TANKERS!....Northrop Grumman and EADS, the parent company of Airbus, have beaten out Boeing for a huge contract to provide aerial tankers to the Air Force. McClatchy reports the reaction:

"I am extremely disappointed in the Air Force's decision to choose Northrup Grumman/EADS over Boeing to make the critical new aerial-refueling tanker. From the beginning, the Air Force vowed to have an open competition process," said Sen. Pat Roberts, R-Kan. "I look forward to seeing their justification for this unfortunate outcome. If this decision holds, it will be at the cost of American jobs and American dollars, if not our national security."

Huh. I wonder why Roberts is so bent out of shape. Let's see if the LA Times has anything to say about this:

Boeing, which was considered the odds-on favorite because it built the tankers that are flying today, had planned to assemble its planes, based on its 767 passenger jet, in Everett, Wash., then ship them to Wichita, Kan., to modify them into tankers.

Ah. That explains it. Any other reaction?

In Paris, at the annual air shows, Airbus officials and Southern politicians proudly displayed the proposed European tanker offering and made the argument that if the United States wants to sell its weapons to European countries, it should also open its doors to foreign suppliers.

That's mighty open-minded of those Southern politicians, isn't it? Back to the LA Times:

In recent months, Northrop tried to burnish its bid by proposing to assemble the plane in Alabama [and Mississippi! Don't forget Mississippi! –ed.]. Its initial plans called for the planes to be assembled in France before being shipped to Alabama to undergo tanker modifications.

Gotcha. Nothing new here, of course. Just thought it was worth pointing out that all huffery and puffery from congress critters about this deal should be taken even less seriously than usual. When it comes to military bidding wars, national security is about the last thing on their minds.

FRIDAY CAT BLOGGING.... Once every four years, on leap year day, I figure our cats need the day off. So today we have some guest catblogging, courtesy of reader Greg S. of Orlando, Florida. I'll let Greg have the floor:

A Rare Quantum Event

Three cats in a chair, spontaneously, not posed. The little kitten Cashew was first, and fell asleep upright in the corner. Then Velvet, the 2-year-old black female. Then the big 11-year-old guy Patches — without disrupting either of the other two — amazing! When Patches gets in a chair, the other two usually run.

I imagine everyone has seen though this ruse already and realizes that what really happened is that I didn't take any pictures of Inkblot and Domino this week and was saved at the last moment by Greg. But let's all pretend this was a well-planned leap year day thing anyway, OK?

"IT'S THREE AM"....The question in this campaign ad is: Who's going to answer the White House phone when it rings at 3 am? Jason Zengerle comments:

I actually thought this commercial was pretty effective — right up until the very end when I realized it was for Hillary. I wonder if McCain can just buy the first 25 seconds of it from her and then recut the ending so he can use it in the general election.

There's something wrong with that response. Why is it somehow OK for John McCain to run on the basis of being the guy who can protect America while Hillary shouldn't? Why are we often so eager to practically concede to Republicans exactly the stereotypes they want voters to believe about us? Seems to me that Democrats ought to get used to the idea of competing on this dimension regardless of whether ads like this are precisely the right way to do it.

—Kevin Drum 1:07 PM Permalink | Trackbacks | Comments (192)

THE HAGEE FACTOR....I don't usually have much use for Bill Donohue, but at least he's bipartisan in his thundering denunciations:

Catholic League President Bill Donohue said in a statement today that [John] Hagee has written extensively in negative ways about the Catholic Church, "calling it 'The Great Whore,' an 'apostate church,' the 'anti-Christ,' and a 'false cult system.'"

"Senator Obama has repudiated the endorsement of Louis Farrakhan, another bigot. McCain should follow suit and retract his embrace of Hagee," Donohue said.

Plus this, of course:

In "Jerusalem Countdown: A Prelude To war" Hagee has stated that Jews brought the Holocaust upon themselves by rebelling against God and that the Holocaust was God's way of forcing Jews to move to Israel where, Hagee predicts according to his interpretation of Biblical scripture, they will be mostly killed in the apocalyptic Mideast conflict Hagee's new lobbying group seems to be working to provoke.

This is what is quaintly known as "pro-Israel" in conservative circles. And McCain is delighted to have Hagee's support. Because, you know, he's such a maverick.

HAPPY LEAP DAY....I figure I probably have 30 or 40 readers who were born on February 29. So this question is for you: when do you celebrate your birthday in non-leap years? February 28? Or March 1?

OBAMA vs. CLINTON....It's late and I don't have time to think of something really insightful to say about this, so I'll just throw it out. It's from the latest Pew poll, and it shows that both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama are likely to beat John McCain in a general election. What's odd, though, is something we've seen before: Hillary's strength among self-identified Democrats. Obama, as expected, draws a few more Republicans and independents than Hillary does, but Hillary has far fewer defections among Democrats. In all, 89% of Democrats would vote for her while only 81% would vote for Obama. Daniel Larison points out some additional detail:

Most remarkable of all is that Obama is weaker among Democrats in all age groups than Clinton. He is four points weaker, and McCain five points stronger, among Democratic voters aged 18-49 than in a Clinton v. McCain race. The losses are even greater among Democratic voters 50-64 and 65+.

In fact, in a matchup against McCain, the only subgroup of Democrats that supports Obama more than Hillary is African-Americans — and even in their case only by a tiny margin. I don't quite know what this means, but it's worth thinking about.

PUBLIC SERVICE ANNOUNCEMENT FOR BLOGGERS....If you are a foreign national wanted in Los Angeles on suspicion of hiring a gunman to shoot down your wife in broad daylight, you should probably avoid announcing on your blog that you plan to take a trip to U.S. soil. Just sayin'.

THE BUCKLEY PROSE STYLE...Andrew Sullivan on William F. Buckley:

I know we shouldn't speak ill of the dead — but am I the only person who found Buckley close to unreadable a lot of the time? I never read his fiction, but his nonfiction was packed [with] endless sentences, ridiculously long words, and meaning that sometimes took several reads to excavate. I don't know how many times I finished a Buckley column with the thought: what on earth was he trying to say?

Actually, that's often how I felt too, and it wasn't his vocabulary so much as it was his fondness for a veering, circuitous style that never quite seemed willing to stop poking around the edges of his ideas and finally stake out a position. But I only occasionally read his columns, and even that only recently. I always figured that maybe his writing just wasn't as sharp as it had been 20 or 30 years ago.

But maybe not. Was he always like that? Is this going to unleash an avalanche of people who take a deep breath and finally admit that they too had a hard time figuring out what Buckley was trying to say much of the time?

KITTY HAWK RUMORS....India currently has one aircraft carrier that's due to be decommissioned in a few years. Its replacement is supposed to be the Admiral Gorshkov from Russia, but the refit work on the Gorshkov has been slow, expenses have risen, and there are reasons to think that the Russian shipyard doing the work isn't up to the task in any case. In the wake of all this, Defense Industry Daily reports that India might soon have an alternative:

As reports begin to suggest that Russia and India are too far apart to agree on the Gorshkov refit, speculation grows that the USA intends to solve India's problem with a stunning offer during Defense Secretary Gates' imminent visit to india. instead of retiring and decommissioning its last conventionally-powered carrier, the 81,800 ton/ 74,200t USS Kitty Hawk [CV-63, commissioned 1961], would be handed over to India when its current tour in Japan ends in 2008. The procedure would resemble the January 2007 "hot transfer" of the amphibious landing ship USS Trenton [LPD-14], which become INS Jalashva. The cost? This time, it would be free. As in, $0.

Free aside from the billions of dollars in maintenance and fighter jet contracts India would sign with us, of course.

As it happens, the Navy has flatly denied the Kitty Hawk rumors. But a denial one day doesn't mean there will be a denial the next, does it? So, since things are a little slow today, I thought I'd pass this along for its gossip value. Today's question, then, is: Would this be a brilliant stroke or utter lunacy? Comments are open.

Originally via Winds of Change.

GALBRAITH AND BUCKLEY....Jamie Galbraith has a brief and gracious remembrance of William F. Buckley posted over at the New Republic that's worth a look. I don't myself have anything to say about WFB because, aside from reading God and Man at Yale several years ago, I'm just not very familiar with Buckley's work other than by reputation. Better then to stay quiet and be thought ill-informed than to open my mouth and remove all doubt.

But Galbraith's piece raises a question: are there any current examples among high-profile liberals and conservatives of the kind of close friendship and mutual respect that Buckley and John Kenneth Galbraith shared? Ezra Klein suggested yesterday that the era of big, popular, serious political thinkers has been permanently eclipsed with the deaths of people like WFB, Galbraith, Milton Friedman, Arthur Schlesinger Jr., and Norman Mailer. "Now, the space they inhabited in the discourse is held by the Coulters and O'Reilly's of the world." Maybe so, and it's hard to picture, say, Ann Coulter and Michael Moore enjoying each other's company socially and taking each other's ideas seriously.

In the blogosphere, we tend to think that's for the best. Politics is serious stuff, and if you're serious about it you shouldn't be on the cocktail circuit every night consorting with the enemy. That's the tribal path that Congress went down many years ago, and it's one that the rest of us have since followed as well. Most of us, anyway.

Still and all, it's kind of stultifying, isn't it? In the post-Gingrich/Limbaugh/Rove/Norquist era that we live in there might not be much we can do about it, but that doesn't mean we have to like it. And, most of the time, I don't.

LEADERLESS JIHAD....Former CIA officer Marc Sageman has collected data on more than 500 Islamic terrorists in an effort to understand who they are, why they attack, and how to stop them. David Ignatius summarizes his new book, Leaderless Jihad, in the Washington Post today:

The heart of Sageman's message is that we have been scaring ourselves into exaggerating the terrorism threat — and then by our unwise actions in Iraq making the problem worse. He attacks head-on the central thesis of the Bush administration, echoed increasingly by Republican presidential candidate John McCain, that, as McCain's Web site puts it, the United States is facing "a dangerous, relentless enemy in the War against Islamic Extremists" spawned by al-Qaeda.

The numbers say otherwise, Sageman insists. The first wave of al-Qaeda leaders, who joined Osama bin Laden in the 1980s, is down to a few dozen people on the run in the tribal areas of northwest Pakistan. The second wave of terrorists, who trained in al-Qaeda's camps in Afghanistan during the 1990s, has also been devastated, with about 100 hiding out on the Pakistani frontier. These people are genuinely dangerous, says Sageman, and they must be captured or killed. But they do not pose an existential threat to America, much less a "clash of civilizations."

It's the third wave of terrorism that is growing, but what is it? By Sageman's account, it's a leaderless hodgepodge of thousands of what he calls "terrorist wannabes." Unlike the first two waves, whose members were well educated and intensely religious, the new jihadists are a weird species of the Internet culture. Outraged by video images of Americans killing Muslims in Iraq, they gather in password-protected chat rooms and dare each other to take action. Like young people across time and religious boundaries, they are bored and looking for thrills.

....Sageman's harshest judgment is that the United States is making the terrorism problem worse by its actions in Iraq. "Since 2003, the war in Iraq has without question fueled the process of radicalization worldwide, including the U.S. The data are crystal clear," he writes. We have taken a fire that would otherwise burn itself out and poured gasoline on it.

This sounds genuinely fascinating, and Sageman explains his data at greater length in this month's issue of Foreign Policy. This is something I'd almost certainly read and comment on if I could, but sadly, it's for subscribers only. Maybe I'll buy a copy at lunch and report back.

THE NOISE MACHINE GETS NOISIER....Now see, this is why Republican strategists are cleverer than me. For the past couple of weeks they've been hammering Democrats for being weak on terror because they oppose retroactive immunity for telecom companies that may have broken the law after 9/11. And that's pretty much what I'd expect them to do. But it never would have occurred to me to switch gears and claim that the real reason Dems were opposing immunity was because they're slaves of the trial lawyer lobby. That's inspiration. Two right-wing hot buttons at once!

Of course, it's ridiculous enough that it's not getting any traction except in GOP fundraising mailers aimed at the fever swamp, but it turns out that there's actually something to this. It's just not on the Democratic side:

With the House Democrats' refusal to grant retroactive immunity to phone companies — stalling the rewrite of the warrantless wiretapping program — GOP leadership aides are grumbling that their party isn't getting more political money from the telecommunications industry.

...."There's no question that from time to time staff, and maybe some Members, say to fellow travelers: 'Are you giving us some air cover? Are you helping us help you?'"

You almost feel sorry for them, don't you? Almost.

THE AWAKENING BEGINS TO NOD....Sudarsan Raghavan and Amit Paley of the Washington Post report that although U.S. efforts to manage the various Sunni Awakenings are "still largely effective," some pretty serious trouble spots have started to emerge:

Nowhere are the tensions more serious than in Diyala, one of the major battlegrounds in the U.S. fight against al-Qaeda in Iraq. Awakening groups, also known here as Popular Committees, are demanding the resignation of the Shiite provincial police chief, Maj. Gen. Ghanem al-Qureishi. They accuse him of running death squads and torturing Sunnis, allegations that Qureishi denied in an interview. The Awakening leaders are also seeking recognition as an official force.

On Wednesday, they vowed to dissolve the committees if their demands were not met. "In the last 10 months, we haven't received any kind of assistance or help from Americans or Iraqi government," said Abu Talib, a top Awakening leader. "On the contrary, the police started to hunt us down."

....The U.S. military acknowledges that it is caught in the middle of a political struggle. "Yes, they are frustrated," said Lt. Col. Ricardo Love, commander of the 1st Battalion, 38th Infantry Regiment, who works in Baqubah, the provincial capital. "They think we can make the government of Iraq do anything. We tell them we don't control the government. But they think we are the mighty power."

Killings of Awakening members are up, there's been infiltration of Awakening groups by al-Qaeda in Iraq, and tensions with the Shiite central government are increasing. None of this is surprising as time continues to slip by without significant political progress, and it's probably not too dangerous until/unless it reaches a tipping point of some kind. Still, it's hardly good news. The Awakening movement was arguably more important than the surge in reducing violence during 2007, and if it starts to fray at the same time that the surge is drawing down, a lot of those gains will be wiped out. Keep your fingers crossed.

IN WHICH I SYMPATHIZE WITH CLARENCE THOMAS....The Associated Press notes an anniversary:

Two years and 144 cases have passed since Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas last spoke up at oral arguments. It is a period of unbroken silence that contrasts with the rest of the court's unceasing inquiries.

....Leaning back in his leather chair, often looking up at the ceiling, Thomas takes it all in, but he never joins in.

This may actually be the only topic that I agree with Thomas about. As near as I can tell, oral arguments before the Supreme Court are treated primarily as blood sport, sort of like frat hazing but for grown men and women. The putative point of the proceedings — i.e., presentation of a legal argument — is never allowed to take unfold in anything like a judicious manner, and the lawyers' arguments are entirely contained in their briefs anyway. The questioning rarely seems to add anything to them.

Frankly, I'd be surprised if any justice ever has changed his or her mind about a case based on the questions they ask during oral arguments. My guess is that Thomas has figured this out and sees no point in joining in the charade. I can't say that I blame him.

UPDATE: Commenter Kevin provides some further insight:

I attended a speech by someone from the Office of the Solicitor General last year, and he spoke about this exact topic. He has argued many, many cases before the Supreme Court. He said that for most cases that get receive media attention (i.e. those that deal with politically sensitive issues), there is little, if any, possibility that oral arguments will make any difference. However, in some of the more technical types of cases, such as cases that deal with obscure procedural nuances, oral arguments can help to flesh out a party's case. On occasion, orals can change the opinion of a justice, but probably not in the cases that laypeople care about.

TIMETABLES....The Bush administration has finally agreed on a timetable for troop withdrawals in Iraq:

Defense Secretary Robert Gates urged the Turkish military on Wednesday to abandon its invasion of guerrilla-controlled lands in the northernmost reaches of Iraq by mid-March.

.... "It's very important that the Turks make this operation as short as possible and then leave," Mr. Gates told reporters in India on Wednesday...."I measure quick in terms of days, a week or two, something like that, not months," Mr. Gates said, becoming the first senior American official to demand a strict timeline for the Turkish operation to end.

Oops. Wrong troops. Sorry about that. But apparently it worked:

Turkey's military operations against Kurdish guerrillas in northern Iraq will last another three or four days, a senior Turkish official said yesterday, after Washington called for a speedy end to the incursion...."Ten days will be a good enough time for the operation. It has been going on now for six or seven days, so another three or four days should wrap it up," the official said.

Our concern, entirely reasonably, is that military action is predictably unpredictable and an extended intervention risks destabilizing northern Iraq and widening into a broader and deadlier conflict. I wonder why nobody thinks of this stuff when we're the ones doing the intervening?

GREETINGS FROM MUSIC CITY....Matt Yglesias draws my attention to a Tennessee Republican Party press release that goes the whole nine yards against Barack Obama: it's got the Hussein middle name, it's got the Farrakhan stuff, it's got the picture of Obama "dressed in Muslim attire," and it's got "more disturbing evidence of Obama's anti-Israel leanings."

Indeed. And all from the poisonous pen of Nashville blogger Bill Hobbs, who is currently the communications director for the Tennessee GOP. But Bill is fighting back against the elitists who find this stuff loathsome. He's mad because he thinks the press should be paying attention to Obama's obvious pro-terrorist sympathies, but instead, for some reason, they're getting bent out of shape about his use of Obama's middle name:

Apparently, using Barack Hussein Obama's middle name is a no-no....Silly, of course. Run a Lexis-Nexis search for the number of times the media has used Hillary Rodham Clinton's middle name, often to underscore her feminist leanings and independence from her husband. Do a search for how many times during the 1988 and 1992 campaigns the media called the first George Bush "George Herbert Walker Bush," to underscore the media's protrayal of Bush as a preppie elitist.

Well, I'm convinced! Nice work, Republican Party of Tennessee.

UPDATE: Ah, I see that the photo and the Hussein references have now been removed from the press release. Apparently someone at the Tennessee GOP has more sense than Bill Hobbs.

WE ARE ALL INSIDERS NOW....Lee Gomes writes in the Wall Street Journal that the wide availability of insider political sites (The Note, The Page, First Read, etc.) has made us all into slaves of Beltway horserace analysis and MSM conventional wisdom. Plus this:

Finally, the sites make it easy to lose perspective. Seeing a story sweep through a site like memeorandum.com, it might be difficult to resist joining the herd and its conventional wisdom. Indeed, some Web authors say they shut down their computers to give themselves a chance to think. "There is a value in crafting your post without having read what the cognoscenti have already written about it," said Marc Ambinder, who is blogging the election for the Atlantic.

Amen. I think more reporters ought to screw up their courage and do that more often. In fact, I'd say that some of the worst posts I've written (this one, for example) have come when I noticed that a lot of other people were writing about something and I felt like that meant I had to weigh in too. But, really, it's just the opposite: if everybody else is already writing about something, what's the marginal value of one more opinion? Unless I have something genuinely new to say, pretty small.

Conversely, what's the value of a personal take on events that's not heavily colored by what everybody else has said? Potentially, at least, much larger. So if that's my comparative advantage, it's probably best to stick with it as much as possible.

Via James Joyner.

WFB....William F. Buckley has died.

ECONOMIC UPDATE....Yesterday: Google shares plummet. Today: Fed Chief signals yet more interest rates soon to come. Coincidence? I think not. Apparently Google even controls the Fed now.

So what happened? AP put it this way on Tuesday: "Consumer confidence plunged, the wholesale inflation rate soared, the number of homes being foreclosed jumped, home prices fell sharply and a report predicts big increases in health care costs." Bernanke puts it this way:

"The economic situation has become distinctly less favorable" since the summer, the Fed chief told the House Financial Services Committee.

....There are dangers that the economy will weaken even further. "The risks include the possibilities that the housing market or labor market may deteriorate more than is currently anticipated and that credit conditions may tighten substantially further," Bernanke cautioned.

Fasten your seat belts.

TURKEY AND THE KURDS....Matt Yglesias comments on the Turkish incursion into northern Iraq, which the Iraqi government is (a) unhappy with but (b) unable to do much about:

Given the Iraqi government's dependence on the U.S. military, a Turkish invasion of Iraq that the United States approves of isn't something the Iraqi government can or will do anything about. Thus this incident becomes one more case where U.S.-supported Iraqi leaders see their credibility as national leaders leeched away. If you think of the goal in Iraq as helping to prop up a government that'll be able to stand up on its own, this sort of thing is a disaster. If, by contrast, the idea is to ensure that the authorities governing Iraq are permanently dependent on external American support to maintain their grip on power, it's actually pretty good.

I'm not sure this is quite right. As near as I can tell, the central government in Iraq doesn't actually care all that much about the Turkish incursion. They object in a pro forma way, of course, but that's about it. Iraqi Kurdistan has been de facto independent since 1991, and in a practical sense the central government has neither the power nor the authority to do anything there. This would be true whether or not the U.S. withdrew from Iraq.

But it's only the central government that's dependent on U.S. troops. We have only a token presence in Iraqi Kurdistan, and the peshmerga forces there are decidedly capable of acting on their own if they choose to. What's more important, then, is whether Iraqi Kurdistan leader Massoud Barzani eventually decides that enough's enough and defies the U.S. by launching a counterattack using peshmerga troops — and that almost certainly depends on just how far the Turks go, how much pressure the U.S. brings to bear, and the state of public opinion in Kurdistan. So far he's limited himself to warnings, but that may or may not be as far as it goes. Judah Grunstein has a bit of background here if you're interested in the current state of play.

UPDATE: Here's the latest:

Lawmakers in northern Iraq's semiautonomous Kurdish region authorized their military Tuesday to intervene if Turkish forces pursuing anti-government rebels bring their battle into civilian areas....The Kurdish regional government's parliament held a special session Tuesday in Irbil to discuss the issue and voted to authorize the regional military force, the peshmerga, to respond if civilian areas are attacked.

But Turkey says it ain't leaving. Stay tuned.

DEBATE WRAPUP....Was tonight's debate really the last one? Damn. And I was finally getting to like them.

Just kidding. Seriously, though, can someone please put a sock in Tim Russert? I didn't even see the entire exchange, but his badgering of Obama on the Louis Farrakhan issue was pretty wretched. It was maybe legitimate to bring it up in the first place, but to keep at it well after Obama had made his position crystal clear was beyond the pale.

Nor did Hillary cover herself with glory on this question, with her inane "denounce" vs. "reject" comeback. Obama's response — Fine, if it will make you happy, then I denounce and reject Farrakhan — was dexterous and smooth.

Overall, I thought Clinton did about as well as she could have on the attack front, but it just wasn't enough. Obama seemed the better, more grounded debater tonight. For example, when Hillary made the point that although Obama's 2002 anti-war speech was all well and good, once he was actually in the Senate he ended up voting the same way she did, I was nodding along. It's a legitimate point. But Obama's answer was pretty good:

It was not a matter of, well, here is the initial decision, but since then we've voted the same way. Once we had driven the bus into the ditch, there were only so many ways we could get out. The question is, who's making the decision initially to drive the bus into the ditch? And the fact is that Senator Clinton often says that she is ready on day one, but in fact she was ready to give in to George Bush on day one on this critical issue.

Clinton and Obama are too skilled for either one to ever land a knockout blow in these things, but I'd give tonight's debate to Obama on points. Whether voters who are tuning in for the first time feel the same way, I couldn't say.

GETTING TOUGH ON LOITERING....The last time I checked in on British attempts to keep teenagers from loitering where they aren't wanted, authorities were dispersing them by playing classical music ("The most effective deterrents, according to a spokesman for Transport for London, are anything sung by Pavarotti or written by Mozart"). Apparently things have gotten a little more hard-nosed since then:

Jordan Webb can predict the exact time of day his head will start aching. If the 10-year-old lingers outside the Reynolds grocery store past 5 p.m., a small black device latched onto the storefront and operated on a timer will emit a high-pitched sound that makes the boy's skull feel like it's popping.

....Jordan is referring to the Mosquito, a $975 transmitter designed to disperse young loiterers by making a loud humming noise that most people older than 25, such as his 41-year-old mother, can't hear. The Mosquito has sparked a new sort of buzz in Britain, this time among political and civil rights groups that say the device is discriminatory and treats young people as second-class citizens.

....On a recent sunny afternoon in this historic town near Oxford, Jordan was kicking a soccer ball outside Reynolds with four other boys his age, all wearing red Manchester United jerseys. At 5 p.m., right on schedule, the grocery store's Mosquito began squealing. Jordan said he felt a painful "scratch" in his ear, and he hustled across the road to get out of the machine's 50-foot range.

Put aside the civil rights question for a moment. Why is this even legal? If Reynolds were transmitting an 85-decibel screech in normal frequencies that extended 50 feet into public space, it would be plainly illegal, wouldn't it? It would be one thing if it were limited to their store, but surely private property owners aren't allowed to transmit irritating sounds in a 50-foot radius outside their own property, are they? How can this possibly be lawful?

OBAMA THE PRAGMATIST?....I have to agree with Ezra about Noam Scheiber's recent TNR piece that tries to make the case that Barack Obama has surrounded himself with unusually pragmatic and independent thinking economists. The problem is that Scheiber's examples just don't back up his claim. Take this, for example:

Just because the Obamanauts are intellectually modest and relatively free of ideology, that doesn't mean their policy goals lack ambition. In many cases, the opposite is true. Obama's plan to reduce global warming involves an ambitious cap-and-trade arrangement that would lower carbon emissions 80 percent below 1990 levels by 2050. But cap-and-trade — in which the government limits the overall level of emissions and allows companies to buy and sell pollution permits — is itself a market-oriented approach. The companies most efficient at cutting emissions will sell permits to less efficient companies, achieving the desired reductions with minimal drag on the economy.

But this is precisely the same policy proposed by both Hillary Clinton and John Edwards. So why does this tell us anything about how pragmatic and grounded Team Obama is?

It's probably worth adding something to this, too: the reason that all the Dems favor cap-and-trade almost certainly isn't because of any special devotion to market-oriented approaches. More likely, it's because it accomplishes much the same thing as a carbon tax but isn't actually a carbon tax. In other words, they're doing it because they don't want to take the risk of supporting a major new tax and getting attacked for it. That is pragmatic, but it's political pragmatism, not economic pragmatism. There's a difference.

MORE ON ANTIDEPRESSANTS....This is obviously not the biggest deal in the world, but yesterday I noticed that a new study suggesting that certain antipressants weren't very effective had gotten big play in Britain and zero play in the U.S. Today I checked back, and the story had spread not only to more British sites, but also to news outlets in France, Germany, India, New Zealand, Canada, Thailand, and elsewhere. Mysteriously, though, the U.S. was still almost completely AWOL. There were short pieces on MSNBC and Fox, and longer pieces at the Washington Post and Time. That was pretty much it. It's really very strange that this story is being almost completely ignored here.

For what it's worth, the Time piece does a good job of explaining why the study is important:

Under the Freedom of Information Act, the researchers writing in PLoS Medicine were recently able to obtain [...] data, they believe, that lets them avoid a bias that often plagues reviews of previous research: the tendency for conclusive positive results to be published, sometimes more than once, and thus over-represented, while mediocre results can be ignored or even swept under the rug.

Drug companies claim the review is still flawed, however. One massive problem: there are many more recent studies than those surveyed in the article, which looked only at pre-approval trials conducted before 1999.

....The companies are correct in claiming there is far more data available on SSRI drugs now than there was 10 or 20 years ago. But Kirsch maintains that the results he and colleagues reviewed make up "the only data set we have that is not biased." He points out that currently, researchers are not compelled to produce all results to an independent body once the drugs have been approved; but until they are, they must hand over all data. For that reason, while the PLoS Medicine paper data may not be perfect, it may still be among the best we've got.

In other words, there might be a lot more data now, but it's hard to trust it because drug companies systematically suppress negative findings after they get FDA approval and no longer have to follow FDA rules. A few weeks ago the New York Times reported on a study that looked at precisely this question:

The new analysis, reviewing data from 74 trials involving 12 drugs, is the most thorough to date. And it documents a large difference: while 94 percent of the positive studies found their way into print, just 14 percent of those with disappointing or uncertain results did.

Now, for what it's worth, I find the results of the PLoS study a little hard to believe. Like a lot of commenters on last night's post, I've just heard too much anecdotal evidence from friends who have (eventually) been helped by various antidepressants. Maybe they were all kidding themselves, but that's a little hard to swallow.

But that aside, the PLoS study is still an important one. It's not the first one to question the efficacy of antidepressants, but are we already so jaded by this stuff that a confirming study isn't even worth reporting in the U.S.? If only for the insight it gives us into drug company testing practices, it seems like it's at least worth letting people know about.

DEBATE UPDATE....Did Hillary Clinton really just complain that she always has to respond to questions before Barack Obama? Yes she did! Followed by a lame reference to Saturday Night Live. Weird.

OBAMA'S TAKE ON TERROR....On Sunday Barack Obama spoke to a small Jewish group in Cleveland, and most of the Q&A revolved around issues related to Israel and a Palestinian state. But at the very end he switched gears a bit and did a nice job summing up his attitude toward the war on terror:

I am not naïve. There is a hard core of jihadist fundamentalists who we can't negotiate with. We have to hunt them down and knock them out. Incapacitate them....And that is where military action and intelligence has to be directed. So all the things I've talked about in the past — improving our intelligence capacity, improving our alliances, rolling up financial support, improving our homeland security, making sure that we have strike forces that are effective — that's all the military, intelligence, police work that's required.

The question then is what do we do with the 1.3 billion Muslims, who are along a spectrum of belief. Some extraordinarily moderate, some very pious but not violent. How do we reach out to them? And it is my strong belief that that is the battlefield that we have to worry about, and that is where we have been losing badly over the last 7 years. That is where Iraq has been a disaster. That is where the lack of effective public diplomacy has been a disaster. That is where our failure to challenge seriously human rights violations by countries like Saudi Arabia that are our allies has been a disaster.

And so what we have to do is to speak to that broader Muslim world in a way that says we will consistently support human rights, women's rights. We will consistently invest in the kinds of educational opportunities for children in these communities, so that madrasas are not their only source of learning. We will consistently operate in ways that lead by example, so that we have no tolerance for a Guantanamo or renditions or torture. Those all contribute to people at least being open to our values and our ideas and a recognition that we are not the enemy and that the Clash of Civilizations is not inevitable.

Nicely put.

EMAIL HELL....Remember all those millions of emails that the White House may or may not have lost over the past few years? Henry Waxman held hearings about this today and wanted to know what happened to the Automatic Records Management System, which was installed by the Clinton administration and worked fine. Information Week reports:

Theresa Payton, CIO for the White House Office of Administration, said in her prepared statement that the incoming Bush administration transitioned from Lotus Notes to Microsoft Exchange over a two-year period from 2002-2004, and that the ARM System established by the previous administration did not work properly with Exchange.

"ARMS was a custom-designed application," Payton testified, "and I understand that it was discovered that it just could not be effectively integrated with Microsoft Exchange."

....Payton testified Tuesday before the Oversight and Government Reform Committee that the Bush administration had tried to institute its own archiving system, known as the Electronic Communications Records Management System, but ultimately failed.

"For several reasons, including the need for additional modifications, the identified performance issues, and projected costs, the deployment of ECRMS was canceled," Payton said.

See? George Bush promised to run the government as if it were a business, and he did. Comparisons to the Iraq war, especially unfair but funny ones, should be left in comments.

VANTAGE POINT....I played hooky this afternoon and went to see Vantage Point. It was wholly preposterous in a 24-ish kind of way, but aside from that the plot actually held together and kinda sorta made sense — which, frankly, isn't bad compared to most B action flicks these days. What's more, director Peter Travis played it smart and kept the running time to a svelte 90 minutes instead of padding it out and trying to pretend it was something more profound than it really was. So thumbs up!

But that's not why I'm posting about this. I just wanted to say that the final line of the movie is pure genius, the funniest thing I've heard in a movie theater in months. When the DVD is released, go ahead and rent it and see if you don't agree.

IRAN UPDATE....So how do things stand with Iran? Laura Rozen attended a CFR speech by Undersecretary of State for Political Affairs Nick Burns yesterday and reports back:

All were looking to Washington's top Iran envoy for a signal about what the Bush administration plans to do on the Iran nuclear issue over the next ten months....And Burns did deliver a fairly clear message on that question. He said that he did not think the Iran nuclear issue would be resolved by the end of the Bush administration and would still be outstanding when a new administration takes office.

"I don't think conflict with Iran is inevitable," Burns said. "There is plenty of space for diplomacy."

"I think the issue plays out well beyond 2009," Burns said.

There's more at the link.

THE GOOD, THE BAD, AND THE BLOGGY....In a short post today, John Quiggin rips into William Skidelsky, deputy editor of the British Prospect, for saying some negative things about bloggers. The subject is the much-mooted decline of book reviewing, and one of the things Skildesky says is this:

Lively literary websites — or online magazines with literary sections — do exist, especially in the US: Salon, Slate, the Literary Saloon. But blogging is best suited to instant reaction; it thus has an edge when it comes to disseminating gossip and news. Good criticism requires lengthy reflection and slow maturation. The blogosphere does not provide the optimal conditions for its flourishing.

This actually piqued my interest enough to read Skildesky's entire essay, and basically I came away wondering, again, if we bloggers are a wee bit too thin-skinned sometimes. As it turns out, literary blogging occupies only a small part of Skildesky's essay, and in any case he has both good and bad things to say about it — along with good and bad things about the rest of the literary criticism community. What's more, regarding the short excerpt John quotes, Skildesky is right, isn't he? There's some good long-form work in the blogosphere, both literary and otherwise, but generally speaking it's hardly an insult to point out that most blogging is reactive and quickly produced.

Endless battles to the contrary, it's never a matter of one medium being better than another, it's a matter of acknowledging and using the strengths and weaknesses of various mediums. TV is good at images; newspapers are good at daily news; magazines are good at long-form journalism; and blogs are good at quick reaction and two-way conversation. In fact, Skildesky himself puts it pretty well:

In the end, though, the squabbles between literary journalists and bloggers miss the point. While both parties have cast themselves as adversaries in a pressing contemporary drama, they really are (or should be) allies in a more important battle — for literature itself, and its right to be taken seriously. The significance of this struggle makes the differences between them trivial.

Quick, chatty reaction to news and books is a specialized form that some people are good at and some people aren't. Ditto for longer form journalism and book reviewing. And both have their place. So what's all the fuss about?

PRO-CHOICE....Via Atrios, I see that the once popular sport of Amy Sullivan bashing is back in vogue. Here's Amy, in an interview with Salon about her new book, The Party Faithful:

You're pro-choice. Does that interfere with being an evangelical?

Well, I don't like the [pro-choice] label. I guess the reason I wrote about abortion the way I did in the book is because I have serious moral concerns about abortion, but I don't believe that it should be illegal. And that puts me in the vast majority of Americans. But unfortunately, there's no label for us.

Amanda Marcotte responds:

Yes, there is. If you think abortion and other forms of contraceptive birth control should be legal — i.e. that women should have the legal right to decide when they have children — you are pro-choice. Even if you still reserve the right to judge them for it. This entire interview with Amy Sullivan, like all her talk on getting the evangelical vote, makes me tired. She appears to have a definition problem, basically, characterizing evangelicals as if they are all Bible-believing Christians, when most self-identified evangelicals are patriarchy proponents with a thin veneer of Christianity over everything as a moral justification.

Actually, I think Amy's point is precisely the opposite. In the rest of the interview, she basically suggests that about 60% of the evangelical community is politically conservative and won't ever vote for a Democrat. But the other 40% will, and those 40% are worth trying to appeal to. And one way to appeal to them is to acknowledge their moral qualms about abortion even if you don't happen to share them yourself. Like this guy:

I think that the American people struggle with two principles: There's the principle that a fetus is not just an appendage, it's potential life. I think people recognize that there's a moral element to that. They also believe that women should have some control over their bodies and themselves and there is a privacy element to making those decisions.

I don't think people take the issue lightly. A lot of people have arrived in the view that I've arrived at, which is that there is a moral implication to these issues, but that the women involved are in the best position to make that determination. And I don't think they make it lightly.

That's Barack Obama, likely the next Democratic candidate for the presidency. All he's doing is acknowledging the moral dimension of abortion, while remaining solidly in favor of abortion choice, reducing unwanted pregnancies, and encouraging responsible sexual behavior.

Now, I don't know why Amy rejects the "pro-choice" label, and it's pretty likely that I don't agree with her reasons — largely because I don't have any moral qualms about early and mid-term abortion in the first place. But then, I'm not an evangelical, am I? In any case, I've invited her to come by in a couple of weeks and guest blog about her book, so we'll all have a chance to rip into her about it then. In the meantime, keep things civil in comments, OK?

(And, of course, click the link to read the whole interview. Most of it isn't about abortion at all.)

LATEST POLLS....Since I posted about the latest Gallup tracking poll yesterday, I guess it's worth noting that the latest CBS/New York Times poll provides wildly different results. Gallup's national poll shows Obama and Clinton virtually tied (Obama is ahead 47%-45%), while the NYT poll gives Obama a huge lead, 54%-38%. I don't know if this is related to differing methodologies or what, but maybe the race isn't quite as tied as I thought it was.

UPDATE: Via Steve Benen, USA Today has Obama ahead 51%-39% while AP/Ipsos has him ahead by only 46%-43%. So it's all over the map. I guess there's no telling what's really going on.

QUOTE OF THE DAY....From Jonah Goldberg:

I don't think Obama supports domestic terrorism.

But you never know, do you?

You should read the whole thing, of course. Apparently the Democratic primary campaign has been sadly lacking in irrelevant 60s-era culture war skirmishes and Jonah hopes that will change in tonight's debate. After all, if Obama and Clinton aren't willing to engage in grandstanding denunciations of 60s radicals on national TV, they're just a short hop away from nominating the head of Hamas to be secretary of state, aren't they?

SURGE UPDATE....I guess the surge is working so well that we have to keep it up forever:

The Pentagon is projecting that when the United States troop buildup in Iraq ends in July there will be about 8,000 more troops on the ground than when it began in January 2007, a senior general said Monday.

Lt. Gen. Carter Ham, head of operations for the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told reporters that by July the troop total was likely to be 140,000. There were 132,000 troops there when President Bush approved orders to send five more Army brigades to Iraq to improve security and avert civil war.

....Asked if the total would be below 132,000 by the time President Bush leaves office next January, General Ham said, "It would be premature to say that."

I think this means that Atrios wins a bet or something.

TALKING BACK TO PROZAC....A new meta-study conducted by Irving Kirsch of Hull University and five American and Canadian researchers has concluded that Prozac and other antidepressants in the SSRI family are essentially worthless. Compared to a placebo, they improved patients' scores on the most widely used depression scale by only 1.8 points:

The review breaks new ground because Kirsch and his colleagues have obtained for the first time what they believe is a full set of trial data for four antidepressants.

They requested the full data under freedom of information rules from the Food and Drug Administration, which licenses medicines in the US and requires all data when it makes a decision.

The pattern they saw from the trial results of fluoxetine (Prozac), paroxetine (Seroxat), venlafaxine (Effexor) and nefazodone (Serzone) was consistent. "Using complete data sets (including unpublished data) and a substantially larger data set of this type than has been previously reported, we find the overall effect of new-generation antidepressant medication is below recommended criteria for clinical significance," they write.

The complete study is here. I have no particular opinion about the quality of this study, and not really any special interest in SSRIs either. In fact, what really drew my attention was the range of news outlets that reported this news. According to Google News, here they are: the Guardian, the Independent, the London Times, the Telegraph, the BBC, Sky News, the Evening Standard, the Herald, the Financial Times, and the Daily Mail. In fact, it's getting big play from most of these folks, including screaming front page treatment from some.

So what's the deal? Why is this huge news in Britain, where most of the stories are making great hay out of the amount of taxpayer money the NHS is squandering on these drugs, and completely ignored here in the U.S.? The conspiracy theory version of the answer is obvious, but what's the real version? Do American newspaper editors universally know something that I (and their British colleagues) don't?

THE RACE....I don't have anything especially insightful to say about the latest Gallup daily tracking poll except to point out just how remarkable it is. After over a year of campaigning, 23 debates, a hundred million dollars of spending from both camps, and 37 primaries and caucuses, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama are....

tied. Democratic Party voters are split almost exactly 50-50 between them.

I don't think there's any profound lesson to be drawn from this. I just think it's striking that these two very different candidates have produced such a knife edge of opinion. It's certainly nothing I would have predicted going into this thing.

DON SIEGELMAN....The case of Don Siegelman, the popular Democratic governor of Alabama who was convicted two years ago on almost certainly bogus bribery charges, has been circulating for a long time. Last night 60 Minutes aired the story, and if you didn't see it you should go read the story on their website. It's too complicated to summarize, so I'll just give you the titillating bit:

Now a Republican lawyer from Alabama, Jill Simpson, has come forward to claim that the Siegelman prosecution was part of a five-year secret campaign to ruin the governor. Simpson told 60 Minutes she did what's called "opposition research" for the Republican party. She says during a meeting in 2001, Karl Rove, President Bush's senior political advisor, asked her to try to catch Siegelman cheating on his wife.

"Karl Rove asked you to take pictures of Siegelman?" Pelley asks.

"Yes," Simpson replies.

"In a compromising, sexual position with one of his aides," Pelley clarifies.

"Yes, if I could," Simpson says.

That sure sounds like Karl, doesn't it? In any case, Siegelman was almost certainly convicted on absurd charges, and almost certainly convicted as part of a partisan hit job (see here for more). Somebody ought to be in jail, but it probably isn't Don Siegelman.

POSTSCRIPT: The 60 Minutes segment was blacked out on CBS affiliate WHNT in northern Alabama. Technical difficulties. Or perhaps not.

DRESSING OBAMA....I feel like Rip Van Winkle. Somehow I only just now noticed that the Freak Show news cycle has been dominated for the entire morning by a Drudge story claiming that Hillary Clinton's campaign has been circulating a picture of Barack Obama dressed in the traditional garb of a Somali elder. It was taken in 2006 during a visit to Kenya.

Drudge's piece is ambiguous — who distributed the picture? who did it go to? — but the Clinton campaign, given a chance to deny the charge, rather loudly declined to do so. So apparently they not only sent the picture around, but then issued a statement slamming Obama for complaining about it. Points for chutzpah, I guess, but not much else.

Peter Wehner probably has the right take:

[This] is pretty nasty stuff, with its "he's a Muslim and it should bother you" undertone....Twenty-four hours from now I suspect we'll see virtually the entire Democratic establishment, and many others, condemning this tactic. It'll advance the storyline that the Clinton campaign is spinning out of control — lurching from melancholy valedictory comments one day to faux outrage the next — and in its dying days.

During tomorrow evening's debate, Hillary Clinton will be on the defensive and very much regret this stupid and ugly effort.

Other than that, it was a swell idea.

I still want to know a few more details: namely who sent out the photo (low level staffer? senior press person?) and who received it (a couple of close friends? a large private email list?). But either way, this was spectacularly ill conceived.

SNEAK PREVIEW....I have to hand it to Bill Kristol. He manages to sum up the upcoming conservative attack on Barack Obama in a single paragraph:

Barack Obama is an awfully talented politician. But could the American people, by November, decide that for all his impressive qualities, Obama tends too much toward the preening self-regard of Bill Clinton, the patronizing elitism of Al Gore and the haughty liberalism of John Kerry?

Yes, yes, and yes! I'd say that insinuations of preening self-regard, patronizing elitism, and haughty liberalism are almost certain to be the heavy lifters in the Republican attack toolbox this fall. Unless, of course, Hillary Clinton wins the nomination, in which case they'll attack her preening self-regard, patronizing elitism, haughty liberalism, and grating shrillness. Who says conservativism is out of new ideas?

FOREIGN AFFAIRS....Michael Signer, who recently finished up a 10-month stint as John Edwards' foreign policy advisor, complains today that the mainstream media has spent that entire time practically ignoring the subject:

This is troubling, because what a candidate says on foreign policy matters. Often, major policy proposals are road maps to what the candidates actually do once elected. George W. Bush's famous national security speech on Sept. 23, 1999, at the Citadel in South Carolina accurately portended his most provocative policies as president, from "transforming" our armed forces through technology and lighter brigades, to disengaging from the Clinton administration's many diplomatic commitments.

....This time around, the three top Democratic candidates all proposed assertive ideas for tackling major problems in roughly the same time frame. In April, May and June respectively, Obama, Edwards and Clinton all gave major speeches on national security. Obama called for "building a 21st-century military." Edwards proposed building a "mission-focused military." Clinton called to "rebuild our strength and widen and deepen [the military's] scope."

You'd think that journalists would do a comparative analysis of what the three candidates had proposed for the U.S. military in the coming decade; what they could do, practically; and what the speeches might predict about national security during their presidencies. But no.

In one sense this is an odd state of affairs, since, as virtually everyone has noted at one time or another, presidents have a lot more control over foreign policy than domestic policy. If Barack Obama wants to withdraw from Iraq, he can almost certainly do it. All he needs is the resolve to see it through. But if he wants to pass universal healthcare, the odds are stacked pretty highly against him. Resolve isn't nearly enough.

But I'd guess that there are a couple of reasons that foreign affairs hasn't gotten a lot of deep analysis this election cycle. First and foremost is the fact that a single subject — Iraq — has dominated the campaign so overwhelmingly that it's sucked all the oxygen out of the foreign policy debate. And Iraq is simplicity itself: all the Democrats want to leave and all the Republicans want to stay. Within the Democratic camp there have been minor differences in emphasis, but hardly enough to hang a few thousand words of navel gazing on. Does anyone really think that they can tell a lot about the candidates by comparing the nuances of Hillary's residual force with the nuances of Obama's residual force?

Second, foreign policy by its very nature tends to be far mushier than domestic policy. Outside of Iraq the Democratic candidates sparred a bit over preconditions for meeting with foreign leaders and whether or not they supported covert strikes against al-Qaeda in Pakistan, but at the level of speeches it was hard to suss out a lot of substantive differences. It's not an impossible task, but anyone trying it either has to admit that the differences are subtle (i.e., boring) or else run the risk of getting things completely wrong via close reading of ambiguous phrases. If candidates were willing to entertain foreign policy hypotheticals their differences would be a lot easier to figure out, but they're not. So we're stuck.

Of course, things weren't really all that different on the domestic side, were they? Domestic policy tends to be a little more specific, which makes for easier comparisons, but in the case of healthcare (to take an example) all that got us was an endless, dreary debate about mandates. That's interesting to wonks, but not to much of anyone else.

Signer suggests that foreign policy debates have been sharper in the past, but his examples are all from general elections, not primaries. This year should be no different. Iraq will still be the 800-pound gorilla, but the differences between John McCain and the Democratic candidate should be sharp enough to produce some foreign policy fireworks. Who knows? By the time October rolls around we might all be wishing that the press would shut up on the subject.

OSCAR THREAD....I was OK with most of the Academy Awards last night except for the winners in the two supporting actor categories. Javier Bardem was fine as hit man Anton Chigurh in No Country for Old Men, but I often wonder if intense, showy roles like this are really all that difficult to pull off. (Comments on this score are welcome from people who know more about the craft of acting than I do.) I would have chosen Casey Affleck instead for his genuinely interesting and affecting turn in The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford.

And Tilda Swinton? Spare me. We've seen the cold corporate lawyer character a hundred times before, and Swinton didn't do anything new or interesting with it. I think I would have chosen any of the other nominees over her, with my top pick going to Amy Ryan in Gone Baby Gone. I didn't actually care for the movie all that much (more flash than substance and an ending that was too heavy handed for my taste), but Ryan's performance was pitch perfect.

But we all have our gripes. And I was certainly happy to see No Country for Old Men beat out There Will Be Blood. TWBB was arresting and, often, enthralling, but like a lot of people I'm growing tired of Paul Thomas Anderson's inability to take all his bits of interesting filmmaking and turn them into a genuine, complete film. On that level, No Country was simply a better movie.

What did you like or hate about the Oscars? The floor is open.

UPDATE: Lots of disagreement in comments over my dissing of Tilda Swinton. Will Allen: "Look at how she interacts with the Ken Howard character; it is a study in self-loathing via bootlicking servility." Ralph: "Swinton's performance was the antithesis of a cliche and made the true villain of the piece all too human." I'm not really on board here, but these are good points. Read the thread for more.

ATTACKING AL-QAEDA....Last August, in the wake of news (here) that Donald Rumsfeld had called off a special ops mission intended to capture senior members of al-Qaeda in Pakistan's tribal areas, Barack Obama called the failure to act a "terrible mistake." He then went on to promise that in an Obama administration, "If we have actionable intelligence about high-value terrorist targets, and President Musharraf won't act, we will."

John McCain has criticized that speech, and over at The Corner David Freddoso joins him today. Responding to the news that we launched a drone missile attack last month against targets in Pakistan, he says:

As much as I appreciate the idea of a dead terrorist, I don't like what we did in Pakistan, and I really don't like the fact that we're bragging about it, or that a presidential candidate would openly discuss it as an option.

....But so powerful is Obamania that liberals can now praise even George W. Bush for doing something they would oppose under any other circumstances — all because of Obama's ill-considered comments last year. That I cannot respect.

The logic for this Pakistan operation clearly flies in the face of every argument against invading Iraq — international law, sovereignty, respect for other countries, our standing in the world, etc.....That Obama's supporters would hold it up as some kind of model is deeply puzzling to me.

The dynamics here are certainly turning deeply weird, aren't they? Freddoso may have a point about liberal reaction (though a drone missile attack in tribal territories is hardly comparable to a massive invasion and multi-year occupation in the heart of the Arab world), but it looks like conservatives might have the mirror opposite problem. Is McCain going to paint himself into a corner and start claiming that he opposes covert attacks just because Obama has said he supports them? And will conservatives then be forced to follow along? This is going to be one peculiar campaign if everyone starts bending themselves into a pretzel over this, with liberals defending covert strikes and conservatives trying to paint that attitude as reckless and naive. I can't wait.

And while we're on the subject, here's a data point to suggest that Obama's position hasn't led the Arab public (or the Arab elite, anyway) to become wary of him. Marc Lynch just got back from the US-Islamic World Forum in Doha and files this report: "The US elections absolutely dominated the conversations, with Obama the runaway favorite. Most of the Arab participants I talked to seemed fascinated by Obama, and frightened by McCain." Maybe the Arabs in Doha don't have a problem with the odd missile attack on Pakistan's tribal areas either.

BUSH TO CONGRESS: JUST KIDDING!....Republicans have spent the past week thunderously denouncing the Traitorcrats for failing to permanently adopt the Protect America Act, complete with retroactive immunity for telecom companies. But guess what? Turns out the White House was just joshing with us:

On Friday evening, Atty. Gen. Michael B. Mukasey and Director of National Intelligence J. Michael McConnell had said in an unusually blunt letter to Congress that the nation "is now more vulnerable to terrorist attack and other foreign threats" because lawmakers had not yet acted on the administration's proposal for the wiretapping law.

But within hours of sending that letter, administration officials told lawmakers on the House and Senate intelligence committees that they had prevailed upon all of the telecommunications companies to continue cooperating with the government's requests for information while negotiations with Congress continue.

...."Unfortunately, the delay resulting from this discussion impaired our ability to cover foreign intelligence targets, which resulted in missed intelligence information," Mukasey and McConnell added.

Government officials declined to comment on how much intelligence data may have been lost or how serious it might have been.

One Democratic congressional official, speaking on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to discuss the matter, expressed skepticism that any significant gap had existed, noting that existing rules permit continued monitoring of known terrorists and their associates.

...."This is serious backpedaling by the DNI," the Democratic official said of McConnell. "He's been saying for the last week that the sky is falling, and the sky is not falling."

In other words, it was just the usual partisan fearmongering from our supposedly nonpartisan intelligence pro Michael McConnell. At least now we know how seriously to take him the next time he says something like this.

BREAKING NEWS....Cuba's national assembly has elected Raul Castro president. A shocking upset, I know.

UPDATE FROM KURDISTAN....Now blogging over at World Politics Review, Judah Grunstein casts a gimlet eye on the recent Turkish incursion into Iraq that's aimed at beating back PKK guerrillas operating from bases just inside the border of Iraqi Kurdistan:

There are conflicting reports about just how many troops Turkey has sent into northern Iraq, with the general trend being bearish. Initial Turkish TV reports (passed on by the press) put the number at 10,000, citing unnamed military sources. Reuters put the number at 8,000, or two Turkish brigades. Later television reports lowered it further to 3,000, which the Iraqi government today bid down to 1,000, only to be undersold by the American military command in Iraq which claimed that only a few hundred Turkish troops took part. The Turkish military, meanwhile, closed the bidding by warning that "media reports about the scope of the operation were misleading and exaggerated." (If this keeps up, look for reports of a Kurdish incursion into Turkey by tomorrow.)

Actually, it's probably a good thing that everyone is trying to downplay this. But read the whole post for more.

EXPERIENCE....Riffing off Scott Lemieux, Matt Yglesias takes a pot shot at Hillary Clinton's claim to be the "experienced" candidate:

If you win a primary on an "experience" argument, then you'd damn well better be more experienced than your general election opponent. McCain would make an experience argument against either opponent, so it's much better to be the opponent with a record of statements aimed at rebutting such arguments (I don't think the American people judge your qualification based on duration of service in a broken Washington system...) than to be the opponent who's been making the argument that voters need to stick with the more seasoned Washington hand.

This obviously gets into the realm of pure spin since "experience" is such an amorphous quality, but I really think that Obama partisans are missing the point here. Like it or not, most voters have a sort of vague operational view of experience that means something like "involvement in big league politics." And on that score, Hillary gets 15 years: 8 years as an activist first lady and 7 years as U.S. senator. Obama, conversely, gets a total of 3 years as U.S. senator. It may seem unfair that his eight years in the Illinois legislature don't count, but for most people they just don't. Being a backbench state legislator just isn't big league politics.

Seen through this lens, the problem with Obama isn't that he's less experienced than Hillary, but that he's inexperienced, full stop. And again, like it or not, John McCain will certainly use that as an argument in the general election campaign in a way he couldn't against Hillary. Sure, he's got 25 years to her 15, but that doesn't matter. Beyond a certain point voters aren't interested in who's got more experience, and 15 years is well beyond that point. If McCain tried to paint Hillary as inexperienced, it would be a waste of breath. Nobody would buy it.

When I decided to vote for Obama in the primary I said I had decided it was worth it to roll the dice. But make no mistake: there really is a roll of the dice here. The American public hasn't elected someone with as little big-time experience as Obama in the past century (though we've come close with Jimmy Carter and George W. Bush). I don't think that will keep him from winning in November, but it's pretty clearly a real issue.

DNA AND THE INSURANCE INDUSTRY....Amy Harmon writes in the New York Times today that patients often refuse to undergo genetic testing because they're afraid that negative results will make it impossible to get health insurance:

"It's pretty clear that the public is afraid of taking advantage of genetic testing," said Dr. Francis S. Collins, director of the National Human Genome Research Institute at the National Institutes of Health. "If that continues, the future of medicine that we would all like to see happen stands the chance of being dead on arrival."

....Insurers say they do not ask prospective customers about genetic test results, or require testing. "It's an anecdotal fear," said Mohit M. Ghose, a spokesman for America's Health Insurance Plans, whose members provide benefits for 200 million Americans. "Our industry is not interested in any way, shape or form in discriminating based on a genetic marker."

Still, a recent study by the Georgetown University Health Policy Institute found otherwise. In 7 of 92 underwriting decisions, insurance providers evaluating hypothetical applicants said they would deny coverage, charge more for premiums or exclude certain conditions from coverage based on genetic test results.

Of course insurance companies are interested in discriminating based on a genetic markers. That's what insurance companies do: they evaluate risks and then offer pricing and coverage that are appropriate and profitable based on those risks. If they don't do that, they aren't being insurance companies.

It's worth saying this over and over: insurance companies don't discriminate because they're evil. They do it because it's what insurance companies do. It's a core part of their business, and if they don't do it they'll go belly up.

This is the biggest reason for wanting to get private insurance companies (mostly) out of the healthcare business. If it were just a matter of their being corrupt or evil, that actually wouldn't be so bad. We could figure out ways to regulate them into good behavior. But it's harder than that. The kind of behavior that most of us want — comparable coverage for everyone under nondiscriminatory pricing rules — is flatly not something an insurance company can offer. If they do, they aren't being an insurance company. And if they aren't being an insurance company, then what good are they doing?

In this case the answer is: impeding progress. In other cases they're merely adding huge amounts of overhead to the system. But positive benefits? Those are a little harder to make out.

COLOR LASER PRINTERS....My 8-year-old color laser printer is finally on its last legs — rest in peace Magicolor 2200 — and now I have to figure out what to replace it with. I'm a longtime inkjet hater, so my initial research has been solely aimed at newer color lasers. The Xerox Phaser 6125 and 6180 both look nice. Or maybe the Dell 1320. Or how about an HP 3600? You can hardly go wrong with HP, right? Naturally I turn to my tech savvy weekend readers for advice. What say you?

FRIDAY CATBLOGGING....On the left we have Domino amongst the light and shadow. On the right, Inkblot gets rewarded for his fine work supervising Marian's gardening. As well he should, since a recent study shows that he and Domino are helping to protect us from heart attacks and strokes:

The study, by researchers at the University of Minnesota, found that feline-less people were 30 to 40 percent more likely to die of cardiovascular disease than those with cats.

Yet dog owners had the same rate as non-owners. "No protective effect of dogs as domestic pets was observed," said the study, presented Thursday at the International Stroke Conference in New Orleans.

Dr. Adnan Qureshi, a stroke expert at the university, said he decided to raise the question because other studies have suggested pets can help reduce stress. He and his team analyzed a group of 4,435 people who had answered questionnaires about pet ownership and other risk factors.

But the cat-dog differential came as a surprise. "We don't understand this," he said, but "it's probably not a coincidence."

Asked if he owns a cat, Qureshi replied: "No. Maybe I should get one, though."

And if you don't have a cat, you should at least drop by here once a week for Friday catblogging. It might help and it can't hurt.

SADR'S CEASE-FIRE....This is good news from Iraq:

Influential Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr on Friday ordered his Mahdi Army militia to extend a cease-fire for another six months, a decision that U.S. and Iraqi officials believe will strengthen a growing sense of stability in Iraq.

....Sadr's cease-fire, which began last August, is widely credited with helping to reduce levels of violence in Iraq. Other factors in quelling the violence have been the birth of a Sunni volunteer force that turned against radical jihadists and the U.S. military "surge" involving thousands of reinforcements.

....Those who honor Sadr's pledge will be treated with respect and restraint, the U.S. military said, adding that it would welcome any opportunity to participate in dialogue with the Sadrists.

Elections are in October. Keep your fingers crossed that the Sadrists, the Hakims, and the U.S. military can keep things from spiralling out of control before then. This is a hopeful start.

McCAIN AND PAXSON....Prurient innuendo aside, Michael Isikoff points out that there's a problem with McCain's claim yesterday that he never did any favors for Paxson Communications:

But that flat claim seems to be contradicted by an impeccable source: McCain himself. "I was contacted by Mr. Paxson on this issue," McCain said in the Sept. 25, 2002, deposition obtained by Newsweek. "He wanted [FCC] approval very bad for purposes of his business. I believe that Mr. Paxson had a legitimate complaint."

While McCain said "I don't recall" if he ever directly spoke to the firm's lobbyist about the issue — an apparent reference to Iseman, though she is not named — "I'm sure I spoke to [Paxson]." McCain agreed that his letters on behalf of Paxson, a campaign contributor, could "possibly be an appearance of corruption" — even though McCain denied doing anything improper.

To be honest, it's genuinely not clear to me whether this really amounts to anything serious. It sounds more like a political misdemeanor than a felony to me. But he still shouldn't lie make misleading statements about it.

THE TIMES SPEAKS....Really, this is unbelievable. Here is New York Times executive editor Bill Keller in an online Q&A declaring himself surprised by both the volume and the lopsidedness of the reaction to Wednesday's John McCain non-affair story. Then his surprise continues:

And, frankly, I was a little surprised by how few readers saw what was, to us, the larger point of the story. Perhaps here, at the outset of this conversation, is a good point to state as clearly as possible our purpose in publishing.

[Blah blah blah]

The point of this "Long Run" installment was that, according to people who know him well, this man who prizes his honor above all things and who appreciates the importance of appearances also has a history of being sometimes careless about the appearance of impropriety, about his reputation. The story cites several examples, and quotes friends and admirers talking of this apparent contradiction in his character. That is why some members of his staff were so alarmed by the appearance of his relationship with Ms. Iseman. And that, it seemed (and still seems) to us, was something our readers would want to know about a man who aspires to be president.

The "larger point." Right. This is just embarrassing. Everybody with a pulse knows that no one is criticizing the Times for reporting that McCain was doing the bidding of a lobbyist and campaign contributor. Rather, this story has gotten saturation coverage because the Times has been careful to refer to Vicki Iseman as a "female lobbyist" on practically every occasion it can — including the introduction to the very Q&A Keller is taking part in. Times reader aren't children. We all know what this means, and we all know perfectly well that the Times piece loudly insinuated some kind of inappropriate romantic involvement between McCain and Iseman. So far, though, the Q&A has addressed only the peripheral subjects of what "Long Run" pieces are like, what the Times' policy on anonymous sources is, and the Chinese wall between the newsroom and the editorial page staff. Riveting stuff.

And the elephant in the room? Missing in action so far. Do you think they'll ever get to it?

UPDATE: Several hours into the Q&A, Jill Abramson finally gets around to the elephant:

We believed it was vital for the story to accurately reflect the range of concerns shared by our sources....If the editors had summarily decided to edit out the issue of romance, because of possible qualms over "sexual innuendo" or some of the others issues cited in the reader questions, our story would not have been a complete and accurate reflection of what our sources told our reporters. The editors and the reporting team believed it was important for readers to know what could have concerned top advisers so much that they confronted their boss. We believe the story did this fairly and accurately, giving readers as much information as we could.

That's it? Abramson acts as though the rules for dropping a tactical nuke are the same as they are for authorizing a mortar attack. But she knows perfectly well how incendiary this stuff is. Surely it requires a little more justification than "this was a vague suspicion that a few guys had at the time"?

I dunno. Abramson is right when she says, "Documents are always useful in reporting, but they are not required." Still, reporters don't just uncritically pass along everything every source tells them, and in this case her sources didn't provide any evidence at all that McCain was romantically involved with Iseman. It was just a concern they apparently had — maybe well founded, maybe not. Is that really enough?

But I'm also intrigued by Abramson's claim that the Times piece gave readers "as much information as we could." That's not the same thing as "all the information we had." Does this signify something, or am I reading too much meaning into her choice of words?

PLAGIARISM....I propose a moratorium on the use of the word "plagiarism" and its derivatives by all political commentators working in all mediums for all political viewpoints anywhere in the English-speaking world for the next 30 days. All in favor? Thanks. Motion carried.

THE POLITICS OF TERROR....Yglesias on the politics of terror:

Democracy is a highly imperfect method of getting good government. One thing that makes it work better is the general sense that if good things happen to a country, incumbent politicians will benefit from that whereas if bad things happen, incumbents will suffer. That often leads to election results that aren't really "deserved" since Jimmy Carter didn't cause the 70s oil crisis and Bill Clinton didn't cause the 90s tech boom. But it does keep the incentives where they belong — insofar as things are under the control of politicians, the politicians try to make good things happen.

But not the post-9/11 GOP. Their political meal ticket is a population terrified of terrorism, and nothing whips that terror up quite like actual terrorism in London, Madrid, wherever. The result is a political party that simply can't adopt policies designed to ratchet-down the level of danger and anxiety.

One of the ironies of this is that conservatives have spent years accusing Democrats of, for example, not really wanting to do anything about racism because they get too much mileage out of making fiery speeches about it to the Urban League every four years. Whether there was ever anything to that or not, there's not much question that this is exactly the GOP's attitude toward terror. Their eagerness for another attack as a way of proving Democratic fecklessness is so palpable you can almost taste it.

THINGS THAT MAKE YOU GO "HMMM"....Normally, John McCain can't talk to the press often enough. Michael Scherer reports that on Thursday that suddenly changed:

In the wake of a scandalous New York Times story suggesting a romantic fling with a lobbyist, McCain arrived at a Ford Focus car assembly plant with a decidedly tense grin plastered across his face. His campaign staff promptly separated anyone with a pen or a tape recorder from the candidate. "The McCain campaign decided who they wanted on the tour, and it's only photographers," a nice lady from Ford announced after a reporter spotted the candidate behind a car chassis and tried to approach him.

....At the end of the day, McCain boarded the plane with his wife, his staff, and his daughter, Meghan, who trailed an entourage of friends, bound for Indianapolis. On another night, he would have sauntered to the back to chew the fat with reporters. But on this night, he only came half-way down the aisle, keeping a safe distance. "Everybody happy?" he called out. "Fun day. Fun day." McCains eyebrows bounced up and down to signal his sarcasm.

His question, of course, was rhetorical. He didn't want to hear anything more. Before anyone could answer he had wheeled around and gone back to his seat, beyond the reach of reporters and their notebooks for just a while longer.

Look, there's no two ways about it it: this is very weird behavior. If there were really no story here, McCain wouldn't be avoiding reporters. He'd be yukking it up and insisting to a sympathetic press corps that he was the subject of a comically thin hit job from the Times. Instead he's acting almost like a caricature of a guilty man. What's going on here?

HAMAS....In this week's Time, Joe Klein describes his experience moderating a panel at the U.S.-Islamic World Forum in Doha:

Many of the Muslim delegates seemed stunned, finally, by the rush of history unleashed by the Bush Administration. "Everything the United States has favored is now radioactive, especially democracy," said Rami Khouri, a Lebanese journalist. The Administration had pushed for elections in places like the Palestinian territories where the essential components of democracy — a free press, a free economy, the rule of law — did not exist. Religious parties had won, or gained momentum, in most of these elections, and the U.S. had backtracked, refusing to accept the Hamas victory in the Palestinian territories, re-embracing autocrats like Hosni Mubarak in Egypt. "Our indigenous democratic reformers," Khouri said, "are in retreat across the region."

If you say you support democracy, you have to support democracy. And you have to support it even if people you don't like win elections. Efraim Halevy, former chief of the Mossad and hardly a wide-eyed naif, tells Laura Rozen of Mother Jones that this is one of the reasons that the U.S. and Israel should face reality and agree to negotiate with Hamas:

MJ: Again and again, Israel and Washington too have tried to engineer which Palestinians would come to power, to whom they would speak or recognize, etc. Is this itself problematic? Should the West step back from trying to manipulate internal Palestinian politics?

EH: Yes, for two reasons. First, is the sovereign right of Palestinians to decide who their leadership should be. I think that is the basis of democracy. More than that, it is the best possible way in my opinion for a country or society to determine how it wants to be governed and how it wants to be lead. And second, so far it must be admitted that attempts to do this [manipulate internal Palestinian politics] have not succeeded. After all, in the final analysis, it would not be possible to create and fashion a leadership from without.

Refusing to deal with Hamas hurts the United States — as Klein observes, nobody in the Middle East believes our democracy rhetoric anymore — and it hurts Israel too. Halevy notes correctly not just that Hamas holds effective power in the Palestinian territories, but that it will continue to hold effective power since the only competition is Fatah's "aging, tired and sad Abu Mazen." There simply won't be any progress without engaging them.

Recognizing this is both a practical and an idealistic position. Maybe Barack Obama will help lead us in that direction. It's a sure bet that George Bush won't.

QUESTIONS FOR THE TIMES....You'll all be excited to hear that the New York Times editors and reporters who worked on the John McCain non-affair story will be answering your questions on Friday. If you have a question, you can submit it to askthetimes@nytimes.com. Here's mine:

1. Yes or no: do you think John McCain had an affair with Vicki Iseman?

2. If yes, why do you think so? If no, why did you spend several hundred words insinuating that he did?
   

OK, that's actually two questions. Or three, depending on how you count. But, really, isn't that pretty much the whole thing? If McCain didn't have an affair, there's no story. If he did, then let's hear the evidence. The rest of the story about the Paxson lobbying is mildly interesting, but we all know perfectly well that no one really cares about it.

NON-STORY NON-COMMENTS....On a pure tribalism-backlash-unexpected-consequences level, I have to say that perhaps the most fascinating aspect of the John McCain non-affair story is the fast congealing conservative consensus that this will help McCain. After all, if the elite-liberal-America-hating New York Times is going after him, he can't be all bad, can he? Apparently McCain finally found a way to appeal to the conservative base.

Also worth noting, just for the hell of it, is Times editor Bill Keller's response when TNR reporter Gabriel Sherman called for comment:

This sounds like a pointless exercise to me — speculating about reporting that may or may not result in an article. But if that's what Special Correspondents of The New Republic do, speculate away. When we have something to say, we'll say it in the paper.

You know, if Keller doesn't want to comment, that's fine. It's an internal matter. But he does work in the news business, and he really has no call to act as if Sherman is some kind of squalid guttersnipe just because Keller's on the receiving end of some reporting instead of the other way around. He needs to get over himself.

TNR ON L'AFFAIR McCAIN....Gabriel Sherman's TNR piece about the internal struggles at the New York Times over publication of last night's story about John McCain's non-affair with telecom lobbyist Vicki Iseman is now up:

The publication of the article capped three months of intense internal deliberations at the Times over whether to publish the negative piece and its most explosive charge about the affair. It pitted the reporters investigating the story, who believed they had nailed it, against executive editor Bill Keller, who believed they hadn't.

....By late December, the reporters had submitted several pages of written questions to [McCain lawyer Bob] Bennett for comment, and completed a draft of the piece before the New Year. But to their growing frustration, Keller ordered rounds of changes and additional reporting. According to Times sources, [Washington bureau chief Dean] Baquet remained an advocate for his reporters and pushed the piece to be published, but sources say Keller wanted a more nuanced story looking less at personal matters and more at questions of Iseman's lobbying and McCain's legislative record.

....In mid-January, Keller told the reporters to significantly recast the piece after several drafts had circulated among editors in Washington and New York. After three different versions, the piece ended up not as a stand-alone investigation but as an entry in the paper's "The Long Run" series looking at presidential candidates' career histories.

If anything, this makes the whole episode even more puzzling. The four reporters on this piece thought they had "nailed it"? Reasonable people can differ on whether they had enough to hang a story on, but there's no way that they "nailed" anything. And what made Keller change his mind? Adding a couple thousand words about the lobbying aspect of this episode did exactly nothing to take attention away from the bombshell innuendo that McCain was having an "inappropriate" relationship with Vicki Iseman — and the reporting on that central assertion doesn't seem to have changed much since late December.

Mysteriouser and mysteriouser. Sometimes stories like this get printed in hopes that they'll kick over some stones and prompt other sources to come forward, and maybe that's what happened here. Stay tuned.

ELECTION UPDATE (IN IRAQ)....Here's the good news in Iraq: provincial elections have been scheduled for October. And here's the bad news in Iraq: provincial elections have been scheduled for October.

In a nutshell, the problem is this: for the past few years, the south of Iraq has been the scene of a battle for control between the Mahdi Army of Muqtada al-Sadr and the Badr Organization of ISCI's Abdul Aziz al-Hakim. But while the surge and the various Sunni Awakenings have gotten most of the credit for the recent drop in violence in Iraq, another key ingredient has been a cease-fire announced by Sadr six months ago — a cease-fire that's looking less and less tenable with elections coming up. Sadr didn't contest the last round of elections, which left ISCI in political control of the region, and Sadr now feels that the U.S. is taking advantage of the cease-fire to team up with ISCI to make sure things stay that way. Tina Susman and Raheem Salman of the Los Angeles Times report:

Sadr loyalists have said their foes are taking advantage of the cease-fire to try to crush the movement politically and militarily.

....Sadr aides cited military raids on the group's strongholds, such as Baghdad's Sadr City district, and they accused U.S. and Iraqi security forces of targeting loyalists in southern provinces where the movement is vying for power with the Supreme Islamic Iraqi Council. The council's leader, Abdelaziz Hakim, is a U.S. ally. Scores of Iraqis have died in clashes involving Sadr's Mahdi Army and the Council's Badr Organization.

....Salah Ubaidi, Sadr's spokesman, said the cleric, who rarely has appeared in public in the last year, would make a statement Saturday if he decided to extend the truce. That would mark the end of the six-month deadline according to the Islamic calendar.

If Sadr remains silent, Ubaidi said, it will mean the Mahdi Army is back in action.

Eric Martin suggests that although Sadr might have actually welcomed some of the early U.S.-ISCI raids as part of his "attempt to purge unruly, disloyal and radical elements from his ranks," things have since gotten out of hand:

But the US forces and ISCI went too far — creating a nearly untenable position for Sadr, who has been facing extreme pressure from within his movement's ranks to release his hold on the militia and respond to this aggression. Sadr is letting ISCI know that, going forward, full retaliation will result from any future assaults (with perhaps a bit of payback mixed in for good measure).

Like it or not, it's long been obvious that Sadr isn't going away. Eric notes that outwardly the U.S. is doing its best to treat Sadr respectfully, but that the raids on Sadr's forces have continued unabated. If Sadr decides that, deferential words to the contrary, this is our way of making sure that Hakim wins this year's elections — elections that Sadr plans to contest — he may decide that restarting the war is his only option. And that means restarting it against us, not just the Badr Organization.

There's no telling how this is going to play out, but it's definitely something to watch.

THE DRUNKEN OLD GUY....Our satellite shootdown went like clockwork last night, but questions remain about why we shot down the satellite. The Chinese, needless to say, aren't buying our story about concerns over the hydrazine fuel tank, and apparently they've chosen the following cryptic Confucius-esque phrase to spread the meme that there's more to this story than the U.S. is letting on:

The drunken old guy's mind isn't really on the wine.

According to China Hand over at American Footprints, "By Google's count, there are 24,300 hits for the Chinese-language search string, 'The drunken old guy's mind isnt really on wine + U.S. satellite.' That is either a sign of the celerity of the China blogosphere's hive mind or an indication of how quickly a meme can spread when the government controls the Internet, or both."

Just thought I'd pass this along for amusement value. Any Chinese language readers have anything to add about this?

UPDATE: In comments, Kevin Miller tells us that this is a chengyu, which are idioms widely used in Chinese that have a short backstory. This particular chengyu means that someone has ulterior motives and was inspired by the story of a wine-drinking "tippler" that KM translates as follows:

Tale of Old Tippler's Pavilion

Chuzhou is embraced by mountains; to its south-west there are ridges upon ridges, of which the forests and valleys are extraordinarily beautiful and charming. The Mount Langya looks not only deep and serene, but also absolutely gorgeous. Walking along the mountain path for a few miles, one can hear the gurgling sound of water — it is nothing but a spring known mythologically as the rock-brewed spring pouring down between two peaks. The path winds through the ridges, and there appears a cozy gazebo perching on the spring — it is none other than the Old Tippler's Pavilion, of which wonder who was the builder? It was a wise monk who lived in the mountain, of which wonder who entitled the name? It was no one but the prefect himself who offered his own nickname.

Once the prefect drank wine with his guests here and very soon he got a bit tipsy after only several sips. As he was the oldest among them, he was therefore teasing himself "an old tippler".

A tippler's delight lay not in wine but in mountains and waters. The delight to enjoy mountains and waters came from the bottom of his heart, and relied on wine as well.

So there you have it.

LOVE CHILD WATCH....Email from a reader:

I would like you to stay on top of this McCain story. If it gets dug into deep enough, I'm hoping we will eventually find out that McCain has been having an affair with David Broder.

Consider it done....

CASTRO'S LEGACY....Ezra Klein recommends Tony Karon on Fidel Castro. He's right: it's a nice piece.

JOHN McCAIN AND THE TELECOM LOBBYIST....OK, let's dive into the John McCain story. According to a heavily padded piece in the New York Times today, several of Mr. Straight Talk's aides became concerned during the 2000 campaign that he was spending a wee bit too much time with an attractive, 32-year-old telecom lobbyist named Vicki Iseman:

In 1999 she began showing up so frequently in his offices and at campaign events that staff members took notice. One recalled asking, "Why is she always around?"

....A former campaign adviser described being instructed to keep Ms. Iseman away from the senator at public events, while a Senate aide recalled plans to limit Ms. Iseman's access to his offices.

In interviews, the two former associates said they joined in a series of confrontations with Mr. McCain, warning him that he was risking his campaign and career. Both said Mr. McCain acknowledged behaving inappropriately and pledged to keep his distance from Ms. Iseman. The two associates, who said they had become disillusioned with the senator, spoke independently of each other and provided details that were corroborated by others.

Separately, a top McCain aide met with Ms. Iseman at Union Station in Washington to ask her to stay away from the senator. John Weaver, a former top strategist and now an informal campaign adviser, said in an e-mail message that he arranged the meeting after "a discussion among the campaign leadership" about her.

Josh Marshall thinks there's more here than meets the eye:

At the moment it seems to me that we have a story from the Times that reads like it's had most of the meat lawyered out of it. And a lot of miscellany and fluff has been packed in where the meat was.

....I find it very difficult to believe that the Times would have put their chin so far out on this story if they didn't know a lot more than they felt they could put in the article, at least on the first go....Equally telling [] is the McCain camp's response and their clear unwillingness to address or deny any the key charges of the piece. (Read the statement closely. It's all bluster.)

Radar reports that the Times, which has been chasing this story at least since December, only published now because it was forced into it:

Michael Isikoff of Newsweek and Michael Calderone of Politico were two of the reporters at rival publications who were chasing the Times story. Calderone was particularly well informed about the details of the Times investigation.

Over at Politico, though, Calderone says it was the New Republic who forced their hand:

According to [campaign advisor Charles] Black, the Times only went with the story now because The New Republic was set to run a piece next Monday about internal dissensions at the paper over whether to run the long-held article.

After the TNR reporter, Gabriel Sherman, began making phone calls to the Times and others outside the paper, they decided to publish, Black alleged.

And TNR says this:

The McCain campaign is apparently blaming TNR for forcing the Times' hand on this story. We can't yet confirm that. But we can say this: TNR correspondent Gabe Sherman is working on a piece about the Times' foot-dragging on the McCain story, and the back-and-forth within the paper about whether to publish it. Gabe's story will be online tomorrow.

That sure sounds like a confirmation to me, but I guess we'll find out more when Sherman's piece is posted. Meanwhile, over at Swampland, McCain aide Mark Salter says the whole story is a load of hooey:

Salter also said that the Senator would soon release statements from those people interviewed by the Times for the story — "dozens" according to him — who denied many of the facts alleged in the story (including Iseman's supposedly frequent presence in the Senate office), but who were not quoted in the piece. The Times also states that the lobbyist "accompanied" McCain to fundraisers. Salter was emphatic: "She ATTENDED McCain fundrasiers, she didn't ACCOMPANY McCain."

I guess that's enough for now. It's hard to say exactly what trajectory this story is going to take — McCain is a hypocrite? The media is corrupt? Disgruntled ex-aides can be a real problem? — but it's sure getting massive attention right now. It's not really ignorable.

NON BLOGGING....I'm having a hard time lately deciding what not to blog about. For example: Should I not blog about the Obama plagiarism non-scandal, surely the silliest campaign kerfuffle since — well, since the beginning of the month at least? So far I've managed to not blog about this very successfully.

Or how about the Obama backlash meme? I failed to not blog about that, and got several emails telling me that I was just feeding the meme by commenting on it. Which is true. And yet, it was all over the place. To ignore it seemed like putting my head in the sand.

Then, today, we have the kinda-sorta-maybe-John-McCain-had-a-non-affair non-story in the New York Times. Should I not blog about that? If I didn't, I think I'd be the only blogger in the galaxy to avoid it.

I'm curious: what do y'all think about this? Should I stick to my guns and avoid this kind of stuff? Or is that just a ridiculous affectation? I mean, if it's good enough for CNN and the New York Times, who am I to think I'm too high-minded to blog about stories like this? Do you, my loyal readers, deserve the chance to comment on this stuff even if I think it's silly? Does it seem weird to come over here every day and see boring charts about real wage declines while the entire rest of the world is talking about other, juicier things? Would the blogosphere be a better place if I avoided navel gazing like this in public and just wrote whatever I damn well felt like? Should I just shut up? Inquiring minds want to know.

BANKRUPTCY....Megan McArdle reaches back into prehistory (blog years are like dog years) and explains why the 2005 bankruptcy bill was a bad idea:

There is [] substantial evidence — good, solid research, not awful surveys — that easy bankruptcy is one of the hidden strengths of the American economy. American bankruptcy law offers an interesting natural experiment; the code, meaning the rules under which debts are discharged, is national, but the details of what is exempt from bankruptcy are done at the state level. Researchers consistently find that the more generous the exemptions are, the higher a state's rate of entrepreneurship. When failing is less risky, people are more willing to try.

Given that, my question for the bankruptcy reformers was: what problem does this change solve? It solves a problem for the credit card issuers, to be sure — but it does so by essentially allowing them to rewrite the terms under which they lent money, which was at least as unjust as any unjustice we might have been trying to rectify. The economic benefit of tighter bankruptcy restrictions is that they make banks more willing to lend, but this was hardly a problem for the economy in 2005. And the economic cost is that people are more afraid to take risks with their income.

Quite so. Credit card issuers have computer models that project delinquency rates with stunning accuracy. When, over the past couple of decades, they steadily loosened their standards for handing out cards and urged more and more debt onto less and less creditworthy customers, they knew exactly what would happen: their default rate would go up a few points. That's a risk they decided was worth taking, but then, when default rates in fact went up, they went to Congress to change the rules.

Generous bankruptcy rules tend to be good for the economy, and as long as those rules are relatively stable banks have excellent tools for managing their exposure to them. If they voluntarily choose to increase that exposure, there's no reason Congress should then bail them out later. The 2005 bankruptcy law was a corporate giveaway, not a vital reform.

OBAMA AND PUBLIC FINANCING....Apparently John McCain is going to try to make a big deal out of Barack Obama's pledge a few months ago to "aggressively pursue an agreement with the Republican nominee to preserve a publicly financed general election." Paul Waldman thinks Obama ought to opt out of that pledge by citing 527s as an excuse:

The argument would go something like this: "I said I would 'aggressively pursue an agreement to preserve a publicly financed election' with my Republican opponent. And I'm happy to have our two campaigns sit down and see if there is a way to make the debate between me and John McCain, within the publicly financed system. But as long as there are 'independent' Republican groups out there planning on spending hundreds of millions of dollars attacking me, it would be pretty foolish to lock myself into a spending limit that makes it impossible to respond. So I ask Senator McCain: Can you call off the right-wing hit squad? If you can do that, I'll be only too happy to say we should both accept public financing. But if you can't, I'm not going to sign away my ability to compete."

McCain would squawk, of course, but the real question is whether it would be enough to satisfy the press.

For the record, I think Obama made a pretty clear promise to accept public financing in the general election as long as McCain did likewise, and the 527 dodge is just that: a dodge. At the same time, I also think Obama was foolish to make his promise in the first place.

But whatever Obama does, I think one thing is clear: he should do it quickly. If he's willing to accept public financing, he should say so straight away and put this whole thing to bed. If he's not, he should lay out his reasons and make a clear and unequivocal statement about it right now. It won't hurt him even slightly in the primaries — Hillary doesn't have much of an opening to attack on this issue, and if she's foolish enough to try it might actually help Obama by giving him a chance to show that he's tough enough for bare-knuckled campaigning too — and no matter how the press reacts the issue will die quickly as long as he takes a firm position. If McCain tries to bring it up later, Obama can then wave it off as old news, a tactic that has almost a 100% success record with the mainstream media.

I'm mystified that the Obama campaign doesn't seem to get this. What do they possibly gain by allowing this issue to remain in the news cycle for weeks or months? They should get off the stick.

JUSTICE AT GUANTANAMO....A couple of months ago Col. Morris Davis, chief prosecutor for the military commissions at Guantanamo Bay, wrote an op-ed in the LA Times explaining that he had resigned his post after he was placed in the chain of command under Defense Department General Counsel William Haynes. Today he sheds some further light on his decision in an interview with Ross Tuttle of The Nation:

When asked if he thought the men at Guantánamo could receive a fair trial, Davis provided the following account of an August 2005 meeting he had with Pentagon general counsel William Haynes — the man who now oversees the tribunal process for the Defense Department. "[Haynes] said these trials will be the Nuremberg of our time," recalled Davis, referring to the Nazi tribunals in 1945, considered the model of procedural rights in the prosecution of war crimes. In response, Davis said he noted that at Nuremberg there had been some acquittals, something that had lent great credibility to the proceedings.

"I said to him that if we come up short and there are some acquittals in our cases, it will at least validate the process," Davis continued. "At which point, [Haynes's] eyes got wide and he said, 'Wait a minute, we can't have acquittals. If we've been holding these guys for so long, how can we explain letting them get off? We can't have acquittals, we've got to have convictions.'"

Davis submitted his resignation on October 4, 2007, just hours after he was informed that Haynes had been put above him in the commissions' chain of command. "Everyone has opinions," Davis says. "But when he was put above me, his opinions became orders."

The analogy to Nuremberg, of course, is pretty inexact. Nobody in 1946 was worried about whether a few acquitted Nazis were going to continue the war if they were released. But Davis's interview nonetheless highlights the fact that not only haven't we figured out what to do in cases like this, but the Bush administration isn't even interested in seriously thinking about the questions. What do you do with prisoners captured in a war where there are no uniforms, no fixed field of battle, no beginning, and no end? How do you make sure you treat them fairly? How do you gather evidence and whose testimony do you trust? What's more important in the long run: the moral high ground gained by fair trials — as in Nuremberg — or the possibility that a small number of the guilty will go free and continue to plan acts of terrorism?

These aren't trivial issues, but Haynes's approach — torture is OK, kangaroo trials are OK, just make sure everyone is convicted and locked up forever — is better suited to a banana republic dictatorship than it is to the foremost democracy on the planet. Even Colin Powell has figured that out by now; why can't George Bush?

INVISIBILITY....When I first read this I thought it sounded very cool:

But scientists are not satisfied. Using other new materials, some are trying to manufacture rudimentary Harry Potter-like cloaks that make objects inside of them literally invisible under the right conditions — the pinnacle of stealthy technology.

Both advances reflect researchers' growing ability to manipulate light, the fleetest and most evanescent of nature's offerings. The nascent invisibility cloak now being tested, for example, is made of a material that bends light rays "backward," a weird phenomenon thought to be impossible just a few years ago.

Known as transformation optics, the phenomenon compels some wavelengths of light to flow around an object like water around a stone. As a result, things behind the object become visible while the object itself disappears from view.

But then I thought twice about it. After all, there are two sides to this (no pun intended): the coolness of invisibility for me vs. the extreme annoyance of invisibility for all the rest of you. How does this balance out?

In my case, pretty clearly on the non-invisibility side. After all, I don't really have much use for being invisible, do I? I work at home, I'm not excited by the prospect of risk-free shoplifting, and it would probably scare the hell out of the cats. On the downside, other people being invisible could become a very serious pain very quickly. Just imagine what Michelle Malkin could do with it.

So here's today's question for you. Not "Would you like the power of invisibility?" Rather, "Would you like other people to have the power of invisibility?" Well, would you?

CHART OF THE DAY.... After several years of the most sluggish economic expansion on record, wages for non-managerial workers finally turned up in 2007. But not for long. As this EPI chart shows, in October the growth halted and for the past three months it's been, once again, negative:

A year ago, real hourly and weekly earnings grew on a yearly basis by over 2%; this January, they are both down by about 1%. Note also that over the past two months, due to the decline in average weekly hours — a function of the weakening job market — real weekly earnings are falling more quickly than hourly earnings.

But don't worry. I'm sure another tax cut for the rich is in the hopper to fix this all up.

HUNDRED DOLLAR OIL....Via Brad DeLong, Jim Hamilton reviews some recent economic data and suggests that although oil at $100.01 might indeed be a sign of surging inflation, there are other possibilities too:

[Alternatively] you could try a line that to me seems a bit more natural: incoming data aren't confirming the initial notion held by many that a recession began in December. If so, it means that the Fed's easing will come to an end within a few months, and that the demand for oil, copper, and most everything else is going to be stronger than many of us had been anticipating as of a few weeks earlier.

If so, $100/barrel might not be as bad news as you thought.

So: we're not headed for recession, therefore demand for oil will shoot up later this year and prices are rising now in anticipation.

Well, sure. I guess that's possible, if unconvincing. But what struck me in the news reports about oil breaking the $100 barrier was the chatter about OPEC cutting production rates at its next meeting in March. The explanations were the usual ones: inventories are now at reasonable levels and OPEC always cuts production in the spring anyway. So, you know, it's not a big deal.

But this sets off alarm klaxons in my brain. It doesn't really matter whether the reason for increasing demand is economic optimism, soaring growth in China, or anything else. If it's really true that demand is high and likely to get higher — and oil at $100 a barrel certainly suggests this in the strongest possible way — then why would OPEC be talking about production cuts? Even just as saber rattling, what's the point? Are they trying to drive prices even higher? That makes no sense.

So what does make sense? My guess is that they're playing games: announce the possibility of cuts, and then, when production quotas stay level after all, everyone breathes a sigh of relief. And once again we're all distracted from the very real prospect that, quite likely, keeping production level is the best OPEC can do these days. They can't increase production anymore — not for long and not in serious quantities, anyway. Iraq is pretty much the only Middle Eastern country left with any spare pumping capacity, but for obvious reasons it can't take advantage of that at the moment.

The latest oil news is not just a short-term spike. Oil prices have been climbing steadily for six years now, and if OPEC had any real control over their pumping capacity they've had plenty of time to demonstrate it. The fact that they haven't, and are continuing to do everything they can to talk down the possibility, speaks volumes.

INFLATION = 4.3%....The headline inflation rate for 2007 is now official:

The Consumer Price Index rose 0.4 percent in January, a bigger gain than economists had predicted. Over the last 12 months, the index has surged by 4.3 percent, one of the highest year-over-year rates in decades, the Labor Department said.

....The core rate is 2.5 percent above its level in January 2007, above the Fed's recognized comfort zone ceiling of 2 percent.

Italics mine. I don't have any special point to make about this except to call attention to the numbers themselves. A lot of people — including a lot of reporters — are still vaguely under the impression that inflation is running at the same low rate it's been running at for the past decade. It's not. The CPI was up 4.3% last year, which means that any growth rate less than that is negative in real terms. That applies to interest rates, retail sales figures, government outlays, wage increases, etc. etc.

I'm just pointing this out as a public service. As always, "Economists predict that inflation will taper off by the second half of this year." And maybe it will. But for now it is what it is.

CONVENTIONAL WISDOM ECHO....Sometimes there's nothing to do except agree with the conventional wisdom, so I guess that's what I'll do. Barack Obama absolutely crushed Hillary Clinton tonight, and Texas and Ohio are now the mother of all firewalls. If Hillary doesn't notch up solid wins there, it's all over. And since Obama usually does better the longer he has to campaign, the two week stretch between now and March 5th probably works to his advantage.

Unless the press decides they're tired of him, of course. Then all bets are off.

By the way, was it just me or did John McCain look unusually scripted and robotic tonight? His heart really didn't seem to be in his victory speech.

JOHN McCAIN'S IDEAS....Fareed Zakaria writes in Newsweek today that the reason conservatism seems so tired these days is that conservatives are still fighting the ghosts of the 70s and 80s. But all those hoary old right-wing warhorses, which got cheers when tax rates were high and judges were forcing parents to bus their kids to faraway schools, now seem about as relevant as attacking the tin trust:

Today's world has a different set of problems. A robust economy has not lifted the median wages of Americans by much. Most workers are insecure about health care, and most corporations are unnerved by its rising costs. Globalization is seen as a threat, bringing fierce competition from dozens of countries. The danger of Islamic militancy remains real and lasting, but few Americans believe they understand the phenomenon or know how best to combat it.

So far, so good. And before I go on, let me say that I like Zakaria. I always wish he didn't seem to have his finger to the wind quite so much, but he's a smart guy and an engaging writer. So what explains the final paragraph of his column, which seemingly pops up out of nowhere?

Political ideologies do not exist in a vacuum. They need to meet the problems of the world as it exists. Ordinary conservatives understand this, which may be why — despite the urgings of their ideological gurus — they have voted for McCain. He seems to understand that a new world requires new thinking.

Where did that come from? Whatever else you can say about McCain, "new thinking" pretty clearly isn't part of his appeal. On foreign policy, he's for the status quo squared. His only real problem with George Bush is that he hasn't been militaristic enough. And on domestic policy he's practically famous for not paying attention to much of anything beyond his two or three pet issues. If running for president requires him to embrace Jerry Falwell, swear fealty to supply-side tax drivel, and repudiate his own immigration plan — well, he's perfectly willing to do it. As near as I can tell, he really doesn't care enough about any of this stuff to think it's worth standing up against.

Personally, I think the Republican electorate did a pretty good job of choosing the least repellent of the candidates they were offered. But they sure didn't do it because John McCain was the candidate of fresh ideas. Where did Zakaria come up with that?

SURVEYING THE MILITARY....Foreign Policy features a survey this month of "3,400 officers holding the rank of major or lieutenant commander and above from across the services, active duty and retired, general officers and field-grade officers." It's hard to be encouraged by the findings, though. Here's a small sample.

On torture: 53% say it's never acceptable. It's nice that this view got at least majority support, but the 44% who disagreed is a discouragingly high number.

On Iraq: 56% say the war hasn't broken the military. That's another very thin majority. Not only do 42% think the war has broken the military, but an overwhelming 88% think it has "stretched the U.S. military dangerously thin."

And then we have the results on the right. Given various ways to increase enlistment, only 22% of the senior officer corps was receptive to the idea of allowing gays and lesbians to serve openly. Compare that to the 38% who supported reinstating the draft (!) and the 58% who thought it was OK to lower educational standards. You'd think these guys could have made just a wee bit more progress than this over the past couple of decades.

YOU SAY KOSOVO....Who says Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama don't have distinct policy differences? Moira Whelan offers up this fascinating tidbit:

I was looking at the statements released by Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama regarding the announcement of Kosovo's independence....There are some interesting differences between the two statements that I'm sure will not be lost on a number of voters concerned with this issue who live in Ohio and Pennsylvania, let alone leaders in the rest of the world.

First and most notable is the Clinton reference to "Kosova" and the Obama reference to "Kosovo." Arguments differ, but suffice to say "Kosova" is considered the pro-Albanian reference while "Kosovo" is the historical name of the region dating back centuries. This may seem subtle to some, but speaks volumes to those who follow the issue.

Question: Is the use of Kosova intended to pander to the pro-Albanian vote? Or is it more of an anti-Serb thing? Seems like more of the latter, and it's hard to figure out what good that does Hillary or anybody else. Still, since I'm obviously in a mood to document campaign trivia today, I thought I'd pass this along.

EQUAL TIME FOR HILLARY....An Obama backlash might not make any difference if Hillary Clinton's campaign keeps taking on water. Just today, we learned that:

• HRC was unable to put together a full slate of delegates for the Pennsylvania primary. In practice this doesn't matter (they'll be assigned later if necessary), but it demonstrates once again just how unprepared the Clinton team was for a campaign that extended beyond Super Tuesday.

• A "high-ranking Clinton official" confirmed to Politico's Roger Simon that Hillary would try to pick off Obama's pledged delegates prior to the convention. Not his superdelegates, who are fair game, but the delegates that Obama has won in the various primaries and caucuses so far. This strategy just reeks of desperation and prompts two questions: (a) why would she do it? and (b) why would a high-ranking campaign official actually admit it? [UPDATE: The Clinton campaign categorically denies they plan to do this.]

• SurveyUSA reports that Clinton is only barely ahead of Obama in Texas, one of her "firewall" states.
  

In some ways this is a game of trivia, things that will all be forgotten almost as soon as they're reported. But a steady drumbeat of this kind of stuff can be deadly, especially for a candidate banking on her experience and party connections. She really needs to step up her game.

"FIRST TIME"?....Speaking of Obama backlash, could we be in for some Michelle Obama backlash as well? We've already been through the "I'm not sure I'd campaign for Hillary" thing, and now we have the "For the first time in my adult lifetime, I am really proud of my country" gaffe. James Joyner rounds up the reaction so far, mostly from conservatives. But I'll bet Hillary supporters will jump on board any second now.

BYE BYE, FIDEL....Well, "Fidel Castro Retires" sure isn't the headline I expected to see when I woke up this morning. But I guess that's why they call it news, right?

Anyway, good riddance Fidel, and a warm norteamericano welcome to Raul Castro. Or something. Meet the new boss, etc. I can't say that I have any idea what changes this will bring to Cuba itself, but speaking from a purely parochial perspective it would certainly be nice if we could use this as a fig leaf to justify ending our insane Cuba policy of the past 50 years. Steve Clemons is right when he says:

Of all the low cost opportunities to demonstrate a new and different US style of engagement with the world, Cuba is at the top of the list. Opening family travel — and frankly all travel — between Cuba and the US, and ending the economic embargo will provide new encounters, new impressions, and the kind of people-to-people diplomacy that George W. Bush, John Bolton, Richard Cheney, and Jesse Helms run scared of.

This is a huge potential pivot point in US-Cuba relations. Will Hillary Clinton step up to the plate — and will Obama move beyond the somewhat timid proposals he offered previously and go to the gold standard in US-Cuba relations articulated by Senator Chris Dodd?

And will John McCain just ignore history's offered up opportunity or will he continue to paw the dirt and blow steam at the island nation just off the Florida coast?

The accession of Raul Castro is unlikely to appease the electorally important (but less important all the time) Cuban exile community in Florida, but why not try pandering to the nation's cigar smokers instead? "Vote for me and Montecristo #2s will be legal again!" I've heard worse campaign slogans.

THE OBAMA BUBBLE....Paul Krugman this morning:

One thing I worry about a lot if Obama is the Dem nominee — and he's surely the frontrunner now — is that there will be a backlash against Obamamania. Actually, it's already starting — probably too late to have much effect on the nomination fight, but in plenty of time to affect the general election.

I hope I'm just a cynical baby boomer who has never really trusted any politician since 1968. But I just have a very bad feeling about the way things are going.

Right on cue, here's David Brooks tonight:

Obama says he is practicing a new kind of politics, but why has his PAC sloshed $698,000 to the campaigns of the superdelegates, according to the Center for Responsive Politics? Is giving Robert Byrd's campaign $10,000 the kind of change we can believe in?

If he values independent thinking, why is his the most predictable liberal vote in the Senate? A People for the American Way computer program would cast the same votes for cheaper.

....Does The Changemaker have the guts to take on the special interests in his own party — the trial lawyers, the teachers' unions, the AARP?

The Gang of 14 created bipartisan unity on judges, but Obama sat it out. Kennedy and McCain created a bipartisan deal on immigration. Obama opted out of the parts that displeased the unions. Sixty-eight senators supported a bipartisan deal on FISA. Obama voted no. And if he were president now, how would the High Deacon of Unity heal the breach that split the House last week?

A "backlash" from a conservative like Brooks is hardly a surprise. Still, I think Krugman is right: bubbles always burst, and Obama has been riding a major league bubble for months now. Before too much longer his supporters are going to come down to earth. Reporters will start wondering why Obama doesn't like to talk to them very much — and then they'll get bored and cynical and start doing to him what they did to Howard Dean in 2004. John McCain is going to find his rhythm (though he hasn't yet) and start making some effective jabs.

This backlash meme is already widespread, and you can almost feel in the air that it's about to explode into a feeding frenzy. In other words, it ain't over yet. Wisconsin and the two weeks after it should be interesting, shouldn't they?

MAKE IT STOP....Some blog posts can give you nightmares just by showing up in your RSS feed. Like this one:

VIDEO: Highlights from the Power Line Book of the Year ceremony. Henry Kissinger, Norman Podhoretz, Mark Steyn, and more.

Brrr. Mark Gisleson has the appropriate response (scroll down a bit for the picture).

PRESIDENTS DAY....Today's topics in the liberal blogosphere appear to be these: John McCain is a hack no matter what Nick Kristof credulously believes; the Clinton campaign is lame for not figuring out the Texas delegate allocation rules until now; there's a primary in Wisconsin tomorrow; and superdelegates either should or shouldn't exercise their own judgment when the Democratic convention rolls around.

Also: Kosovo is now independent.

And with that, I'm planning to take the rest of Presidents Day off. If you're off too, enjoy yourself. If you're not, work extra hard to honor two presidents in one day. See you tomorrow.

"BUSH-McCAIN"....Elisabeth Bumiller presents us with a charming President's Day story about both an actual president and a man who would be president:

Senator John McCain's campaign advisers will ask the White House to deploy President Bush for major Republican fund-raising, but they do not want the president to appear too often at his side, top aides to Mr. McCain said Sunday.

....Democrats, meanwhile, have been using every opportunity to link Mr. McCain to Mr. Bush, even defining Mr. McCain's candidacy as part of a "Bush-McCain" ticket that they say will essentially give the president another term.

Who will win this exciting battle? The answer, as always, depends on....our friends in the press! Stay tuned.

ROUTER WOES....Last night I went to Micro Center and told one of the salesguys that the signal strength on my WiFi router was lousy. He instantly told me not to screw around with special antennas or anything like that, but to dive in and replace my old G router with a shiny new N router. And luckily for me, they had the Linksys WRT150N on sale for a mere $89. He assured me it was so powerful I'd be lucky if my neighbors didn't start complaining.

So I got one. Installation did not go as smoothly as one might hope, but it's now up and running. Signal strength upstairs, however, still sucks. In fact, it might even be worse than before. Anybody have any relevant experience with these things that they'd like to share?

And speaking of routers, what's the deal with WPA2? I should use it, shouldn't I? First, though, I guess I have to download the appropriate XP update from Microsoft, which doesn't come preinstalled on new machines even though it was released nearly three years ago. Blah. Then I have to convince the router that it has a wired connection to my desktop machine. Half of the setup software believes this, but the other half doesn't. And Linksys tech support doesn't answer. Double blah.

Moral of the story: After spending a hundred bucks and mucking around for a couple of hours, I can say that I'm manifestly no worse off than I was before. Aren't computers great?

UPDATE: Oh hell. The Dell Latitude we bought apparently isn't N-compatible. This explains why the N router isn't doing any better than the old one. Guess I should have gotten the super-duper antenna after all.

RESEARCH ON THE WEB....The world is full of advice on how to do research. There's general advice that applies to research of any kind. There's particular advice for particular fields. There's advice that applies to archival research and advice that applies to field research. There's advice for novices and advice for graduate students.

But how about bloggers doing research on the web? Here are five pieces of advice for them. Enjoy.

1. If you use Google (and who doesn't?) don't use the default page. Use the Advanced Search page instead:

   http://www.google.com/advanced_search

   Sure, the Advanced Search page is sort of a crutch for people who haven't memorized Google's set of Boolean operators. But that's most of us, right? And since any advanced search you use is better than any advanced search you don't, you're better off with the crutch than with nothing. So bookmark the Advanced Search page and use it.

   While you're at it, you should also free yourself from the tyranny of getting only ten results per page. The best hits aren't always in the top ten, and you're more likely to see them if you just have to scroll down a single page rather than going back and forth between different result pages. So go to http://www.google.com/preferences and set your default to 50 results per page.

2. Whenever you read something by someone you don't know, Google 'em. Find out what axe they have to grind. Are they liberal or conservative? Do they work for a think tank? Do they have a history of being obsessed by weird stuff? What expertise do they have? The web allows you to root out this stuff in less than a minute or two for most people. Take advantage of it.

3. If you're writing about a specific topic that you're not that familiar with, take a minute and find an article that provides a quick outline of the general subject area. Even a modest 60-second familiarity with the lay of the land can save you a lot of grief and keep you from making an idiot of yourself.

4. Speaking of which, use Wikipedia. No, it's not 100% reliable. And given the nature of the internet community, it's better on some topics than others. You're more likely to get a useful description of the binomial theorem than you are of the objective correlative in Heart of Darkness.

   But all reference works have limitations, and virtually all popular references should be taken as starting points, not final authorities. And that's how you should use Wikipedia: as a starting point. The scope of Wikipedia is vast; it's extremely useful for recent events; it frequently does a decent job of summarizing a topic; and most articles come with a lot of highly useful links. Sure, you have to be careful with Wikipedia, but you should always be careful anyway.

5. And while we're on the subject, always click the link. The web makes checking sources so easy that there's no excuse for failing to at least skim the primary links in an article. Click, click, click!
   

ARE YOU INTERESTED?....What is it that makes something interesting? Over at The Monkey Cage, Lee Sigelman glosses Paul Silvia on the subject and tells us there are two primary attibutes that make something interesting. The first, of course, is a particular event's novelty. If it's just the same old stuff, it's not interesting.

Second, though, is the event's potential comprehensibility, which involves considerations of whether one has the skills, knowledge, and resources to deal with the event. As Silvia puts it, "Concepts confusing to novices can be interesting to experts because experts feel able to understand them." Thus, if something I consider new and surprising happens and if understanding it seems to fall within the realm of what I consider possible for me, I'm likely to find it interesting and worth pursuing. But if understanding it seems hopeless to me, I'm likely to set it aside and wait for something else to grab me. Or just to sleep.

This is one of the virtues of blogs: at their best, they make things comprehensible that other mediums don't. Not for everybody, of course: even the chatty first-person style of the blogosphere is too opaque for some people, and the growing use of insidery jargon can sometimes make it as hard to get started with the blogosphere as it is to pick up Lost in the middle of a season.

Still, for some people it makes politics and policy interesting in a way that nothing else does. And lots of interested people is a good thing, right?

HOW DUMB ARE WE?....What a remarkable essay this is. Susan Jacoby spends 1,500 words telling us that Americans are getting dumber but doesn't offer a single piece of evidence to support this notion. Not one. She tells us that we're reading fewer books. She tells us that it's bad for toddlers to watch a lot of TV. She tells us that campaign soundbites are getting shorter. She tells us that FDR urged people to buy maps so they could follow his fireside chats during World War II. She tells us that kids today don't care much about geography.

But dumber implies a comparison over time. It demands evidence that kids (or adults, for that matter) are less capable, less knowledgable, or less adept than they were 50 years ago. And who knows? Maybe they are. But I'm only willing to be persuaded if Jacoby is willing to offer up some actual evidence first.

REPUBLICANS IN TROUBLE?.... Democrats are ahead by 14 percentage points in Gallup's latest generic congressional poll. That's good. It's always better to be ahead than behind.

But the number itself is misleading. As near as I can tell, Democrats routinely poll about ten points better than Republicans in these polls early in the year, so their real lead right now is probably more like three or four points. If this holds up through the summer, it means that Dems are likely to hold onto their current majority and maybe even pick up a few seats. If it expands, the results might be even better. At the very least, though, it's good news that Democrats are polling so well even though they control Congress and congressional approval ratings are in the toilet. Apparently voters aren't blaming them for the gridlock.

SATELLITE, SATELLITE, BURNING BRIGHT....So what's the deal on that spy satellite we're shooting down? Noah Shachtman talked today to a "veteran space security specialist" who said he was pretty skeptical of the official story playing up the danger from the satellite's hydrazine fuel tank. Rather, his guess is that we've been itching to do this ever since the Chinese shot down a satellite of their own last year, and this is just a convenient excuse:

My real concern is that this is simply a knee-jerk reaction made by the Administration in response to the purported threat by the Chinese. Since the April 2007 ASAT [anti-satellite] test, there have been rumors and whispers going around that the Administration and like-minded individuals are looking for more sticks (instead of carrots) to use against China. While this "shoot down" is not a direct action against China, it would be a clear signal that the US can possess an active ASAT capability at any time if it so desires. That is a serious development as the previous US ASAT system using F-15s was mothballed in the 1980's.

There are many significant political ramifications that would happen as a result of this. The US has been berating the Chinese on their ASAT test but now demonstrate that it is okay as long as it occurs at a low enough altitude to prevent long-lasting debris and can "save lives". This is close to an implied "ok" for the US and other nations to conduct more ASAT tests, which could open another arms race.

There's more at the link. It's all very mysterious.

FRIDAY CAT VLOGGING....I have newfound respect for Steven Spielberg. Last week I got the bright idea of creating a cat video, and as soon as the thought entered my head I walked upstairs and found Inkblot plucking treats out of the air from Marian's outstretched hand. It was video gold!

Now, you might be thinking that 20 seconds of a cat eating treats is nothing to get too cocky about. But let me tell you: that remains my best effort even after a further week of intensive feline moviemaking. For starters, as we all know, cats mostly sleep all day. Then, whenever they started doing something, I didn't have my camera handy. So I zipped off to get my camera, and by the time I got back they were just lying around again. Are they unionized or something?

Anyway, long story short, Domino presented a considerable vlogging challenge. But I promised you a Domino video, and a Domino video you shall have. It's called "Domino on the Chaise Lounge," and the title pretty much speaks for itself. I had another one with sound effects in the same genre, but it made Domino look fat and you guys are hell on fat cats. So you get this one instead.

I learned something new this week, too. I figured that since YouTube compresses the video to 320x240, I might as well shoot at that resolution to begin with. But no. The quality of this week's offering is much worse than last week's video, which was shot at 640x480. So although the higher resolution takes longer to upload, I guess I'll go back to using it. Nothing's too good for our resident housecats, after all.

UPDATE: In comments, disparue says this thing is a "chaise longue," not a chaise lounge. And that's correct. You learn something new every day.

However, I fear it's too late. A Google search for chaise lounge returns 2 million hits vs. 1.1 million for chaise longue. I suspect that this particular bastardization of the language is here to stay.

ECONOMIC UPDATE....The New York Times reports the latest batch of bad economic news:

The price of imports rose 1.7 percent in January and was up 13.7 year over year, the highest annual rate since the Labor Department records began in 1983....Manufacturers' woes were reflected in the Empire State Manufacturing survey, a measure of business conditions in New York State. The index fell in February to -11.7, its lowest reading since April 2003....Meanwhile, a closely watched measure of consumer confidence, the Reuters/University of Michigan survey, fell to 69.6 in February, the lowest reading since February 1992. It had stood at 78.4 in January.

Meanwhile, here in Southern California where I'm typing this, median home prices are down 18% from their peak and home sales are at their lowest level since records started being kept. And the Fed? They're lowering interest rates but it doesn't seem to be doing any good.

Blecch.

TELECOM IMMUNITY....I mentioned yesterday that although I oppose telecom immunity in the FISA bill currently being considered by Congress, I'm not "hellbent" on it. Several readers were unhappy about that and wanted to know exactly what I meant. So here it is.

First, let's set the stage right after 9/11. Al-Qaeda had hijacked four airplanes and driven them into three buildings, killing over 3,000 people. We didn't know if more attacks were imminent. A week later people started dying from letters contaminated with anthrax and we had no idea who was behind them or if more was to come. There were seemingly credible reports at the time that Osama bin Laden might be close to acquiring a nuclear bomb. Our intelligence services were essentially running both deaf and blind.

As I've mentioned before, in a genuine national emergency like this I don't have a problem with the president assuming extraordinary powers for a short period. If, right after 9/11, George Bush asked telecom companies to open up their data streams to the NSA for a few weeks or months on an emergency basis until legislation could be passed formalizing new rules for data collection, I'd expect them to go ahead and comply.

I realize, of course, that not everyone agrees with this position. Some people have a more absolutist view of the law and believe there's no excuse for breaking or stretching it regardless of circumstances. But I'm not one of them: as long as it's limited to a short while after 9/11, I'm OK with an expanded surveillance program.

The problem, of course, is that it didn't go on for only a short while. After things had quieted down, Bush's Department of Justice produced memos justifying the continuing legality of the program even without enabling legislation. Congress was, as near as I can tell, informed about what was going on and offered no resistance. (A few Democrats have since weaseled a bit about whether they were really, truly informed, but frankly, I don't believe them. I think they knew what was going on and were too scared to register any complaints.)

And so the program continued. And the telecom companies were stuck. They couldn't go public, obviously. And there was never any appropriate time to suddenly pipe up and stop cooperating. The administration argued that the program was perfectly legal even under current law, and all along there appeared to be bipartisan support for that position in Congress. So everything just drifted along until James Risen blew the whistle in the New York Times.

And now who's being asked to take the fall? The president? The Department of Justice? Congress? Of course not. It's the telecom companies who are being sued.

Now, it's inevitable that some people are going to read this and think that I'm concocting some kind of defense for telecom immunity. I'm not. I oppose it. In the end, the telecoms are big boys with big legal staffs, and they knew exactly what they were doing — and providing them with retroactive immunity at this point sets a terrible precedent and creates all sorts of perverse incentives to break the law in the future. At this point, if they think they can make a case that they acted in good faith and shouldn't be held accountable, they need to make it to a judge and jury. If they have a good case, they'll win. If they don't, they'll lose.

Still and all, the reason I'm not hellbent on this view is because it doesn't seem right that the least culpable party is the one getting taken to court, while the most culpable parties — the president, the DOJ, and both Democrats and Republicans in Congress — get off scot free. Sure, that's life. It's unfair sometimes. I get it. But I don't have to like it.

UPDATE: Just for the record, the Senate version of telecom immunity in S.2248 applies only to activities taken after 9/11. There have been reports of possibly illegal NSA/telecom activities being initiated several months before 9/11, but S.2248 wouldn't apply to them. Here's the relevant text:

[A] covered civil action...shall be promptly dismissed, if the Attorney General certifies to the court that (A) the assistance alleged to have been provided by the electronic communication service provider was (i) in connection with an intelligence activity involving communications that was (I) authorized by the President during the period beginning on September 11, 2001, and ending on January 17, 2007; and (II) designed to detect or prevent a terrorist attack, or activities in preparation for a terrorist attack, against the United States....

If I'm misreading this, or reading the wrong version of the bill, please let me know in comments.

UPDATE 2: Josh Patashnik notes that it was entirely possible to target the more culpable parties if we'd wanted to: "There was an ideal solution to this problem: the Specter–Whitehouse substitution amendment, which would have allowed lawsuits to go forward but would have substituted the United States as a defendant, letting the telecoms off the hook." Needless to say, the White House opposed this.

QUOTE OF THE DAY....From Ezra Klein, remarking on Hillary Clinton's campaign:

During periods when I see more of Hillary Clinton and less of her campaign, I'm more favorably disposed. During periods when I see less of Hillary Clinton and more of her campaign, I'm less favorably disposed.

This, mind you, comes in a post in which he says he thinks Clinton "has run a pretty good campaign." I wonder what a bad campaign would look like?

DEAD ZONES....Marine researchers appear to have figured out the cause of the massive low-oxygen "dead zones" that have reappeared off the coast of Oregon every summer since 2002:

"We couldn't believe our eyes," [Jane] Lubchenco said, recalling her initial impression of the carnage brought about by oxygen-starved waters. "It was so overwhelming and depressing. It appeared that everything that couldn't swim or scuttle away had died.

Upon further study, Lubchenco and other marine ecologists at Oregon State University concluded that that the undersea plague appears to be a symptom of global warming. In a study released today in the journal Science, the researchers note how these low-oxygen waters have expanded north into Washington and crept south as far as the California state line. And, they appear to be as regular as the tides, a lethal cycle that has repeated itself every summer and fall since 2002.

"We seem to have crossed a tipping point," Lubchenco said. "Low-oxygen zones off the Northwest coast appear to be the new normal."

....If this theory holds up, it means that global warming and the build-up of heat-trapping gases are bringing about oceanic changes beyond those previously documented: a rise in sea level, more acidic ocean water and the bleaching of coral reefs.

Probably nothing to worry about, though. Just more marine biologist fearmongering. After all, there are probably benefits to massive oxygen-starved zones in the ocean, right? And malaria abatement in Africa is more important in any case. What's more, none of this would be a problem in the first place if Al Gore would stop flying around in a private jet. Or something.

Move along. Nothing to see here.

UPDATE: Hey, it turns out there are benefits to massive oxygen-starved zones in the ocean. Well, one benefit, anyway. If you happen to be a giant squid. Details here.

RUMORS AND REPORTS OF RUMORS....Why are we planning to shoot down an "out-of-control, school-bus-size U.S. spy satellite"? The official story is that it's carrying 1,000 pounds of toxic fuel that could kill a bunch of people if doesn't burn up on reentry. But not everyone is buying the official story:

The announcement set off an immediate debate on defense blogs and among experts who questioned whether there is an ulterior motive. Some experts said the military is seizing an opportunity to test its controversial missile defense system against a satellite target.

But others noted that the Standard Missile-3 has successfully been tested against warhead targets, which are far smaller than the satellite.

"There has to be another reason behind this," said Michael Krepon, co-founder of the Henry L. Stimson Center, a liberal arms-control advocacy organization. "In the history of the space age, there has not been a single human being who has been harmed by man-made objects falling from space."

....[Gen. James] Cartwright said that the Aegis missile system aboard the cruiser would fire an SM-3 missile with a heat-seeking nose that destroys its target by hitting it, not blowing it up. The missile, known as Block III, was developed primarily for intermediate missile defense against warheads coming in at low altitude. The Navy has spent the past three weeks modifying missile software normally set for hitting much higher targets, he said.

Asked whether the plan is really an attempt to test the Aegis system as an anti-satellite system — which would be a very controversial step internationally — Cartwright said the amount of special modifications being done to the programs used to guide the system would "not be transferable to fleet use."

Yeah, sure. Personally, I think this is actually an ill-disguised attempt to locate the Lost castaways. And speaking of lame segues, Lost is pretty cool this season, isn't it? Tonight's episode was great.

BUSH IS PISSED....FILM AT 11....I saw this headline on the Washington Post's front page a few minutes ago and thought, WTF? Eve Fairbanks apparently thought the same thing:

Seriously, though, why the hell is this the Post's headline? Here's what happened: House Democrats refused to sign the Senate's version of the FISA bill, which excused the telecom companies for their past surveillance sins, rebuking the Republicans and the Senate. Even more ballsy, the 35-strong liberal bloc in the House knocked down a temporary extension, meaning FISA will probably expire on Friday night. Then the Republicans threw a temper tantrum and walked off the House floor; Bush put out an angry statement — and the tantrum made the headline.

But it's what the Democrats did that was the news! Every time Congressional Democrats do something Bush remotely doesn't like, he puts out an angry statement. It's like writing a story about the Capitol burning down and headlining it, "Many Cameramen Gather at Capitol."

All winter Pelosi et al have been sneered for caving to Republicans; now they're sneered at for getting rebuked by Republicans when they don't cave. If I were Pelosi I'd feel like I couldn't win.

I guess "House Democrats Grow A Pair" probably wouldn't pass muster with the Post's style standards, but surely they could have thought of something? I mean, I can sort of understand why walking off the House floor is news, but Bush putting out an angry statement? You gotta be kidding. It would be news if Bush ever put out a non-angry statement.

WHAT THE FED HEAD SAID....Fed chairman Ben Bernanke testified before Congress today and Brad DeLong provides a pithy summary:

Further cuts in the federal funds rate are on the way. Ben Bernanke is talking about how we are in a slow-moving financial crisis of DeLong Type II: one in which large financial institutions are insolvent — "pressure on bank balance sheets" — and in which lower short-term interest rates and a steeper yield curve are a way of providing institutions with the life jackets they need to paddle to shore.

Well, that sure doesn't sound very optimistic, does it?

HILLARY WINS! (one more delegate)....Everybody laughed last week when I forgot about the provisional ballots and declared Hillary Clinton the winner of the New Mexico primary, but it turns out she won after all. So there.