministry of Defense are judged to be ineffectual....corruption investigations are clearly inadequate in the Ministry of Trade. The Ministry of Health is a sore point....Anticorruption cases concerning the Ministry of Education have been particularly ineffective....the Ministry of Water Resources it is effectively out of the anticorruption fight....the Ministry of Labor & Social Affairs is hostile to the prosecution of corruption cases....In the Ministry of Displacement & Migration there has been only one investigation initiated or complaint made about any person identified with the Shia. Anticorruption activity efforts are in practical measure devoid in the Ministry of Science and Technology....In the Ministry of Youth & Sports no cases have made it to trial because the minister has granted Article 136B immunity from trial on wholesale bases....Only one conviction has ever come from corruption cases in the entire city of Baghdad.

Did I leave any out?

Actually, yes. The Ministry of Finance, the Ministry of Oil, the Ministry of Transportation, the Ministry of Housing and Construction, and the Ministry of Electricity are also hopelessly corrupt. I think that's all of them.

MORAL HAZARD....Several people have already pointed out the weirdness of this passage from today's New York Times's story about the new labor contract between GM and the UAW:

Beyond the bookkeeping effect of VEBAs, the health care funds could create a kind of incentive for Detroit companies and the union to modify their behavior.

....U.A.W. members, assured of health care benefits that were the envy of the labor movement, had little incentive to take better care of their health, since their generous coverage would pay for most any ailment.

By contrast, Toyota, which pays premiums only for workers, not their families, has fitness centers at its factories and requires newly hired workers to exercise two hours a day during their training period.

But this goes way beyond weird. Toyota funds employee healthcare through a mandatory payroll tax that stays the same regardless of whether its employees are healthy. The funding system itself provides no incentives one way or the other to stay fit. Furthermore, Japanese payroll taxes heavily subsidize the healthcare system for nonworkers, which means that, in essence, Toyota is paying for healthcare for everyone, not just its workers.

Japan has universal healthcare. Everyone is covered no matter what, so Japanese workers and their families have every bit as much incentive to overuse the healthcare system as American autoworkers. There's nothing about this entire passage that makes any sense. What's it doing in the story?

WITHDRAWAL....Why were all three of the leading Dem candidates at last night's debate unwilling to promise a full withdrawal from Iraq by 2013? James Joyner takes a guess:

There's no doubt that the major candidates for the Democratic presidential nomination are reluctant to give a firm commitment on withdrawing troops from Iraq. The reason, I suspect, is that there's a vast difference in running for president and running for Congress. Those with a plausible chance of being elected Commander in Chief have much less luxury to be glib and reactionary in their foreign policy pronouncements, since they would actually have to execute those policies upon taking office.

I don't think this holds water. Candidates make promises all the time and then break them. And this one is even easier to break than most: there are certain to be dozens of events over the next four years that will provide a president with a perfectly plausible excuse to stay in Iraq even if he or she had promised otherwise during the campaign.

I think the problem is simpler: the major Dems aren't promising to get out of Iraq because they don't think it's a winning position. Even in the Democratic primaries, they don't think it's a winning position.

Why? Perhaps they've decided that the median Democratic voter isn't really as hellbent on total withdrawal as the median liberal blogger. Perhaps they think that a promise to begin withdrawing is good enough for most people. Perhaps they think that a firm promise to withdraw runs the risk of hurting them in the general election — and anything that even remotely looks like a flip-flop would hurt them even more. Perhaps they're scared of elite Beltway opinion. Perhaps they genuinely believe that we need to keep some troops in Iraq.

But whatever it is, they've all apparently decided that taking a fuzzy withdrawal position isn't going to hurt them too badly. They don't think advocates of total withdrawal are going to punish them enough at the polls to make a bolder position necessary. Time will tell if they're right.

THE DEBATE....There are times when I really admire the fortitude of mainstream reporters, and last night was one of them. For the first time in a while I watched one of the Democratic debates, and by the end I felt like I was in a total fog. What would I have done if I had to write a thousand-word summary to make the next day's paper? I couldn't even figure out enough to say for a blog post.

Part of the problem was Tim Russert. I long ago got tired of his rote version of gotcha interviewing, and it was on full display last night. He seems to think that the only way of interviewing politicians is to find something embarrassing or inconsistent that they once said and then demand that they explain themselves. Not only does this get boring, but he doesn't seem to have figured out that modern politicians all know perfectly well how to avoid answering these "have you stopped beating your mother" questions. So instead of a hard-hitting debate, what you get is even mushier and less enlightening than a normal conversation. The answers all start with "Let me back up and explain the real issue here" and then meander off into whatever the candidate feels like talking about. The only thing Russert's questions accomplish is to make each candidate waste ten or fifteen seconds at the beginning changing the subject.

As for the candidates themselves, Edwards seemed to me to do the best. His answers weren't as sharp as I've seen before, but he mostly seemed to frame things in ways that made sense, even in cases where they make no sense at all (for example, the business of cutting off congressional healthcare until Congress passes a healthcare bill). Obama was, again, tentative and halting. He mostly just relied on well-rehearsed soundbites and constant reminders that HE WAS RIGHT ABOUT THE WAR FROM THE BEGINNING. We get it, Barack. Hillary was OK, but didn't really advance her cause, I thought. Even granted that Russert should quit asking hypotheticals since he knows no one will answer them, her answers to his hypotheticals were more plainly evasive than usual.

Among the others, Gravel needs to be put out of his misery. These debates really don't need comic relief in the form of someone playing the cranky uncle role. Dodd did pretty well, I thought, though his reliance on his decades of Washington experience didn't seem very convincing. Richardson never does very well in these forums and didn't do well last night. Biden I can't figure out. He has this weird attitude that seems to say that he's just up there having a good time and knows perfectly well that he has no serious chance of becoming the nominee. And he knows we know it. So we're all in on the joke. Or something. And Kucinich was Kucinich. It doesn't matter that much, but he did better than usual.

Anyway, those are my impressions. What were yours?

LIVE BY THE SWORD....It's schadenfreude time:

A crucial GOP fundraising committee is nearly broke, according to its latest monthly filing with the Federal Election Committee last week.

The National Republican Congressional Committee (NRCC) reported $1.6 million in cash on hand and $4 million in debts as of Aug. 31. The group helps bankroll House campaigns for GOP candidates.

Its counterpart, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, reported $22.1 million, more than 10 times its Republican counterpart.

....Senate Republicans are in a state of relative poverty, also. The National Republican Senatorial Campaign has just over $7 million on hand, according to the new filings. The Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee has more than $20 million.

It couldn't happen to a more deserving crew.

THE ARGUMENT....Last night, mulling over the contradictions in the way people answer various poll questions, I guessed that there's "something like 30% who want to stay in Iraq, 30% who want to get out, and 40% somewhere in the middle who aren't really sure what to do." No poll will ever confirm this beyond doubt, of course, since polls (at best) measure only inclination, not depth of feeling. But given the way people respond to different wordings of different questions, it seems like a reasonable guess.

Here's why it matters: we're not going to get out of Iraq until a sufficient number of people get pissed off enough about it to demand action — and we're kidding ourselves if we think a casual answer to a poll question counts as "pissed off." Support for withdrawal is almost certainly not as deep or as wide as a quick glance at the polls suggests, and that's why congressional Democrats haven't worked up the gumption to defund the war. They don't think there are enough voters firmly on their side.

So why are so many people unsure of what to do? Because Iraq is a big, messy problem, of course. But there's more than that. Conservatives have presented a clear message: If we leave, al-Qaeda will take over Iraq. If we leave, there will be genocide. If we leave, Iraq's civil war will spread and the entire region will erupt in flames.

Liberals, by contrast, mostly just argue that the surge isn't working and there's been no political progress. And that's true. But it's a lousy argument. Conservatives are making a persuasive and spine-chilling prediction of disaster if we leave. Liberals are just saying our presence isn't accomplishing anything. That's not enough. Instead of merely claiming that we're not doing any good in Iraq, we need to make persuasive arguments that we're actively doing harm. There are plenty to choose from:

• A significant chunk of the insurgency is motivated by opposition to the American occupation. Our presence is actively inflaming the violence, not reducing it.

• The Maliki government will never make any political compromises as long as they know we're around to prop them up. Leaving is the only way to force them into action.

• We're arming both sides in a civil war. The longer we stay, the worse the eventual bloodbath will be.

• Our presence in Iraq is al-Qaeda's greatest recruiting tool. They're going to keep getting stronger until we leave.

• The real disaster is in Afghanistan and Pakistan. We desperately need to more troops into that theater.
  

These aren't nuanced arguments. If you were writing a 5,000-word piece for Foreign Affairs you'd hedge them until they were barely recognizable. But in the hurly-burly arena of blogs and op-eds and TV shoutfests, this is what it takes to drive public opinion.

When we argue that the surge isn't working, we're playing on conservative turf. We're accepting their frame for the debate. We need to stop, and instead start making positive arguments of our own that conservatives have to parry. It's the only way we're going to turn the leaners into genuine war opponents.

FUNDRAISING....Bloomberg reports that Hillary Clinton may be about to "blunt one of rival Barack Obama's few advantages" in the presidential race:

As the campaigns press donors with predictions that their candidate is losing the fund-raising race, both Clinton and Obama are set to report about $20 million in donations during the third quarter, which ends Sept. 30, according to campaign officials and fund-raisers.

A failure to out-raise Clinton would deprive Obama of the momentum he needs to overcome his rival's significant leads in national and key state polls.

This is crazy. Obama is on track to raise maybe 3x what the leading candidates in 2004 raised for primary season. He's already raised $60 million compared to Howard Dean's $50 million for the entire 2004 race. There's just no way he could seriously be expected to do much better than that. Have we really gotten to the point where an insurgent candidate can raise nearly $80 million by September and still be considered a disappointment? Holy cow.

BLACKWATER UPDATE....Apparently there's a major State-Defense bureaucratic battle brewing over the role of Blackwater contractors in Iraq:

"This is a nightmare," said a senior U.S. military official. "We had guys who saw the aftermath [of the shootings in Nisoor Square last week], and it was very bad. This is going to hurt us badly. It may be worse than Abu Ghraib, and it comes at a time when we're trying to have an impact for the long term."

...."This is a big mess that I don't think anyone has their hands around yet," said another U.S. military official. "It's not necessarily a bad thing these guys are being held accountable. Iraqis hate them, the troops don't particularly care for them, and they tend to have a know-it-all attitude, which means they rarely listen to anyone — even the folks that patrol the ground on a daily basis."

....A State Department official asked why the military is shifting the question to State "since the DOD has more Blackwater contractors than we do, including people doing PSD [personal security detail] for them....They've [Blackwater] basically got contracts with DOD that are larger than the contracts with State."

There are plenty of other juicy quotes in the story too, including one from a Lt. Colonel who — if I'm reading it right — says that no one believes Blackwater's story that it was Iraqis who fired first in the Nisoor Square incident.

In related news, David Kurtz reports that (a) the State Department has refused to allow Blackwater to testify at congressional oversight hearings, (b) Condoleezza Rice has also refused to testify, and (c) nobody else from State will testify either unless it's done in closed session. In other words, Blackwater's actions, just like its employees, are in a legal limbo that prevents any effective oversight from either congress or the judicial system. Nice work if you can get it.

POLL LITERALISM....Everybody is beating up on David Brooks for his column yesterday, and rightly so. As he does so often, Brooks based his Tuesday column on the conceit that he has some special insight into what "ordinary" voters think, an insight that (a) usually turns out to be remarkably close to what David Brooks himself thinks and (b) bears little relation to what actual polls say.

This is one of Brooks's worst habits, and it's a tiresome one. But there's an opposite habit that can be equally dangerous: "poll literalism." This is a common malady among liberals — I'm guilty of it myself periodically — who frequently claim that "everyone agrees with us" based on poll results that show support for liberal positions on a wide variety of issues. And it's true: polls really do show this with some regularity. Unfortunately, answers to poll questions come in a vacuum. They don't show what people think once the other side has a chance to get a few licks in.

Here are two examples. First, withdrawal from Iraq. A recent New York Times poll showed that 65% of respondents want to withdraw either some or all of our troops from Iraq. Hooray! The country is with us! But then the Times asked a followup question: "What if removing troops meant Iraq would become more of a base of operations for terrorists, then would you still favor removing U.S. troops from Iraq, or not?"

Guess what? Of that 65%, only 30% still favored removal. That's a huge drop based on a single hypothetical, and in a real campaign that hypothetical would practically blanket the airwarves. It wouldn't convince everyone, of course, but it would probably convince a sizable chunk. The odds are that in real life — i.e., during a campaign in which voters were responding to actual arguments instead of casually answering poll questions over a telephone — there's something like 30% who want to stay in Iraq, 30% who want to get out, and 40% somewhere in the middle who aren't really sure what to do.

Example #2 comes from a much derided recent poll conducted by Celinda Lake for Joe Biden. The reason it was derided (aside from the fact that Washington Post reporter Chris Cillizza failed to inform his readers that Biden was behind the poll) was because of the wording of one of the questions: "Some people say [your Democratic incumbent] is a strong supporter of Hillary Clinton and will support her liberal agenda of big government and higher taxes if she becomes president," the poll stated, before asking respondents whether they would still vote for their incumbent or choose a Republican candidate.

Outrageous! And it is. On the other hand, that's exactly what Republican House candidates are going to say, isn't it? Which means that this poll, showing a 6-point lead for Democratic incumbents, is probably more useful than generic polls showing a 10 or 15 point lead.

Now, obviously this works in both direction: liberals get to make arguments during campaigns too. But conservative arguments appeal to fear pretty effectively, which means that on difficult, highly charged issues, like withdrawing from Iraq, a lot of people tend to be schizophrenic. One day they want to get out, but then they see a scary TV ad and the next day they don't.

Brooks has a bad habit of ignoring poll results that he doesn't want to acknowledge, but it can be nearly as debilitating to go in the other direction and take poll results too seriously. Middle America may not be as hawkish as Brooks imagines them to be, but they probably aren't as noninterventionist as the blogspheric left imagines either. The truth isn't always in the middle, but in this case it probably is.

HOUSING BUBBLE WATCH....The housing meltdown continues apace:

The supply of unsold U.S. homes ballooned to an 18-year high in August as demand for existing homes fell to a five-year low, according to a report by the National Assn. of Realtors....Also today, a separate report indicated that home prices were falling at an increasing rate. The closely watched S&P/Case-Shiller home prices index, which tracks results in metropolitan areas and is considered a leading measure of U.S. single-family home prices, showed an annual decline of 4.5% for the 12 months ended in July, representing the biggest drop since 1991.

....Sales are expected to continue their descent, further weighing down prices...."August's sales do not reflect the full impact of the credit crunch, which hit financial markets in mid-month, since most sales were financed with loans approved weeks beforehand," said Patrick Newport, an economist with research firm Global Insight.

Alan Greenspan says there's nothing he could have done about the housing bubble. Monetary levers are too crude to do any good, and the least worst option is to let the bubble collapse on its own and then pick up the pieces afterward.

Maybe so. But that still doesn't explain why Greenspan cheered on the bubble back in 2004. Watch him squirm over that here.

UNIONBUSTING CONFIDENTIAL....Art Levine dons a false moustache and crashes the gates at a seminar designed to teach managers how to keep unions at bay. Sample advice:

What if we simply wanted to fire union organizers? That was possible to do, said Stief, as long as you were careful to do so for other reasons. "Union sympathizers aren't entitled to any more protection than other workers," he explained. But the firing could not be linked to their union activity.

What if we felt like saying a lot of anti-union stuff to our workers? Lotito introduced a segment called "You Can Say It." Could we tell our workers, for instance, that a union had held strike at a nearby facility only to find that all the strikers had been replaced — and that the same could happen to the employees here? Sure, said Lotito. "It's lawful." He added, "What happens if this statement is a lie? They didn't have another strike, there were no replacements? It's still lawful: The labor board doesn't really care if people are lying."

The rest of the story is here.

DIRECTIVE NUMBER 12....In the Bill Sammon piece I linked to earlier, he notes that George Bush is busily "institutionalizing controversial anti-terror programs so they can be used by the next president." Guantanamo was the example Sammon used to illustrate this point, but a friend emailed last night to raise my consciousness about another example: Homeland Security Presidential Directive Number 12. A blogger whose wife is a grad student doing climate modeling for NASA explains:

This Presidential Directive is all about choice....My wife's choice is she can either sign over to the Federal Government the right to investigate every aspect of her life (including fingerprinting, credit check, medical records, character references, etc.) or she can "voluntarily" choose to not be allowed entry into the building wherein she works. The choice is hers.

....NASA, of course, has many top secret projects, projects which require high security. No one questions the need for high security and detailed background checks for specific, highly sensitive projects. This is perfectly reasonable.

But the Federal Government under Bush is now insisting that ALL employees, contractors, students, etc. associated with NASA agree to allow an investigation into their lives should the Federal Government deem it necessary for any reason.

Basically, if you want to work for NASA in any capacity, you're now required to sign away your privacy rights in advance. Ditto for just about any other government agency that decides to implement this directive. It's just another lovely little policy being "institutionalized" for George Bush's successor.

FEEL THE LOVE....Bill Sammon talks to a "senior White House official" for his new book, The Evangelical President, and gets an early read on how the GOP plans to react after they lose the 2008 election:

Democrats understand the negative consequences of moving too quickly to reverse Bush's Iraq policy [he said]. The official noted that in the wake of Vietnam, anti-war Democrats "suffered for 20-some-odd years because they were identified as the party, when it came to national security, of being weak."

...."One of two things will happen if a Democrat gets elected president," he said. "They will either have to withdraw U.S. troops in order to remain true to the rhetoric — in which case, any consequences in the aftermath fall on their heads. Or they have to break their word, in which case they encourage fratricide on the left of their party. Now that's a thorny issue to work through."

Yes indeedy. If Iraq fails, all the consequences will fall directly on Democratic heads. Democratic heads. With a capital D. You can almost feel the knife twisting. Do you think he managed to deliver that line to Sammon with a straight face?

REPUBLICANS AND RACE....Bob Herbert looks at the recent antics of the Republican Party and decides it's time for a history lesson:

The G.O.P. has spent the last 40 years insulting, disenfranchising and otherwise stomping on the interests of black Americans....This is the party of the Southern strategy — the party that ran, like panting dogs, after the votes of segregationist whites who were repelled by the very idea of giving equal treatment to blacks.

....In 1981, during the first year of Mr. Reagan's presidency, the late Lee Atwater gave an interview to a political science professor at Case Western Reserve University, explaining the evolution of the Southern strategy:

"You start out in 1954 by saying, 'Nigger, nigger, nigger,' " said Atwater. "By 1968, you can't say 'nigger' — that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states' rights, and all that stuff. You're getting so abstract now [that] you're talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you're talking about are totally economic things, and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites."

Lovely man, Lee Atwater.

In related news, today is the 50th anniversary of school integration in Little Rock, Arkansas, an event memorialized for all time in the photo on the right, taken by Arkansas Democrat photographer Will Counts. Vanity Fair has a terrific piece up on their website framed around that photograph and the two high school students it captured: Elizabeth Eckford, one of the original Little Rock Nine, and Hazel Bryan, the white student screaming at her in the background. It's worth a read.