ROMNEY FOR VEEP?....Will we soon have Mitt to kick around again?

In a surprise to many Republican insiders, former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney is at the top of the vice presidential prospect list for John McCain. But lack of personal chemistry could derail the pick.

"Romney as favorite" is the hot buzz in Republican circles, and top party advisers said the case is compelling.

Like most liberals, I think this is a great idea because it would provide lots of good material for future blog mockery. Still, that's just a personal insta-reaction, and I wouldn't be too quick to write this off as a dumb move. Yes, there's the whole Mormon/evangelical thing, and God knows McCain doesn't need even more problems with the evangelical community. But Romney helps him with conservatives, helps him with fundraising, is unlikely to make any serious gaffes, and can hold his own in a debate. Personal chemistry aside, he might be a fairly shrewd choice.

CHART OF THE DAY....From Andrew Gellman, here's a scatterplot of the social and economic attitudes of adults in the 48 continental U.S. states. (For some reason, Alaska and Hawaii are missing.) There's nothing super surprising here, but it seemed like interesting data to share. Note, for example, that there are several "conservative" states that are relatively liberal on the economic scale (West Virginia and Kentucky), but there are no "liberal" states that are socially conservative. Make of that what you will.

A second graph in the same post breaks down attitudes in each state between Democrats and Republicans and shows that there's far more overlap in social attitudes than in economic attitudes. Discuss.

CLARK ON McCAIN....Today's outrage of the hour involves Wesley Clark. On Face the Nation yesterday he noted that John McCain doesn't really have any wartime command experience:

SCHIEFFER: Can I just interrupt you? I have to say, Barack Obama hasn't had any of these experiences either, nor has he ridden in a fighter plane and gotten shot down.

CLARK: I don't think getting in a fighter plane and getting shot down is a qualification to become president.

Andrew Sullivan is unhappy about this:

Wesley Clark is now and always has been a Clinton-type, but this is pretty revolting. This kind of personal attack was repulsive coming against Kerry from the far right. And it's repulsive the other way round. Both Kerry and McCain served their country honorably; and their records should be revered, period. You can make an argument against McCain's foreign policy experience and judgment on its merits. Do it and leave this crap out of it.

Hold on a second. In the 2004 campaign Kerry made his military record a major part of his campaign, and conservatives pointed out that his naval service 30 years ago didn't necessarily mean he had a strong national security record today. Sure, the Swift Boat attacks were way over the line, but the pushback on "military record = national security chops" was perfectly legitimate politics.

Clark isn't doing anything different here. There are some other, less savory attacks coming from the left that may merit Andrew's ire (see here), but Clark's point is a fair one. It's fair for him to make it and it's fair for McCain's supporters to push back on it. There's nothing out of line here.

RUMORS AND REPORTS OF RUMORS....A reader recommends this Washington Post story as an antidote to today's McClatchy story about the hard times that Republican attack groups have fallen on. Bottom line: maybe conservatives don't need to spend millions of dollars on Swift Boat-style attacks because fringe lunatics are doing all the same work for free. All hail the internet!

CORRELATION, CAUSATION, AND BLOGGING....Kieran Healy is annoyed:

You only have to hang around the world of social science research- or policy-related blogging for a few hours before you come across someone willing to snottily inform you, or some other luckless interlocutor, that although the finding of this or that paper may appeal to you, nevertheless don't you know that Correlation Is Not Causation. Often this seems to be the only thing they know about statistics.

I grudgingly admit that it's a plausible-sounding rule, and in the textbooks and stuff. But, to be honest, I read it too many times in various posts and comments threads the other day, and in my raging pique I found myself thinking that the next time it happened I would say, "That's completely backwards: in fact, causation is just correlation" and fling a copy of Hume's first Enquiry at their head. Or at the screen, I suppose, but that image is less satisfying, because now who's the crank on the internet, etc.

OK, he's kidding. Sort of. But not really. Bloggers are fond of yelling "correlation is not causation" at any piece of research that comes to a conclusion they find distasteful, but what they almost never do is actually read the paper in question, which invariably addresses most of their concerns: research methodology; alternate explanations; potential intervening variables; results of similar studies in the past; shortcomings in the data set; etc. That's not to say that researchers always take every possible problem seriously enough, or that social science papers don't deserve heightened scrutiny. But it is to say that if, in 30 seconds, some possible problem with the research program occurs to you, it's almost a dead certainty that the person with a PhD who performed the study also thought of the same thing. And discusses it in the paper.

At least, that's what's I've found on virtually every occasion when I've cracked open one of these things. The discussion isn't always great, and sometimes it leaves a variety of questions hanging, but it's almost always there. It's true that correlations don't always imply causation, especially if the research is poorly done or the statistical analysis is mangled, but it also turns out, surprisingly enough, that people with doctorates mostly understand this stuff almost as well as bloggers who read the New York Times.

DEPRESSED....McClatchy reports that conservative attack groups are in hibernation this year:

There's no 2008 equivalent to the 2004 Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, which spent $22 million attacking Democrat John Kerry. Prominent groups and donors that played key roles in independent conservative 527 groups four years ago say they're sitting out this election. And while they've raised more than they did at this point four years ago, the independent pro-Republican groups still lag more than $50 million behind pro-Democratic groups.

....At this stage four years ago, the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth had been up and running for more than a month, ripping Kerry's Vietnam record. It started airing its big ads that August.

Another pro-Republican group, Progress for America, aired its first ad criticizing Kerry's national-security record and credentials four years ago this week, the first $1 million salvo of what would be a $35 million barrage in key states.

Today, there are no such groups on the Republican side.

My naive explanation for this is that convervatives are just massively depressed this year. Continuing to try to defend George Bush is a bummer; John McCain isn't really their guy; they don't think they can win; Barack Obama is so talented he scares them; rich people don't feel like wasting their money on a loser; evangelicals are sort of wondering why God has forsaken them; and overall, they're as tired of the war as anyone. Basically, they're having trouble getting out of bed this morning.

Which is all great news. On the other hand, my wife, who hangs out more regularly with normal people than I do, cautions me constantly that she thinks McCain has a better chance than I'm giving him credit for. My analytic side continues not to believe her, but her instincts aren't bad on this kind of thing. So I'll hold off on breaking out the champagne until November.

ADVISING THE IRAQIS....Here's a piece of news that will surprise exactly no one:

A group of American advisers led by a small State Department team played an integral part in drawing up contracts between the Iraqi government and five major Western oil companies to develop some of the largest fields in Iraq, American officials say.

....In their role as advisers to the Iraqi Oil Ministry, American government lawyers and private-sector consultants provided template contracts and detailed suggestions on drafting the contracts, advisers and a senior State Department official said.

"Detailed suggestions" indeed. I think that's what Michael Corleone called it too.

BRINKSMANSHIP IN IRAN....In the New Yorker, Seymour Hersh reports that the Bush administration is stepping up covert action against Iran:

Late last year, Congress agreed to a request from President Bush to fund a major escalation of covert operations against Iran, according to current and former military, intelligence, and congressional sources. These operations, for which the President sought up to four hundred million dollars, were described in a Presidential Finding signed by Bush, and are designed to destabilize the country's religious leadership. The covert activities involve support of the minority Ahwazi Arab and Baluchi groups and other dissident organizations. They also include gathering intelligence about Iran's suspected nuclear-weapons program.

As Hersh acknowledges, operations to destabilize Iran are nothing new. However, this one is bigger and deeper than any of our previous programs, and the question it immediately raises is: are we doing this to prepare the ground for a military strike later in the year? Coincidentally, this week Laura Rozen asked five Middle East experts whether recent actions suggest that either an American or Israeli strike is in the offing, and for the most part they were skeptical:

I still think a strike is still less rather than more likely....Very, very unlikely....The recent war rhetoric coming out of Israel seems more geared towards ensuring that America keeps its military option on the table, than towards signalling that Israel itself is prepared to take military action....I think the likelihood that the US attacks Iran before Bush leaves office to be quite low....

On the other hand, as Danny Postel points out, "One thing we do know is that the intellectual runway is being slicked for an attack....The writing on the wall looks deadly serious to me. I'd rather fall for the hawks' propaganda than awake one morning to find out that I'd underestimated the threat. But even if it is just posturing, it's a very dangerous game with potentially cataclysmic consequences."

Both pieces are worth reading to get a broad picture of what's really going on. And if you have any questions for Laura's panel of experts (Daniel Levy, Yossi Melman, Trita Parsi, Danny Postel, and Jacqueline Shire), they'll be guest posting and taking questions all week over at the Mother Jones blog. Head on over if you want to join in the chat.

THE OMNIVORE'S DILEMMA....By the way, the clear winner from my book thread the other day was Michael Pollan's The Omnivore's Dilemma. I'll try to gather together some of the other widely recommended books from that thread later, but this one must have gotten at least a dozen shoutouts just in the first 50 comments alone. It's a great choice since it's otherwise not the kind of book I'd notice, which means I'm almost certain to learn some interesting new stuff. Thanks, everyone!

FIREFOX 3....So I installed Firefox 3 a couple of days ago and everything seems....fine. Memory use is definitely better, which was one of v2's biggest problems, and everything else seems to work about the same as always.

Unfortunately, one thing that still seems to work the same as always — though I'm not 100% sure of this — is the fact that certain web pages can pretty much freeze up Firefox completely. As near as I can tell, the problem lies in the Flash plugin, which is occasionally allowed to go haywire and suck up 98% of the system's resources, thus bringing not only Firefox to its knees, but everything else too. Whose fault this is I can't really say, since I imagine that the OS, Firefox, and the plugin should all prevent this kind of thing from happening.

Anybody else have this problem? Or any other observations, good or ill, about Firefox 3? Comments are open.

TAIBBI ON McCAIN....One of the nice things about not being famous is that it makes it unlikely I'll ever end up in Matt Taibbi's crosshairs. John McCain, however, is not so fortunate:

McCain enters the general election in the form of a man who has jettisoned the last traces of his dangerous unorthodoxy just in time to be plausible in the role of the torchbearing leader of the anti-Obama mob, waving the flag and chanting, "One of us! One of us!" all the way through to November. He now favors making the Bush tax cuts permanent, he's unblinkingly pro-life every time he remembers to mention abortion, and he's given up bitching about torture. With his newfound opposition to his own attempts to reform immigration policy and campaign finance, McCain is perhaps the first candidate in history to stump against two bills bearing his own name.

McCain's transformation is so complete that at a recent town-hall meeting in Nashville, when asked to name an author who inspired him, the candidate — who once described televangelists of the Jerry Falwell genus as "agents of intolerance" — put none other than Joel Osteen at the top of his list. "He's inspirational," McCain said.

Standing at the meeting, I didn't write Osteen's name down in my notebook — apparently because my brain refused on some level to accept that McCain had actually said it. Of all the vile, fake, lying-ass, money-grubbing shyster scumbags on the face of this planet, there is perhaps none more loathsome than Osteen, a human haircut with plastic baseball-size teeth who has made a fortune selling the appalling only-in-America idea that terrestrial greed is actually a form of Christian devotion.

That's some good beach reading right there. Enjoy!

"RESPONSIBLE, GRADUAL"....Over at The Corner, Peter Hegseth says:

Recent reports and rumors have indicated that Senator Obama plans to aggressively move to the middle on Iraq in the coming months.

Hmmm. I haven't heard these rumors. But then, I wouldn't have, would I?

Is anybody else writing stuff along these lines? Hegseth himself doesn't provide any evidence aside from a slight change of wording in yesterday's Obama speech. All I can say is, if it's true it's going to make the backlash over his FISA stand look like a cocktail party squabble.

DOBSON'S DIATRIBE....Peter Wehner, former aide to George Bush and a well-known evangelical Christian, writes in the Washington Post today about James Dobson's recent temper tantrum over Barack Obama's religious views:

If Christian conservatives want to be taken seriously, they need to make serious arguments and speak with intellectual integrity. In this instance, Dobson didn't. He has set back his cause and made some of us who are evangelicals and conservatives wince.

Good for him for saying so. Dobson's outburst would have made me wince too if he were on my side.

CDS WATCH....Clinton Derangement Syndrome is alive and well. Here is Kathryn Jean Lopez on Hillary Clinton's "mortification" during her appearance with Barack Obama today:

I may be crazy. But Bill Clinton is not going to let himself be humiliated. He's in talks with McCain before long if he's not already. He's going to salvage his name before this election is over. Like I said ...

This tops even Andrew Sullivan's CDS, and that ain't easy to do.

FRIDAY CATBLOGGING....More summer catblogging today! On the left, Domino strolls around the garden looking for a good place to roll around so she can track lots of dirt into the house. On the right, Inkblot is up on our west-facing wall because he knows the late afternoon light is flattering to his muscular physique. And who are we to damage his self esteem by telling him otherwise?

NORTH KOREA'S NUKES....Barron YoungSmith comments favorably on North Korea's decision to blow up the cooling towers of the Yongbyon nuclear reactor:

This is a momentous step because it's largely irreversible: North Korea will never again be able to kick out inspectors and start reprocessing plutonium in a matter of days, as it did in 2003.

Of course, we don't know if Kim's decision was affected by the fact he now has a nuclear arsenal. North Korea may very well renounce its nuclear program, but keep the 8-15 bombs it produced during George Bush's "I'm not talking to you" phase (cir. 2001-2006).

That's true. On the bright side, though, North Korea's 2006 nuclear test was a major league dud. Now, obviously even a poorly-designed nuclear bomb isn't something you want going off in your backyard, but a low-yielding nuke too heavy to deliver via ICBM isn't really all that great a deterrent. It's not out of the question that the North Koreans might eventually decide to declare their arsenal of bombs and trade them away as long as we keep John Bolton at bay and continue talking.

LETTING ADDINGTON OFF THE HOOK....Here is Dana Milbank's take on David Addington's congressional testimony yesterday:

There he sat, hunched and scowling, at the witness table in front of the House Judiciary Committee: the bearded, burly form of the chief of staff and alter ego to the vice president — Cheney's Cheney, if you will — and the man most responsible for building President Bush's notion of an imperial presidency.

David Addington was there under subpoena. And he wasn't happy about it.

Could the president ever be justified in breaking the law? "I'm not going to answer a legal opinion on every imaginable set of facts any human being could think of," Addington growled. Did he consult Congress when interpreting torture laws? "That's irrelevant," he barked. Would it be legal to torture a detainee's child? "I'm not here to render legal advice to your committee," he snarled. "You do have attorneys of your own."

OK, so Addington is not only an arrogant prick, he's the kind of person who revels in being an arrogant prick. We've seen the type before and we'll see it again: smart, well-briefed, and completely convinced of his own self-righteousness.

But there's another aspect to this that never gets the attention it deserves: the Judiciary Committee members knew the kind of person Addington was. They knew he was smart and well-briefed and arrogant — and therefore difficult to question. But they all insisted on their ten minutes of glory anyway. Obviously the Republican members wouldn't have given up their time in order to put Addington under more pressure, but why weren't the Democrats willing to give up their collective time and turn it over to a staff member who was Addington's equal and could have grilled him for a consecutive hour or two? That's the only way it was even remotely plausible that they'd get anything useful out of him.

Instead we had a bunch of amateurs tossing easily evaded questions at him for a few minutes apiece. It was tailor-made to allow Addington to get away with saying nothing, and that's exactly what he did. Next time the politicians ought to pack away their egos and let someone else take the stage.

TAKING YOUR GUN AWAY....Mark Kleiman hopes that with the Heller case removing the threat that "the government is going to take away your guns," maybe there will be less resistance to moderate gun control measures that really do reduce crime:

With any luck, taking the "gun confiscation" card out of the political pack might actually reduce the fervor of the opposition the NRA can whip up to sensible measures such as requiring background checks for gun sales by private individuals (the current rule that requires them only for purchases from gun dealers), computerizing data on which dealers are selling the guns that get used in crimes, and developing and deploying technology that would allow police to identify, from a bullet or a shell casing found at a crime scene, when, to whom, and by whom the gun that produced that metal was lawfully transferred.

I hope so too, but I doubt it. Unfortunately, my sense is that the gun confiscation argument never had all that much impact on centrist gun owners in the first place. It only appealed to an extremist fringe that's fueled by an inchoate rage against pointy-headed DC bureaucrats — a rage that's not going anywhere just because of one Supreme Court decision. After all, these are the guys who are so far off in lala land that they're convinced it's the United Nations that's going to take their guns away. We all know the Supreme Court can't stand up to the Secretary General (thanks to pointy-headed DC bureaucrats who are in on the game), so Heller is really pretty meaningless, isn't it? The fight goes on.

Anyway, that's my guess. Plus there's the fact that the NRA has to keep raising money, and tamping down fears of gun confiscation probably isn't high on their list of fundraising strategies. Logic says Mark ought to be right, but I suspect in practice that Heller will have no effect at all on the lunatic fringe.

UPDATE: Plus, in fairness, Heller was a 5-4 decision and the gun lobby will be able to say with some justice that it could get overturned pretty easily. Thus we need to keep our guard up, eternal vigilance in the price of liberty, etc. etc.

SEAN HANNITY SETS FLIP-FLOP WORLD RECORD....Taking shots at Sean Hannity is sort of like winning a pub quiz against the town drunk: there's just not much sport in it. Still, he does outdo himself sometimes. Via ThinkProgress, here he is yesterday talking about President Bush's deal with North Korea:

HANNITY: The news today brings a clear foreign policy victory for the Bush administration. But will the press report it that way? Joining us now for analysis, former ambassador to the U.N. and a Fox News contributor, John Bolton. What do you think this means?

BOLTON: I think it's actually a clear victory for North Korea. They gain enormous political legitimacy....In return, we get precious little. I think this is North Korea demonstrating again that they can out-negotiate the U.S. without raising a sweat.

HANNITY: Boy I tell you they've done it time and time again, and I'm sorta perplexed, Mr. Ambassador, to understand why we keep going back to the well knowing that they haven't kept the agreements in the past. Whatever happened to Reagan's "trust but verify"?

That was the shortest lived foreign policy victory in history.

CAP AND TRADE....Matt points to a GAO letter today which suggests that it's possible to create a cap-and-trade program that's not regressive. The chart on the right gives you a sense of the problem: low-income houses spend 22% of their income on energy, while high-income households spend only 4% of their income on energy. If you raise the cost of energy, you hurt the poor far, far more than the better off.

Two things are worth noting. First, utility costs are a bigger problem than gasoline. On a percentage basis, the poor pay 7x as much for utilities as the well off, while they pay only 4x as much for gasoline. What's more, unlike gasoline, there are seldom any reasonable alternatives for utility expenditures.

Second, there are always tradeoffs. Using the money from permit auctions (or carbon taxes) to rebate other taxes is indeed progressive if the rebate is fairly flat, but only if you pay taxes in the first place — which many of the poor don't. For the very poorest, then, a tax rebate scheme would still be regressive: you'd essentially be hitting them with a big new energy tax without any offset at all. Conversely, a more targeted approach, like expanding funding for the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program, helps the poor more directly but removes the incentive to use less energy.

The answer, then, is almost certainly a bit of this and a bit of that. No single solution targets assistance to the poor ideally, but a basket of solutions (payroll tax rebates, energy assistance, more funding for mass transit, etc.) can do a pretty good job. It won't be perfect, but a well-designed program can make a cap-and-trade program pretty progressive.

WIDENING THE WEB....You'll soon be able to buy your own custom internet domain name, but sadly, the price tag will be high. I was thinking maybe I could snag .drum, or failing that, .kevin or .kevindrum or .kevindaledrum or something. But with the application fee expected to be around a hundred grand or so — and that's assuming you don't get into a bidding war with some other glory hound — I guess I'll pass for now. Still, watching everyone else fight over this ought to be fun. Here's hoping they don't bring down all the tubes doing it.

MY FRIENDS....I don't know in general if Mark Halperin's advice to John McCain is good, but I'll second this particular nugget:

9. Never say "My friend(s)..." again.

Where did McCain pick up this habit? It doesn't make him sound like one of the guys, it makes him sound like he's about to put the arm on you at a Turkish bazaar. It's weird.

OIL UPDATE....Welcome to summer!

Crude oil jumped above $140 a barrel to a record as Libya threatened to cut output, OPEC's president said prices may reach $170 by the summer and the dollar weakened.

....A decision by the ECB to increase interest rates in July may cause the dollar to decline and prompt investors to buy more oil, [Chakib] Khelil, who is also the Algerian oil minister, told the Paris- based television channel. Prices would ease toward the end of the year, he said.

Threats against Iran would also support prices during the summer, he said. A political crisis that would stop Iran's oil production would push prices over $200 a barrel, to possibly $400 a barrel, he said.

On the bright side, Khelil doesn't actually think a political crisis is likely. He says he's pretty sure oil prices will stay under $200 a barrel. Comforting words indeed.

MORE COLIN POWELL RUMORS....The last time I read about the possibility of Colin Powell supporting Barack Obama, I clicked the link and was disappointed. He's said some diplomatically encouraging things about Obama in the past, but in the latest go-around all he said — again — is that he'll vote for the best man when November rolls around. Eh.

Today, though GOP gossipmonger Robert Novak resurrects the rumors:

The prototypal Obamacon may be Larry Hunter, recognized inside the Beltway as an ardent supply-sider....Explaining his support for the uncompromisingly liberal Obama, Hunter blogged on June 6: "The Republican Party is a dead rotting carcass with a few decrepit old leaders stumbling around like zombies in a horror version of 'Weekend With Bernie,' handcuffed to a corpse."

While he never would use such language, Colin Powell is said by friends to share Hunter's analysis of the GOP. His tenuous 13-year relationship with the Republican Party, following his retirement from the Army, has ended. The national security adviser for Ronald Reagan left the present administration bitter about being ushered out of the State Department a year earlier than he wanted. As an African American, friends say, Powell is sensitive to racial attacks on Obama and especially on Obama's wife, Michelle. While McCain strategists shrug off defections from Bruce Bartlett and Larry Hunter, they wince in anticipating headlines generated by Powell's expected endorsement of Obama.

So here's an interesting question: how would the liberal blogopshere react if Powell endorsed Obama? Powell remains broadly popular, and there's no question that a Powell endorsement would be a huge boost for Obama. On the other hand, lefty bloggers as a group mostly loathe Powell and would groan at the possibility of him having any influence in an Obama administration. That's sure not change we can believe in.

So: yowls of protest, or a collective shrug because the world isn't a perfect place and you gotta do what you gotta do if you want to win a presidential election? My guess: it all depends on just how bitterly Powell denounces the Republican Party in his hypothetical endorsement speech. If he sounds a bit like Larry Hunter, liberals will break out the balloons. If he plays the diplomat, expect some grousing.

McCAIN'S MOMENTUM....Theda Skocpol thinks that Barack Obama needs to get his act together:

Although Obama seems to be "up" in current national polls, McCain is actually doing a much better job of shaping the agenda to his advantage. He has used strong symbols (it does not matter if they are "gimmicks") to portray himself as activist on gas prices and the environment and put apparent distance between himself and Bush. And he has managed to paint Obama as an ordinary schemer on campaign finance. Abetted by the media's proclivity for dramatic gestures and horse race analysis, the McCain camp has done what it needs to portray their man as a fighting underdog focused on real-world issues. Meanwhile, Obama's "economic tour" has gone little noticed — and his campaign seems not to understand how very difficult it will be to get the media to convey the economic stakes in this election to ordinary voters.

The rest is worth reading, even though I think she's probably overreacting to the fact that Obama is just in a different phase of his campaign than McCain. Having just won his primary, he needs to spend time consolidating his victory, unifying the base, and getting some unpopular decisions (like opting out of public financing) out of the way now. Sure, he's giving up some momentum to McCain, but it's better to do it now than later.

COLD DEAD HANDS....Since I'm time zone challenged, I've only now heard the (not unexpected) news that the Supreme Court handed down a ruling in the DC gun rights case today; that it was written by Antonin Scalia; and that for the first time it finds that the Second Amendment provides an individual right to own handguns. So that's that: the one-worlders at the UN can't take away your guns anymore.

I'm basically OK with this. My personal, layman's view has always been that both the history and the wording of the Second Amendment point toward a limited, personal right to bear arms, not merely the right for a militia to be armed. On a practical level I'm less sure whether this is a good thing, since I've never gotten into the policy weeds of handgun control and whether it's effective. Still: a right's a right. The wording of the Second Amendment suggests to me that the government can regulate guns a bit more than they can regulate, say, speech, but that they can't flatly ban them.

On another note, this is the latest in a whole bunch of high-profile 5-4 Supreme Court rulings this term. I wonder if that means that the composition of the court will be an even bigger campaign issue than it otherwise would be? My guess is yes.

NORTH KOREA UPDATE....McClatchy and others report that we're making some fairly remarkable progress on the North Korea front:

North Korea on Thursday will provide a long-awaited declaration detailing its nuclear weapons programs, a potential breakthrough in a 17-year-long effort to rid the Stalinist state of nuclear arms, U.S. officials said.

North Korea's tally of its weapons work, which initially will be delivered to China, the chair of the six-nation nuclear talks, will trigger a rapid series of events in the normally slow-moving diplomacy that eventually could lead to the establishment of diplomatic relations between the United States and the isolated communist nation.

Also on Thursday, President Bush is expected to announce that he intends to remove North Korea from the U.S. government's list of nations that sponsor terrorism and waive it from the provisions of the Trading With the Enemy Act, which bars almost all commerce.

As early as Friday, North Korea plans to demolish the cooling tower at its Yongbyon nuclear reactor, with the head of the State Department's Korea desk, Sung Kim, on hand to witness.

In addition, Joe Klein reports that a source tells him "that there will be more encouraging developments from North Korea in the weeks to come." This progress started in earnest after North Korea's failed nuclear test in 2006, and I'm still a little mystified about exactly why that triggered it. Presumably the Chinese put their foot down in some way at the same time that Christopher Hill managed to convince George Bush to muzzle the Cheneyite dead-enders and let him engage in serious diplomacy. So far, it seems to be working.

BOOK BLOGGING....It's kinda slow around here today, so how about if I put you guys to work for a change? I've been in a fiction phase for the past month and I'm ready to switch back to nonfiction for a while. Got any recommendations? I don't happen to be in the mood for either political books or history at the moment, but anything else is fair game. I want to learn something new about some interesting institution, movement, or field of knowledge. What have you got for me?

SONG OF NORWAY....I don't drive very much, and when I do it's mostly quick trips around town. With rare exceptions, a round trip to LA — about a hundred miles — is the longest distance I travel.

So I'm sort of smitten by the idea of an electric car, and in the LA Times this morning auto reviewer Dan Neil sings the praises of the City, an electric car from a Norwegian company called Think. It gets 112 miles on a charge, meets all relevant safety standards, drives nicely, and might be on sale in Southern California in 2009. As usual with these things, though, he saves the bad news for last:

In any electric car program, the crucial component is the battery. Think has settled on three suppliers: MES-DEA, which produces a molten sodium battery, and A123Systems and EnerDel, which produce varieties of lithium-ion batteries. The MES-DEA battery yields 28 kilowatt-hours, while the EnerDel and the A123Systems batteries produce 26 and 19 kWh, respectively. Any of the three are expensive. At current market prices, Think's City could cost up to $35,000, more than half of that tied up in the battery.

For that reason, Willums proposes to sell the cars for $20,000-$25,000 and lease the batteries to owners, for a $150 to $200 monthly "mobility fee." All battery maintenance and replacement costs would be covered, and there could be ways to compensate owners for the costs of the electricity to charge the cars.

It could be worse, but 35 grand for a two-seater with a 112-mile range is definitely an early adopter kind of car. On the bright side, at least Dan Neil got a trip to Oslo out of the deal.

FAN FAVORITES....Just curious: is there any plausible prospect for Barack Obama's running mate who hasn't been immediately and widely trashed throughout the liberal blogosphere? Nobody comes immediately to mind.

CREATING THEIR OWN REALITY....The Bush White House has apparently adopted a bold new strategy for denying that greenhouse gases are an environmental threat: refusing to open email from the EPA that says they are. College freshmen around the world are rejoicing that one of their favorite excuses for avoiding class assignments now has official sanction.

Having failed to get the White House to read its original report, the EPA has decided to punt on fourth and long:

Over the past five days, the officials said, the White House successfully put pressure on the E.P.A. to eliminate large sections of the original analysis that supported regulation, including a finding that tough regulation of motor vehicle emissions could produce $500 billion to $2 trillion in economic benefits over the next 32 years. The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the matter.

Both documents, as prepared by the E.P.A., "showed that the Clean Air Act can work for certain sectors of the economy, to reduce greenhouse gases," one of the senior E.P.A. officials said. "That's not what the administration wants to show. They want to show that the Clean Air Act can't work."

And it can't! Not in BushWorld, anyway.

THE RENTAL NON-BUBBLE....Ezra Klein is puzzled that although housing prices skyrocketed over the past eight years, rental prices have stayed steady as a rock:

Obviously, no one's shocked to see we had a housing bubble, but I'm a bit surprised that rents were totally unaffected. In theory, the run-up in costs should've made it relatively more profitable for landlords to sell, thus depleting the rental stock, and forcing renters to stay competitive by paying more. That didn't happen, though I'm not sure why.

A couple of guesses here. First, part of the housing bubble was caused by low interest rates, something that doesn't affect rental rates. In fact, low interest rates generally help to keep rental rates low. Second, the housing bubble took a lot of renters off the market: home ownership rates went up a couple of points and rental rates went down a couple of points. That kept pressure on landlords to keep rents low. Third, there might be a psychological effect, at least in the short term: as long as property prices are rising smartly, landlords might be willing to accept lower rental rates. You're more likely to accept a lower cash flow ROI if you think there's a big capital gain coming your way a few years down the road.

Anyway, just guessing here. The fact that the housing/rental ratio was going up so fast was one of the signs that pointed to a housing bubble in the first place, so maybe the easiest thing to say is simply that a bubble in one market doesn't necessarily suggest there should be bubbles in other markets. After all, if you have bubbles everywhere, that's just inflation.

RECESSION?....In a battle of local economic forecasters, UCLA says we're not in a recession but Chapman University says we are: "Chapman economists believe overall U.S. spending will decline through most of 2008. Consumer spending will fall $100 billion, representing a full percentage-point decline in real growth of gross domestic product." The good news: nationally, they think the recession will be mild and the e