QUOTE OF THE DAY....From Hank, explaining the tech industry in a nutshell:

"As a matter of fact, the last one was a classic cc:all flame fest over text editors."

If you don't get it, it's probably a clue that you have a life.

TRIGGER HAPPY....This is weird. I missed this nugget buried deep in Seymour Hersh's July piece in the New Yorker when I first read it, but it turns out that our little run-in with those Iranian boats earlier this year sparked some conversation in the White House:

[A] lesson was learned in the incident: The public had supported the idea of retaliation, and was even asking why the U.S. didn't do more. [A former senior intelligence] official said that, a few weeks later, a meeting took place in the Vice-President's office. "The subject was how to create a casus belli between Tehran and Washington," he said.

The story contains no further details, but apparently that's not because Hersh doesn't know them. ThinkProgress asked Hersh about the Cheney meeting at a recent conference, and he said this:

There was a dozen ideas proffered about how to trigger a war. The one that interested me the most was why don't we build — we in our shipyard — build four or five boats that look like Iranian PT boats. Put Navy seals on them with a lot of arms. And next time one of our boats goes to the Straits of Hormuz, start a shoot-up. Might cost some lives.

And it was rejected because you can't have Americans killing Americans. That's the kind of — that's the level of stuff we're talking about. Provocation. But that was rejected.

Fascinating. So why wasn't that in his story? According to Hersh, it's because his editors didn't think he should write about options that were discussed but subsequently rejected.

You gotta be kidding. The fact that they're even talking about stuff like this is news. If Hersh's editors thought his sourcing was no good, then his piece shouldn't have mentioned the meeting at all. But if the sourcing was good enough to report the meeting in the first place, it was good enough to report what they talked about. What were the New Yorker's editors thinking?

POSTSCRIPT: If this story sounds familiar, that's because it is. In one of David Manning's famous memos describing a prewar meeting between George Bush and Tony Blair, he says that Bush admitted that WMD was unlikely to be found in Iraq and then mused on some possible options for justifying a war anyway:

"The U.S. was thinking of flying U2 reconnaissance aircraft with fighter cover over Iraq, painted in U.N. colours," the memo says, attributing the idea to Mr. Bush. "If Saddam fired on them, he would be in breach."

In the end, of course, we didn't do this. We just didn't bother with any pretext at all.

YOU AND YOUR DOCTOR....Tyler Cowen says that one of the reasons for rising healthcare costs is that people object to any limits on the amount of care they can get. Matt Yglesias demurs:

While people will naturally always want "all the care they want," people's desire to obtain health care is large part a result of their interaction with the health care system. If I'm feeling ill and want the doctor to prescribe me some antibiotics, but then he says "no no no, you have madeupitis and if you take antibiotics you'll die" then suddenly it seems I don't want the antibiotics anymore. Medical treatment isn't fun, people don't just want treatment for no reason. If you convince them that the treatment isn't useful, they really won't want it.

This is a common response on the left, but I'll confess to some curiosity about it. I happen to agree with Matt, but that's largely because I, personally, labor under a considerable fear and loathing of doctors. (OK, more loathing than fear, actually.) I avoid seeing doctors unless I absolutely have to, I don't like taking medication, and I basically feel that the least possible medical care is the best possible medical care. Put me in a hospital and all I want to do is get out before the staff kills me with a central line infection or a misfilled prescription. (Tell me again: why, exactly, is it that doctors seem to think it's cute that they have unreadable handwriting?)

But that's just me, a relatively healthy middle-aged guy, and the fact that I feel this way isn't an especially good guide to public policy choices for a trillion dollar industry. So would any GPs care to chime in on this? Do patients typically tend to demand boatloads of care they don't really need? Do they insist on taking drugs that won't help them because they saw them on teevee? Do they come back over and over and over until you finally cave in and provide expensive new treatments that are vanishingly unlikely to do any good?

As it happens, there's a fair amount of research to back up my neurosis-based view that patient demand isn't a huge factor in rising healthcare costs. A famous RAND study, for example, suggests that free healthcare has only a modest impact on demand for services, and other research fairly convincingly indicts supply-side issues (more doctors = more healthcare), institutional issues (intensive marketing campaigns from pharmaceutical and device firms), and incentive structures (if you pay doctors for prescribing services, they'll prescribe more services), among others.

Still, demand-side issues aren't trivial, especially for the over-65 crowd, which accounts for the majority of healthcare spending. So what are patients like on average? Are most of them like me and Matt, eager to avoid medical care unless it's absolutely necessary? Or are we outliers? Comments?

CULINARY DELIGHTS....Tomorrow Marian and I are going to the Orange County Fair, and we all know what that means: lots of deep fried food. If Elina Shatkin in the LA Times is to be believed, our best bet is to start off with deep-fried apple fries as an appetizer, move on to deep-fried Spam™ accompanied by deep-fried zucchini for the main course, and then finish off with either deep-fried Snickers or deep-fried Reese's Whips for dessert. Foods to be avoided at all costs include deep-fried White Castle burgers, deep-fried frog legs, and deep-fried Tootsie Rolls.

Anybody have anything to add to this?

CONSPIRACIES....According to a poll done to publicize the new X-Files movie, the #1 conspiracy theory (in Britain, anyway) is the belief that Area 51 exists to investigate aliens. I don't buy their claim that a full 48% of Britons believe this, but whatever. All in good fun etc. etc.

But down at #10, we get this: "The world is run by dinosaur-like reptiles." What the hell kind of conspiracy theory is that? Dick Cheney doesn't look anything like a dinosaur.

UPDATE: And of course there's this too, explaining why the government is so uninterested in investigating UFOs: "Drawing on the work of Giorgio Agamben, Michel Foucault, and Jacques Derrida, the puzzle is explained by the functional imperatives of anthropocentric sovereignty, which cannot decide a UFO exception to anthropocentrism while preserving the ability to make such a decision. The UFO can be 'known' only by not asking what it is." Uh huh.

JOHN McCAIN'S "PALPABLE PAIN"....From Todd Purdum's profile of John McCain in Vanity Fair today:

But irrepressible candor has always been McCain's irresistible force, and its embers still burn bright. In Sparks, Nevada, this week, when a grouchy older man responded to McCain's support for an immigrant guest-worker program by saying the United States needed to reform its child-labor laws to let young Anglo-Saxon American farm kids learn the value of hard work, McCain stubbornly responded that he still favored the guest-worker initiative.

That's it? McCain disagreed with some crotchety old coot who wants to throw out our child labor laws so that more white kids can work in the fields? And then followed up by — stop the presses! — not flip-flopping on a signature position he's held for years? The bar for "irrepressible candor" sure is getting low these days.

HALFTIME REPORT...."Joe Klein vs. the Neocons" is nicely summarized here by Todd Gitlin. Click 'n read if you haven't been following this soap opera and want to catch up.

DOG WHISTLES....Newsday's John Riley, after watching John McCain's latest ad montage linking Barack Obama to Britney Spears and Paris Hilton, is perplexed by his choice of celebrities:

Anyone with even a vague sense of pop culture knows that Britney and Paris are yesterday's news. Here's a link to Forbes' Celebrity 100. Paris and Britney don't even make the list any more. Instead, the top 10, in order: Oprah Winfrey, Tiger Woods, Angelina Jolie, Beyonce Knowles, David Beckham, Johnny Depp, Jay-Z, The Police, JK Rowling, Brad Pitt.

So, they didn't pick other big celebrities, who were either men, or black, or married. What they picked was two sexually available white women.

But it must have been a coincidence, because we know John McCain wants to run an elevated campaign focusing on the serious issues that America faces.

Meanwhile, Adam Serwer acidly notes the Obama campaign's ritual denunciation of rapper Ludacris for writing some offensive lyrics about John McCain and Hillary Clinton:

I hear that one of the goals of the transition team is plans for a new federal agency that will deal exclusively with issuing apologies on behalf of Barack Obama for anything black people do that offends you.

Indeed. Gonna be a long campaign.

THE CONSERVATIVE WAR ON CONTRACEPTION....Here's the latest front in the conservative war on contraception: a proposed regulation that would strip federal funding from any healthcare organization that doesn't allow workers to opt out of providing abortion services to patients. This wouldn't have a big impact on actual abortions, of course, since anyone who's pro-life wouldn't work for an abortion clinic in the first place. However, the new regs define abortion so broadly that it covers "any of the various procedures — including the prescription, dispensing and administration of any drug or the performance of any procedure or any other action — that results in the termination of life of a human being in utero between conception and natural birth, whether before or after implantation."

In other words, birth-control pills, IUDs, Plan B emergency contraceptives, and God only knows what else. "As soon as you have a definition in one part of federal law," says R. Alta Charo, a lawyer and bioethicist at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, "it can become the inspiration for the reinterpretation of other statutes." Which is, I'm sure, the whole point. This is just the initial skirmish.

COSSACKS AND CZARS....At the New York Times, Jim Rutenberg lays out the McCain campaign strategy and where it comes from:

After spending much of the summer searching for an effective line of attack against Senator Barack Obama, Senator John McCain is beginning a newly aggressive campaign to define Mr. Obama as arrogant, out of touch and unprepared for the presidency.

....Mr. McCain's campaign is now under the leadership of members of President Bush's re-election campaign, including Steve Schmidt, the czar of the Bush war room that relentlessly painted his opponent, Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts, as effete, elite, and equivocal through a daily blitz of sound bites and Web videos that were carefully coordinated with Mr. Bush's television advertisements.

The run of attacks against Mr. Obama over the last couple of weeks have been strikingly reminiscent of that drive.

That's pretty clear. And the cossacks work for the czar, right? Not quite:

As Election Day nears, McCain's campaign is adopting the aggressive, take-no-prisoners style of Karl Rove, the GOP operative who engineered victories for President Bush....But the sharp-edged approach is being orchestrated for an unpredictable candidate who often chafes at delivering the campaign's message of the day. It is that freewheeling style that has made him popular with voters and cemented his reputation for candor and straight talk.

That's Juliet Eilperin and Robert Barnes of the Washington Post, who evidently can't abide the thought that McCain himself is responsible for his campaign's "sharp-edged" approach. Apparently he's just a straight talking guy who woke up one morning and found himself mysteriously under the sway of a vile cabal of political hit men and unable to do anything about it.

Enough's enough. McCain hired Steve Schmidt, he approves the strategy, and he signs off on the ads. If his campaign is mired in sleaze, it's not happening despite McCain, it's happening because of McCain. Stop making excuses for him.

MEME WATCH....Rich Lowry's "shrewd friend" — a recurring character at The Corner — emails today to say that Barack Obama is "showing hubris and contempt for the rest of us in how he considers America fundamentally broken and he's the solution." Roger that. But this isn't the shrewd part of SF's missive. The shrewd part is identifying the vector by which this folktale will spread:

The question now is whether Dana Milbank is the bird leaving the wire and every other bird in the press follows him or not. If this narrative sets in, Obama might have to move up his VP announcement to change the story.

Even a cynic might think that the media is finally tired of playing the GOP's game on this score — Clinton was shifty, Gore was an exaggerator, Kerry was a flip-flopper — but that's still an open question. If the press decides to run with Steve Schmidt's presumptuous/messiah/I'm-not-saying-he's-unpatriotic-but meme, then Obama could be in real trouble.

At least, that's what people keep telling me. Personally, though, I don't think it's going to work. In fact, the McCain campaign shows signs of being a little too obviously tickled pink with the pickup they're getting on these stories. There's a good chance they're going to carry it a step too far before long and end up on the receiving end of a major backlash. After all, even the media has its limits. I think.

POSTSCRIPT: By the way, speaking of the I'm-not-saying-he's-unpatriotic meme, do you notice anything funny about this exchange?

STEPHANOPOULOS: You've also taken some heat this week with your comments saying that Senator Obama would rather lose a war than win a political campaign....

MCCAIN: Well, I'm not questioning his patriotism....

STEPHANOPOULOS: When you say someone would rather lose a war, a candidate, that's questioning his honor, his decency, his character.

MCCAIN: All I'm saying is — and I will repeat — he does not understand. I'm not questioning his patriotism.

The funny thing, of course, is that Stephanopoulos himself never suggested that McCain was questioning Obama's patriotism in the first place.....

UPDATE: It sounds like longtime McCain advisor John Weaver agrees that McCain's campaign is in imminent danger of going overboard.

PROBLEMS WITH POLLING....Taegan Goddard gives us a preview of The Opinion Makers, by David W. Moore:

The author — a former senior editor of the Gallup Poll — says that today's opinion polls misfire due to an intrinsic methodological problem: survey results don't differentiate between "those who express deeply held views and those who have hardly, if at all, thought about an issue."

This is disturbing. Either Moore managed to find a publisher for a book thesis about as obvious as "college students like to drink," or else Moore's thesis actually isn't as bog obvious as I think it is. I'm not sure which is worse.

Or there's a third option: his thesis really is as obvious as I think it is, but everyone keeps pretending not to know it anyway. Which means it's worth a book. Good luck, David!

THE MATA HARI OF FIREARMS....Isn't "Mary McFate" a great name for a spy? I think so. So it's only fitting that Mary McFate is, indeed, a spy. For the NRA. For the last decade, it turns out, she's been busily infiltrating gun control groups until being outed by a team of reporters at Mother Jones:

Informed of McFate's true identity, her friends and associates in the gun control community expressed shock and anger. "That astounds me," says Barbara Hohlt. Of McFate's ability to maintain her cover, she adds, "She was very, very good. Everybody knew her for years and trusted her." Brian Malte, director of state legislation at the Brady Campaign, says, "Oh my...Of all the people." Kristen Rand, legislative director of the Violence Policy Center, remarks, "This is totally bizarre." And she adds, "I would find it hardest to believe this about her. She comes across as kind of dense — or she's putting on a good act."

McFate's (now former) colleagues note that she was well-positioned for many years to provide the NRA — or any other gun rights groups — the plans, secrets, and inside gossip of practically the entire gun violence prevention movement. "She had access to all the legislative strategy for every major issue for years," says Rand.

Fascinating, no? The Sierra Club better watch its back.

PAGING MAUREEN DOWD....I saw this Dana Milbank piece last night but didn't bother commenting because it was late and life is too short. Milbank occasionally does good work, but basically he's ruined himself by his relentless quest to turn himself into the Washington Post's Maureen Dowd, and this piece was right in the Dowdian strike zone: snotty, too clever by half, and self-consciously bursting with adolescent cynical detachment. If Dowd were the only person who wrote this stuff it would be bad enough, but the fact that she's influenced a whole generation of wannabes is what really makes her style so malign.

At any rate, it turns out that Milbank's piece is not only snotty, too clever by half, and self-consciously bursting with adolescent cynical detachment, it's also wrong. Milbank Dowdified his Obama quote because it was the only way to get it to fit his storyline. In a bizarre and karmic way, I guess that's appropriate.

RUSSIAN GAS....Via Juan Cole, Asia Times reports that Russia, the Saudi Arabia of natural gas, has signed an agreement to buy and market Turkmenistan gas. "Curiously," says M K Bhadrakumar, "the agreements reached in Ashgabat on Friday are unlikely to enable Gazprom to make revenue from reselling Turkmen gas....In other words, plain money-making was not the motivation for Gazprom. The Kremlin has a grand strategy."

That "grand strategy" is, basically, to control as much world gas production as it can, and to form a cartel with other gas producers where it can't. I'm not sure what exactly this means, but at a minimum it kills the American plan to build a pipeline from Turkmenistan through Afghanistan and Pakistan to India; it makes Iranian gas production even more strategic than it already is; and it makes me more perplexed than I already am about T. Boone Pickens' claim that natural gas is the key to U.S. energy independence. Hopefully some energy experts will weigh in soon to tell me whether any of this is stuff I really need to be concerned about.

STATUS-OF-FORCES BACK FROM THE DEAD....The Wall Street Journal reports that a status-of-forces agreement between the U.S. and Iraq, presumed dead a few weeks ago, is back on the front burner:

The Bush administration's embrace of a flexible timeline for pulling U.S. troops from Iraq has accelerated negotiations between Washington and Baghdad over a long-term security pact, officials from both sides said.

....An actual date for a planned pullout hasn't been hashed out. Iraqis are pushing for a 2010 withdrawal, but a compromise could be a year or two after that, according to people familiar with the talks. The agreement would allow for flexibility in case violence spikes again in Iraq, these people said.

This makes a lot of political sense to me. Nouri al-Maliki's pronouncement last month that talks were at a dead end was always best interpreted more as a negotiating tactic than a final rejection. After all, it's in Maliki's security interest to ensure a continuing American presence but in his electoral interest to make clear that it's not a permanent presence, and a formal agreement is pretty clearly the best way for him to serve both these imperatives at once.

Likewise, the Bush administration has every incentive in the world to conclude some kind of agreement with Iraq, even if it implies (artfully, of course) a withdrawal timeline. George Bush knows perfectly well that the odds favor Barack Obama winning the presidency in November, and if inauguration day rolls around with no agreement in hand, Obama is likely to make good on his 16-month timetable. But if Bush manages to conclude an agreement with Maliki that, say, agrees on troop withdrawals starting in late 2009 and concluding in 2011, how likely is Obama to try to renegotiate it?

Not very, I'd say. Political capital that would be worth spending to start a withdrawal where none existed wouldn't be worth spending merely to speed up an already agreed withdrawal by a few months, which in turn means that a signed agreement is Bush's best chance to ensure that troops stay in Iraq at least a year or two longer than they otherwise would. So here we have a case where both parties are genuinely well served by coming to terms before November — and that means they probably will. If I had to guess, I'd say we'll see something by September.

STANDING TALL....Sunday morning, here's the candidate himself talking about Social Security on ABC:

STEPHANOPOULOS: So, that means payroll tax increases are on the table, as well?

MCCAIN: There is nothing that's off the table.

Today, after getting beat up by the tax jihadist wing of the GOP, here's the candidate's mouthpiece on Fox:

KELLY: Might the Social Security tax go up? Is that on the table?

BOUNDS: No, Megyn, there is no imaginable circumstance where John McCain would raise payroll taxes. It's absolutely out of the question.

This is just getting embarrassing. Is McCain running for president of the United States or is he trying out for a part in some high-concept wacky political comedy? He needs to make up his mind.

Via ThinkProgress.

SHAKE SHAKE SHAKE....Oooh. Nice little earthquake we just had here in Irvine. Guess I should turn on the TV to find out whether it really was little or not.....

UPDATE: Ah. 5.6 centered on Chino Hills. That's about 20 miles north of me.

UPDATE 2: Just upgraded to 5.8.

UPDATE 3: Now downgraded to 5.4 Make up your minds, seismologists!

CAMPAIGN WATCHING....National Review editor Rich Lowry comments on John McCain's ad claiming that Barack Obama refused to visit wounded troops during his visit to Germany:

I buy the basic Obama defense of his decision not to visit Landstuhl. I don't think he was deliberately snubbing wounded troops. So I think the McCain ad is unfair, but it hits on a key vulnerability of Obama — the sense that he's above-it-all and entirely too grand for his own good.

Shorter Lowry: Yeah, he was lying, but that just makes the ad even more awesome!

OK, now I'm being unfair. But considering how scurrilous this accusation was, couldn't Lowry muster up just a slightly stronger condemnation than "but it makes a good point anyway"?

ZOMG!!!....VOTER FRAUD!!!....A nonprofit organization that employs people to register voters in Virginia noticed that three of its workers in Hampton Roads appeared to be faking names in order to make their daily quota, so they turned them in to authorities. And what was the response of the chairman of Virginia's Republican Party? He warned people not to register to vote:

"Identity theft is widespread problem in Virginia," [Jeff] Frederick said. "Today, I am encouraging voters who have filed out any of these voter registration forms to immediately contact their registrars, and Virginians should exercise caution when approached by a stranger who asks them for their information."

And why should a minor incident like this make Virginians afraid of widespread identity theft? Say it along with me: It's because this is, of course, not an isolated incident:

"We don't know who's doing all of this, but I'm sure that it's more than one group," Frederick said in a telephone news conference. "There's certainly — definitely, I think — a more widespread problem than just an isolated incident."

Definitely a widespread problem. Of course it is. And the name of this widespread problem is.....Barack Obama.

Via Swampland.

TED STEVENS....Alaska senator Ted Stevens has been indicted on corruption charges:

From May 1999 to August 2007, prosecutors said Stevens concealed "his continuing receipt of hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of things of value from a private corporation." The indictment released Tuesday said the items included: home improvements to his vacation home in Alaska, including a new first floor, garage, wraparound deck, plumbing, electrical wiring; as well as car exchanges, a Viking gas grill, furniture and tools.

But there's more to Uncle Ted than just corruption. For more on the GOP's longest-serving senator, take a look back at "State of Dependency," a profile of Stevens and Alaska by Charles Homans that ran in our November 2007 issue. Apparently Republicans were right all along about the morally debilitating effects of relying for decades on a nonstop stream of federal welfare handouts.

QUOTE OF THE DAY.... From Steve Pearce, a Republican House member from New Mexico who is running for the Senate:

"At a time when we're facing $4 gasoline, I think that you need people who've been in the energy industry to tell us what to do."

Uh huh. And when it comes to diet advice, I turn to the Colonel. His advice is always finger lickin' good.

HARNESSING THE POWER OF THE NET....I missed this yesterday, but Dan Drezner went directly to the source and discovered how Justice Department officials vetted potential DOJ employees using the awesome power of the Nexis news database. Here's the search string they used:

[first name of a candidate] and pre/2 [last name of a candidate] w/7 bush or gore or republican! or democrat! or charg! or accus! or criticiz! or blam! or defend! or iran contra or clinton or spotted owl or florida recount or sex! or controvers! or racis! or fraud! or investigat! or bankrupt! or layoff! or downsiz! or PNTR or NAFTA or outsourc! or indict! or enron or kerry or iraq or wmd! or arrest! or intox! or fired or sex! or racis! or intox! or slur! or arrest! or fired or controvers! or abortion! or gay! or homosexual! or gun! or firearm!

Mayberry Machiavellis indeed. Click the link to read their fevered denials and eventual confessions.

UPDATE: The LA Times has more:

In the second of a series of reports on the politically charged tenure of former Atty. Gen. Alberto R. Gonzales, the department's inspector general found that two former Justice aides used sexual orientation as a litmus test in deciding whom they would hire or fire.

The report describes an alleged "sexual relationship" between a career prosecutor and a U.S. attorney, who were not named. Margaret M. Chiara, the former U.S. attorney in Grand Rapids, Mich., said in an interview with The Times that she now believed she was fired because of the erroneous belief that she was having a relationship with career prosecutor Leslie Hagen.

"I could not begin to understand how I found myself sharing the misfortune of my former colleagues," Chiara said of the eight other U.S. attorneys who were fired. "Now I understand."

The Chiara case was always one of the oddest of the U.S. Attorney firings, and apparently now we know why. A followup report on all nine USA firings is expected shortly.

KIRKUK....The New York Times account of the bombing in Kirkuk on Monday is devastating:

Just after 11 a.m., a suicide bomber blew herself up, killing at least 17 demonstrators and wounding 47 others, according to Iraqi security officials.

No one claimed responsibility for the bombing, which bore the hallmarks of Sunni Arab extremists. Nonetheless, many in the crowd blamed Turkmen extremists for the attack, and within minutes a mob of enraged Kurds began attacking Turkmen political offices and setting their buildings ablaze.

....One element fueling the Kurds' rampage was the widespread belief that Turkmens had fired on Kurdish demonstrators dashing away from the bomb blast.

....Farouk Abdullah, a senior Turkmen politician, said that offices of every Turkmen party had been attacked and that Kurdish rioters had destroyed a number of other Turkmen buildings. "We don't know why they attacked us," he said. "We did not have anything to do with the explosion."

By the end of the day, the riot and violence by Kurds against Turkmens had become one of the most severe ethnic skirmishes in Kirkuk since the American-led invasion of Iraq in 2003. The city has long been considered a tinderbox because of its volatile mix of Kurds, Turkmens and Arabs.

The suicide bombing was bad enough on its own. The fact that it immediately led to a Kurdish rampage is worse. Everyone who follows Iraqi politics has been waiting on pins and needles for years for Kirkuk to erupt, and pretty much everyone seems to think that this kind of thing could be all it takes to turn Kirkuk's long-simmering ethnic feuds into all-out war. So far it hasn't, though, and the good news is that the Sunni extremists who were probably responsible for this attack are likely to have a limited supply of female suicide bombers. That may be a thin reed, but at least it's a reed.

McCAIN'S PRIORITIES...."Will McCain Abandon Cap and Trade?" asks Matt Yglesias. The short answer, of course, is yes. The slightly longer answer is that I think the question is ill formed. Cap-and-trade is one those enormous, mega-complex, special-interest magnets that's almost impossible to pass no matter how committed you are to it. Getting it through Congress will take an enormous amount of political capital, and I wouldn't even bet on Barack Obama making it a high enough priority to push it through.

As for John McCain, it wouldn't even be in his top ten. Technically speaking, then, he might never officially "abandon" it, but practically speaking, there's never been the slightest chance that even his watered-down version of cap-and-trade would ever see the light of day. He just doesn't care enough about it.

MAYBERRY MACHIAVELLIS....Monica Goodling has long since admitted that she used political considerations to hire career lawyers in the Justice Department, and a couple of months ago the Inspector General compiled statistical evidence showing that this was pretty clearly Bush administration policy. So in a way, today's followup report is anticlimactic: it tells us that the Bush DOJ, as we've known for quite a while, was basically run by a bunch of low-rent Boss Tweeds.

Still, anticlimactic or not, its dry recitation of the facts surrounding "Candidate #1" (the first of eight political hit jobs engineered by Goodling) is pretty startling:

He was an experienced terrorism prosecutor and had successfully prosecuted a high-profile terrorism case for which he received the Attorney General's Award for Exceptional Service....Battle stated that Voris told him that the candidate was head and shoulders above the other candidates who had applied for the counterterrorism detail.

Sounds like a great guy. But there was a problem:

The candidate's wife was a prominent local Democrat elected official and vice-chairman of a local Democratic Party. She also ran several Democratic congressional campaigns....Battle, Kelly, and EOUSA Deputy Director Nowacki all told us that Goodling refused to allow the candidate to be detailed to EOUSA solely on the basis of his wife's political party affiliation.

....Because EOUSA had been unable to fill the counterterrorism detail after Goodling vetoed this candidate, a current EOUSA detailee was asked to assume EOUSA's counterterrorism portfolio....He had no counterterrorism experience and had less than the minimum of 5 years of federal criminal prosecution experience required by the EOUSA job announcement. Battle, Nowacki, Kelly, and Voris all said they thought that he was not qualified for the position, since he had no counterterrorism experience. The replacement candidate was a registered Republican who Goodling had interviewed and approved before he was selected for his EOUSA detail.

Your Bush administration at work: When it's politically convenient, the war on terror is vitally important. When it's not, it's not.

DRIVING....Here's the latest from the Department of Transportation: total miles driven in May were down 3.7% from last year, the first significant May decline since they started keeping records in 1983, and even bigger than April's 1.6% drop. What's interesting, though, is that this change isn't as sudden as it sometimes seems: it's actually been building for a couple of years. This chart shows things a little more clearly, and you can see that driving started leveling off as early as 2006 before finally beginning to decline this year.

In one sense this is impressive: 3.7% is a fairly sizable drop. On the other hand, considering that gasoline prices have doubled since 2005, it's also a remarkably restrained response. It'll be interesting to see if these declines are permanent, or if driving volume goes back up as people get used to higher prices.

And in case you're interested, the steepest decline was in Michigan, where driving is down 7.4%. At the other end is North Dakota, the only state to laugh in the face of $4 gas. Their driving was up 0.7% in May.

TO THE STOCKS!....John McCain is going to prevent oil companies from pocketing the proceeds of his gas tax holiday by publicly shaming them into passing the savings along to consumers? You betcha. I guess he came up with that idea because it's worked so well with other huge industrial corporations in the past.

And while we're on the general subject this morning of economic malpractice, here's a pretty good example: the headline on Jonathan Weisman's budget article in today's Washington Post. The Bush administration's budget accounting has always been an exercise in smoke and mirrors, but that still doesn't justify calling next year's deficit a "record." It's not even close when adjusted for inflation, which is the only reasonable way to do it — as anyone even faintly familiar with budget reporting knows. Reporting the truth is bad enough. There's no need to spice it up.

LIES, DAMN LIES, AND TAXES....I confess that I'm not quite as bent out of shape as some people about Michael Scherer's article in Time this week that describes Obama's and McCain's tax plans. Yes, Scherer is more nebulous than he needs to be, but at the same time, it really is true that the plans are complicated and hard to nail down, and Scherer writes plainly about their main features: namely that McCain's plan benefits the rich while Obama's benefits the middle class, and that McCain's plan is a bigger deficit buster than Obama's.

That said, did everyone catch Scherer's lede?

"The choice in this election is stark and simple," John McCain said at recent Denver event, repeating a phrase that is a staple of his stump speech. "Senator Obama will raise your taxes. I won't."

Seems clear enough, right? It's an old argument you already know — Republicans cut taxes, Democrats raise them. Except it's not true, at least not in the way that it seems. But don't take my word for it. Here is Douglas Holtz-Eakin, McCain's chief economic policy adviser. "I used to say that Barack Obama raises taxes and John McCain cuts them, and I was convinced," he told me in a phone interview this week. "I stand corrected."

Italics mine. So Holtz-Eakin, who is still trying to keep his reputation from being completely shredded by the campaign, now admits that Obama isn't going to raise taxes. But his boss is still saying the opposite. Anyone want to take bets on whether McCain stops lying about this?

THE USUAL CYCLE....The New York Times reports that the volume of short-term commercial loans has dropped 3% this year, the largest annual decline since 2001:

Banks struggling to recover from multibillion-dollar losses on real estate are curtailing loans to American businesses, depriving even healthy companies of money for expansion and hiring.

....Drew Greenblatt, president of Marlin Steel Wire Products, figured it would be easy to get a $300,000 bank loan to finance a new robot for his factory in Baltimore....But when Mr. Greenblatt called the local branch of Wachovia — the same bank that had been aggressively marketing loans to him for years — he was distressed by the response. "The exact words were, 'We're saying no to almost everybody,' " Mr. Greenblatt recalled.

....Some suggest that the banks, spooked by enormous losses, have replaced a disastrously indiscriminate willingness to hand out money with an equally arbitrary aversion to lend — even on industries that continue to grow.

"There's been a lot of disruption in the credit market, and a lot of traditional lenders have really tightened up," said Gregory Goldstein, president of Macquarie Equipment Finance, which leases computer gear and other technology to companies. "Before, some of the standards they lent on were weak, but we think they have overshot and gone too far on the other end."

Gotta laugh at that one. Of course banks overshot on the way up and are overshooting on the way down too. That's what always happens. It happened with savings and loans, it happened with South American loans, it happened with dotcoms, it happened with housing, it always happens. Bankers, as near as I can tell, have about as much common sense as the average lemming. The Fed can help, but it can't turn them into a different species. Buckle up.

HIGHWAY LINGUISTICS....PART 3....I know you've all been transfixed by this weekend's discussion of Southern California's habit of prepending "the" to freeway numbers, haven't you? So here it is: one final post with the long-awaited semi-official explanation for this phenomenon. It's official because it appears in an academic journal, but only semi because I remain a little skeptical anyway. It's below the fold on the off chance that you couldn't care less about all this.

The article is called "The" Freeway in Southern California, by Grant Geyer, and it appeared as a note in the summer 2001 issue of American Speech. His story starts at about the time that LA's original five freeways were being built in the 30s and 40s:

In about 1941, just before the completion of the first of the famous freeways, intercity traffic came into Los Angeles on the north-south axis on U.S. 99, U.S. 101, or California Route 1....Before the freeways were built, locals generally preferred the old, time-honored street or road names instead of numbers in conversation. So for 'U.S. 99' they said San Fernando Road because the highway followed that particular named street, as far as the distant end of "town." Likewise, 'U.S. 101' was Ventura Boulevard and 'Route 1' was Pacific Coast Highway....Route 1 or Route 101 was not used in town.

My mother, who grew up in LA, confirms this. Within "town" (basically LA County) names were used for these routes. Outside of town, they were referred to by number. Onward:

When the federal interstate system grew up, the southern California area got its share of funding and road numbers....However, for the first 20 years of the interstate system, no one used the numerical designations....The interstate routes around Los Angeles were called the Ventura Freeway, the Hollywood Freeway, the Santa Ana Freeway, the Golden State Freeway, the San Bernardino Freeway, the Pasadena Freeway, the Glendale Freeway, the San Diego Freeway, the Santa Monica Freeway, the Harbor Freeway, the Riverside Freeway, and the Long Beach Freeway.

....The strange-sounding usage of the plus number, as in the 118, was the natural result of an amazing proliferation of new, minor interstate cutovers, extensions, and bypasses that began about 1975....[It] was even more pronounced when new major Los Angeles interstates sprang up without having any precursors and without being extensions of earlier, nonnumerical freeways. The first one I remember in this category was the 605 Freeway.

This gibes with my memory too. I-605 is off