Non-Fiction

1. Wordplay, by the creators of the documentary
   

2. Stumbling on Happiness, by Daniel Gilbert
   

3. The Infernal Machine, by Matthew Carr
   

4. The Matador's Cape, by Stephen Holmes
   

5. Buda's Wagon, by Mike Davis
   

6. Countering Terrorism, by Michael Chandler and Rohan Gunaratna
   

7. A Brief History of the Middle East, by Christopher Caldwell
   

8. The Modern Middle East, by Mehran Kamrava
   

9. Sick, by Jon Cohn
   

10. The Health Care Mess, by Julius Richmond and Rashi Fein
    

11. Through Our Enemies' Eyes, by Michael Scheuer
    

12. The Looming Tower, by Lawrence Wright
    

13. The Seven Fat Years, by Robert Bartley
    

14. Reaganomics, by Bruce Bartlett
    

15. How to Conquer the New York Times Crossword Puzzle, by Amy Reynaldo
    

16. Dreams From My Father, by Barack Obama
    

17. The Undercover Economist, by Tim Harford
    

18. Storm World, by Chris Mooney
    

19. The Political Brain, by Drew Westen
    

20. The Big Con, by Jonathan Chait
    

21. The Argument, by Matt Bai
    

22. Team of Rivals, by Doris Kearns Goodwin
    

23. Republic.com 2.0, by Cass Sunstein
    

24. Hidden Iran, by Ray Takeyh
    

25. Break Through, by Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger
    

26. How to Talk About Books You Haven't Read, by Pierre Bayard
    

27. Daydream Believers, by Fred Kaplan
    

28. The Defining Moment, by Jonathan Alter
    

29. Galileo's Pendulum, by Roger Newton
    

30. Not Remotely Controlled, by Lee Siegel
    

31. Overtreated, by Shannon Brownlee
    

Fiction

1. The Android's Dream, by John Scalzi
   

2. Ghost Brigades, by John Scalzi
   

3. Iron Sunrise, by Charles Stross
   

4. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, by J.K. Rowling
   

5. Singularity Sky, by Charles Stross
   

6. Light, by M. John Harrison
   

7. Playing for Pizza, by John Grisham
   

8. The Runes of the Earth, by Stephen R. Donaldson
   

9. A Game of Thrones, by George R.R. Martin
   

QUICK HITS....Some quick hits for New Year's Eve:

• Tyler Cowen's list of "policy areas where my views are uncertain." There are areas where I'd disagree in some ways — I think national healthcare is a necessary first step to containing healthcare costs, charter schools are a better bet than vouchers, and there's plenty of scope for getting started on global warming at only a modest cost — but overall, it's surprising how closely I agree with him. It just goes to show that real-world evidence that's inconclusive to a libertarian can be equally inconconclusive to a liberal, even if our temperaments and ideologies point us in different policy directions anyway.

• And speaking of uncertainty, Borzou Daragahi has a good piece in the LA Times today about who really rules in Iran. The answer: it's not nearly as clear as a lot of people would like you to think. Daragahi's piece is a worthwhile corrective to a lot of the bloviating you read about Iran from neocon pundits and their fellow travelers.

• And finally, aside from the sheer inanity of the New York Times picking a jingoistic hawk like Bill Kristol as its "conservative" columnist, what's really disappointing is how conventional the choice is. Kristol is well known, appears on TV a lot, and goes to the right parties, so now he's a Times columnist. Would it really have killed them to choose someone a little more interesting and little more heterodox? Will we even have to bother reading past the first paragraph of Kristol's columns to know what he's going to say? How about Chris Caldwell or Bruce Bartlett or Tyler Cowen or Clive Crook or Matt Continetti or Ross Douthat or Irwin Stelzer or David Kuo or — well, just about anybody besides the safest of safe choices? I don't agree with any of these other guys either, but at least they might occasionally write something that I didn't expect.
  

And with that, a Happy New Year to all! Except for Pinch Sulzberger.

PROJECTION FROM THE FEVER SWAMP....Andrew Sullivan posted this email from a Republican reader today:

A party that is as motivated by revanchist impulse as today's Democratic Party cannot bring itself to transcend its anger. That is why Hillary will survive the Obama insurgency.

Yes, Obama would beat us, bad. We would hemorrhage Republican women and a significant number of conservatives would vote Obama to teach the Republicans in Washington not to deviate from Reagan and Goldwater. We would be forced to return to first principles, and we would.

But that is not what Democrats want....Hillary knows that her base voters are more filled with anger at Bush than they are with hope for the future and change for all the American people.

Whatever else you think about the Clinton vs. Obama question, this is almost certainly wrong. Among the activist liberal base — the people who are the loudest and angriest about what George Bush has done over the past seven years — support is way stronger for both Obama and John Edwards than for Hillary Clinton. Hell, in the dKos straw poll, Chris Dodd outdraws her too. Conversely, Hillary is the choice of much of the party leadership as well as much of the rank and file, including women, blue collar workers, and moderates who believe (fairly or not) that Obama simply isn't experienced enough.

Conservatives tend to be so blinded by their hatred for Hillary that they're convinced that her liberal supporters are also motivated by hatred. But they aren't. Among activist liberals, Hillary is mostly viewed as as smart and hardworking, but also triangulating and mainstream. She's the candidate of caution and moderation, not the candidate of the haters. The anti-Clinton fever swamp protests too much.

RUDY ON HEALTHCARE....Did Rudy Giuliani really say this? It's right up there with "After all, you just go to an emergency room." What a clown.

INFLATION....Michael Barbaro has a followup story about weak holiday season sales today, and this time he takes inflation into account:

A final sales tally from the season will not be available from most chains until next week. But an early projection from MasterCard Advisors, a unit of the credit card company, found that overall spending from Nov. 23 to Dec. 24, when adjusted for inflation, was essentially unchanged over last year, a weak performance.

Given the uncertainties in the proper measure of inflation to use, this is probably OK. In reality, I think the MasterCard projection probably shows a small decrease in sales compared to last year, but depending on how you calculate things it might turn out to be pretty close to zero.

As for myself, I have no data to offer on holiday sales, but I do have an anecdote. I went out to a gigantic new local shopping center today and business was.....normal. I had no trouble parking, no trouble walking right into the movie theater (Charlie Wilson's War, flawed but still lots of fun), and the crowds at Borders, Best Buy, and Whole Foods seemed about like normal Saturday levels.

Leave your own anecdotes in comments. Leave enough of them, and perhaps they'll magically morph into data.

IN WHICH I PLAY THE GRINCH....I'm twiddling my thumbs for a bit until it's time to hop in the car and head over to my father-in-law's place, and a few minutes ago I came across a piece by Michael Barbaro in the New York Times about "bleak" retail holiday spending this year:

Spending between Thanksgiving and Christmas rose just 3.6 percent over last year, the weakest performance in at least four years, according to MasterCard Advisors, a division of the credit card company. By comparison, sales grew 6.6 percent in 2006, and 8 percent in 2005.

But this isn't right. As near as I can tell (though, naturally, Barbaro doesn't bother to mention it), these numbers aren't adjusted for inflation. In other words, they're useless. Here's what that paragraph should have said:

Adjusted for inflation, spending between Thanksgiving and Christmas declined 0.7 percent over last year, the weakest performance in at least four years, according to MasterCard Advisors, a division of the credit card company. By comparison, sales grew 4.0 percent in 2006, and 4.4 percent in 2005.

I adjusted Barbaro's numbers using annual CPI figures. Alternatively, you could use some other measure of inflation. For example, you could exclude food and energy, which would give you a lower inflation rate but also a smaller spending increase. One way or another, though, you have to adjust for inflation in some kind of reasonable way. Nominal figures are the worst possible way of conveying the correct impression of what's really going on.

Question: why does this happen so routinely? Wages that are up 3% in a period when inflation is running 4% aren't actually up. Spending that's up 3% in a period when inflation is running 4% isn't actually up. This isn't rocket science. Anyone tasked with writing economic news, even on Christmas, should know that spending numbers have to be adjusted for inflation if you want to genuinely inform your readers about the state of the economy. Nominal numbers can be added later in the story if you want to present those too. Why is this so hard?

MERRY CHRISTMAS!....Christmas is here and I'm signing off for the year now. I hope everyone has a nice holiday.

I'll be on vacation until shortly after New Year's. Steve Benen of The Carpetbagger Report will be guest blogging for me, and I may pop in occasionally myself depending on mood and availability of internet time. But probably not much. See you in 2008!

THE HUCK....Gee, evangelical Christian and former George Bush speechwriter Peter Wehner thinks that maybe Mike Huckabee is just a little too Christian. "Is Mike Huckabee, a man of extremely impressive political gifts and shrewdness, playing the Jesus card in a way that is unlike anything we have quite seen before?" he asks.

I don't know. Is he? Huck's Jesus card sure seems awfully familiar to me.

HARRY & LOUISE & BARACK....A week ago, in the wake of multiple slimings of Barack Obama by the Hillary Clinton campaign — including "Osama" emails from two of her Iowa county chairs, Billy Shaheen's drug accusations, and Bob Kerrey's "secular madrassa" comments — I was feeling pretty poorly disposed toward Mrs. Clinton. But my dyspepsia wore off pretty quickly. Politics is politics, after all, and in the annals of campaign black arts this stuff is small potatoes. In the end, it's forgivable.

But I have to say: my less charitable feelings toward Obama aren't wearing off. They're growing. It's true that I've never been a big fan of his Kumbaya schtick, but I also recognized it as both sincere and a good campaign tactic. I figured that if he could use it to win an election and build a wave of public opinion for progressive policies, that would be great.

But you know what? I've been voting for three decades now. I've heard lots of politicians take up the "bold truthteller" meme. I've listened to lots of great speeches. I've seen plenty of campaigns that turned on whether the press simply felt more warmly disposed toward one candidate or the other for no good reason. (It's Christmas, so: yes, Bob, the worst example in recent memory was the press corps' treatment of Gore and Bush in 2000.) And I've also been exposed to my share of "post-partisan" candidates who could somehow bring a third way to Amerca's hyperpartisan politics.

Maybe this is one reason that I'm not quite as taken by Obama as a lot of people: I've seen it before. Gene McCarthy, Jimmy Carter, John Anderson, Gary Hart, Paul Tsongas, and John McCain, among others, have all taken up this banner in past elections. And not to put too fine a point on it, but this isn't exactly a hit parade of either electoral or policy success.

And now there's this. Obama's using Harry & Louise clones to attack a key plank in progressive healthcare policy. I know that we blog readers are policy geeks and barely one person in a hundred cares about this kind of stuff. But I do, and I'm only willing to put up with the Kumbaya campaign as long as I think that, in the end, it really is going to promote progressive ends. Takeoffs on Harry & Louise decidedly don't. If that's where he's going, I'm getting off the train.

VIDEOTAPE....In the LA Times today, Josh Meyer writes about a subject that's been bouncing around in my head for the past couple of weeks but never quite made it onto the blog: why did we videotape only two interrogations of al-Qaeda subjects in the months after 9/11?

By their own accounting, the CIA and other U.S. intelligence agencies have not videotaped the interrogations of potentially hundreds of other terrorism suspects. That indicates an outmoded level of secrecy and unprofessionalism, the interrogation experts contend.

....Many interrogation experts, including some involved in the ongoing Intelligence Science Board study, say they have urged U.S. intelligence officials to look to Israel, Britain and other countries with decades of experience in dealing with terrorism to learn from their successes — and their mistakes.

Israel and Britain both adopted a scientific approach to interrogations long ago, using videotape and other documentary evidence to help determine which techniques work and which don't in getting violent extremists to disclose operational details of their networks and more strategic subjects such as what motivated them in the first place.

The article goes on to discuss both the videotape question and the harsh interrogation vs. building rapport question, and mostly rehashes old ground on those subjects. But regardless of where you stand on that, doesn't it seem almost beyond belief that we wouldn't videotape every interrogation we did and then study the tapes endlessly for clues? It hardly seems like you need to talk with the British and the Israelis to figure out that this might be a good idea.

SUNNI AWAKENING UPDATE....I've mentioned a few times before that our "bottoms up" strategy of supporting Sunni tribes in the provinces surrounding Baghdad carries a number of risks. The biggest risk, I suppose, is that once the tribes finally feel safe from the threat of al-Qaeda in Iraq, they'll relaunch their insurgency and start shooting at American soldiers again. The second biggest risk is that the Shiite central government understands perfectly well that "competing armed interest groups" in the provinces are — well, competing armed interest groups.

That phrase comes from Australian Lt. Col. David Kilcullen (here), and a week ago I linked to a quote from a U.S. Army officer who was fairly candid about the effect that arming the tribes is likely to have on the balance of power in Iraq. "The grass-roots level will force change at the top," he suggested, "because if they do not act on it, they will get overrun."

Quite so. And does the Maliki government understand this threat? Via Cernig, AP reporter Diaa Hadid makes it clear that they do indeed:

Iraq's Shiite-led government declared Saturday that after restive areas are calmed it will disband Sunni groups battling Islamic extremists because it does not want them to become a separate military force.

....The statement from Defense Minister Abdul-Qadir al-Obaidi was the government's most explicit declaration yet of its intent to eventually dismantle the groups backed and funded by the United States as a vital tool for reducing violence.

"We completely, absolutely reject the [Sunni] Awakening becoming a third military organization,'' al-Obaidi said at a news conference.

He added that the groups would also not be allowed to have any infrastructure, such as a headquarters building, that would give them long-term legitimacy. "We absolutely reject that,'' al-Obaidi said.

The Maliki government has made similar noises in the past, but this is by far the most unequivocal they've ever been about it. And needless to say, the Sunni leaders are having none of it. There's exactly zero chance that they will ever voluntarily disband their "Concerned Local Citizens" groups.

Who knows? Maybe this is posturing more than anything else. Maybe Petraeus and Crocker can work some magic that will defuse all this. But a year from now, if the Iraqi civil war is raging once again, this is where it will have started.

UPDATE: In the New York Times, Alissa Rubin and Damien Cave have a long overview piece on the current status of the Awakening. Money quote: "The Americans are haunted by the possibility that Iraq could go the way of Afghanistan, where Americans initially bought the loyalty of tribal leaders only to have some of them gravitate back to the Taliban when the money stopped."

And then there's this from the Iraqi side: "Many people believe this will end with tens of thousands of armed people, primarily Sunnis, and this will excite the Shiite militias to grow and in the end it will grow into a civil war," said Safa Hussein, the deputy national security adviser and a point man on the Awakening program for Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki.

"Many people" indeed. The whole story is worth a read.

AIRING THE DIRTY LAUNDRY....In an interview with David Brody, Mike Huckabee talks about the private contempt that the moneycon-driven Republican Party has for evangelicals like him:

They were more than happy for us to come to the rallies and stand in lines for hours to cheer on the candidates, appreciated us putting up the yard signs, going out and putting out the cards on peoples doors and making phone calls to the phone banks and — really appreciated all of our votes. But when they got elected, behind closed doors, they would laugh at us and speak with scorn and derision that we were, as one article I think once said "the easily led." So there's been almost this sort of, it's okay if you guys get a seat on the bus, but don't ever think about telling us where the bus is going to go.

Say what you will about Huckabee, but he's got their number on this. Liberals, at least, just honestly disagree with evangelical social fervor. Republican elites, by contrast, are willing to pander endlessly for evangelical votes, evangelical money, and evangelical organizing zeal, but once the elections are won they think of them, in Peggy Noonan's recent words, as "the idiot vote." Unless evangelical interests coincide with the moneycon wing of the party (as they do with judges, for example), they get little more than a few symbolic bones tossed their way.

As you can imagine, I'm delighted to see evangelicals finally figuring this out and getting ready to turn their longstanding misgivings into out-and-out rebellion. It's about time this battle got fought in the full light of day.

Via Andrew Sullivan.

SIMON SAYS....In the annals of unconvincing excuses, this one is now quickly rising into gold medal territory. The question is why the CIA never turned over its interrogration videotapes to the 9/11 Commission:

A C.I.A. spokesman said that the agency had been prepared to give the Sept. 11 commission the interrogation videotapes, but that commission staff members never specifically asked for interrogation videos.

The review by Mr. Zelikow does not assert that the commission specifically asked for videotapes, but it quotes from formal requests by the commission to the C.I.A. that sought "documents," "reports" and "information" related to the interrogations.

....Mark Mansfield, the C.I.A. spokesman, said that the agency had gone to "great lengths" to meet the commission's requests, and that commission members had been provided with detailed information obtained from interrogations of agency detainees.

"Because it was thought the commission could ask about the tapes at some point, they were not destroyed while the commission was active," Mr. Mansfield said.

So let's review:

• The 9/11 Commission was an official investigative body chartered by both Congress and the president.

• It specifically asked for "documents," "reports" and "information" related to detainee interrogations.

• The CIA knew about the tapes, knew they were germane, and knew the commission was likely to ask for them at some point.

• But it never revealed their existence and never turned them over because no one ever specifically said the word, "videotape."
  

From an administration that said the vice president is a fourth branch of government; that the Medicare prescription bill would only cost $400 billion; that waterboarding isn't torture; and that Iraq was trying to procure uranium from Africa — well, this one might not even make its all-time top ten mendacity list. For one thing, the deceit is a little too obvious. Surely to make the list your lies have to display more than a fourth-grade level of sophistication?

PUBLIC SERVICE ANNOUNCEMENT....Happy winter solstice! The days are finally getting longer again. Hooray!

Unless you live in Australia. Then they're starting to get shorter. Boo hiss.

FRIDAY CATBLOGGING....This is it. Possibly the last catblogging pictures ever taken with my old camera. Sniff. On Christmas I'll put up my traditional Inkblot ornament photo, and then I'll be off for a week, which means potential guest catblogging. (Exciting!) Then, in January, I'll unveil new and improved Friday Catblogging, thanks to advanced consumer technology.

So here's the final Irvine-based catblogging of 2007. Domino is upstairs, dramatically outlined in a lovely, warm patch of sunshine in the bedroom. She'll follow this sunshine all day: first to the stairs, then into the dining room, and eventually up on my desk in the study. Then, when the sun goes away, it's off to the pod for the rest of the day. Meanwhile, Inkblot is staring upward wondering what all the fuss is about. He wants me to come downstairs and open the door so he can frolic in the backyard. And so I did.

BOLD STROKES....I was emailing with Matt Yglesias the other day and, among other things, suggested that one reason he didn't like Hillary Clinton was because she was too hawkish. But "hawkish" is pretty lazy shorthand, and he said his real problem with her (and her foreign policy team) was more specific. Today he explains:

The problem is that I think she's unlikely to try any of the bold strokes necessary to turn our situation around. I don't see her trying for a grand bargain with Iran, don't see her making the tough choices necessary to revitalize the NPT, don't see her taking political risks on the Arab-Israeli confict, don't see her acting boldly and decisively on Iraq, and don't see her accomplishing anything particularly innovative and interesting in terms of UN Reform.

By contrast, I think an Obama administration (and probably an Edwards administration as well) will include some people at high-levels who are pressing for those things, and will be led by a man who has some inclinations in those directions. I think Clinton and her people are too narrowly political, too complacent about the depth of America's problems in the world, and, yes, maybe too inclined to believe that if the shit really hits the fan all that'll happen is that public support for the use of force will revive and that under new, more competent leadership, the armed forces will resolve the situation by waging a new war.

This is unquestionably a better way of framing the issue. Arguing about whether someone is "hawkish" usually just ends up as an argument over semantics and temperament. It's not completely useless, but it's not very enlightening either.

By contrast, the "bold strokes" argument at least provides an opening for a more substantive conversation. There's still some mind reading and tonal analysis required, since the candidates haven't all spelled out clear positions on the issues Matt mentions, but it's a step in the right direction.

I'm not going to try to definitively take a side on this question, but I do think that this is a potentially productive way of looking at things. And while Matt's critique of Hillary is persuasive, here's the flip side: do you think the world is really likely to be moved by bold strokes? It's possible that my skepticism on this is due more to our age difference than anything else, but I'd say the odds are slim. The institutional forces at work are huge, and I think they mostly respond to patient pressure, smart and knowledgable diplomacy, well-timed compromise, and a clear sense of how the world really works and where you can successully insert a helpful wedge. People who parachute into gigantic institutions — and this is the biggest institution of them all — thinking that they can cut through all the various Gordian knots with bold initiatives are likely to be disappointed.

But then there's this: every once in a great while, someone who thinks that way turns out to be right. And they end up being an enormous force for change. The question is, is Obama that guy? And is the world currently a fertile place for a brand new vision of American foreign policy? More on this later.

POSTSCRIPT: Honesty compels me to remind everyone that I have a longstanding belief that although vision and strategy are important, execution is more important. See here, for example. So feel free to dismiss me as a hopeless technocrat if you like.

UPDATE: Also worth noting on this same subject: the almost-never-wrong Mark Schmitt on the "Theory of Change" primary. He makes some sharp points.

"NEARLY ALL"....Apparently Bill Richardson is on the warpath about an alleged Hillary Clinton flip-flop on Iraq. Really? I hadn't heard that. So what's her current position?

On Wednesday, Clinton told a voter that nearly all forces could be withdrawn within a year if she were elected president. But Richardson pointed out that during a debate in September, she, Obama and Edwards said they couldn't commit to withdrawing all the troops by 2013 — the end of the next president's first term.

...."Governor Richardson knows that Senator Clinton has been clear and consistent: If George Bush has not ended the war in Iraq, she will," [Clinton spokesman Howard] Wolfson said. "As she has said, she would accomplish that by beginning to withdraw our troops within 60 days after inauguration at the rate of one or two brigades a month. This would mean that nearly all troops could be home within a year."

Wolfson is right: Hillary has said this before. So I guess what we're really arguing about is the meaning of "nearly all." Gotcha. So let's parse this. The next president will probably take office with 15 combat brigades still active in Iraq, which means that ten months of withdrawals starting in April 2009 would get us down to five brigades by January 2010. If the drawdown were a bit faster than one brigade per month, you might get down to one or two brigades, which is Hillary's well-known "residual force."

The problem is that this still doesn't tell us everything. You can figure a combat brigade at about 3,500 troops, so 2-5 brigades means somewhere between 7,000 and 17,000 combat troops. But that still leaves you with tens of thousands of additional troops that are outside the brigade structure. Are they coming home too? Or does this leave some wiggle room to keep upwards of 50,000 troops in Iraq?

Who knows? Bottom line: it's a word game right now. Richardson has said he'd withdraw all troops, which is clear enough, but both Clinton and Obama have been vague about their plans. And they still are. In today's Rorschach primary, "nearly all" means whatever you want it to mean.

ECONOMIC NEWS....I'm asking this completely without snark: Is there any reason at all for a reporter to write a paragraph like this?

Incomes also rose in November, by 0.4 percent, double the rate of increase in October, although that was more than offset by increased prices, the department reported. Discounting for inflation, disposable personal income — the money left to spend after taxes — fell 0.3 percent.

What possible excuse can there be for leaving the initial impression that incomes rose in November? Real income is the only income that matters, and real income was down. That's the number that should get the attention.

And while we're at it, that 1.1% increase in consumer spending that's in the first paragraph of the story? Also not adjusted for inflation. The real number is 0.5%.

And the primary driver of that 0.5% increase in consumer spending? Since incomes were down I suppose you can guess the answer, but you have to plow through to the tenth paragraph before the Post actually tells you: "The increase in spending came because consumers either borrowed or dipped into savings. The department reported that personal savings declined by more than $48 billion in November." Crikey.

EXPERTS IGNORED....FILM AT 11....I know this will come as a shock to you all, but it turns out that the Bush administration's decision to turn down California's application to regulate greenhouse gases was a purely political judgment that completely ignored the technical merits of the case:

"California met every criteria . . . on the merits. The same criteria we have used for the last 40 years on all the other waivers," said an EPA staffer. "We told him that. All the briefings we have given him laid out the facts."

....Technical and legal staff also concluded that if the waiver were denied, EPA would very likely lose in court to the state, the sources said....They advised him to either grant the waiver outright or give California a temporary one for three years.

Instead, three sources said, Johnson cut off any consultation with his technical staff for the last month and made his decision before having them write the formal, legal justification for it.

The good news, at least according to LA Times legal writer David Savage in a separate piece, is that California is likely to win its court challenge.

IN THE DOLDRUMS UNTIL 2012....Merrill Lynch on the end of the housing bubble:

As we saw in the November housing starts data, the builders are now frantically cutting production.

But with the sales backdrop still softening, they may have to slice their construction plans by another 30% before we hit bottom on a cyclical basis. And, that bottom could be as long as a year away. Beyond that, weak demographic fundamentals point to years of sluggish real estate activity, particularly in terms of the "price". The looming dominance of the "move down" buyer suggests that home values will continue to soften long after the building industry mops up the current excess supply. In fact, real estate pricing in general can be expected to be in the doldrums through 2012.

....Here is what we really "do not get". There are still economists out there talking about how the housing recession is still local and not regionally broad based. We have no idea who their data vendors are. In our view, this clearly goes down as the most national real estate downturn since the 1930s.

But think of the bright side: at least the housing bubble kept the economy humming long enough to get George Bush reelected. So it was all worth it, wasn't it?

EXECUTIVE POWER....In CQ Politics this week, David Nather recaps the Bush administration's enormous expansion of executive power and then asks whether any of the candidates running for election in 2008 are likely to give up that power if they win office. It turns out he had a hard time getting anyone to go on the record about it:

In light of the Bush record, all eight of the major presidential candidates were asked by CQ to answer a set of written questions on specific issues, such as whether the candidate believes that a president can authorize conduct outside the laws to defend the country; under what circumstances the candidate would claim executive privilege; and whether the candidate believes that a president should issue statements after signing legislation into law, as Bush has, that declare some of the provisions optional.

Only one of the candidates — Edwards — answered the questions, although Clinton's campaign touched on some of the issues in a separate exchange.

Among the Democrats, Nather reports that all three of the leaders live up to their stereotypes: Edwards is fiery and populist; Clinton takes the middle ground; and Obama speaks in vague but agreeable generalities. Here's the full list of Nather's pieces on the major candidates and their record on executive power:

• Hillary Clinton
  

• John Edwards
  

• Rudy Giuliani
  

• Mike Huckabee
  

• John McCain
  

• Barack Obama
  

• Mitt Romney
  

• Fred Thompson
  

1994 vs. 2008....Ezra Klein writes about the prospects for universal healthcare if a Democrat wins the presidency next year:

I'd like to believe, as Joe Klein does, that America's corporations will make this the year that they finally support universal health reform. But I wouldn't bet an extraordinary amount of money on the prospect. For instance: Though the NFIB [a small business lobby that was instrumental in defeating Bill Clinton's healthcare plan in 1994 –ed.] has been making conciliatory noises, and even talking with Ron Wyden on occasion, they still came out in ferocious opposition to Schwarzenegger's California reforms, which are not dissimilar to the models offered by the national Democrats....Any president walking into this counting on the support of the corporate community will get their lunch handed to them.

I agree. But that's boring, so instead I'm going to play devil's advocate. There really are a number of differences between 1994 and today that work in favor of getting business cooperation on a serious healthcare plan:

• In 1994, the business community got sold on the idea that the HMO revolution might succeed in reining in healthcare costs, which meant there was no need for the feds to get involved. Obviously that didn't happen, and no one in the business community now believes that there's some quick fix on the horizon that will keep their healthcare liabilities from continuing to skyrocket. They're much more open to a government solution on this score than they were 14 years ago.

• The Clinton plan included mandates on small businesses. The current crop of Democratic plans don't. When it comes to assuaging business concerns and producing healthcare plans they can live with, Democratic politicians have gotten much, much smarter over the past decade.

• Public opinion has shifted too. The public was in favor of healthcare reform in 1994, but not overwhelmingly — and Harry & Louise were enough to turn them against the Clinton plan. Today, public opinion is far more strongly in favor of healthcare reform, and that's a tailwind that even conservative politicians have to respect.
  

Now, having said that, I think (a) public opinion still isn't where it needs to be, (b) the business community remains suspicious of big government healthcare plans for all the usual ideological reasons, and (c) movement conservatives haven't budged an inch on healthcare. They view it, probably rightly, as a stalking horse for resurgent liberalism, and will oppose it every bit as furiously as they did in 1994.

Still, there are differences. The climate today for healthcare reform really is more hospitable than it's been in a long time. It's not 1994 forever.

UPDATE: Ezra takes issue with my point about public opinion. I don't think polls adequately capture what's really going on with broad-but-shallow issues like healthcare, but it's still worthwhile to look at them as a baseline of sorts. And at least as far as the CBS/NYT polls can show us, discontent over the healthcare system is about the same today as it was in 1994.

IMMIGRATION.... Matt Yglesias browses through a Democracy Corps strategy memo about immigration and highlights the chart on the right:

This graph plays to my prejudices. But since I found it in the midst of an analysis designed to play against my prejudices, I find it pretty noteworthy. And, of course, it backs up other surveys indicating that the immigration issue only really plays with a minority of the public. And, of course, it's now well known that immigration is the biggest concern in areas where immigration is a new phenomenon and my guesstimate is that this leaves the target audience pretty small.

Maybe, but I'm less sure about that. One of the problems with polls is that they rarely measure depth of feeling. So you get polls where 70% of the country wants more money for education, 70% wants universal healthcare, 70% supports the UN, etc. etc. But this doesn't really tell you much. These are all default "feel good" answers that rarely give you any insight into the way people vote.

But here we have just the opposite. Yes, 31% is a minority, but if the survey is to be believed, that's 31% who feel pretty damn strongly about the issue and are likely to base their votes on it. That's a pretty sizable number.

Now, I agree with Matt that this doesn't necessarily mean that Democrats need to get medieval on immigration. For starters, there's a downside with other groups, and in any case the fact that lots of people think it's a big priority doesn't mean those people are all demanding that we seed the border with tactical nukes. In fact, this is the kind of issue that very well might lend itself to modestly tougher rhetoric combined with moderation on the actual policy side of things. Which, it turns out, is pretty much what DC says:

Voters want to know first, that leaders 'get it' — that they share their common sense frustration with the problem and second, that they will act against employers, on the borders and on government programs to get things under control. But most in the broad public hold positive views of the new immigrants and will support an inclusive American response, including a path to citizenship for the responsible, tax-paying and law-abiding — if they believe first that America has acted to get this national problem under control. They really want to hear that Democrats 'get it' — because it says a lot about the Democrats' values and ability to solve real problems.

I don't really have any problem with this. In fact, on a policy basis, it's not that far from the mainstream Democratic view: later in the report we learn that employer sanctions and a path to citizenship are popular, whereas deportation and fence-building aren't. (Cutting back on government benefits gets a mixed response.) Just make sure that everyone knows you "get it" first.

THE BLOGOSPHERE vs THE VSPs....PART 2....A member in (extremely good) standing of the VSP community emails to suggest a delicate topic for the liberal blogosphere to take a second look at:

One thing you might write about — if only because nobody else has, I think — is how that whole dust-up over the O'Hanlon/Pollack op-ed looks in retrospect. I mean, clearly they were on to something — the relative quieting down of stuff that has taken place in Iraq over the last several months, etc. Completely debatable whether that was due to the surge, or is sustainable, or is deeply significant, etc. etc., but it's not like the caricature of them put forth in the blogosphere at the time — as paid lobbyists for the Bushies, reporting back what they were told to after checking out a Potemkin village — holds up, does it?

Hmmm. Yes. Seems like I was pretty skeptical of the O'Hanlon/Pollack report myself. But basically they reported two things: (a) violence is down and security has improved, and (b) the economy, police force, political leadership, and infrastructure are still disaster areas. And actually, um, that pretty much seems to be true, doesn't it?

Discuss.

UPDATE: The blogosphere dissents! "Et Tu Kevin?" writes Ilan Goldenberg. He reviews the main critiques of O&P "at least as far as I saw it," and concludes that "I still think they all stand." Meanwhile, Matt Yglesias suggests I'm "aiming for some kind of wanker prize." He also reviews the criticism of O&P and concludes, "I'm not shedding any tears for them."

One note: this is a little deep in the weeds, but Ilan points out that my nickel summary of O&P was based primarily on their full report, written in late August, not on the New York Times op-ed they wrote earlier and got blasted for. "But nobody read the report," he says. "Everyone read the op-ed."

That's a fair criticism. At the time, I spent more time with the report than I did with the op-ed, so that's what I based my impressions on. But it's true that the op-ed got a lot more attention, and it's also true that the op-ed painted a considerably rosier picture than the full report. The op-ed was almost entirely about the improved security situation and, unlike the report, gave virtually no attention to the continuing political/economic/infrastructure problems.

Still, I'll stand my ground in at least one respect: whatever problems O&P had with tone and emphasis, their main point was that security was getting better. And they turned out to be right — at least for now. I'd advise not being too churlish about acknowledging that.

That said, the war was still a bad idea and we ought to be withdrawing U.S. troops regardless of any security gains we've made over the past year. Without political progress our military presence does no good, and if anything, the political landscape today looks even worse than it did when O&P wrote their op-ed four months ago. It's well past time to leave.

FAVORITE COLORS....What's the color of the year for 2008? According to the New York Times, the Color Institute says blue iris, while the Color Association says bamboo. Just another symbol of the polarized times we live in.

THE MIDDLE KINGDOM'S DILEMMA....In 1952, Mao Zedong proposed a solution to the uneven distribution of water in China: take from the (lush, wet) south and give to the (dry, arid) north. Fifty years later, Mao's eccentric dream took shape as the South-to-North Water Transfer Project, a gigantic initiative to divert water hundreds of miles north from the Yangtze River to the Yellow River.

There was only one problem: as geologist Yong Yang discovered on extensive field trips to the frozen source of the Yangtze, there just wasn't enough water to meet the government's goals. In one section of the river, the government wanted to divert more water than the entire flow of the river could provide. And even in areas where the goals weren't literally impossible, they still ran the risk of decimating downstream communities, including Shanghai, that depend on the Yangtze for agriculture, industry, and hydropower. Yet as Christina Larson reports in our December issue, the project goes on, for reasons that would sound drearily familiar in any country:

Informed sources say that the project has a champion in retired President Jiang Zemin — still a powerful force in Chinese politics — and a handful of influential retired army officers. And many entrenched interests have a reason to hope that construction proceeds. The steering committee that manages the water transfer project is led by Premier Wen Jiabao, and its members include high-ranking officials from the national government. A similar bureaucracy has been replicated in affected provinces, creating hundreds of titles and salaries dedicated to moving the project forward. Five state banks have major investments in the plan, and expect loans to be repaid when water user fees are assessed. The two companies with multibillion-dollar contracts to build the early phases of the project are hungry for more.

Why care about some corrupt Chinese engineering boondoggle? Because it's emblematic of China's schizophrenic attitude toward environmental problems: on the one hand, because the central government can't police the provinces well enough to enforce its own laws, activists like Yong are nowadays allowed — sometimes even encouraged — to sound environmental alarms. On the other hand, it often doesn't make any difference. China is still China. Their future affects us all, but even though the Chinese leadership is aware of what it needs to do to address its many looming environmental catastrophes, it's often afraid to follow through:

Every industrialized country — apart from Singapore, a green authoritarian city-state — that has cleaned up its environment has done so with the help of civil society and a free press....David Lampton, the director of the China studies program at Johns Hopkins University's School of Advanced International Studies, explained Beijing's conundrum: "The Chinese are caught between the logic of what they know they need to effectively implement environmental policy, and the fear of whether these groups could become the opening wedge to political liberalization."

....Perhaps China will, once again, elide the apparent contradictions of its environmental politics in the same way that it has somehow melded capitalism and communism. Or perhaps smoggy cities, dwindling water supplies, and peasant protests over pollution will force the party to accept greater political openness. Or perhaps the environmental activists themselves will call for it. Whatever happens, the consequences will be epic. If China continues on its current course, within twenty-five years it will emit twice the carbon dioxide of all the OECD countries combined. The Middle Kingdom's dilemma is ours, too.

UPDATE: Still thirsting for more? Check out Jacques Leslie's piece in Mother Jones:

Chinese ecosystems were already dreadfully compromised before the Communist Party took power in 1949, but Mao managed to accelerate their destruction....Yet the Mao era's ecological devastation pales next to that of China's current industrialization. A fourth of the country is now desert. More than three-fourths of its forests have disappeared. Acid rain falls on a third of China's landmass, tainting soil, water, and food.

Excessive use of groundwater has caused land to sink in at least 96 Chinese cities, producing an estimated $12.9 billion in economic losses in Shanghai alone. Each year, uncontrollable underground fires, sometimes triggered by lightning and mining accidents, consume 200 million tons of coal, contributing massively to global warming. A miasma of lead, mercury, sulfur dioxide, and other elements of coal-burning and car exhaust hovers over most Chinese cities; of the world's 20 most polluted cities, 16 are Chinese.

BITTER CONFRONTATION....Paul Krugman has been criticizing Barack Obama pretty strongly in recent weeks for, in general, being too centrist, too accomodating, and too rosy-eyed about his ability to charm his opponents into compromise (see here, for example). Jon Alter disagrees:

Krugman calls Obama "naive" and an "anti-change candidate" because he favors bringing all of the players in the health care debate around a "big table" and rejects the populist message of John Edwards, who is apparently Krugman's choice for president. "Anyone who thinks the next president can achieve real change without bitter confrontation is living in a fantasy world," Krugman writes, endorsing Edwards's view that the insurance and drug industries should be excluded from any talks on health care reform because they stand to lose profits.

The columnist and his candidate both believe that Franklin D. Roosevelt succeeded by being a polarizing figure. I studied FDR for four years while writing a book about him, and this is simply untrue. It's also untrue of other successful Democratic presidents and for a simple reason: "Bitter confrontation" simply doesn't work in policy-making.

Alter goes on to make some interesting historical analogies, but I want to stop right here because it strikes me that he's misinterpreting Krugman in an important way. Krugman — I think — isn't actively recommending "bitter confrontation" as a policymaking tactic, he's simply observing that any Democratic president had better expect sustained, dogged, and bitter confrontation from their opponents if he or she tries to implement serious healthcare reform.

Krugman's fear seems to be that Obama is expecting that he can charm and negotiate his way out of this inevitable confrontation, and won't be prepared when that turns out not to work. Edwards and Clinton, by contrast, since they harbor no illusions, will be willing to play hardball from day one. That doesn't necessarily mean they're going to be out on the hustings every day during their first term hurling populist invective at pharmaceutical companies and the insurance industry, but it does mean that, like FDR, they'll be willing to use every lever of power they can think of, both public and private, to get their way.

Now, that may or may not be fair. Obama might very well know what to expect. Or Krugman might just be wrong about the reception he'll get. But bitter confrontation is what Krugman is predicting, not what he's yearning for. It's an important difference.

JAG INTIMIDATION UPDATE....Charlie Savage reports that the Cheney/Addington/Haynes plan to ruin the career of any JAG lawyer with the temerity to disagree with them has been abandoned. "In light of the feedback that [Haynes] received, he thought that it was wiser to try a different approach," a Pentagon flack explained. I'll bet.

THE HORROR....I didn't even know the MPAA approved print ads for movies in the first place. Shows how much I know. But they do, and it turns out that ads for documentaries that depict U.S. soldiers leading away a hooded prisoner are verboten. Too much like a horror film, apparently. Which, in fairness, it is, isn't it?

Via Sullivan.

SMOKIN'....Republicans in the Senate have broken the all-time obstructionism record a mere 11 months into the current congressional session. Congratulations, GOP!

UPDATE: Ezra has it in handy chart form here. Everything's better in chart form, isn't it?

INKBLOTISM....Matt Yglesias joins the Rorschach club.

THE KIRKUK FIASCO....Juan Cole is suspicious about the timing of the recent Turkish raids on Kurdish guerrillas in northern Iraq, which came just as Condoleezza Rice was flying to Kirkuk to meet with Kurdish leader Massoud Barzani — a meeting that was angrily cancelled after Barzani learned about the raids:

Was Rice's trip to Iraqi Kurdistan Deliberately Sabotaged?

....Look, it is absolutely impossible that Condi plans out a trip to Kirkuk and a meeting with Barzani with full knowledge that while she is there, Turkey will send 500 Turkish soldiers into northern Iraq to occupy the villages of Kaya Retch Binwak, Janarok and Gelly Resh. Or even that when she set out on her trip, she knew that Turkey was planning to bomb Iraqi Kurdistan on Sunday, killing 3, wounding 8, and displacing 300 Kurdish villagers....So there are only two possibilities.

Not to keep you in suspense, the two possibilities are (a) a U.S. screwup of fairly monumental proportions or (b) Turkish treachery, possibly including some sympathetic moles inside the State Department. "I'll bet you State is looking into this fiasco as we speak and if you hear fairly soon that someone high in the department (or another department who has similar clearances) suddenly resigns to spend more time with his family, you can reasonably speculate that he was the source of a leak to [Turkish chief of staff Yasar] Buyukanit — if indeed there was one."

THE BLOGOSPHERE vs THE VSPs....In the National Interest today, David Frum levels a blast at the lefty blogosphere ("personal," "rude," "bitter," "imperfectly grammatical") in the guise of an essay about the split between liberal bloggers and the Very Serious People™ of the liberal foreign policy establishment. It's provocative in spots, but his thesis can be summed up pretty briefly: (a) the liberal blogosphere doesn't like the liberal foreign policy community much and isn't shy about saying so, (b) this kind of populist revolt has happened a bunch of times in the past, and (c) it never lasts long. Sometime soon the blogosphere will turn its sights elsewhere and the foreign policy experts will reassert their control — but perhaps as "an expanded and enlarged community." So everybody's a winner!

Well, maybe so. Hell, probably so. But I'm curious about something. This is just a diversion from the main point of his essay, but where did this paragraph pop out of?

Few presidential candidates have drawn more support from the liberal FPC [i.e., "Foreign Policy Community"] than Barack Obama. Obama has been endorsed by former National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski and advised by Harvard professor Samantha Power, Clinton counter-terrorism czar Richard Clarke and even George W. Bush's former NSC Senior Director for the Middle East, Bruce Riedel. Compared to Obama's, Hillary Clinton's foreign-policy team looks a little like a gala performance in Branson, Missouri: all the names you remember from decades ago.

I guess this all depends on how you define "liberal FPC," but FPC advisors don't come much more "decades ago" than Zbigniew Brzezinski, do they? And let's not forget Anthony Lake and Susan Rice, two Obama advisors who are ex-Clintonites in good standing (as is Clarke, of course). Samantha Power is, indeed, a new face on the foreign policy scene, but the fact is that every Democrat's foreign policy team is made up mostly of ex-Clintonites who are fully paid-up members of the liberal FPC. So what's the point of this strained assertion? Apparently it's to set up an argument that Obama, once embraced by the FPC but now a darling of the netroots, has responded by becoming the next best thing to a foul-mouthed blogger ("this once-irenic candidate now hurls accusations with the brio of a blogger on the Daily Kos"). This accusation is so absurd that it's hard even to know how to respond.

Anyway, Frum's piece has some entertaining vitriol here and there, and once you get past the pro forma comparison of Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer to Joe McCarthy (yeesh), he even ends with an admission that maybe the liberal blogosphere will end up having a positive effect on the FPC. There's not a lot of new insight in the piece, but it might be worth reading just to get a sense of what the all the liberal catfights look like to an outsider.

GOOD NEWS FROM IRAQ....According to the Pentagon, new focus group findings in Iraq have produced some good news: it turns out that Iraqis have a number of "shared beliefs" about their current situation that "cut across sectarian lines."

Great! And what is this good news? "Iraqis of all sectarian and ethnic groups believe that the U.S. military invasion is the primary root of the violent differences among them, and see the departure of 'occupying forces' as the key to national reconciliation."

Really, you can't make this stuff up. Elsewhere, the Pentagon's quarterly report on Iraq tells us that we're making security gains in Iraq, but:

The provinces just north of Baghdad and Anbar have shown the least progress, as Sunni Arab insurgents move their bases north. In Nineveh province and its capital, Mosul, violence remained above 2006 levels.

The report argues that the gains are not irreversible, and it casts a pessimistic light on the ability of the central government to meet many of the legislative goals set by U.S. officials. The report calls the lack of progress disappointing and says failures are hindering reconciliation between warring sects within Iraq.

And David Ignatius passes along the good news that the UN has brokered a postponement of the scheduled election in Kirkuk, which illustrates "that there can be virtuous cycles, too, even in a country as bitterly divided as this one."

That's true, and the UN deal is a relief. Unfortunately, I suspect that "virtuous cycles" aren't the reason for it. Instead, my guess is that the Kurdish leadership decided that it wouldn't hurt to have a few more months to chase out even more Arabs and Turkmen and install an even bigger Kurdish majority in the city. As with so much else in Iraq, the UN agreement might be good news, or it might merely be a postponement of bad news. Caveat emptor.

THE ENERGY BILL....George Bush has signed the energy bill passed by Congress yesterday:

Soon, you won't find those old-fashioned 100-watt incandescent light bulbs in stores. You will be able to buy more energy-efficient appliances. And you will see labels on TVs and computers that tell you how much energy they consume.

....In addition to the 40% increase in fuel efficiency for new cars and light trucks by 2020, for a fleetwide average of 35 mpg, the bill requires a fivefold increase — to 36 billion gallons — in the amount of alternative home-grown fuels, such as ethanol, that must be added to the nation's gasoline supply by 2022.

....The American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy has projected that the bill will reduce energy use by 7% and carbon dioxide emissions by 9% in 2030. The Washington think tank also has estimated it will save consumers and businesses more than $400 billion between now and 2030, "accounting for both energy cost savings and the moderately higher price of energy-efficient products."

Speaking of Rorschach tests, this is is a pretty good one. What do you think of this bill? Is it a weak-kneed sellout by spineless Dems unwilling to take a stand for real energy reform? Or a pretty good effort from a party with a slim majority and a recalcitrant president, one that that makes a modest but real difference that a future Democratic president can build on?

I'll take Door #2, please. Yes, there's still too much corn ethanol in this bill, and losing the 15% mandate for renewable electricity generation was a blow. But seriously, compare this bill to the energy industry porkfest that a Republican congress passed in 2005. It's like night and day. That one was little more than a massive handout to every energy lobbyist who ever dined at Charlie Palmer's. Today's bill, by contrast, actually accomplishes something. The CAFE increase to 35 mpg, all by itself, is historic, and 60% of the fuel mandate is for advanced biofuels and cellulosic ethanol, rather than the corn variety. This is real legislation that addresses a real problem, not a handout for campaign donors masquerading as "reform."

With this bill signed, the fight for an even better bill starts tomorrow. But without a Democratic congress we'd still be fighting to get even this much — and we wouldn't be any closer than we were five years ago. So, warts and all, good job, Harry and Nancy.

But if you want an alternate view, check out Ken Ward here. "Weak-kneed sellout" is the least of his criticisms.

BRIAN ROEHRKASSE, PLEASE LEAVE THE BUILDING....Most of the Justice Department leaders responsible for the U.S. Attorney scandal have long since resigned. Alberto Gonzales left in September. Deputy AG Paul McNulty gave notice a few weeks before that. Bradley Schlozman left at around the same time. Kyle Sampson is gone. Mike Elston is gone. Monica Goodling is gone.

But one of the prime figures in the scandal is not only still around, but got a promotion: Brian Roehrkasse, a Bush 2000 campaign worker who worked as a spokesman for the DOJ Office of Public Affairs during the USA scandal, was promoted in August to head the entire office. In the December issue of the Monthly, Bud Cummins, one of the U.S. Attorneys who was fired last year, says it's time for him to leave too. "Roehrkasse did more than perhaps any other DOJ official to disseminate the avalanche of untruths," Cummins writes. Then, "out of dozens of examples," he lists Roehrkasse's five biggest whoppers. You can read 'em here.

THE ARMY'S OTHER CRISIS....In the December issue of the Monthly, Andrew Tilghman takes a long look at a subject that gets only sporadic attention in the daily press: the intense pressure that the Iraq war is putting on the Army's ability to retain its midlevel officer corps. The exodus of officers with between four and nine years of experience has jumped from 8% to 13% just in the past four years, and the officers who are leaving are disproportionately some of the Army's highest performers:

Colonel George Lockwood, the director of officer personnel management for the Army's Human Resources Command [has] estimated that the Army already has only about half the senior captains that it needs. "Read the last line again, please," Lockwood wrote. "Our inventory of senior captains is only 51 percent of requirement." In response to this deficit, the Army is taking in twenty-two-year-olds as fast as it can. However, these recruits can't be expected to perform the jobs of officers who have six to eight years of experience. "New 2nd Lieutenants," Lockwood observed, "are no substitute for senior captains."

Even the pool from which the Army draws its future leaders is being diluted....The number of OCS graduates has more than tripled since the late 1990s, from about 400 a year to more than 1,500 a year. These soldiers may turn out to be good commissioned officers. But they are also needed in the noncommissioned officer (NCO) corps, the parallel structure of senior-level sergeants who form the Army's backbone, responsible for ensuring that orders are effectively carried out, rather than making policy or strategic decisions. Yet the Army is already several thousand sergeants short and has been reducing NCO promotion times in order to fill the gaps. Sending more soldiers who are NCOs, or NCO material, to Officer Candidate School is merely robbing Peter to pay Paul.

....In Washington, I met Matt Kapinos and his longtime friend Jim Morin for lunch....Both men were frank, thoughtful, and occasionally sarcastic about their disillusionment with the Army; it was clear that they'd discussed the subject repeatedly before. "You have a three-star general like John Vines come down to talk to us, and he says, 'Just go out there and shoot people,'" Kapinos said. "And you know that that is not how to fight an insurgency. Everyone who's ever read the most basic article on counterinsurgency knows that is not how you're going to win."

"Yeah," Morin agreed. "The general would come out and give these bellicose speeches, and every time he did that, I'd have to go back to my guys and say, 'What the general really meant to say was ... "

There are plenty of reasons for the Army's retention problems that go beyond the Iraq war, but Tilghman reports that the war has intensified them in two ways: first, through simple weariness caused by multiple deployments thousands of miles from home, and second, through frustration with a senior officer corps that doesn't understand modern counterinsurgency and seemingly has little desire to learn. And without midlevel officers, you don't have an army:

Civilian hawks in the government believe that the way to reduce the grueling pace of deployments while continuing to prosecute the war for "as long as it takes" is simply to increase the size of the force. Rudy Giuliani, for instance, has called for adding ten combat brigades. But who is going to lead these new forces if seasoned young officers continue leaving the Army in droves? Calls to expand the Army are empty rhetoric if the military brass and their civilian bosses fail to grapple with whether the services can recruit and retain junior leaders in both numbers and quality.

One final thought: the four-star generals of tomorrow are the captains and majors of today. If you're losing the best of those midlevel officers, you're not only losing the backbone of today's Army, you're losing the leadership of tomorrow's. "The generals who will appear before Congress in twenty-five years are in the Army right now," Tilghman says. "They're junior officers, probably captains. And keeping them in uniform might be the Army's most important mission."

Read the rest here.

ON THE COUCH....Speaking of how the Democratic primary has become a Rorschach test, here's an example. Both of these posts come via Ezra Klein, but the example of the Rorschach-ee is me, not him.

First, Ezra points to a Steve Clemons post praising Hillary Clinton:

I've met her a number of times, usually at receptions....The last time...we had a really interesting discussion about what should be on a roster of 21st century threats and how our national security and foreign policy resources should be reorganized to deal with future challenges rather than keeping vested interests tied to old threats well funded. Her quick grasp of what I was trying to get at — and a detailed response that was serious and level-headed — really surprised me as I'm used to politicians who typically have to fake their way through detail.

....I am convinced of something about Hillary Clinton's commitment to use every lever and every aspect of government machinery to push her legislative and policy work that I'm disappointed to say that I can't find as strongly in Barack Obama's profile. My concern has to do with the fact that as Chairman of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations' Subcommittee on Europe, Obama has held zero hearings — at least that is how the record appears to me. [Steve then goes on to argue that this is an unusually sluggish performance.]

....I'm not trying to find a minor, nuanced difference between Obama and Clinton and inflate that to inappropriate levels. I am a fan of some of Obama's foreign policy positions — though I think that I tend to appreciate his speeches influenced by Zbigniew Brzezinski that reflect tough-minded thinking and hard choices rather than those influenced by former Clinton National Security Adviser Anthony Lake that seem to want America to rush into every global cause without clear delineation of priorities and an accounting of potential costs and consequences to our national interest.

But the question of how a Chief Executive would utilize the machinery of government towards the public good has always been of interest to me.

I've truncated Steve's argument considerably, and you should read the whole thing to get a better flavor of what he's saying. But I think you can get the gist from that excerpt. Ezra follows this with a post in which he reprints an email from an Obama supporter who likes Obama's approach to reducing the influence of big corporations:

Now, you could try to overcome that influence by, as you noted, running on a platform, winning a large majority of the popular vote, and then using the bully pulpit to try to drive that agenda through Congress. That seems to be Edwards preferred method.

Obama's is more sneaky and backdoor. He'd rather quietly go about removing those interests' access, their ability to throw their money at Congressman and officers in the executive, and only then sit down at the table and say, "lets talk." It's why someone who has been running on "taking on special interests" for 11 years now (and he has, go check out his speeches in 2004 and in his runs for state office) has always made campaign finance reform, ethics reform, etc central to his legislative agenda.

Neither of these posts comes directly from the candidates themselves, or even from anyone close to the candidates, and I could take any number of lessons from them. But one of the big reasons I find myself leaning toward Hillary is that Steve's argument strikes me as both plausible and important while the anonymous emailer's strikes me as naive. Hillary is smart and well-briefed, she is level-headed, and the evidence suggests that over the past seven years she's gotten pretty good at working with Republicans to get things done in the Senate. I like those qualities and would like to see them in a Democratic president, so I'm happy to project them onto her.

Conversely, anybody who thinks that Obama or anyone else is going to overcome the influence of big corporations via sneakiness and stealth is living in a dreamworld. It may be possible to do a deal with conservatives and their lobbyists on various issues, but they aren't going to be conned and they aren't going to be fooled. Unfortunately, I have a deep fear that maybe Obama really does believe he can do that, and so I project that onto him despite the fact that this argument is coming from some anonymous guy writing on a blog, not anyone who really knows Obama's mind.

Obviously I'm not trying to persuade anyone here. You may read these posts and come to the exact opposite conclusion. Maybe, contra me, Hillary is just another Jimmy Carter, good on details but not so good on a vision of governance. Likewise, maybe Obama really is stealthy and slick enough to get things done that a more confrontational politician couldn't. As always, your mileage may vary.

But for what it's worth, that's where I am right now. Still leaning modestly toward Hillary, still unsure that Obama really knows how to get things done in modern-day Washington. But still watching and waiting.

THOUGHT FOR THE DAY....Here it is: The Democratic primary has become more a Rorschach test than an actual contest. I suppose this is a banal proposition, but it's been remarkable lately watching so many people — and I include myself here, though I don't always blog about it — so transparently project their own desires and fears onto the top three candidates, often in completely contradictory ways. I don't have any good examples of this right at hand, but maybe I'll try to collect a few over the next few days.

Still, perhaps we can all come together on one thing: if it's going to be a Rorschach test, surely Inkblot is our most electable candidate? He's got a pretty good policy platform, too.

UNDERSTANDING FRANCE....Interested in France? David Bell says that Arthur Goldhammer's blog French Politics "has a fair claim to be offering the best commentary on France available in the English language today." Just thought I'd pass that along.

QUOTE OF THE DAY....From Josh Patashnik, after linking to Michael Cannon's livid blast against Arnold Schwarzenegger's universal healthcare plan for California:

The conservative health care strategy works like this: endorse subsidies in theory, since it would seem unacceptably heartless to simply say that people who can't afford medical care shouldn't get it. Then, whenever anybody proposes a plan to actually implement subsidies, vehemently oppose it without offering any alternative plan to expand coverage. (Which is what California Republicans are doing.) In other words, let states experiment — except when they actually do.

OUTSOURCED CHART WONKERY....No, not outsourced to India, just to another blog. Afferent Input tries to chart the CBO's latest figures for increased income inequality but hits a snag: all the poor schmoes at the bottom have done so badly that their lines all get squashed together. His solution: make the chart really tall and skinny.

The numbers in this chart are all normalized to zero in 1979, and what they show is that the total share of national income going to the super-rich has more than doubled over that time. The merely well off have also gotten a slightly bigger piece of the pie, while everyone else has funded this free-for-all. "Everyone else," in this case, means 90% of the country. Our share of national income has gone down in order to make sure that virtually all the fruits of economic growth over the past four decades could go to the well-off, the rich, and the super-duper-rich.

One of the reasons it's important to see charts like this, even if you've seen them before, is that it gives the lie to the endlessly recycled myth that growing income inequality is mainly due to increased returns to education and technical skills. But it ain't so. The returns to education might be growing a bit — though even that's debatable — but by far the biggest beneficiaries of skyrocketing income inequality have been the top 1%, the top 0.1%, and the top 0.01%. Not even Republicans will try to make the case that the top 1% have become better educated over the past 40 years compared to the top 10%, so if that's where income inequality is concentrated then education just can't be a huge factor. If you're interested in the truth, you have to look elsewhere.

KERREY....For the record, I'm with Mark Kleiman on the whole Bob Kerrey dustup. I was just barely willing to give him the benefit of the doubt over his "Obama's Muslim father" remarks — largely because I think he's substantively right about this — but his "secular madrassa" comment simply can't be spun as sincere even if you're bending over backward to be charitable. If he really thinks he's helping Hillary with the nonsense, he's sadly mistaken.

THE EQUATIONS OF POLITICS....Walter Shapiro listens to the stump speeches of the three leading Democratic candidates and sums them up this way:

Edwards and Clinton are both playing traditional roles in the never-ending political drama of the outsider versus the insider. Obama is the wild card, as the 21st-century candidate trying to rewrite the equations that govern political math.

There's nothing original there, but it does get to the heart of the difference between Obama and the other two. The question is, do you believe that there's a "new politics" out there waiting for someone to grab hold of it and change the "equations that govern political math"? I gotta say, I'm skeptical — the same way I was skeptical when the dotcommers thought they'd rewritten the rules of stock valuation and the subprime lenders thought they'd rewritten the rules of risk evaluation. Call me cynical, but from where I sit politics doesn't look a lot different today than it did when I cast my first vote 30 years ago.

TORTURING ZUBAIDA....Did torturing Abu Zubaida work? Was he an "unstable source who provided limited intelligence under gentle questioning" or a "hardened terrorist who cracked under extremely harsh measures"? At the Washington Post, Dan Eggen and Walter Pincus investigate.

THE SCHOOLS THE TALIBAN WON'T TORCH....The Taliban has been increasingly resurgent in Afghanistan over the past year, but our problems there go well beyond the military. The Washington Post reported on Monday that "Afghanistan is so poor and so starved for modern infrastructure, one senior administration official said, that it could well be 'a longer, if not larger, challenge than Iraq.'" A day earlier, the New York Times reported that Nicholas Burns, the under secretary of state for political affairs, "was coordinating another internal assessment of diplomatic efforts and economic aid — the sorts of 'soft power' assistance beyond combat force that officials agree are required for success."

In the December issue of the Monthly, Gregory Warner says a big part of the soft-power problem is simple funding: "According to the RAND Corporation, the American-led nation-building effort in Afghanistan is the least-financed such effort in sixty years." The solution, though, isn't just more funding, but funding the right kind of programs:

In a country where almost all the recent news has been bad news, the National Solidarity Program, or NSP, offers a rare glimmer of hope....The novel thinking behind the National Solidarity Program is largely the work of Scott Guggenheim, a maverick World Bank staffer who in the late 1990s pioneered a similar program in Indonesia.

....Guggenheim designed a program that would distribute small grants to villages....Local leaders were charged with administering the projects and required to take bookkeeping classes and keep minutes at planning meetings. Billboards above project sites indicated how money had been spent, encouraging local oversight. "The core elements were requiring that citizens participate and that there be high levels of transparency about how money was being transferred and used," one of Guggenheim's former Bank colleagues, Dennis de Tray, now at the Center for Global Development in Washington, said. "It had to be auditable."

....Maybe the most surprising characteristic of NSP projects is security related. In a survey last year of school burnings by the Taliban, Human Rights Watch observed that schools built by the NSP have less chance of being destroyed by insurgents than schools built by other aid programs. The reason, as Dennis de Tray explains, relates to the matter of local ownership. "If you're the Taliban, you feel some comfort in attacking things built by foreigners," de Tray says. "But you don't want to create animosity among citizens you're trying to recruit to your side."

The NSP has other benefits as well: village councils that successfully complete projects can apply for additional grants, and after the fourth or fifth grant cycle, Guggenheim says, "something like real responsive government started to emerge."

Unfortunately, although other countries have increased their funding of NSP, the United States has actually decreased its contribution. The result is fewer villages participating, and fewer of them getting to the stage where the grants start to produce real changes in the way local governments become more responsible, more closely aligned with the central government, and less vulnerable to the Taliban. And the savings involved? A tiny fraction of what we spend on military and counternarcotics efforts.

Read the rest of the story here.

THE DEFENSE BUDGET....Lorelei Kelly wants to make sure we all know just how massive the post-9/11 defense budget has gotten — even when you don't count the cost of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan:

Last week, both houses of Congress approved the conference report on the Fiscal Year 2008 Defense Authorization bill, H.R. 1585. The bill includes $506.9 billion for the Department of Defense and the nuclear weapons activities of the Department of Energy....The amount of Cold War lard is truly astonishing, especially given the fact that the military itself is hollering from the hilltops that it can't be responsible for all of our national security needs and that today's problems just don't have military (read "Cold War weapons systems") answers.

....Keep in mind, today's defense spending is 14% above the height of the Korean War, 33% above the height of the Vietnam War, 25% above the height of the "Reagan Era" buildup and is 76% above the Cold War average

In fact, since the September 11, 2001 attacks, the annual defense budget — not including the costs of military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan — has gone up 34%. Including war costs, defense spending has gone up 86% since 2001.

Now you know.

RETROACTIVE IMMUNITY....Given a choice of two FISA bills, one that provided retroactive immunity to telecoms companies that illegally cooperated with the NSA after 9/11 and one that didn't, Harry Reid decided to bring to the floor the bill that provided immunity. Reid is rightly taking a lot of heat for this in the liberal blogosphere, plus additional heat for overriding Chris Dodd's hold on the bill, but today the Reid-approved legislation passed its first test 76-10. This suggests pretty strongly that Matt Yglesias is right: The Senate as a whole clearly wants the immunity provision to pass, including a majority of Democrats, which means Reid should hardly be held up for any special opprobrium. He's just doing the will of the people.

But why is nearly every senator so anxious to provide telecoms companies with immunity? After all, as Russ Feingold points out, under current law "companies already get immunity for cooperating with government requests for information — as long as the requests follow requirements that are clearly laid out in the law." The answer, apparently, is that that's not good enough. Attorney General Michael Mukasey wrote recently that "in the future we will need the full-hearted help of private companies in our intelligence activities," and evidently we want that cooperation whether the government's requests are legal or not. Thus the immunity. It's a message for the future.

Other people have done a better job than me of explaining why this precedent is so odious, so I won't rehash it here. Go read Glenn Greenwald instead.

But it's still worth noting that it didn't have to be this way. After all, hardly anyone, either liberal or conservative, would have objected if the Bush administration had gotten telecoms cooperation as a genuine emergency measure following 9/11. As Ron Suskind reminds us in The One Percent Doctrine, this was the situation at the time: Al-Qaeda terrorists had just attacked the country; further attacks seemed highly likely; our intelligence network was scrambling and nearly blind; we had good reason to believe that Osama bin Laden might be negotiating with Pakistani radicals to obtain a nuclear weapon; and credible reports suggested that al-Qaeda might also be on the road to manufacturing weaponized anthrax. Under the circumstances, asking telecoms companies to cooperate on an interim basis even in the absence of legal approval would hardly have been inappropriate.

But that's not what happened. As Suskind also reminded us, instead of requesting temporary cooperation and then asking Congress for the implementing legislation within a few months, the Bush administration insisted on going it alone. Dick Cheney had long been obsessed with reasserting the power of the executive branch, and Bush himself was obviously smitten with the idea of being a "wartime president." It was a toxic combination. As a result, instead of calming down after the initial panic and getting Congress fully involved, Bush and Cheney insisted on moving ahead for years in a legal gray zone.

So now we end up where we are today. Instead of an emergency request that was quickly put on a firm legislative foundation, we have a legal quagmire. And because Congress — Republicans and Democrats alike — went along with this even after we had gotten our bearings and had no excuse for continuing to operate on an emergency basis, they're just as happy as anyone to put this whole episode behind them and cave in on the retroactive immunity issue.

And what happens the next time a president demands telecoms cooperation for years on end without legal justification? Well, that's the problem, isn't it?

UPDATE: Chris Dodd's filibuster has forced Reid to withdraw the FISA bill until next year. But it's only a temporary victory. In January the fight starts all over again.

THE SURVEILLANCE STATE....This story ran yesterday in the New York Times, but I didn't want to bury it on the blog on a Sunday. So in case you haven't seen it already, it's worth your while to read Eric Lichtblau, James Risen, and Scott Shane on the rise of the surveillance state. Here's a snippet:

A lawsuit was filed in federal court in New Jersey challenging [NSA's] wiretapping operations. It claims that in February 2001...N.S.A. met with AT&T officials to discuss replicating a network center in Bedminster, N.J., to give the agency access to all the global phone and e-mail traffic that ran through it.

The accusations rely in large part on the assertions of a former engineer on the project. The engineer, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said in an interview that he participated in numerous discussions with N.S.A. officials about the proposal. The officials, he said, discussed ways to duplicate the Bedminster system in Maryland so the agency "could listen in" with unfettered access to communications that it believed had intelligence value and store them for later review. There was no discussion of limiting the monitoring to international communications, he said.

"At some point," he said, "I started feeling something isn't right."

As with many of the other programs described in the article, note the date: February 2001. That's before 9/11. Read the whole thing.

ENDING THE WAR....Matt Yglesias links to the latest NYT/CBS poll about Iraq, and the results are clear: more than 70% of the country thinks we should leave within two years or less:

As you can see, virtually nobody in the United States wants to see American troops remain in Iraq for longer than five years. If you put squarely to people a political and strategic choice between a long-term military commitment to Iraq and trying to wrap our involvement up as quickly as is feasible, it wouldn't even be a close call.

Unfortunately, I don't think it's that easy. Here's the thing: in every poll taken for the past three years, we've seen basically the same results: (a) a majority wants to leave Iraq within one or two years, and (b) almost nobody wants to leave right now. So where will all those people who want to leave within a year or two be when pollsters ask this question again in 2008? Most likely answer: they'll still want to leave within a year or two and they still won't want to leave right now.

It's easy to say that the public is overwhelmingly in favor of withdrawing from Iraq and congressional Democrats are cowards for not fighting harder to end the war. But that's poll literalism at work. In reality, as near as I can tell, the public is unhappy, but at the same time unwilling to endorse serious action to stop the flow of Friedmans and set a firm deadline for leaving. Maybe congressional Democrats need more backbone when it comes to Iraq, but as always, it's public opinion that's key. And public opinion just isn't as overwhelmingly on our side as we often like to think. Fix that, and we'll all be amazed at how fast Dems can grow a spine.

QUOTE OF THE DAY....From the book jacket of Jonah Goldberg's forthcoming Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left, From Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning:

The quintessential liberal fascist isn't an SS storm trooper; it is a female grade-school teacher with an education degree from Brown or Swarthmore.

Quite so. Up against the wall with all of 'em.

FIGHTING TERRORISM....Former Nebraska Senator Bob Kerrey, asked about Barack Obama yesterday, said: "I like the fact that his name is Barack Hussein Obama, and that his father was a Muslim and that his paternal grandmother is a Muslim. There's a billion people on the planet that are Muslims and I think that experience is a big deal." Mark Kleiman agrees, but James Joyner doesn't:

I disagree strongly with Kerrey and Kleiman about the value of having a president with a Muslim middle name. Indeed, the idea that religious nuts who are willing to murder thousands of Americans would think "Hey, they elected a guy with a Muslim middle name! They must be okay!" is absurd. Hell, they kill plenty of people named Hussein who actually are Muslims; the only thing they hate more than American infidels is Arab apostates.

I think this is badly wrong. And it's badly wrong in an important way. In fact, it gets straight to the heart of perhaps the most serious, most durable misunderstanding held by conservatives about how to fight terrorism.

Kerrey wasn't suggesting that electing Obama would have any direct effect on hardcore al-Qaeda jihadists. It wouldn't. But terrorists can't function unless they have a critical mass of support or, at a minimum, tolerance from a surrounding population. This is Mao's sea in which the jihadists swim. Without it, terrorists simply don't have enough freedom of movement to be effective, and their careers are short. It's why the Red Brigades in Italy and the Baader-Meinhof gang in Germany lasted only a few years, while the IRA in Ireland has lasted decades.

What Kerrey was getting at was simple: in the long run, the only way to defeat the hardcore jihadists is to dry up their support in the surrounding Muslim world. And on that score, a president with black skin, a Muslim father, and a middle name of Hussein, might very well be pretty helpful.

For today's jihadists, the answer is hard power. There's no other way to stop them. But for tomorrow's jihadists, the answer is soft power. As long as a substantial fraction of the Islamic world supports or tolerates jihadism, we'll never stop the production of new terrorists or seriously reduce their effectiveness. But if that support dries up, we can win. This is where our foreign policy should be focused, and the fact that it hasn't been for the past six years — that, in fact, we've gone backward on this score — is by far the most calamitous aspect of George Bush's disastrous war on terror.

UPDATE: James responds here, and I pretty much agree with him. I don't think the mere fact of having Obama as president would make a huge difference in the fight for Muslim world opinion. Other things are far more important. But it might help.

FIGHTING BACK AGAINST NASTY....Sometimes it's wise to just keep your mouth shut. The U.S. Attorney scandal earlier this year didn't really take off until Deputy Attorney General Paul McNulty put his foot in his mouth and told Congress that the prosecutors in question had been fired for "performance-related" reasons. Until then, the firees had mostly been willing to take their lumps and move on, but McNulty's comment pissed them off and they started talking. The rest is history.

Likewise, Rudy Giuliani probably should have kept his mouth shut a week ago instead of telling Tim Russert, "How can I not have pretty good judgment about the people who work for me and not been able to turn around the United States attorney's office?" In the New York Times today, the U.S. Attorney whose office Giuliani supposedly "turned around" fires back. According to John Martin, Giuliani made no major changes in the staff or leadership group he inherited; the idea of prosecuting organized crime families under the RICO statute originated a year before he took office; his famous securities fraud cases originated in a tip from Merrill Lynch; and the trial of Bronx Democratic leader Stanley Friedman originated with the Chicago FBI office. He concludes:

There is no question that Mr. Giuliani is an able lawyer. It is unfortunate, however, that he feels he must denigrate the accomplishments of others to advance his own political interests.

That's unfortunate all right, but it's also part of Rudy's DNA. You don't get one without the other.

BASRA....The British handed control of Basra over to the Iraqis yesterday, and here's what the local police chief told the LA Times about the transfer:

Maj. Gen. Abdul Jalil Khalaf, police commander of Basra, said he did not expect an escalation in violence because Iraqi forces have been in control of the city since Britain started its troop pullout in September.

...."There are no militias controlling the streets of Basra anymore," Khalaf said. "Now, only the law and security forces have control over the streets."

That sounds hopeful. But here's what the very same police chief told the Guardian:

"They left me militia, they left me gangsters, and they left me all the troubles in the world," he said in an interview for Guardian Films and ITV....In the film, to be broadcast on the Guardian Unlimited website and ITV News, Khalaf lists a catalogue of failings, saying:

• Basra has become so lawless that in the last three months 45 women have been killed for being "immoral" because they were not fully covered or because they may have given birth outside wedlock;

• The British unintentionally rearmed Shia militias by failing to recognise that Iraqi troops were loyal to more than one authority;

• Shia militia are better armed than his men and control Iraq's main port.
  

In the interview he said the main problem the Iraqi security forces now faced was the struggle to wrest control back from the militia.

So what's the story? Do militias control Basra or not? I can't say for sure, but here's one hint: even in the optimistic LA Times story, there's a telling note: "The fact that the [handover] ceremony was held not in the city, but in an airport lounge with signs for 'international baggage claim' and 'passport control' leading to the venue, underscored the state of security in town." Indeed.

HUCKABEE AND BUSH....In his recent Foreign Affairs essay, Mike Huckabee had hard words for George Bush's approach to national security:

American foreign policy needs to change its tone and attitude, open up, and reach out. The Bush administration's arrogant bunker mentality has been counterproductive at home and abroad. My administration will recognize that the United States' main fight today does not pit us against the world but pits the world against the terrorists.

Bold! Truthtelling! A brave effort to stand up to the Bush adminsitration's unthinking hawkishness. Except for one thing: as soon as Mitt Romney called him on it, Huckabee backed down:

I didn't say the President was arrogant....I've said that the policies have been arrogant....I'm the one who actually supported the President's surge. I supported the Bush tax cuts, when Mr. Romney didn't. I was with President Bush on gun control, when Mitt Romney wasn't. I was with the President on the President's pro-life position, when Mitt Romney wasn't.

What's funny about this is that, given the realities of magazine lead times, Huckabee almost certainly wrote his essay at least a month ago, and maybe earlier than that. Back then, like any candidate with no realistic shot at winning, he was occasionally willing to speak out and let the chips fall where they would. But the Republican presidential race has been so volatile that a mere month later Huckabee finds himself with an actual shot at the nomination. So no more truthtelling for the Huck! He's George Bush's biggest supporter now, and don't you dare think otherwise.

This is just another example of why everyone should ignore bold truthtelling from minor candidates. It's easy to take unpopular stands when you have no chance of winning, but not so easy when you're actually trying to scrounge up the votes to put yourself over the top. Huckabee is just the latest victim of this eternal truth.

THE REVENGE OF THE GUT....Back in 2001, the widely respected scholar John DiIulio spent about half a year in the George Bush White House as head of the Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives. Here's what he told Ron Suskind about his experience:

In eight months, I heard many, many staff discussions, but not three meaningful, substantive policy discussions....The lack of even basic policy knowledge, and the only casual interest in knowing more, was somewhat breathtaking.

This weekend, six years after serving in the same White House at the same time as DiIulio, former Bush speechwriter David Frum finally decides that maybe DiIulio was right. What's more, after listening to Ron Paul and Mike Huckabee burble confidently on about absurdities, he concludes that just maybe the entire conservative movement bears some blame for this state of affairs:

Many of us on the conservative side have fed this monster. (Rightly) aghast at the abuse of expertise by liberal judges, liberal bureaucrats and liberal academics, we have sometimes over-reacted by denying the importance of expertise altogether.

....So now instead of holes in our souls, we conservatives are getting candidates with holes in their heads.

Here's the lesson to learn: It's always important to respect the values and principles of the voters. But politicians who want to deliver effective government and positive results have to care about more than values — and have to do more than check their guts. They need to study the problem, master the evidence, and face criticism.

Welcome back to the reality-based community, Mr. Frum. Good luck reining in the beast you and your colleagues have spent the past three decades unchaining.

Via Andrew Sullivan.

UPDATE: Ross Douthat wonders why Frum only mentions Huckabee and Paul:

If you're going to be hard on the current crop of Republican candidates for making bogus claims about public policy, it seems awfully unfair to leave out the candidate given to running ads in which he announces: "I know that reducing taxes produces more revenue. The Democrats don't know that. They don't believe that." (They don't believe it, of course, because in the current fiscal landscape you can't find a serious conservative economist who thinks it's true.)

....If you're looking for cases where the Right's anti-elitism has shaded into outright anti-intellectualism — for cases where, in Frum's words, a GOP politician has deliberately failed to "study the problem, master the evidence, and face criticism" — Giuliani's frequent channeling of Larry Kudlow seems like at least as telling an example as anything Mike Huckabee and Ron Paul are peddling.

He's right. The Fair Tax and the gold standard are crank ideas that, while they tell us something about the candidates who support them, will never actually become public policy. "Tax cuts increase revenue," on the other hand, not only tells us something about Giuliani, but about the entire modern Republican Party apparatus. I imagine that's why Frum didn't include it.

RECRUITING....Military recruiting has been tough lately, and that's produced both good news and bad. The good news: there's much less interest in kicking out gay soldiers. The bad news: one in five recruits enters service on waivers, and as a result gang activity is up. Rep. Mike Thompson (D–Ca.) is trying to do something about it.

DA DA DA DUM....Today is Beethoven's birthday. Crank up your iPod and listen to something good.

WHO KNEW?....Over at Newsweek, the saga of the destroyed CIA interrogation video continues. Michael Isikoff and Mark Hosenball report that intelligence director John Negroponte provided direction about the tapes to CIA director Porter Goss in a 2005 memo...

...which records that Negroponte strongly advised against destroying the tapes, according to two people close to the investigation, who asked for anonymity when discussing a sensitive matter. The memo is so far the only known documentation that a senior intel official warned that the tapes should not be destroyed.

Later in the piece, they report that Goss was "dismayed" to learn that the tapes had been destroyed, thus perpetuating the story that Jose Rodriguez Jr., then chief of the CIA's National Clandestine Service, destroyed them entirely on his own despite contrary advice from virtually every other person involved in this. And maybe that's true. But Rodriguez is sure looking more and more like a classic fall guy every day, isn't he?

NEGATIVES....Southern California apostate Ezra Klein snags the front (op-ed) page of Southern California's newspaper of record today with a very nice piece about whether Hillary Clinton is really a uniquely polarizing candidate. It's true, he says, that her negatives are currently higher than either Edwards' or Obama's:

Still, it's a bit misleading to say "she" is more polarizing. Polarization isn't a character trait; it's the outcome of a process. And that process is American politics....As pollster Scott Rasmussen tells me, all the other candidates are going to see their negatives go up during the course of the campaign — and if one of them ultimately wins the race, their negatives will go up even further. "The next president will get to where she is no matter who we elect," he said. It's not that the others are necessarily less polarizing than Clinton. It's that they're not as polarizing yet.

....The polarizing effects of the process are the larger truth that voters have to grapple with. How will Obama look after nine months of sinister insinuations about his heritage, religious loyalties and racial background? How will John Edwards look after the airwaves are blanketed with sneering ads focusing on his mansion and his record as a trial lawyer and his pricey haircuts? How will Mitt Romney come off after mocking videos of his bald shifts in position play during every commercial break?

Yep, that's the question. And it's a real question, not a rhetorical one. How will Obama look after nine months on the receiving end of the right-wing slime machine? A big part of his appeal to Democrats depends on whether you think he'll come out of the other end of the campaign with the same high negatives as Hillary or whether he'll manage to stay five or ten points below her. My guess: if Obama gets the nomination, his negatives will never quite reach Hillary's level, but by November they'll only be three or four points lower. Personally, I doubt that that will make a difference. Either one of them has what it takes to win.

"THEY WILL GET OVERRUN"....A couple of weeks ago I linked to a story about the initial troop drawdowns in Iraq and expressed surprised that they were taking place in Baghdad rather than in outlying provinces. Today, the LA Times reports that the military has had second thoughts about this too:

In a change of plans, American commanders in Iraq have decided to keep their forces concentrated in Baghdad when the buildup strategy ends next year, removing troops instead from outlying areas of the country.

....The shift in deployment strategy, described by senior U.S. military officials in Iraq and Washington, is based on concerns that despite recent improvements, the capital could again erupt into widespread violence without an imposing American military presence.

That's not especially good news. But if that's the way it is, then that's the way it is. We stay in Baghdad.

Later in the article, though, the local U.S. commanders provide a rationale for leaving the provinces that's surprising in its honesty:

The day-to-day commander in Iraq, Army Lt. Gen. Raymond T. Odierno, and his staff believe that the increasing competence of provincial security and political leaders will put pressure on the government in Baghdad that "will breed a better central government," said his chief of staff, Brig. Gen. Joseph Anderson.

...."The grass-roots level will force change at the top because if they do not act on it, they will get overrun," said another senior military officer responsible for Iraq war planning.

In other words, our "bottoms up" strategy — which, you'll recall, was adopted out of necessity as a response to the Anbar Awakening — is creating competing power centers in the provinces that are becoming ever better equipped to successfully challenge the central government. And that's deliberate. Australian Lt. Col. David Kilcullen fessed up about this months ago in a little-noticed piece on the Small Wars Journal blog, and apparently U.S. commanders are now talking about it more openly too. The message to prime minister Nouri al-Maliki is: get your act together or else the Sunni sheikhs in Anbar and Diyala are going to get it together for you.

Kilcullen called the revitalized Sunni tribes "competing armed interest groups," and expressed the hope that their existence would create a stable "intra-communal balance of power." That was a pretty strained piece of spin from the start, and now even that thin curtain is being stripped away. Today, we're all but admitting that the more likely result of "competing armed interest groups" is civil war, and if the Maliki administration doesn't get this, "they will get overrun."

In fact, I imagine the Maliki government and its allies get this perfectly well — and they're undoubtedly preparing for it. Unfortunately, that preparation probably doesn't include making concessions to their Sunni adversaries. More likely, it means making sure they're the ones who get overrun.

BALI WRAPUP....Since I vented last night about the absurd "compromise" reached at the Bali climate change conference on Friday, it's only fair to give equal time to a more considered opinion now that the negotiations are over and the final document looks a little better than it did at this time yesterday. Given the Bush administration's participation, says John Quiggin, firm CO2 targets were just never in the cards:

But on just about every other score, the outcome has been better than anyone could reasonably have expected, including:

• Agreement in principle on a 2050 target of halving emissions

• Agreement to negotiate a binding deal in 2009, when Bush will be gone, and short-term targets back on the table

• Agreement to provide assistance to developing countries for both mitigation and adaptation

• Agreement by China to pursue emissions-cutting actions that are measurable, reportable and verifiable.
  

Other winners from Bali: Al Gore and new Australian prime minister Kevin Rudd. And the losers? "They know who they are."

WHY WE TORTURE....Responding to yesterday's post about the conservative moral justification for the use of waterboarding, stress positions, etc. against detainees in American custody, one of my conservative correspondents wrote to me this morning to explain why he supports the torture of suspected terrorists. Beneath the intellectual superstructure that we often hear from torture apologists, I suspect that what he wrote pretty closely mirrors the actual underlying beliefs that we're up against when we liberals argue against the morality of torture. So without comment, here's what he sent me:

I want our side to win. Or maybe more accurately, I don't want our side to lose....As with any other form of violence, motivation is everything. A cop shooting a murderer is not the same as a murderer shooting an innocent victim, although both use guns, and at the end, someone is bleeding and dying.

You'd be amazed at how many people find these things nearly equivalent. A leftist I know sees no difference between a Palestinian child dying from a stray Israeli bullet during a firefight, and an Israeli child dying when a Palestinian terrorist puts the barrel of a gun to the kid's forehead and blows his brains across the back wall of the child's bedroom. In his two-dimensional perception, the only important factor is that both resulted in a dead child. Avoiding true moral analysis and motivations allows him to skirt the concept of "evil," a term which makes many liberals intensely uncomfortable.

John Kiriakou said that waterboarding a terrorist stopped dozens of attacks. Dozens. Not attacks on military targets, but attacks on innocent non-combatants.

That was the motivation.

The terrorists who torture and kill our prisoners (never something as benign as waterboarding) don't do it because they need information to save innocent people. They do it because they like it, because they want to hurt or kill someone.

At some point you have to decide if a known terrorist having a very bad day (after which he goes back to a hot meal and a cot) is more of a moral problem than allowing a terrorist to blow up a building full of people.

Yes, it's good if we do it, when it's for the right reasons. So far, it's been for the right reasons. And no, it isn't good when it's done to us, for the reasons it has been done to us. Get back to me when some enemy tortures one of our soldiers in order to save innocent lives.

Got it?

HARDBALL....Charlie Savage of the Boston Globe reports that the White House is taking steps to rein in those pesky JAG lawyers who think that Guantanamo detainees deserve something at least remotely resembling a fair hearing:

The Bush administration is pushing to take control of the promotions of military lawyers, escalating a conflict over the independence of uniformed attorneys who have repeatedly raised objections to the White House's policies toward prisoners in the war on terrorism.

....Retired Major General Thomas Romig, the Army's top JAG from 2001 to 2005, called the proposal an attempt "to control the military JAGs" by sending a message that if they want to be promoted, they should be "team players" who "bow to their political masters on legal advice."

It "would certainly have a chilling effect on the JAGs' advice to commanders," Romig said. "The implication is clear: without [the administration's] approval the officer will not be promoted."

You will be unsurprised to learn that this is a revival of a policy first proposed in the early 90s by — of course — Dick Cheney, David Addington, and William Haynes. Savage says that the Senate Armed Services Committee forced Cheney to back down the first time, but now he's back to give it another try.

Haynes, by the way, is currently the Defense Department General Counsel, a political appointment. He's also the guy who caused Morris Davis, chief prosecutor for the military commissions at Guantanamo Bay, to resign his job. (Note: that's the chief prosecutor, not some effete, terror-loving defense attorney. The prosecutor resigned because the deck was stacked too firmly in the prosecution's direction.) If you need your memory refreshed, here's Morris in the LA Times a few days ago:

I resigned because of two memos signed by Deputy Secretary of Defense Gordon England that placed the chief prosecutor — that was me — in a chain of command under Defense Department General Counsel William J. Haynes. Haynes was a controversial nominee for a lifetime appointment to the U.S. 4th Circuit Court of Appeals, but his nomination died in January 2007, in part because of his role in authorizing the use of the aggressive interrogation techniques some call torture.

I had instructed the prosecutors in September 2005 that we would not offer any evidence derived by waterboarding, one of the aggressive interrogation techniques the administration has sanctioned. Haynes and I have different perspectives and support different agendas, and the decision to give him command over the chief prosecutor's office, in my view, cast a shadow over the integrity of military commissions. I resigned a few hours after I was informed of Haynes' place in my chain of command.

The Military Commissions Act provides a foundation for fair trials, but some changes are clearly necessary. I was confident in full, fair and open trials when Gen. Altenburg was the convening authority and Brig. Gen. Tom Hemingway was his legal advisor. Collectively, they spent nearly 65 years in active duty, and they were committed to ensuring the integrity of military law. They acted on principle rather than politics.

The first step, if these truly are military commissions and not merely a political smoke screen, is to take control out of the hands of political appointees like Haynes and Crawford and give it back to the military.

Bush, Cheney, and Addington obviously have exactly the opposite view.

Via Steve Benen.

HUCK AND THE MONEYCONS....Atrios comments on the newfound conservative loathing of Mike Huckabee:

I understand why the Villagers are freaked by Huckabee, but I don't understand why all of the idiot conservative bloggers are freaking out too. They're using the kind of language to describe the religious right that I steer clear of personally.

Over at The Corner they're up in arms over Huckabee too. The language might be a little more judicious, but the high priests of mainstream conservatism are every bit as unglued about Huckabee as the bloggers.

There are a variety of ostensible reasons for this: lack of foreign policy bona fides, too compassionate for their taste, too willing to consider spending money, etc. But I think the real reason is simpler: as with blogosphere conservatives, mainstream conservatives are mostly urban sophisticates with a libertarian bent, not rural evangelicals with a social conservative bent. They're happy to talk up NASCAR and pickup trucks in public, but in real life they mostly couldn't care less about either. Ditto for opposing abortion and the odd bit of gay bashing via proxy. But when it comes to Ten Commandments monuments and end times eschatology, they shiver inside just like any mainstream liberal. The only difference is that usually they keep their shivering to themselves because they want to keep everyone in the big tent happy.

But then along comes Huckabee, and guess what? He's the real deal. Not a guy like George Bush or Ronald Reagan, who talks a soothing game to the snake handlers but then turns around and spends his actual political capital on tax cuts, foreign wars, and deregulating big corporations. Huckabee, it turns out, isn't just giving lip service to evangelicals, he actually believes all that stuff. Among other things, he believes in creationism (really believes), once proposed that AIDS patients should be quarantined, appears to share the traditional evangelical view that Mormonism is a cult, and says (in public!) that homosexuality is sinful. And that's without seeing the text of any of his old sermons, which he (probably wisely) refuses to let the press lay eyes on.

I think this brand of yahooism puts off mainstream urban conservatives every bit as much as it does mainstream urban liberals. They're afraid that this time, it's not just a line of patter to keep the yokels in line.

BALI BUFFOONERY....I realize that diplomacy and sausage making aren't always pretty, but the latest "compromise" at the Bali climate talks is about as ridiculous as anything I've seen in a long time:

Talks had been deadlocked all week by U.S. insistence on the removal of a passage in the document's preamble mandating that industrialized countries reduce their emissions 25% to 40% below 1990 levels by 2020.

....A compromise proposed by Indonesian Environment Minister Rachmat Witoelar makes the controversial targets footnotes to the preamble, a move that seems to have satisfied both sides.

"This is a compromise. We can live with this," said German Environment Minister Sigmar Gabriel.

The U.S. also seemed pleased. "We can live with the preamble," said chief U.S. negotiator Harlan Watson.

Italics mine. Why not just put the numbers in hexadecimal and then rejoice at all the progress we've made?

FRIDAY CATBLOGGING....The days are numbered for my beloved old Nikon Coolpix digital camera with the rotating middle. Soon, catblogging will be brighter, sharper, more colorful, better focused, and more image stabilized. Soon.

But not yet. Today the Nikon continues to crank out catblogging fodder. On the left is Inkblot, lurking on the stairs and seemingly looming out of the shadows. It didn't look like that in real life, of course. But the crappy dynamic range of the Nikon's CCD makes Inkblot look ever so much more dramatic than he really is, so score one for obsolete technology.

And what was Inkblot staring at? Do I even need to tell you? A few feet up the stairs, there's Domino sitting on the landing and looking slightly alarmed at the vast Inkblottian presence. Her response? "Grrrr." My response? Say that to the camera, sweetie.

By the way, here's an update on Inkblot's weight loss. As our vet told us, there was nothing unusual about it, and he's plateaued at about 17-18 pounds, down from 22. And it's made a difference. Not a huge one, but he's unquestionably more lively these days than he used to be. So that's good. Except for Domino, who's gained weight on the diet cat food and doesn't really appreciate Inkblot's increased desire to play. Her response? "Grrrr."

DEFINING TORTURE DOWN....Paul Waldman is pissed off that Republicans have successfully cowed the media into refusing to use the word "torture" for things like waterboarding and sleep deprivation, which are pretty clearly torture:

This is not complicated. Everyone all over the world agrees on what constitutes torture. Torture is the intentional infliction of physical or mental suffering in order to obtain information or confessions. Not hard to understand. Yet Republicans have successfully lured the entire journalistic community into their moral sewer, where there is some degree of suffering (defined not by how awful it is, but by whether it's fast or slow, and whether it leaves visible scars) that marks the line between torture and not-torture. If I rip your fingernails out — torture! If I tie you in a "stress position" designed to gradually inflict elevating amounts of pain, up to sheer agony, over the course of an hour or two — not torture!

Italics mine, and of course Paul is correct. It's not hard to understand.

But here's the part I don't get. Obviously a lot of people deal with this issue by simply not thinking about it. But among the torture supporters who do think about it, what exactly do they think? Putting legal issues aside, there are two basic moral positions:

1. The stuff we do is OK, full stop. If Iranians or al-Qaeda or Hamas used waterboarding or stress positions on Americans in order to wring information out of them, we'd have no cause to complain. War is war.

2. It's not OK in general, but it is acceptable when used against suspected terrorists. It would be wrong to torture Americans because our fighters are uniformed soldiers, not irregulars.
   

I guess — what? It has to be #2, right? That's the usual legal distinction, and we certainly know that we wouldn't accept waterboarding or stress positions or any of the rest against Americans with equanimity. So it has to be #2.

But is this also the moral position among torture apologists? Or something else?

OBSESSION....I would just like to take this opportunity to express my awe over Andrew Sullivan's ability to dig up every single piece of anti-Hillary spleen in existence. I literally don't think he leaves any stone, or any blog comment section, unturned in his daily effort to illuminate his otherworldly loathing for Mrs. C. In its own way, it's a brilliant work of performance art.

WAS IT FOR ALL THOSE TICKER TAPE PARADES THEY THOUGHT THEY WERE GOING TO GET?....ThinkProgress passes along the news that federal spending on paper shredding has increased over 500% since George Bush took office. Consider this an open thread for paper shredding jokes.

UPDATE: In other news from ThinkProgress, Bill O'Reilly apparently thinks that certain retailers should be exempt from his "War on Christmas" tirades. Namely, retailers that sell a lot of books. More specifically, retailers who sell a lot of Bill O'Reilly's books. Gutsy as always, Bill.

UPDATE 2: Emailer JMK suggests that maybe all the shredded paper was for the $20 million Iraq war victory celebration that Republicans budgeted for 2006 and then rolled over into 2007. Maybe!

AL GORE AND THE PRESIDENCY....Matt Yglesias says everyone should give up on the idea that Al Gore might run for president:

That said, I agree with the basic sentiment: Gore hits the sweet spot of experience and vision in a way that nobody else can. What's more, a person who's in a position to be a viable presidential candidate and who believes the things Gore says he believes almost has a duty to run, a duty that I'm sad he hasn't seen fit to take up.

Me too. At the same time, I feel like there's an obvious point to make about Gore that, for some reason, no one ever makes: the stuff he's done over the past five years that puts him in that sweet spot is largely stuff he was only able to do because he had the freedom of not running for office. Real politicians who are running for real office have to be very careful about what they do and say. They have to pander to interest groups, they have to raise millions of dollars from rich donors, and they have to soften up their positions to avoid alienating too many fence-sitters. That's just the way it is, and while it's nice to think that maybe Gore would have figured out a way to square this circle and still win, it ain't so. If Gore were seriously seeking office he simply wouldn't have been able to spend his time the way he has since 2002.

Plus, as Bob Somerby tells us, Gore also knows perfectly well that the quasi-cease-fire he's had with the press recently would break down completely if he actually ran for office. We'd be back to stories about earth tones and discovering Love Canal, profiles that harped endlessly on his stiffness and wonkiness, and talking head buffoonery about his weight or the size of his house. Is it any wonder he figures he can get more done as a private citizen than as a Democratic primary candidate?

ENTITLEMENTS....Speaking of charts and the CBO, here's the chart gracing their home page at the moment. It sure explains why Tim Russert and his pals are so obsessed with skyrocketing, out-of-control, demographic-tidal-wave, pick-your-favorite-metaphor Social Security spending, doesn't it?

Of course, Russert and his pals actually use medical services, of which Medicare is merely a reflection, and are thus not quite so keen to bang on endlessly about how we should be working to control medical costs and distribute medical care more efficiently and more equitably. After all, that might actually affect them. Slashing Social Security benefits really doesn't.

HO HO HO....The CBO released its latest data series on income inequality yesterday (PDF here, Excel spreadsheet here), and the news was pretty much what you'd expect: the rich are still getting richer a lot faster than anyone else. I was going to make a chart showing just how much faster they were piling up the goodies than the rest of us, but I got lazy and didn't do it. However, Matt Yglesias, who has recently decided to challenge me in the small but lucrative niche of chartblogging, has the goods here for the years 2003-2005. However, it looks pretty much the same if you look at the numbers for the past decade, or the past two decades, or the past three decades. For the rich, income is up and tax rates are down. For the rest of us, income is close to stagnant. Too bad we don't have a whole political party to look after our welfare just like the rich folks do, eh?

LIQUIDITY vs. SOLVENCY....Paul Krugman writes today that the Fed's latest plan to rescue the financial system probably won't work. The Fed can provide liquidity, he says, but liquidity isn't the problem. Actual bad loans are the problem:

What's going on in the markets isn't an irrational panic. It's a wholly rational panic, because there's a lot of bad debt out there, and you don't know how much of that bad debt is held by the guy who wants to borrow your money.

How will it all end? Markets won't start functioning normally until investors are reasonably sure that they know where the bodies — I mean, the bad debts — are buried. And that probably won't happen until house prices have finished falling and financial institutions have come clean about all their losses. All of this will probably take years.

This sounds about right. There seem to be two fundamental problems at work here. First, there are huge numbers of mortgage loans out there that are genuinely hard to value. Partly that's because of lots of them were crappy no-doc-no-down-teaser-rate-two-year-reset-etc. loans to begin with, and partly because the housing bust means that even high-quality mortgage loans are tricky to value these days. Nobody knows just how far down the housing market is going to go, and that means nobody knows just how widespread the default rate is going to be on these loans.

Second, it's because the rating agencies appear to have been engaged in a massive, multi-year machination to over-rate complex financial instruments. Part of this seems to have been a genuine (if hardly excusable) mistake: the computer models they used to rate the tsunami of CDOs and SIVs coming out of Wall Street simply weren't as sophisticated as they thought they were. But it also seems to have partly been a case of the rating agencies being deliberately overoptimistic because they didn't want to lose the huge fees they were getting for rating these new financial instruments. No one wanted to piss in the punch bowl and ruin everyone's year-end bonus checks.

So: (a) lots of bad loans, (b) lots of good loans soured by the housing bust, and (c) all of them packaged up together and then given ratings that bore little relation to the actual quality of the underlying assets. And what makes it worse is that the uncertainty this causes generates even lower prices for this stuff than it deserves on its own lousy merits. CDOs and SIVs that are worth maybe 80% of their supposed value can't fetch even that much because everyone is petrified that things might be even worse than they think. Who knows what AAA really means these days? A real effort to honestly value all this stuff would cost everyone a lot of money, but it would probably be less than it's going to eventually cost them if they don't come clean. But no one wants to be first, so we are where we are: at the very beginning of a long, slow financial meltdown instead of at the midpoint of getting our arms around it all. Thanks a lot, Wall Street.

UPDATE: Steve Randy Waldman offers a counterpoint.

THE FILIBUSTER....One of the favorite tenets of the liberal blogosphere is that Harry Reid should quit playing by gentlemen's rules and call the GOP's obstructionist bluff. If Republicans want to filibuster everything short of Mother's Day resolutions, make 'em do it the old-fashioned Mr.-Smith-Goes-To-Washington way, talking until their tonsils give out. A while back I spent some time trying to find out if this was actually practical, but the Senate rules turned out to be complex enough that I just couldn't figure it out.

But now I don't feel so bad. Time's Karen Tumulty decided to consult some experts, and it turns out they don't know either:

Tom Mann of the Brookings Institution calls this idea impractical. Given the fact that Republicans could muster 41 people on most things to hold the floor, a real filibuster could go on interminably....But Norm Ornstein at the American Enterprise Insitute thinks Reid should call the Republicans' bluff, starting with holding the Senate in session five long days a week. "You have a different Senate now. Frankly, they're soft," says Ornstein. "If they had the backbone and the discipline to do it, it would work."

Crikey. Mann and Ornstein are (a) practically Siamese twins and (b) about as knowledgable on congressional rules and traditions as anyone this side of Robert Byrd. As one of Tumulty's emailers puts it, "Oh my God — Ornstein and Mann don't agree?! That's like a disagreement between Moses and Jesus. This is more complicated than I thought."

As near as I can tell, Reid does have the authority to demand a real honest-to-Capra filibuster. But then what? It all depends on who you listen to. Expert A says it would work. Expert B says no, the Republicans would just take turns speaking in between naps and the real pressure would be on Democrats, who have to keep meeting bleary-eyed quorum calls. Expert C says the problem is that it would bring all other Senate business to a halt, while Expert D says no, other business could proceed. And Expert E says it might work, but if Reid declares war on the Republicans they can start withholding unanimous consent on everything in sight, turning the whole place into a gigantic Sargasso Sea of legislative molasses.

And even if it did work, George Bush would just veto the resulting bills anyway and no one would care. Hell, Bush has now vetoed the SCHIP bill twice, and unless you're a major political junkie you didn't even know about the second go-around.

But the bottom line is this: if Mann and Ornstein disagree, then yes, this question is more complicated than we think. Stay tuned.

THE DEMOCRATIC FIELD....Markos evaluates his choices for the Democratic presidential nomination:

Hillary? Yeah right. Edwards? If he hadn't taken public financing, I'd probably go for him....That doesn't mean I think Obama walks on water. Far from it. The guy is going around idiotically attacking Paul Krugman, dancing with homophobic preachers, and while his rhetoric is beautiful upon first listening, an hour later you're left wondering if he said anything of substance at all (and the answer is usually "no").

I confess that this attitude puzzles me. I guess it's human nature to obsess more than we should on flaws and weaknesses, but honestly, these three are all pretty damn good Democratic candidates. With the possible exception of the Dr. Jekyll half of LBJ, any one of them would be the most liberal president in the past half century — and unquestionably the most liberal since 1969.

And electability? They're all electable. Every single one of them is an almost certain winner next November if they run even a merely competent campaign.

In 2004 Democrats really did have a weak field. I ended up supporting Wes Clark, knowing full well that his inexperience might doom him, and sure enough it did. Howard Dean was much more moderate than his fans gave him credit for, and didn't know how to run a campaign. Edwards was pretty green as well. So we ended up with John Kerry, a compromise candidate that lots of people could support but almost no one could love.

But this year is different. Clinton, Edwards, and Obama are all solid liberal candidates; all of them are pretty good at inspiring their own base; and all of them seem to know how to run a campaign. I'm still dithering about who to support, but while I have issues with all three of them, I'm mostly dithering because they're all really good and the differences between them are, frankly, pretty small. Let's not let the perfect be the enemy of the good.

Republicans, on the other hand, are really and truly screwed. Every party has suffered through bad fields in the past, but off the top of my head I'm having a hard time remembering one as bad as the 2008 GOP crop. They're the ones who should be pulling their hair out.

RANDOM DEBATE THOUGHTS (SO FAR)....Unexpected debating point of the day (so far) comes from Barack Obama: "Reducing obesity to 1980 levels will save Medicare $1 trillion."

Most tiresomely repetitive sound bite (so far) comes from Hillary Clinton: "We need to get back on a path to fiscal responsibility."

Dumbest policy proposal (so far) comes from Bill Richardson: a constitutional amendment to require a balanced budget.

Also (so far), everyone is on their best behavior. You'd barely even know they were running against each other.

Consider this a debate open thread.

RUDY'S SPECIAL DEAL....Time magazine has the latest on Rudy Giuliani's lucrative post-9/11 lobbying contract with Seisint, a database mining company founded by former cocaine smuggler Hank Asher:

The firm's potential seemed endless to [Giuliani Partners], and it signed on for what Seisint saw as a heavily discounted fee of $2 million a year, plus a percentage of revenue from company sales to government and corporate buyers.

In the first year, GP earned $6.5 million, Seisint records show, in part for what [Seisint shareholder Michael] Brauser and Seisint's in-house lobbyist, Dan Latham, say were commissions for state and federal contracts. Giuliani "came through," says Brauser. "The doors were wide open. It was almost a flood of business opportunities."

....But the Seisint deal wasn't as perfect as it seemed. One problem: the payment of percentages or commissions to "solicit or secure" government contracts is prohibited by federal law and laws of some states....A GP official who refused to be named insists that the firm never received "commissions" from Seisint — despite what Brauser and Latham remember and despite the fact that payments to GP are labeled "commissions" in both the minutes of a Seisint board meeting and a key financial statement. Instead, says the official, GP earned "special bonuses" based on the achievement of corporate "milestones."

Ah, yes, "special bonuses." I guess that's something like "special interrogation techniques" and "special mortgage offers." Very special.

This is why I keep thinking Romney is going to win the GOP nomination, Mormon underwear or not. Unless John McCain can somehow bring himself back from the grave, who else is there? They're all dead men walking.

REPO HELL....Maybe Atrios needs to sign up for one of these tours?

YET MORE OBSTRUCTION....I see that the climate change negotiations in Bali are going pretty much the way everyone expected them to:

"My own country, the United States, is principally responsible for obstructing progress here in Bali," said [Al] Gore, who flew to Bali from Oslo, Norway, where he received the Nobel Peace Prize for helping alert the world to the danger of climate change.

....The United States, Japan and several other governments are refusing to accept language in a draft document suggesting that industrialized nations consider cutting emissions by 25 percent to 40 percent by 2020, saying specific targets would limit the scope of future talks.

....The United States delegation said while it continues to reject inclusion of specific emission cut targets, it hopes eventually to reach an agreement that is "environmentally effective" and "economically sustainable."...."We don't have to resolve all these issues ... here in Bali," said Undersecretary of State Paula Dobriansky, the head of the U.S. delegation.

Translation: Specific targets would limit the scope of the United States to continue doing nothing of substance. Gore's advice to the delegates was simple: just ignore the Bush administration, pass some targets for emissions reductions, and wait until next November. There's no guarantee that the next president will support greenhouse gas limits, he told them, "but I can tell you I believe it is quite likely."

NYET REVISITED....Say what you will about the Republican Party's indifference to anything other than obstructing Democratic legislation (and I have), it seems to be working like a charm. Jonathan Weisman and Paul Kane report in the Washington Post:

As Congress struggles to adjourn for Christmas, relations between House Democrats and their colleagues in the Senate have devolved into finger-pointing.

House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Charles B. Rangel (D-N.Y.) accuses Senate Democratic leaders of developing "Stockholm syndrome," showing sympathy to their Republican captors by caving in on legislation to provide middle-class tax cuts paid for with tax increases on the super-rich, tying war funding to troop withdrawal timelines, and mandating renewable energy quotas.

....Senate Democrats have fired back, accusing Pelosi and her liberal allies of sending over legislation that they know cannot pass in the Senate, and of making demands that will not gain any GOP votes. Sen. Evan Bayh (D-Ind.) noted that, this summer, Reid employed just the kind of theatrics Rangel and other House Democrats are demanding, holding the Senate open all night, pulling out cots and forcing a dusk-till-dawn debate on an Iraq war withdrawal measure before a vote on war funding. Democrats gained not a single vote after the all-night antics.

"I understand the frustration; we're frustrated, too," Bayh said. "But holding a bunch of Kabuki theater doesn't get anything done."

....Republicans, who spent 12 years in similar battles, are just enjoying the spectacle.

"Just let 'em stew for a while," said soon-to-retire Senate Minority Whip Trent Lott (R-Miss.), a veteran of the GOP's own squabbles.

This is really not a story you want to see on page A1. Yuck.

GARBAGE IN....What happens when you let a professor of computer science write a magazine article about romantic love? If the computer science professor is David Gelernter and the magazine is the Weekly Standard, you get a sentence like this one, explaining why it's wrong to take the dangers of premarital sex lightly:

But this innocent, ignorant view defies a fundamental law of human nature: Keeping steady company with a person you adore plus not sleeping with her (or him) yields "being in love," which is a new state of mind that is more than the sum of its parts.

Decisions, decisions. Is this my new favorite example of cosmically awkward Gelernter writing? Or is this one from a couple of years ago still #1?

Via Britt Peterson, who has more to say about all this.

CRAZIFICATION UPDATE....I know I'm supposed to keep up on these things, but Alan Keyes participated in today's Republican debate? Alan Keyes? WTF?

Explanation here, which just goes to show that rules are made to be broken.

MORE ON THE HUCK....Ross Douthat has more on the fact that Mike Huckabee is basically just making stuff up as he goes along and plainly doesn't have a clue about most of the things he's asked about. Economic policy? How about a 30% sales tax? Foreign policy? He likes Tom Friedman and Frank Gaffney, two pop commentators with almost nothing in common. Energy policy? Let's eliminate oil imports by 2017. Immigration policy? Ship everyone back to Mexico. Etc. It's grade school stuff.

And not to beat this into the ground, but what's really astounding about this is that nobody actually seems to care much. But eventually somebody will, because eventually this weird combination of barstool ignorance and internet-email-list credulity is bound to produce a howler of the kind that the press likes to latch onto. There's no telling what it will be, but it's coming, and when it does the Huckabee boomlet will be over.

Which is yet another reason why I think Romney will win the GOP nomination: because it's impossible for any of the others to win. Of course, neither can Romney himself, which leaves us with a problem, doesn't it? For now, though, I'll stick with Romney as my prediction, with McCain as a dark horse. Unfortunately, given my track record with these things, that probably means Giuliani is a lock.

UPDATE: National Review editor Rich Lowry on Huckabee's debate pronouncement that the Fair Tax (a 30% sales tax to replace the income tax) will make poor people rich: "Does Huckabee feel as though he can just say anything if it sounds good?"

Well, yeah, pretty much. But you have nobody to blame but yourselves.

NYET....A friend of mine emailed this morning to ask a question:

So, let me get this straight: When the Democrats are the minority in the Senate, the Republicans get their way, and when the Democrats are the majority in the Senate, the Republicans get their way.

That's about the size of it. Today's New York Times explains Mitch McConnell's "nyet" strategy for making sure that nothing gets done:

Mr. McConnell and his fellow Republicans are playing such tight defense, blocking nearly every bill proposed by the slim Democratic majority that they are increasingly able to dictate what they want, much to the dismay of the majority leader, Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, and frustrated Democrats in the House.

In fact, the Senate Republicans are so accustomed to blocking measures that when the Democrats finally agreed last week to their demands on a bill to repair the alternative minimum tax, the Republicans still objected, briefly blocking the version of the bill that they wanted before scrambling to approve it later.

Italics mine. It's hard to say anything about this other than the obvious: the Democrats have a very slim majority; the rules of the Senate work against them; and the Republican Party, even as it prepares to shuffle into what may well be a decade of irrelevance, continues to display a genuinely remarkable ancien régime ability to stick together and insist that nothing is wrong until its collective face turns blue. Even the fact that the entire country may well turn blue next November as a result doesn't dissuade them.

What bugs me about this is not the fact that the modern Republican Party doesn't really care about actual governance. This is hardly news. At this point, it's an exhausted organization so bereft of ideas that it really doesn't have much choice except to follow a policy of obstruction to its logical, nihilistic conclusion.

But why does the media have to play along? It's nice that the Times ran this story, but it would be nicer if the media simply reported what was happening on a regular basis. I'm not asking for special treatment, just headlines that tell us what's really going on. If Republicans have adopted a strategy of simply blocking every piece of legislation that makes it to the floor of the Senate — and everyone agrees that they have — then we should be regularly seeing headlines that say "Republicans Block ______ " There's nothing partisan about this, it's just a description of what's happening. If Democrats block things, they can say that too. But unless the press reports this stuff accurately on a regular basis, the public simply has no idea why nothing is getting done.

Which, of course, is exactly what congressional Republicans are counting on. So why help them out so transparently?

MORAL HAZARD....Atrios takes a look at the Fed's latest bailout plan and says:

I don't claim to be an expert on the mysterious world of high finance, but it's hard not to perceive that this latest Fed action is rewarding bad behavior.

Of course it is. When it comes to rescuing large financial institutions run by rich people, the party line is that we need to put our emotions on hold, save the system, and not get caught up with making petty moral judgments. Moral judgments are only appropriate when it's some working class schmoe who's done something either stupid or unlucky. Understood?

"WE CREATE OUR OWN REALITY"....Via Kieran Healy, a university professor tells a wee tale:

I have now received three (3) student papers that discuss Iraq's attack on the Twin Towers on 9/11. All three papers mention it as an aside to another point. I've had two papers on the virtue of forgiveness that argue that if we had just forgiven Iraq for the 9/11 attacks, we wouldn't be at war right now. I just read a paper on the problem of evil which asked why God allowed "the Iraq's" to attack us on 9/11.

The thing that upsets me most here is that the the students don't just believe that that Iraq was behind 9/11. This is a big fact in their minds, that leaps out at them, whenever they think about the state of the world.

Mission accomplished!

THE VILLAGE IDIOT....So when Mike Huckabee told Katie Couric that we ought to be "free of energy consumption in this country within a decade," what do you think he really meant? There are a couple of possibilities, but I suppose the most likely is "free of energy imports," or perhaps "free of foreign oil."

This, of course, has the benefit of not being literally impossible, but I wonder if anyone will bother to follow up with him about this? After all, ending foreign oil consumption in the next decade is the next best thing to impossible, and in any case, would require federal action of a staggering size and scope — certainly far more staggering than anything Huckabee has ever given the remotest indication of supporting. Basically, he was just randomly shooting his mouth off without the slightest idea of what he was talking about.

So, again: will anyone press him on this? Or will he get the village idiot treatment that Republicans since Ronald Reagan have so often gotten, where they're sort of expected to say harebrained stuff and nobody holds it against them? After all, this has nothing to do with Huckabee's hair, his cleavage, or his middle name, only with the fact that he displays an almost comical, grade-school ignorance of even the bare basics of national energy policy. And who cares about that in a president of the United States?

TWO MINUTES HATE....From the LA Times today:

More than any other question, Republican presidential candidates are asking voters to consider a single issue in the weeks before primary voting begins: Who detests illegal immigration the most?

They always have to detest someone, don't they?

HUCK TOUTS ZEC!....Over at ThinkProgress, they're highlighting the fact that both Fred Thompson and Mike Huckabee don't believe in global warming. It turns out that's not quite fair: they both cravenly evaded Katie Couric's question ("Do you think the risks of climate change are at all overblown?") by pleading ignorance, but they didn't outright deny that climate change is real. So that ruined the post I was planning to write on this subject.

However, it turns out I got something better. Mike Huckabee, believe it or not, has by far the most spectacular energy conservation plan of any presidential candidate in history, Democrat or Republican. Here it is:

I think we ought to be out there talking about ways to reduce energy consumption and waste. And we ought to declare that we will be free of energy consumption in this country within a decade, bold as that is.

That is bold! I sure hope his plan for getting to ZEC (zero energy consumption) doesn't have something to do with the end times.

Bonus question: what are the odds that Couric followed up on this howler? Slim or none?

GIULIANI CRATERING.... ABC has a new national poll out, and on the Democratic side it's a snooze: no one has gained or lost more than three points of support.

On the Republican side, however, the news is much more interesting: Huckabee is gaining and Giuliani is falling. In fact, he's cratering. He's lost 9 points overall, and as the handy chart on the right shows, he's losing big in every single subcategory. Most interesting, I think, is his free fall among people who are "very closely" following the race. This seems like a bellwether, no? These people have already reacted to the news that Giuliani tried to hide the details of his security expenses back in 2000 because he didn't want anyone to know he was visiting his mistress in the Hamptons, but surely the less attuned will eventually hear about this too.

It's hard to call this good news, since Huckabee and the rest are no prizes either, but someone has to be the worst of the lot, right? And Giuliani is it. So: good news it is.

WALL STREET....Back in November, when Fed vice chairman Donald Kohn merely suggested that the Fed might cut interest rates, Wall Street rallied and the Dow Jones gained 330 points. Happy days! Today, the Fed announced that it actually had cut interest rates, so Wall Street was happy all over again, right? Of course not: "Investors reacted by sending the markets sharply lower, pushing the Dow down more than 200 points in a matter of minutes."

Yeah, yeah, I know: investors had already priced in the prospect of a rate cut, so the actual rate cut itself didn't matter. If you believe that, fine. Personally, I think it's just further evidence that Wall Street investors are clueless. They should have figured out what that rate cut meant weeks ago, and the answer is: nothing good.

NATION BUILDING....Women who don't dress modestly enough are being gunned down in Basra:

Religious vigilantes have killed at least 40 women this year in the southern Iraqi city of Basra because of how they dressed, their mutilated bodies found with notes warning against "violating Islamic teachings," the police chief said Sunday.

Maj. Gen. Jalil Khalaf blamed sectarian groups that he said were trying to impose a strict interpretation of Islam. They dispatch patrols of motorbikes or unlicensed cars with tinted windows to accost women not wearing traditional dress and head scarves, he added.

Maybe the Interior Ministry should do something about this? Or maybe not:

The Iraqi government has ordered all policewomen to hand in their guns for redistribution to men or face having their pay withheld, thwarting a U.S. initiative to bring women into the nation's police force.

....Critics say the move is the latest sign of the religious and cultural conservatism that has taken hold in Iraq since Saddam Hussein's ouster ushered in a government dominated by Shiite Muslims. Now, that tendency is hampering efforts to bring stability to Iraq by driving women from the force, said U.S. Army Brig. Gen. David Phillips, who has led the effort to recruit female officers.

Elsewhere, the Washington Post reports that the national police force, which the Jones Commission said was so thoroughly corrupted by sectarian rancor that it should be scrapped, will instead have its mission "adjusted" by "gradually withdrawing its forces from neighborhoods and moving them to regional garrisons across the country, where they will serve as an emergency response force." Which sounds to me suspiciously like scrapping them as an actual police force while still keeping them around as a none-too-subtle reminder to the Sunni minority about who's in charge these days.

Good stuff. Certainly well worth a trillion dollars of U.S. taxpayer money, no?