RUDY UPDATE (AFTERNOON EDITION)....Dick Polman runs down the evolving list of excuses Rudy has offered up for hiding security detail expenses in obscure city agency accounts here.

Excuse #5 — I did it in order to help the men in blue get their expenses reimbursed more quickly — never made sense in the first place (why not just do it openly if that's the real reason?), but in any case gets shot down here:

The current New York Police Commissioner Ray Kelly said today he knew of no problems with the delay of payments before Giuliani was mayor, when Kelly served under Mayor David Dinkins, or since.

"I don't recall anybody, any statements about delay," Kelly told reporters.

He said all bills for the police details for Dinkins and now for Mayor Mike Bloomberg are handled directly "through the police department."

Meanwhile, Rudy's campaign is in full panic mode, flatly refusing to talk to the press:

"We've already explained it," he said, walking past reporters after a town hall meeting.

Giuliani, who is normally friendly to reporters, bristled past them, and campaign staffers were unusually physical in keeping the press away. Several campaign aides told campaign reporters to return to the press area, and some of his security detail manhandled reporters.

"We've already explained it." Uh huh. I sure hope he doesn't think that excuse is going to tide him through the upcoming week.

COWBOYING IN LEBANON....It looks like Middle East reporting problems are everywhere. Today NRO, responding to some complaints about W. Thomas Smith Jr.'s "public cowboying" from Beirut — as well as the accuracy of some his reporting — admits that they "should have provided readers with more context and caveats in some posts from Lebanon this fall."

Smith's explanation is here. As near as I can tell, the problem is that he made some pretty dramatic claims about Hezbollah activity that were couched as eyewitness reports, when in reality they were based on quick automobile drive-bys combined with tips from anonymous sources:

In retrospect, however, this is a case where I should have caveated the reporting by saying that I only witnessed a fraction of what happened (from a moving car), with broader details of what I saw ultimately told to me by what I considered then — and still consider to be — reliable sources within the Cedar Revolution movement, as well as insiders within the Lebanese national security apparatus. As we were driving through that part of town, I saw men I identified as Hezbollah deployed at road intersections with radios. I was later told that these were Hezbollah militants deploying to Christian areas of Beirut, and there were four or five thousand of them.

Since then, I have not been able to independently verify that "thousands" of armed Hezbollah fighters deployed to the Christian areas of Beirut in late September, but my sources continue to insist that it happened.

Well, we all make mistakes. Live and learn, eh? Whether the New Republic will be so charitable remains to be seen.

FRIDAY CATBLOGGING....We have paper bags around all the time, but for some reason Domino decided that this week was paper bag week. I actually got a few good pictures of her while fiddling around with my camera's flash, but sadly for her I discarded them all in favor of this one, just because it's so comic book perfect. Not only does she have laser beam eyes, but she looks like she's ready to use them. It's a good thing Inkblot wasn't around.

Speaking of Inkblot, that's him on the left in a picture from last week. Right now it's raining, if you'll excuse the expression, cats and dogs, so there are no good photo ops at the moment. This picture, however, recalls happier, sunnier days.

CORN STARCH....E.J. Dionne notes that although the Republican presidential candidates are usually full of blustery talk about the evils of big government, they're a wee bit more cagey when it comes to specific examples that might be unpopular in early primary states:

Oh, yes, the candidates were all for big spending cuts — but only of the vague, across-the-board variety. When the brave foes of Washington's largess were confronted with a question about eliminating farm subsidies, they morphed into big-government guys.

Bold about slashing budgets earlier in the debate, Giuliani was judiciousness itself when it came to farmers. Farm spending cuts, he insisted, should not be done "simplistically." No, no, "we've got to do this very carefully."

Romney, who kept coming back to the dangers of runaway government outlays, insisted that farm subsidies were different because "it's important for us to make sure that our farmers are able to stay on the farm." Romney helpfully explained all this opportunism by ticking off the list of states besides Iowa, home of the first presidential nominating caucus, where farmers loom large. He sounded as if he were merrily counting delegate votes in his head.

Plus, guarding our precious food supply is a national security issue. Also a basic matter of anti-Europe fairness. And a boon for struggling family farmers. Uh huh.

SUDAN....I've missed commenting on a lot of stories this week just out of sheer busy-busy, and one of them was the conviction of a British teacher in Sudan for allowing the kids in her class to name a teddy bear Muhammad. Here's the aftermath:

Thousands of Sudanese, many armed with clubs and knives, rallied Friday in a central square and demanded the execution of a British teacher convicted of insulting Islam for allowing her students to name a teddy bear "Muhammad."

..."Imprisoning this lady does not satisfy the thirst of Muslims in Sudan. But we welcome imprisonment and expulsion," the cleric, Abdul-Jalil Nazeer al-Karouri, a well-known hard-liner, told worshippers. "This an arrogant woman who came to our country, cashing her salary in dollars, teaching our children hatred of our Prophet Muhammad," he said.

....Most Britons expressed shock at the verdict by a court in Khartoum, alongside hope it would not raise tensions between Muslims and non-Muslims in Britain.

"One of the good things is the U.K. Muslims who've condemned the charge as completely out of proportion," said Paul Wishart, 37, a student in London. "In the past, people have been a bit upset when different atrocities have happened and there hasn't been much voice in the U.K. Islamic population, whereas with this, they've quickly condemned it."

There isn't much we can do about this, but it's still appalling and worth highlighting. In any case, good for the Brits.

RUDY UPDATE....Michael Cooper of the New York Times rounds up a few of Rudy Giuliani's recent campaign trail whoppers and writes:

All of these statements are incomplete, exaggerated or just plain wrong.

Rudy's official response appears to be that he's only lying a little bit, not a lot, and anyway, everyone knows in their hearts that he's really right. Or something. In any case, I count eight separate whoppers debunked in the article. Go read.

Elsewhere in Rudy-land, Josh Marshall is keeping close tabs on the creative accounting that Rudy used in the waning days of his mayoralty to hide expenses for his trips to the Hamptons to meet up with his mistress:

Rudy's defense in all this has been that there's nothing wrong here because this Enron accounting he was using in the mayor's office wasn't specifically to conceal the Shag Fund. And we're getting the sense that he's right. At least in part.

It seems more likely in his final years and months as mayor Rudy was living larger and larger on the NYC dime. And a look at the book-keeping details that are emerging suggests a very conscious effort to use these squirrelly accounting techniques to hide Rudy's high-living ways from public scrutiny. Some of it was Shag Fund spending, but not all, probably not even most.

The problem is that even though the accounting techniques were part of a general effort to hide Rudy's living the high-life on the city's dime, it's now shined a bright light on the Shag Fund. And the Shag Fund was evidently spread more widely than the stuff accounted for with the squirrelly book-keeping.

Josh also notes that Rudy's current explanation for all this, namely that this creative accounting was actually a big-hearted attempt to reimburse cops for their expenses more quickly, is pretty weak stuff. The idea that the NYPD might be slow in cutting checks for expense reports is easy to believe, but do security detail cops really have to rent their own cars, instead of using city cars? And if it was really all above board, why scatter the expenses into half a dozen weird little agencies? And why refuse to explain it when the comptroller started asking questions? Stay tuned.

THE EDWARDS MANDATE REVISITED....Writing from the land of tulips and universal healthcare, Ezra Klein says I'm giving short shrift to the political merits of individual mandate healthcare plans (i.e., the kind of plans currently on the table from John Edwards and Hillary Clinton). But I think he missed the point of my criticism (here) of Edwards' plan for enforcing enrollment in his version of IM.

As it happens, I really do think individual mandate plans are dumb on pure policy grounds. But I also realize that my preferred alternative is a political loser and that IM is (possibly) a political winner. So I'm for it. But that's exactly why Edwards' Diogenes-like effort to define his enforcement mechanism for IM in such mind-numbing detail is a bad idea: it practically forces voters to confront the fact that IM doesn't really make much sense. If you're really that dead serious about forcing everyone to get coverage, why the Rube Goldberg mechanism? Why not just tax everyone and sign 'em up for Medicare?

This is, frankly, something you want to keep a little blurry, not something you want to sharpen, and a smart politician understands this. Ezra is right when he says that IM "basically trades away certain amount of economic efficiency in order to evade the political implications of nationalizing health spending." That being the case, it's politically wise to keep things fuzzy at this point — especially since enforcement is a detail that has no chance of surviving the political process intact anyway, and accomplishes nothing except providing your opponents with an opening for demagogic attacks. Right?

UPDATE: Nicholas Beaudrot points out that all the healthcare plans on the table (including Edwards') provide various subsidies and tax credits for poor people, and that in any case, everyone has a political incentive to make sure that the middle class doesn't pay too much for healthcare. "Thus, in practice, the number of people who would actually see their wages garnished or get taken to collections would be relatively low."

Exactly. And I'm sure that Republicans all realize this and will therefore refrain from using it as an unprincipled way of panicking Harry and Louise about jackbooted IRS thugs raiding accounting departments across the country and demanding that H&L's wages be garnished. So I guess no harm has been done after all.

SIZING UP THE SURGE....The LA Times reports on the difficulty of getting accurate civilian fatality figures in Iraq:

Iraqi officials have been reporting far higher civilian death totals than those reported by U.S. forces, and aides to American commanders now acknowledge that the U.S. military probably had been undercounting such casualties.

....The conflicting figures frequently arise from incidents in which the U.S. asserts it has killed insurgents whereas Iraqi officials and witnesses say civilians died.

....American officers say that trends in both U.S. and "host nation" reporting show that violence has decreased substantially over the last four months. "The trends are the same; the magnitude is different," said Army Col. Bill Rapp, head of Petreaus' small in-house group of advisors. "He reports both, and our guess is truth is in between that range."

The "magnitude" is different. Hmmm. The Times also reports that U.S. commanders think the Iraqis intentionally lowball civilian fatalities in areas where they've taken over the lead from American troops. They do this to make their own security forces look better, which, ironically, is exactly the same thing that various independent monitoring groups have accused Petraeus of doing to make the U.S. surge look good in areas where we've taken over.

Denying that the surge is working is apparently the latest Great Lefty Sin™, and God knows I don't want to do that. I'm still waiting for political progress. Still, a year from now it will be interesting to find out just what the consensus is on how much violence really did decrease during the second half of 2007. Stay tuned.

MELTDOWN DOWN UNDER....As you all know, Labor won last week's election in Australia, primarily on promises to ratify Kyoto and pull out of Iraq. But it turns out the Liberal (i.e., pro-business right) Party didn't just go down to defeat. "Instead," writes John Quiggin, "there has been a meltdown of spectacular proportions on the losing side." More about the happy news here. With any luck, perhaps we can hope for the same performance next year from our own pro-business right party?

THE EDWARDS MANDATE....Both John Edwards and Hillary Clinton include "individual mandates" in their healthcare plans that require everyone in the country to sign up for coverage. But what if you refuse to sign up anyway? Today, John Edwards explained how his plan would deal with that:

Under the Edwards plan, when Americans file their income taxes, they would be required to submit a letter from an insurance provider confirming coverage for themselves and their dependents.

If someone did not submit proof of coverage, the Internal Revenue Service would notify a newly established regional or state-based health-care agency [which] would enroll the individual into the lowest cost health-care plan available in that area....The newly covered individual would not only have access to health benefits but would also be responsible for making monthly payments with the help of a tax credit.

....If a person did not meet his or her monthly financial obligation for a set period of time (perhaps a year, perhaps longer) the Edwards plan would empower the federal government to garnish an individual's wages for purposes of collecting "back premiums with interest and collection costs."

Paul Krugman calls this a "terrific idea," but I'm not so sure. There are at least two big problems here — and probably three.

First, do we really want the IRS enforcing healthcare mandates? That's not what the IRS is for, and Americans are (rightly) suspicious of using the IRS as a quasi-police agency to enforce whatever federal law the current administration feels like using it for. This is probably not a constructive road to go down.

Second, a Rube Goldberg enforcement program like does nothing except highlight the absurdity of individual mandate healthcare plans in the first place. If you're really this serious about getting every man, woman, and child in the country enrolled, why go through all this? Why not just do it like Medicare, where the funding mechanism is the existing tax system and everyone is enrolled automatically? It amounts to the same thing and it's cheaper, easier, and less intrusive.

Third, this is a political loser. Do we really want to treat people who don't sign up for healthcare like deadbeat dads and Chapter 11 refugees by garnishing their wages? Unless I'm way off base, this is just not going to go over well. Republicans will have a field day with it.

Sometimes you can offer too much detail in a campaign, and this is one of those times. No healthcare plan will survive the election in anything close to its campaign form, so why bother offering up a detailed enforcement mechanism that's never going to see the light of day anyway? Politically it's an albatross and substantively it's meaningless. It's just a mistake all around.

SY'S SECRETS....Matt Taibbi reveals Seymour Hersh's reporting secrets:

He's old school. He's the kind of guy who sits and pores over the newsletters of all these minor government agencies to see who retired that week so he can approach that person to see if he's got any stories to tell on his way out of service. There are a few guys like that who are still out there, but they're all holdovers from a lost age.

Old school indeed.

THE REPUBLICAN BASE....Last night Joe Klein sat in on one of Frank Luntz's focus group sessions for the Republican debate. It was one of those deals where each participant got a "dial" that allowed them to register instant approval or disapproval of what each candidate said. Klein's report:

In the next segment — the debate between Romney and Mike Huckabee over Huckabee's college scholarships for the deserving children of illegal immigrants — I noticed something really distressing: When Huckabee said, "After all, these are children of God," the dials plummeted. And that happened time and again through the evening: Any time any candidate proposed doing anything nice for anyone poor, the dials plummeted (30s).

The other big loser: John McCain saying we shouldn't torture people. In fact, it was an even bigger loser. It turns out that the only thing these GOP voters hated more than helping the poor was being told that it's wrong to torture people.

Ladies and gentlemen, your Republican base.

SHAGADELIC!....I sort of buried the big Rudy/Judi story in the middle of my debate blogging last night, and that's just not right. It deserves a post of its own.

So just in case you missed it, The Politico reported yesterday that back in 1999-2000, when Rudy was carrying on an affair with Judith Nathan (later Mrs. Rudy #3), he tried to hide what was going on by charging the expenses of his security detail to obscure city agencies:

The expenses first surfaced as Giuliani's two terms as mayor of New York drew to a close in 2001, when a city auditor stumbled across something unusual: $34,000 worth of travel expenses buried in the accounts of the New York City Loft Board.

When the city's fiscal monitor asked for an explanation, Giuliani's aides refused, citing "security," said Jeff Simmons, a spokesman for the city comptroller.

But American Express bills and travel documents obtained by Politico suggest another reason City Hall may have considered the documents sensitive: They detail three summers of visits to Southampton, the Long Island town where Nathan had an apartment.

....Broadening the inquiry, the comptroller wrote, auditors found similar expenses at a range of other unlikely agencies: $10,054 billed to the Office for People With Disabilities and $29,757 to the Procurement Policy Board.

The next year, yet another obscure department, the Assigned Counsel Administrative Office, was billed around $400,000 for travel.

Rudy's explanation for these odd billing practices? Three so far: (a) it's just a "hit job," (b) it's the police department's fault, and (c) why, this is just standard operating procedure.

Well, standard operating procedure at Enron, maybe, but probably not for the city of New York. But there's more. While this was all still percolating, ABC News reported this afternoon that Judi had been getting some additional special treatment:

Well before it was publicly known he was seeing her, then-married New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani provided a police driver and city car for his mistress Judith Nathan, former senior city officials tell the Blotter on ABCNews.com.

"She used the PD as her personal taxi service," said one former city official who worked for Giuliani.

Former mayor Ed Koch was not amused: "That was bizarre. She's not the city's responsibility. Rudy is the city's responsibility. Your wife and his children get protection, and that's understood. But certainly not your lady friend."

And just to jog your memories, remember that this comes on top of all those rumors that Rudy bucked his advisors and insisted on putting his emergency command post in the World Trade Center so that it would be within walking distance of City Hall, and therefore convenient for in-city trysts with Judi. That turned out not to be such a great idea, but what can you do? Love makes fools of us all.

And, hell, as long as we're piling on Rudy, ABC also reported today that for the past two years Giuliani Security & Safety has been providing security consulting and advice to the Qatar Interior Ministry, "which is currently run by a member of the royal family who has long been accused of supporting al Qaeda, according to security consultants familiar with the area."

If you want to keep up, TPM (natch) is flooding the zone on all things Rudy. Head over there for the latest.

THE PUBLIC RECORD....Aroused by Daniel Davies' and Jon Chait's recent tongue lashings of the right, Tyler Cowen throws out an idea:

I'd like to propose a new research convention. Anytime a writer or blogger talks about what The Right or The Left (or some subset thereof) really wants or means, I'd like them to list their personal anthropological experience with the subjects under consideration. Davies presents [Milton] Friedman as a shill for the Republican Party; I'd like to know how many (public or non-public) conversations he has had with Friedman about the topic of the Republican Party.

....How many supply-siders has Chait talked to? It might be a lot, but again I'd like to know. Has he met with the people who write The Wall Street Journal Op-Ed page? How many of them? How many leading Republican donors and strategists does he know? Did they really chat with him, or were they in controlled "interview mode"? How motivated are they by supply-side doctrine? What did those say who weren't so motivated?

How many intelligent pro-life Republicans do you know? How many southern racist Republicans do you know? Have they confided in you? Do they trust you? Do you really think you know what they believe?

Actually, this kind of amateur anthropology goes on all the time, and it obviously has its uses. But it also has its drawbacks: the conventions of social interaction allow people to obfuscate, prevaricate, evade, and just generally lay on the charm in ways that frequently blur distinctions instead of sharpening them. And human beings being the social primates that we are, we often give views that we hear in person more weight than they deserve simply because we heard them in person.

So I disagree: When it comes to important issues of public policy this kind of personal interaction should be secondary. For the most part, we shouldn't judge people by what they say in private or how they act around their kids. We shouldn't judge presidential candidates by how sociable they are on the press plane or whether they'd make a good drinking buddy. That's how we ended up with George Bush. We should judge them mostly by their public record: their speeches, their actions, their roll call votes, and their funding priorities. Anthropological research, aka hanging out and having a few beers, is fun and interesting, but it's not necessarily a superior guide to what someone really thinks or what they'll really do when the crunch comes.

As a political blogger, I often wonder if I'd be better off if I lived in Washington DC. There are obvious upsides: DC is full of interesting conferences, has scads of subject matter experts, and is home to lots of social gatherings where I could catch up on the latest gossip, discuss issues in more depth than I can via email, and take the measure of people in person instead of only in print. This kind of thing is great blog fodder. I'll bet that lunch with Tyler and his GMU confederates would be both instructive and entertaining, for example.

But there's an upside to being a continent away, too: I don't hear any of the gossip, so it doesn't affect what I think or write. Everyone's on the same print-based plane. And I don't have any close relationships, so I can pretty much say whatever I feel without worrying that I'm going to lose a friendship over it. (I worry about that sometimes, of course — I'm a human being, not a cyborg — but certainly less than if I had regular social contact with the people I write about.) Overall, even with the downsides factored in, I'll bet that my analytical track record is better because I keep my distance and avoid being spun, not worse.

But of course, there's no way to know for sure. Maybe someday Marian and the cats and I will move to DC, and after a few years you can all decide whether my blogging is better or worse for it. But no time soon, I'm afraid.

THE GOP'S FOREIGN POLICY....Moira Whelan notes that none of the Republican candidates in Wednesday's debate so much as mentioned the word "Annapolis":

Not only that, these guys were allowed to skate by with only sweeping assertions about "radical Islam" and the like. Not a single candidate was asked to address in detail what they would do to address the challenges we face...except to say that we should face them. No policy proposals, no tough ideas, just rhetoric.

That's because the Republican Party doesn't have a foreign policy anymore. For some reason, CNN chose to air only two questions directly related to foreign policy last night, which may seem irresponsible at first glance but actually turned out to be a sign of prescient good judgment on their part. After all, the first question produced nothing but bluster from Rudy Guiliani ("The most important thing to do is to make certain that we remain on offense against Islamic terrorism"), some followup bluster from John McCain ("If we'd done what the Democrats said to do six months ago, al-Qaeda would be telling the world they beat America"), and then some up-the-ante bluster from Duncan Hunter ("I will never apologize for the United States of America").

The second question produced — surprise! — some bluster from Fred Thompson ("Islamic terrorism has declared war on us in Western civilization"), more bluster from McCain ("This is a transcendent challenge of our time"), and yet more bluster from Tom Tancredo ("We are living in a world where we are threatened"). Ron Paul tried to break the mold, but only got booed for his efforts.

Nickel summary: Stay on the offense, never surrender, and never apologize, because Western civilization is under threat from the transcendent challenge of our time. See how easy it is? I've just written an entire section of the 2008 Republican platform for them. No need to thank me, though. I'm doing it for the children.

THE DOG THAT DIDN'T BARK....Fred Kaplan suggests that the real purpose behind Tuesday's Mideast peace talks in Annapolis wasn't really Mideast peace at all:

The fact that Syria attended may mean something larger still. As David Brooks noted a few weeks ago in a very intriguing New York Times column (which, I'm told by someone else, was inspired by a briefing from Rice aboard her plane), the main goal of the then-impending Annapolis conference would be not so much the signing of an Israeli-Palestinian peace treaty as the forging of an anti-Iran alliance. "Flipping" the Syrians — offering them an incentive to break away from Iran — would go a long way toward that goal. As NPR's Deborah Amos has observed, Syria's attendance might mark a step toward this flip.

Steven Erlanger reported yesterday that it's not just the United States that has this goal in mind:

"The Arabs have come here not because they love the Jews or even the Palestinians," said an adviser to the Palestinian negotiating team who spoke on condition of anonymity. "They came because they need a strategic alliance with the United States against Iran."

....Dan Gillerman, Israel's ambassador to the United Nations, put it this way: "This is the summit of our hope and their fear. It's our hope that at long last the Arab world will understand that the Israeli-Palestinian problem is not the core and can be solved, and their fear of Islamic extremism and Iran, which they call the Persian threat. This is what brought them here."

All roads lead to Tehran.

KEEPING UP WITH THE VA....The Department of Veterans Affairs, already under pressure before the Iraq war, is struggling to keep up with demand for disability claims. The waiting time to process new claims is now six months and rising.

Blue Girl's solution: provisionally approve all claims by default (90% are approved eventually) and then cut them off only if they're later disapproved. Bonus feature: this might give the VA an incentive to speed up its claim processing. It's worth a thought.

DEMOCRATS IN THE MIST....In the right-wing blogosphere, the biggest topic of discussion about last night's Republican debate is the fact that some of the questioners were Democrats. In particular, retired Brig. Gen. Keith Kerr, who asked about gays in the military, turned out to be a Kerry and Clinton supporter.

Personally, I think Republicans have bigger things to worry about than that. But if you're interested, James Joyner has a good roundup.

AN EXTRA PENNY....Tom Tancredo last night:

I reject the idea categorically that there are jobs that, quote, "no American will take." I reject it....Am I going to feel sorry if a business has to increase its wages in order for somebody in this country to make a good living? No, I don't feel sorry about that, and I won't apologize for it for a moment.

Eric Schlosser, today, on the penny-per-pound raise that Florida tomato pickers got in 2005:

Burger King, whose headquarters are in Florida, has adamantly refused to pay the extra penny — and its refusal has encouraged tomato growers to cancel the deals already struck with Taco Bell and McDonald's.

This month the Florida Tomato Growers Exchange, representing 90 percent of the state's growers, announced that it will not allow any of its members to collect the extra penny for farm workers. Reggie Brown, the executive vice president of the group, described the surcharge for poor migrants as "pretty much near un-American."

Welcome to the real world, Rep. Tancredo. Your move.

THE WACKO PARADE....The Weekly Standard's blog comments on the questioners at Wednesday's Republican debate:

So, a good night for for the lowest denominator, a bad night for the GOP. America got to see a vaguely threatening parade of gun fetishists, flat worlders, Mars Explorers, Confederate flag lovers and zombie-eyed-Bible-wavers as well as various one issue activists hammering their pet causes.

Funny! But wait. NRO publishes an email from a reader:

I was absolutely disgusted with what I saw tonight from CNN. Thousands of people submitted questions for this debate; yet, the questions they chose only served to reinforce the stereotype that the average Republican voter is a confederate-flag-waving, gun-toting, bible-brandishing conspiracy theorist! There were staggeringly few questions on National Security, and the few that were asked include some of the substanceless "gotcha" questions which were designed for no other purpose than to induce gaffes.

Is the second guy right? Did CNN load up the debate with wackos? Or is he in denial about the real face of the contemporary GOP?

You'll be unsurprised to learn that I vote for option B. If you get questions from tub thumpers, gun nuts, and tax zealots, then you air questions from tub thumpers, gun nuts, and tax zealots. But I'm biased. So I guess I'll leave it up to the wingers to fight this one out with CNN.

GOP DEBATE WRAPUP....I got nuthin'. What do I know about which Republican pandered best to the Republican base?

But here's my offhand reaction: Giuliani did pretty well. His attack on Romney in the first few minutes was over the top, but aside from immigration his answers were crisp and he didn't make any big mistakes. Thompson rambled. McCain was pretty good, though his answers could have been sharper. Romney was even more weaselly than usual. Huckabee was very good — though he benefited from not being much of a punching bag. Except for the Thompson attack ad, none of the other candidates really took any shots at him.

THE GOP DEBATE....8:32 — Ron Paul apparently believes the NAFTA superhighway urban legend is for real. Oof.

8:35 — Giuliani's once again proposing that we cut the federal workforce by 20%. Somebody really ought to press him for a few more details on that one of these days.

8:41 — McCain's going after Ron Paul?

8:43: Hmm. Not quite 100% pandering to Grover Norquist and his anti-tax pledge. Is Grover over?

8:47 — Ah. Anderson Cooper breaks in to ask Rudy Giuliani about today's Politico story saying that in 1999-2000 Giuliani expensed security detail charges to obscure city agencies in order to hide the fact that he was carrying on an affair with Judith Nathan (now his wife). Giuliani, in an uncharacteristically brief answer, says there's nothing to it.

(In case you don't feel like clicking the link, the Politico story found evidence of $34,000 worth of travel expenses buried in the accounts of — get this — the New York City Loft Board. Giuliani's aides refused to explain the expenses on grounds of security, "But American Express bills and travel documents obtained by Politico suggest another reason City Hall may have considered the documents sensitive: They detail three summers of visits to Southampton, the Long Island town where Nathan had an apartment.")

9:04 — McCain and Giuliani don't own a gun? What the hell kind of effete pussies are they?

9:16 — "Do you believe this book? This specific book. Do you believe this book?" That guy was kind of creepy, wasn't he? ("This book" = The Bible)

9:28 — Is waterboarding torture? Romney: "As a presidential candidate it would not be wise to say which techniques we would and would not use." Spare me. What a weasel.

9:33 — Wow. A question from someone who apparently thinks the Republican Party candidates are insufficiently warmongerish. Iraq forever!

9:35 — McCain: We coulda won in Vietnam!

9:48 — Duncan Hunter says we shouldn't allow gays in the military because most soldiers are conservatives. Um, OK.

Total weaselling from Romney on this question. He favored gays in the military in 1994, but he doesn't now because we're at war. Uh huh. As for the future, well, he's got no opinion at all. He'll just rely on the advice of his military advisors. Sheesh.

9:57 — Huckabee on the space program: "I've got a few suggestions, and maybe Hillary could be on the first rocket to Mars." Whoosh. Where did that come from? What a lame attempt at a zinger.

10:01 — Romney's opposed to displaying the Confederate flag. He actually took a stand on something that might conceivably offend a Republican voter bloc!

10:06 — McCain: No more pork if I'm president. Bold stand, Senator.

ME AND WALL STREET....I will never understand Wall Street. Here's the latest:

Fed Official's Remarks Send Stocks Soaring

Stocks soared on Wall Street today after a top Federal Reserve official appeared to open the door for additional interest rate cuts....In his speech this morning, delivered to the Council on Foreign Relations in New York, [Fed vice chairman Donald] Kohn pledged that the Fed "will act as needed" to address the volatility of the current economic situation.

"Uncertainties about the economic outlook are unusually high right now," he said. "In my view, these uncertainties require flexible and pragmatic policy making."

Now see, if it were me I'd be running for the hills at this news. Sure, Kohn was signalling that the Fed might cut interest rates, but he was only doing that because he thinks there's a danger that the economy might be tanking. So here's the difference:

Kevin: Economy tanking = bad. An interest rate cut is nice, but it doesn't nearly make up for a bad economy. I'm going to go hide in a cave.

Wall Street: Interest rate cut = good. Who cares if the economy is souring? Let's party!

Yes, sure, lower interest rates make stocks a relatively better investment than bonds, and that's good news for Wall Street. But the effect is small, and the stimulative effect of an interest rate reduction is both small and far in the future. A declining economy, by contrast, is bad news right now, and the vice chairman of the Fed just warned us that he was afraid the economy might indeed be declining.

And the market goes up 300 points. I don't get it.

FOLLOW THE MONEY....You just know that any letter that starts out by describing DC trade associations as playing "an invaluable role in building policy consensus, informing the legislative process, and advancing the democratic ideals of citizen participation and responsive government" has got to be good. And it is! Turns out it's the lobbying industry's latest attempt to evade new legislation that forces them to disclose just who their big moneymen are. They really, really don't want you to know. More here.

QUOTE OF THE DAY....Chris Hayes on the almost insane level of candidate deconstruction practiced by the modern media:

Myself, I'm currently working on two stories, one about a crucial little league team defeat John Edwards suffered in 4th grade that taught him hard lessons about resilience and competition and 5,000-word profile of an advertising exec from Duluth who roomed with Mitt Romney at Harvard for a week while his own dorm was under construction.

GOVERNMENT BY TEMPER TANTRUM....Pardon me for yet another rant about Arnold Schwarzenegger and the budget travails of my home state:

Next year's state budget, with no changes to current programs or revenues, will be $10 billion in the red, and similar shortfalls are projected for the following years.

....When the state budget has taken a turn for the worse in the past, some legislators resisted common-sense solutions to increase revenue alongside prudent cuts....And we end up with bad quick-fixes. The perfect example is the $15-billion bond issued in 2004 to cover the last major budget shortfall. Repayment on that debt now costs the budget $3 billion a year.

Democrats deserve blame for mismanaging California's budget in the early 00s, but it's hard to overstate just how irresponsible and infantile Schwarzenegger and California Republicans have been since then. In 2003, in the middle of an existing budget crisis, Schwarzenegger ran a demagogic and pandering campaign based on cutting California taxes by $4 billion. Then, to fix the shortfall this caused, he supported the 2004 bond measure. The net cost to the state of this GOP flight to fantasy now adds up to $7 billion per year.

If it weren't for Schwarzenegger and his fellow GOP tax fanatics, next year's projected shortfall would be $3 billion — or possibly even less. That would have been manageable. Instead we careen from crisis to crisis thanks to the government-by-temper-tantrum practiced by modern California Republicans. Thanks a lot, guys.

THE JAY GATSBY OF IRAQ....Alan Weisman writes in the LA Times today about Richard Perle and Ahmed Chalabi:

Perle, of course, was the most prominent and aggressive advocate of Chalabi, dubbed the "Jay Gatsby of Iraq" for his social life and financial scandals, as the leader of a new Iraq.

"The Jay Gatsby of Iraq" fits Chalabi nicely, though, unfortunately, it's a little bit of stretch to say that Chalabi has been "dubbed" this. As near as I can tell, George Packer quoted Noah Feldman calling Chalabi the ''Jay Gatsby of the Iraq War" in The Assassins' Gate, H.D.S. Greenway repeated it in a late 2005 piece for the Boston Globe, and Weisman is the first one to mention it since. I guess maybe now I'm the fourth. But it deserves wider exposure, no?

HILLARY'S OPERATION....From Chris Cillizza:

To date, Obama has 19 offices in 13 states where Feb. 5 primaries are scheduled, including the campaign's newest satellite office in Fargo, North Dakota....Clinton, by contrast, has five total offices currently open in Feb. 5 states — two in California, and one each in New Jersey, New York and Arkansas.

Cillizza bills this as evidence that Obama thinks the primary season will still be in full swing after January, which is fair enough, but it's the flip side that surprises me the most: Hillary only has five offices up and running so far in the Feb. 5 states? Why? She has plenty of money, she has a top notch campaign operation, ten weeks isn't very long for regional offices to get fully staffed and functional, and she can't possibly believe with any confidence that the whole thing is going to be over by the end of January. So why wait so long to begin serious local organizing?

PAKISTAN NEWS....Pervez Musharraf has stepped down as head of the Pakistani army. Now he's merely a civilian dictator.

ARBITRATION AND YOU....Over at Mother Jones, Stephanie Mencimer writes about the increasing number of businesses that won't do business with you unless you sign away your right to a trial in case of dispute. In fact, there are now entire industries that refuse to deal with anyone who won't agree in advance that all disputes be resolved by a private arbitration firm:

All of this is especially nefarious given that the vast majority of consumers who attempt to seek justice in mandatory arbitration lose. The nonprofit consumer group Public Citizen recently analyzed data the NAF provided to the state of California, one of the few states that actually requires arbitration firms to disclose information about their results. Public Citizen found that in 94 percent of 19,000 cases, NAF arbitrators ruled in favor of the businesses that hired them.

....One reason businesses often come out on top in arbitration is that arbitrators who rule for consumers have a tendency to find themselves out of work. Such was the case with Richard Neely, a former chief justice of West Virginia's Supreme Court, who worked briefly as an arbitrator for the NAF. In an article called "Arbitration and the Godless Bloodsuckers," Neely reported that he had refused to award a bank arbitration-related fees that he judged to be far in excess of what a court would have charged. He never got another case. Neely is not alone. A 2000 study of forced arbitration in HMO contracts found that on the rare occasion that an arbitrator made a significant award for a patient, the HMO never hired that person to arbitrate a case again.

Fun fact: when car manufacturers tried to insist on arbitration clauses in their contracts with car dealers, the dealers fought back furiously, saying that it would allow big corporations to "unilaterally deny small business automobile and truck dealers rights under state laws that are designed to bring equity to the relationship between manufacturers and dealers." The dealers lobbied Congress to prohibit this and Congress agreed.

But guess which industry is one of the worst abusers of arbitration clauses when it comes to selling their product to consumers? Yep. Auto dealers. Read the whole thing.

SOCIAL SECURITY AGAIN....Why are Ruth Marcus and the Washington Post so obsessed with demanding that we all address Social Security's long-term problems right this instant? It's a mystery. Truly a mystery.

Here's what they need to think about. The most common solutions to Social Security's eventual shortfall are (a) a small tax increase, (b) a small reduction in the rate of growth of benefits, and (c) a small increase in the retirement age. Question: are there any advantages to implementing any of these solutions right now, rather than, say, ten years from now?

I'd say no. The advantage to waiting is obvious: projections of Social Security's solvency are uncertain, and waiting gives us more data. Why try to project 40 years in the future if you don't have to? Better to wait and see what direction the economy actually heads.

Balanced against that, there really aren't any advantages to acting sooner. Social Security is currently running a surplus, so increasing payroll taxes today does nothing except increase the size of the trust fund — a meaningless exercise at best, and a positively harmful one at worst. We might need to raise taxes in the future once Social Security starts running a deficit, but raising them now does nothing at all to change either Social Security's future obligations or the source of its future funding.

As for ideas (b) and (c), what's the point of locking ourselves into them now? If we wait ten years, not only will we know more about the real shape of the future funding problem, but we'll still have 25 years or more to gradually introduce any changes we think we need. Do we really need to give beneficiaries more than 25 years notice that they might have to retire one year later than they think? Or that after they retire their benefits are going to increase at a slightly slower rate than the law currently requires? I don't see the point. 25 years is plenty of warning for changes as small as the ones we're talking about.

Bottom line: 2017 is a better time to deal with Social Security than 2007. Raising taxes now doesn't accomplish anything, and if it turns out that we need to reduce benefits we can do it in 2017 just as well as we can do it today. For now, we should put Social Security on the back burner and instead spend time worrying about healthcare costs, nuclear proliferation, and global warming. Those are problems that really do need to be addressed right away.

HUCKABEE AND THE MONEY-CONS....Matt Yglesias notes that Christian conservative darling Mike Huckabee is gain