Link!

So a buncha pointy-headed sciencey types are all upset because we're "using up resources" and "destroying the world." Well, boo hoo hoo! Do you hear that sound, sciencey-types? It is the world's largest violin playing just for the exhaustion of our natural resources. The violin is made entirely of mulched rainforest and played by enormous smoke-belching engines of steel and concrete, standing a thousand feet tall in glorious tribute to the undying achievement that has been man's rape of the natural world! Tomorrow it will be scrapped and replaced with a newer, bigger violin with built-in wireless and dolphin-exploding capabilities

Jesse Lee thinks the sole force able to take out DeLay is Rove, and he can only do that by converting the GOP caucus. True, but I don't think he's got the power. The house leadership is surprisingly disconnected from the White House -- there's been no patron relationship there. Unlike Frist, Hastert and DeLay built this goddamn majority, and I'd be stunned if they let the transient occupants of the White House tell them how to run it. So I think Rove's meddling might prove counterproductive.

But what about internal fears from the conference? That's trickier. If DeLay is dragging down the poll numbers and become a problem for the Republicans, would he allow Hastert and Blunt to put him out of his misery? My answer, again, is nope. You have to remember that DeLay was never a Gingrichite, he's never been a movement guy concerned with creating an enduring GOP majority in order to change the world. DeLay's ruthlessness, and thus his success, actually comes from his alternative motivation -- the man wants power, simple as that. And he doesn't just want it for his friends or party or patrons, he wants it for himself. So you're about to watch DeLay cash in all the chits, call in all the debts. All those lawmakers he installed in power? Watch them circle the wagons. All those lobbyists he invited into the Capitol? Watch them contribute to the fund. And DeLay himself? He's readying for war, already constructing a him-against-the-world narrative. His very belligerence closes off his escape routs, once he's entered the fight and vowed to win it, losing becomes unacceptable, a knife in his pride. He won't allow it -- it's personal.

And that, for Democrats, is probably the best outcome. DeLay flailing wildly, desperately trying to survive as Republicans distance themselves, caucus dissension hits the papers, and the poll numbers nosedive. DeLay, for his part, has never been good in front of the cameras. He's not a skilled media personality, more apt to reach heights of sublime absurdity (i.e, his defense of Quayle, which argued that minorities snatched up all the spots in Vietnam, leaving no room for white boys like Dan and Tom) and blistering rage than to turn in compelling and vulnerable performances. But if he wants to survive, he'll have to step into the limelight, which might kill him on its own. And the more damage DeLay takes, the more his omnipresent PAC contributions and fundraisers will hurt the candidates they were meant to benefit. In the end, he's got too much pride to go quietly and he's too connected to go on his own. If Tom's going to die, he won't go clean. He'll writhe and flail, and he'll take many a friend and foe down with him.

We can only hope.

Kevin Drum knocks George Will's support for a national sales tax out of the park:

A national sales tax is an idee fixe among a certain type of conservative lunatic, sort of like the gold standard and the Trilateral Commission. George Will might be dumb enough to fall for it, but the rest of us shouldn't. It's just a plain stupid idea.

But you know what? I wish Republicans would quit gabbing about it and actually implement it. They'd then be out of power for about a century or so, which might give the rest of us a chance to do some good. So go ahead Rep. Linder: make my day.

Go read his reasoning and marvel over what a fun debate this would be to have.

Brad Plumer's got a characteristically thoughtful post on why Americans want to be the dominant global power. I mean, really, what good does it do us? And, from a logical standpoint, he's right. In fact, I'd much rather be a highly-developed country on the second-tier of world power (like Japan or France) than America. So long as you believe the global strongman to be basically benevolent -- and, odd bouts of French-hating and Japanophobia aside, we've proved ourselves such -- you're really in much better shape letting someone else worry about supporting a massive army, purchasing all the latest weapons technology, and dashing across the globe when the bat eagle signal dances across the sky. You can save your cash and create a nice, comfy social net, full of health care for all and long, paid vacations.

But, if you're an American, and you've got even an ounce of nationalism in you, you'd rather see a world dominated by you than anyone else. You are good, you don't believe there to be anyone better, so the best possible outcome for the world, if not for your deficit, is American preeminence. in that way, I think Brad underestimates how much of this is a weird offshoot of white man's burden, call it best country's chore. It's not that Americans really want to be dominant, it's that they feel they kinda owe it to the world, all things considered.

Aside from some folks at the top of the national security food chain who defend it in cost-benefit terms, I think this is mostly an instinctive thing. Americans are a bit isolationist and a bit reluctant to project force in order to promote Good Stuff, but they'll generally vote for the hegemonically-inclined over his opponent, because this taps into nationalism rather than foreign policy opinion. And that's why I believe any effective national security critique the Democrats can adopt will rely, in large part, on arguing that there are better ways to promote American preeminence and apply American force. I don't think you'll get far by tapping into isolationist strains, but I think you can make quite a run by invoking our moral authority and responsibility to set an example for the world.

So back to the Democracy Corps poll (no Josh Marshall-esque, never-ending cliffhangers here!). Let me go through the relevant results and then get to thoughts. The Republican party rates about 4% higher than we do, while Bill Clinton rates a smidge higher than the Republican party and George W clocks in at .4% above him (yes, I know we're leaving statistical significance here). Weirdly, when asked who they'll vote for in the 06 midterms, a Democrat or a Republican, respondents chose the good guys over the not-so-good, 46%-45%. When thinking about the presidential, Hillary beats Jeb, 50%-47%, and the hypothetical Bill v. George match-up gives Clinton the easy edge, 51%-46%.

When asked what direction the country should be heading in, Bush's or something totally different, totally different won effortlessly, 52%-45%. From there we go to comparative polls, the graphs of which I posted here. They show, basically, that the Democrats win on specific domestic issues, but Republicans win on general attributes ("know what they stand for", etc). Foreign policy wasn't a major focus of the poll.

So what we've got is a party whose individuals do just fine (remember kids, we've won the popular vote in three of the last four presidentials, and we would've made congressional gains in 2004 save for a bout of illegal redistricting in Texas) but the party itself, as a standalone structure, may well be more hurt than help to those carrying its flag. That is, of course, a problem. In some ways it returns to the argument I was having with Matt a few days ago. Democrats, right now, are doing an excellent job of foiling Bush's legislative strategy and thus protecting Americans from privatization. But that success is not conferring benefits on the party itself. Maybe that's just because few Americans are tuned in, and when we run against privatization in 2006 we'll see the gains. In fact, I'd bet there's an element of that in the mix. But when total success is doing you no good whatsoever, you know there's a problem.

So what's the answer? Blah blah party-building blah blah blah. But in the specific, we really have to be more overt about tying our opposition to our party, which is to say embracing what we oppose and what we support as characteristics of Democrats rather than the battle lines of a particular congressional battle. That's why we need some general Democratic media representatives like Dean really pounding away at the connection between this fight and the Democratic/Republican philosophies. Beyond that, that's why we really need to increase the coherence between the Democratic thinkers (like the national security experts at Democracy Arsenal, which has now been recommended by everyone but me) and ordinary Democrats. Beyond that, it's back to Bill Bradley's pleas to build a stable pyramid of our own and create an institution where our party is stronger than its candidates.

Yeah, I know, this is all standard. And I hate to be a Cassandra about all this, but I fear we're getting so excited about defeating Bush's Social Security plan that we're not noticing how little good it's doing our party. What we've got, thus far, is just a good first step. We've put the President on the defensive and found a ripe issue for the election. But you know what? We've had good first steps before. It's all part of our inverted pyramid: rather than building a solid foundation for the next election, we just hope that whatever's going on at the moment will be enough to take down the right. It rarely is. What's going on at the moment has to also boost us. Gingrich understood that, and used the defeat of health care as a starting point to nationalize and sell a Republican message about limited government and establishment hubris. We're being presented with the same opportunity, and we need to approach it with the same vision. This poll should be plenty of evidence for that.

God knows she deserves it. The NY Times editorial page puts it particularly well and, hopefully, dredges some meaning and beauty out of this whole sordid affair.

The new Democracy Corps memo just popped into my inbox and, despite the spin, it strikes me as bad news. It's not that Republicans are doing well so much as Democrats are doing really, really badly. And that's not individual Democrats -- Hillary easily beats Jeb (and 11% of Republicans cross lines for her) and Bill stomps all over George. But the party's image stinks. It's past midnight and I lack the energy to work up a full analysis now, but I'll leave you with these two graphs to noodle over; my comments to follow in the morning:

Via Body and Soul, this 911 recording is hilarious. That's right, it's so funny that my recommendation wouldn't carry enough weight unless I italicized it. And, apropos of my earlier comments that Orange Count is not a sandbox full of spoiled rich kids, this all occurs -- sigh -- in the OC. Alright then, off you go.

Update: If you've listened to the call, wiped the tears of mirth (mirth is an underused word, don't you think?) from your face, and are still looking for things to read, this post of Kevin's is mighty interesting.

Bill Bradley's op-ed today is so spot-on it brought a tear to my eye. For awhile now, I've been incoherently expressing the difference between Republican and Democratic presidential candidates by saying that the former are defined by their party while the latter are forced to define their party. But Bradley hit the target much more accurately:

To further the party's ideological and political goals, Republicans in the 1970's and 1980's built a comprehensive structure based on Powell's blueprint. Visualize that structure as a pyramid.

You've probably heard some of this before, but let me run through it again. Big individual donors and large foundations - the Scaife family and Olin foundations, for instance - form the base of the pyramid. They finance conservative research centers like the Heritage Foundation, the Cato Institute and the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, entities that make up the second level of the pyramid.

The ideas these organizations develop are then pushed up to the third level of the pyramid - the political level. There, strategists like Karl Rove or Ralph Reed or Ken Mehlman take these new ideas and, through polling, focus groups and careful attention to Democratic attacks, convert them into language that will appeal to the broadest electorate. That language is sometimes in the form of an assault on Democrats and at other times in the form of advocacy for a new policy position. The development process can take years. And then there's the fourth level of the pyramid: the partisan news media. Conservative commentators and networks spread these finely honed ideas.

At the very top of the pyramid you'll find the president. Because the pyramid is stable, all you have to do is put a different top on it and it works fine.
...

To understand how the Democratic Party works, invert the pyramid. Imagine a pyramid balancing precariously on its point, which is the presidential candidate.

Democrats who run for president have to build their own pyramids all by themselves. There is no coherent, larger structure that they can rely on. Unlike Republicans, they don't simply have to assemble a campaign apparatus - they have to formulate ideas and a vision, too. Many Democratic fundraisers join a campaign only after assessing how well it has done in assembling its pyramid of political, media and idea people.

There is no clearly identifiable funding base for Democratic policy organizations, and in the frantic campaign rush there is no time for patient, long-term development of new ideas or of new ways to sell old ideas. Campaigns don't start thinking about a Democratic brand until halfway through the election year, by which time winning the daily news cycle takes precedence over building a consistent message. The closest that Democrats get to a brand is a catchy slogan.
...

A party based on charisma has no long-term impact. Think of our last charismatic leader, Bill Clinton. He was president for eight years. He was the first Democrat to be re-elected since Franklin Roosevelt. He was smart, skilled and possessed great energy. But what happened? At the end of his tenure in the most powerful office in the world, there were fewer Democratic governors, fewer Democratic senators, members of Congress and state legislators and a national party that was deep in debt. The president did well. The party did not. Charisma didn't translate into structure.

If Democrats are serious about preparing for the next election or the next election after that, some influential Democrats will have to resist entrusting their dreams to individual candidates and instead make a commitment to build a stable pyramid from the base up. It will take at least a decade's commitment, and it won't come cheap. But there really is no other choice.

Absolutely correct in every way.

Update: Kevin's got some further thoughts, mainly, that the remarkable success conservatives have had has come from exploiting levers of power no one had really thought of before (though he forgets what may be the most important two -- direct mail and churches). Regarding Bradley's op-ed, I'd argue that conservative innovation hasn't been the result of dedicated and original thinkers looking for new opportunities but the simple dividends of paying attention to structural strength. None of the paths they formed were particularly novel, at least not once they started forging them. But Democrats never really tried to counter the conservative radio presence (at least not until Air America), never tried to figure out our own framing, never attempted to pack the courts (not since FDR, anyway) -- but none of this stuff was exclusive to the other side, it was more our lack of interest that gave offered them such massive returns. If Bradley's ethos was adopted, Democrats would be on the lookout for ways to challenge current forms of conservative advantage and create some of their own. Evidence is they're trying, at least to a degree. Online fundraising is really owned by liberals, with DailyKos, MoveOn.org, and the Dean campaign all firmly settled on the left so that, at least, is positive.

What always surprises me is that there is a natural place to make great gains that Democrats completely ignore. While both parties battle over Hispanics and Catholics, Republicans begin vying for Blacks, and Democrats start Godding up their language, nobody pays any attention to the young. As a group, we naturally tilt towards the left, but Democrats show little-to-no interest in codifying that advantage. You don't see them working to support mobilization on college campuses, you don't see them deploying speakers and politicians to schools, you don't see them working to align themselves with the young on issues they care about, you don't see them trying to do, well, anything. And yet, here you've got a constituency that tilts left, that Republicans don't care about, and that will be voting for a long time to come. It's really a very stupid oversight.

I think this might be my favorite blog ever.

Brad Plumer is so right on this it's hard to believe he's not been hired by the DCCC and given a corner office somewhere:

Look, last year no one was offering Senate Democrats a chance to "wash their hands" of Tom Daschle. Quite the opposite—the phrase "Daschle Democrats" spread far and wide across the airwaves, during the big push to paint the entire minority party as one giant ball of pure, black-hearted obstructionism. It was dirty, it was lame, it was disgusting, but that's how the fucking game goes. *No one* gets out of here alive!

Seriously, it's useless, entirely useless trying to turn Tom DeLay into a big lightning rod for all the outrage against the House's excesses these days. If that's what happens, he'll be purged in a minute's notice and then absolutely nothing will change. The GOP will just find someone else to do what DeLay does. Roy Blunt can do what DeLay does. The K Street stovepipe will still pump along. The rule-bending and committee-abusing will still go on. House Democrats will still be cut out of the decision-making process. DeLay's just the symptom of a larger disease, and that's how he ought to be treated and portrayed. Hm? Please, please get this right so I don't have to spend all my time being a shrill partisan hack. Thanks.

Agreed. Judged by temperament, I'm a pretty moderate guy. But there's no time to be moderate anymore, not if you've taken even the slightest look into what's going on in the House, in this Administration, in the Republican party, in the country -- the whole system is going so sour it makes me sick. Which is why I'd love to see the tumor removed. But it'd be terrifically moronic to make this about Tom DeLay, rather than make Tom DeLay about the Republican majority. If the former works, all the right has to do is pull him from the spotlight, either by snatching his position or forcing his resignation. Either way, the corruption train chugs along, just with a new conductor.

It's the same problem I'm seeing with Social Security. Democrats are gingerly testing the waters of attack politics, dipping in a toe here and there to criticize an opponent, or a policy, or a procedure. But they seem afraid, or maybe unwilling, to widen the assault, to kill something and tie the dead weight to the Republican party's neck. I'm glad we're nailing privatization, but it's not helping our poll numbers any. In fact, Democrats in congress are seeing the same drop -- though it's taking them even lower -- than their Republican counterparts. Tom DeLay's a really bad guy, but we're getting really excited at the sight of his weakness and not, so far as I can tell, working him into a long-term strategy. Rahm Emanuel can tap all the "squeaky-clean" candidates he wants, but if we make the scandal about the guy, once he's gone, there's no more scandal.

Privatization, DeLay, all these things need to become about the Republican party as a whole. Privatization needs to explain their unhealthy obsession with destroying the American safety net. DeLay needs to explain the tight embrace the Republican majority and industry lobbyists are locked into. Anything less allows them to lose a battle but escape the war. And, as the minority party, the status quo is too untenable for us to allow that.

Duncan is right that Orange County isn't the uber-wealthy playground that the eponymous TV show portrays it as. What most people think of when they picture the county is Newport Beach, an enormously affluent community by the beach. They might also imagine Laguna Beach, where Dncan lived, and Laguna Hills. What they're not imagining is Buena Park or Fountain Valley, blue collar areas experiencing major immigrant influxes. Neither are they giving much thought to Westminster (almost entirely Vietnamese) or Santa Ana, where the residents speak only Spanish.

A similarly annoying phenomenon is at work in LA, where the word conjures up a specific stretch of Sunset Blvd. to most everyone. That the city possesses massive areas where immigrants pack themselves into little-regulated, little-noticed apartment buildings, has giant areas with a semi-suburban flavor seems unknown. Having dinner in the Ethiopian district and dessert in the Jewish area strikes people as the sort of thing you can only do in New York, despite the fact that the two, in LA, are mere miles from each other. It's a pity.

Kristof's got a great column on the foolishness of the Bush administration's marriage-based AIDS prevention programs in Africa. Go read it.

In comments to my post on the absurdity of the infinite-horizon, TJon writes:

Why don't Democrats use this to mock Republicans. Use the infinite model to calculate how much SS will cost between 4050 and 4100. Ask Republicans if they agree with that prediction. Ask them details about it. How many workers will there be per retiree? How much will a retiree get in 2005 dollars? Will that cover the toll lanes on the commute from Mars to Venus? Economists can't predict what is going to happen next year, much less 75 years from now. Its a joke and we need to start mocking it.

Word.

Jeanne d'Arc is right. This does raise a lot of questions.

Over at the Agora, they're running through another round of "why-oh-why are all universities so lefty", this time with an assist from Howard Kurtz:

"[c]ollege faculties, long assumed to be a liberal bastion, lean further to the left than even the most conspiratorial conservatives might have imagined." 72 percent of college faculty describe themselves as "liberal," with only 15 percent labeling themself "conservative." 50 percent identified themselves as Democrats and 11 percent as Republicans. Disparity at so-called "elite" schools, it seems, is even more pronounced. The report offers percentage views on specific issues as well. The study was conducted by professors at the University of Toronto based on a survey of 1,643 full-time faculty at 183 four-year schools. It was funded by the Randolph Foundation, a right-leaning group.

So in places where intelligent, informed people work, many of them turn out to be liberal. At the places the most intelligent and informed people work, even more of them turn out to be liberal. And so we scratch our heads and wonder about bias? Why?

Political ideology, unlike gender or race, isn't encoded in your genes. You're not born with a certain leaning, ejected from the womb with a partisan affiliation. And while the opinions of your parents are often bequeathed unto the kids, they're not inviolable, as evidence by Kerry's far-greater vote share among the young (if it was just about the parents, each generation should mirror the one before it).

Moreover, glance around the blogosphere, particularly the rightmost end of it. Where, on the left, most everyone is a proud Democrat, the right is fairly littered with libertarians. Indeed, many of the right-leaning academics, when the election forced them to choose, ended up with Kerry rather than Bush. That's not because Dan Drezner or David Adesnik are raging progressives, but because they found the president a bit bankrupt in the thought department.

So really, why fight it? We keep finding that academia swings left, those with post-graduate work overwhelmingly backed Kerry...it's time to stop the head-scratching. Being a libertarian is perfectly fine, as is being an economic conservative and a neocon. But the weird merging of the Christian Right, the Neocons, and Karl Rove's theories that's currently directing the Republican party makes no sense at all. It's an administration where the President believe the "jury's still out" on how the earth was formed and the Senate Majority Leader -- a trained doctor! -- thinks AIDS can be transmitted through tears (to say nothing of the House Majority Leader who couldn't go to Vietnam because those damn minorities had gobbled up all the spots).

And so people who care about their party making sense shy away from Bush. Sometimes they find more elements of their beliefs in him than in the Democrats, and so they pull the lever for the "R", but the more that intellectual coherence matters, the less they make that bargain. And so as you climb up the rungs of academia, where internal coherency and intellectual rigor become values to live and die by, you find fewer Republicans. Simple as that.

Update: In response to Michael and some of the comments, I should clarify that I don't believe liberals are necessarily smarter than conservatives -- I've met some morons and geniuses among both breeds. What I do believe, or am at least considering, is that the heavy consumption of information tilts consumers towards the liberal end of things. To rephrase, you could be brilliant but not particularly informed and carry on with your biases intact. But if you're reading the papers and thinking critically about the massive deficit, the lack of WMD's, the nomination of John Bolton, the insane prioritization of Social Security over Medicare, our president's distaste for reading the news, the fiscal absurdity of his tax cuts, the pro-torture bent of his underlings, and so forth, I think it'd swing you hard left. That's not true for everyone and, crucially, it's not true of all Republican administrations, but it is accurate when restricted to Bush 43.

While he's awarding Kim Du Toit the ribbon for "America's Worst Blogger", Robert Farley offers an offhand explanation of what a blogger should be:

A decent blogger actually introduces new ideas; he does not simply confirm what you already believed but were too ashamed to verbalize.

We should print it on a mousepad and send it off to, well, more than a few bloggers I can think of. LGF and The Idiotarian Rottweiler should have it forcibly tattooed on their foreheads.

Michael Schreiber writes:

I am scared of New York and Chicago. Both are next to large bodies of water and quite a bit more sophisticated than California in a number of ways; but these two pulsating bodies tower over me like Olympian Gods. The names alone sound of cosmopolitan, excitement. sex-appeal and dynamic tones. Of course, I have never lived in these two places, nor for that matter have I lived anywhere else in the country. I am a California kid, too afraid to be bordered by anything other than the blue body of water crashing within ear shot of my house.

To which I can only say "huh"? It's sad -- he's bought into the mythology of Chicago and New York too. So far as I can tell, from a fair number of visits and a large number of friends, the Chi-town/NY mystique is entirely an invention of hardship. Unable to compete with the massively enjoyable lifestyle offered by California, they've fallen back on some ephemeral claim to sophistication and worldliness (though, so far as I know, Chicago isn't very sophisticated, and nor is Brooklyn). But Manhattan, which is what everyone thinks of when they call New York to mind, could fit in LA's back pocket. We could set it between Sunset's club strip and the Hollywood Bowl, a little to the left of the Disney Center, and let it hang out there. Would anyone even notice?

Actually, people would. New York, on this beautiful Spring day, is at 50 degrees and cloudy. I believe they call that "nice", there. Chicago is at 61, my buddy Grant, who goes to U of C, is probably sporting flip-flops. Los Angeles is at 71. And we consider that shitty weather.

So Illinois and NY can keep their worldliness, their faux-sophistication. Whatever keeps them warm at night -- they deserve it. But it breaks my heart to see full-blooded Californians buying into it. You can hear the beach, Michael -- stand proud. You can swim in it too, stand prouder. You've got two world class cities in SF and LA, and SD probably merits an honorable mention. You can read outside all year round, exult in it. And if you like New York and Chicago, have at it, they're great places. But not in any way that should make a Californian pale with envy.

Looks like we should consign that little part of us awaiting answers on the intelligence failures that led us into Iraq to that same purgatory where we still expect a verdict in the Plame case. It didn't have to be that way. Liberals weren't happy when Kansas Senator Pat Roberts condemned the intelligence verdict on the Bush administration to "Phase II", which would only emerge after the election, but still, we understood. Were we Republicans, tasked with defending a President who'd obviously massaged inadequate intelligence into the shape he wanted, we'd want the report to come out post-election as well.

But even I didn't think they'd just stonewall the thing. Even I didn't think they'd just bog down the investigation and let it fizzle out of its own accord. But that's exactly what Roberts has done. No administration officials have been interviewed, obstacles set up by the OSP (a bunch of neocons who seem responsible for much of the mess) have not been bypassed, and Roberts has declared the investigation "on the backburner", which ensures that it'll never singe Bush.

Checks and balances indeed.

Matt's got an excellent post on troop withdrawal in Iraq. Read it.

Over at Sean-Paul's place, I'm undersigned on a letter protesting The National Press Club's strange lineup for their upcoming "Blogger? Journalist?" event. Slated to discuss the issue are Wonkette, Congress Daily's John Stanton, and Jeff Gannon. Yeah, that Jeff Gannon.

It's such a laughably silly slate that you can't be mad, just amused. Nevertheless, in an event that bills itself as having bloggers and journalists attending to discuss what they are, you'd think they could add in a representative blogger or two. Ana Marie-Cox is not, so far as I can tell, a blogger anymore. I mean, maybe she is, but whenever I click over to Wonkette, which I rarely do, it seems someone else is writing the site. BoiFromTroy, or, right now, Greg Beato, or "Joe Klein" -- but not Cox. One of the defining traits of bloggers is that they, well, blog, and Cox doesn't seem to do that. I don't blame her, all these panels eat up the workday, but it's time for her to turn in the blog decoder ring and become a professional guest panelist if she's going to drop off her site and become ubiquitous at breakout sessions and buffet lines.

In addition, it's kinda weird to represent political blogs, which are overearnest, highly wonky things, with Cox. It'd be like using gossip-queen Liz Smith as the standard representative for political reporters. It'd embarrass the media, which is why it wouldn't happen and, I guess, why they use Wonkette to represent us -- we're eminently embarassable. But this time, at least, the jokes on the media. The guy they've chosen to accept as a legitimate halfway point between online media and respectable journalism is a partisan hack who sold his body by the hour. They could've picked Andrew Sullivan, Matt Yglesias, Josh Marshall, or any of the other blogger/writers who populate the net, but no, they chose the male prostitute and paired him with the blogger obsessed with anal penetration. Says something, doesn't it?

Apropos of nothing save my annoyance, I did a little research on the "infinite-horizon" modeling today. "Infinite horizon" projections are where we get numbers like Social Security's supposed $11 trillion deficit. It's a way of forecasting costs off into the great beyond. It's also a load of crap. President Bush's tax cuts, if judged via an infinite horizon projection, would cost us $20 trillion, and his Medicare plan would be coming to your house to eat your children.

But the infinite horizon is BS. While trawling around the internets to figure out exactly how it works, I found a good Fact-Check.org article explaining that, well, it doesn't. Because it's so inaccurate, it was never included until the 2003 Trustees Report, which apparently was when the Bush administration decided to add fangs and a pitchfork to the Social Security numbers. A technical panel advising them on the inclusion on the number said it's misleading as a dollar estimate and should instead be expressed as a percentage of the taxable payroll numbers, which, in 2003, would have been 3.8%. Not so impressive, is it?

It gets worse. In a letter to the Social Security Advising Board, the American Academy of Actuaries (nominated for most boring national convention six years in a row!) wrote:

The new measures of the unfunded obligations included in the 2003 report provide little if any useful information about the program’s long-range finances and indeed are likely to mislead anyone lacking technical expertise in the demographic, economic, and actuarial aspects of the program’s finances into believing that the program is in far worse financial condition than is actually indicated.
...
Thus, we believe that including these values in the Trustees Report is unnecessary and is, on balance, a detriment to the Trustees’ charge to provide a meaningful and balanced presentation of the financial status of the program.

So the whole thing is useless. What's really aggravating is that Bush has shown no compunction about shortening every projection we've got. Bush has rejected 10-year budgetary outlooks in favor of five-year projections, and the Medicare expansion was regularly undersold and placed on a shortened projection in order to lowball the costs. And that's not even getting into the the intimidation of its chief actuary, who believed it'd cost $100 billion more than the Administration was admitting, and was told he'd lose his job if he said anything. He was right.

This, I feel, has been the media's primary failure over the past few few years. By not insisting on any numerical standard for their economic reporting, they've allowed the Administration to bewilder voters by placing every policy on a different projection depending on whether they want it to look healthy or near-death. That failure has denied news consumers any sort of comparative ability when evaluating different stories. It's straight insane that voters think Social Security is in worse shape, yet they do. And, after all, how can they compare them accurately when Social Security is evaluated into the ever-stretching future and Medicare is capped at 10 years? They can't -- there's no way to decipher that. It's the media's job to provide the translation. And they've failed.

Grassley's admission that privatization probably won't happen -- indeed, that no bill is likely to move forward -- drives that stake nice and deep into the privateers' heart. This is like Moynihan's reluctance to push Clinton's health care bill and his public disparagement of its chances, the combination of which did much to kill the plan. Go Grassley!

Update: The reason this is such a big deal, which I forgot to mention, is that Grassley, as chair of the Finance Committee, is charged with writing the bill and bringing it to the floor. He's the guy. And the guy thinks there'll be no bill.

Matt's explosion of opprobrium towards my earlier post on Dean deserves a response. Suffice to say there are two schools of thought on Dean's ascension to the chairmanship: mine, which is that Dean is a highly effective media representative and his primary role should be spokesperson, and Matt's, which is that Dean is an enormously ineffective media rep and should keep his goddamn head down so he doesn't paint the left as liberal. Matt's quite pleased that Dean's proving invisible and apparently focusing on the technocratic responsibilities of the job because he believes that if Dean jumps onto the scene Rove will "wet his pants", assumedly from glee rather than fear.

Maybe so. But likely not. To start, Dean is very good in front of the cameras. Aside from the Scream, which has colored a lot of perceptions, Dean was an enormously capable speaker and debater. More to the point, he was brilliantly clear at delivering his message. That was, if you remember, the center of the pro-Dean argument -- he knew what he stood for amidst a party that didn't. The reason for Dean's clarity is that he's a public pugilist, a simple speaker who likes to attack and pummel his opponent's points. Democrats are desperately in need of just that. It relates to the Rude Pundit's graphic post from this morning, when you've got your opponent on the ground, you don't put your hands in your pockets, whistle a triumphant tune and walk away. You finish the job. Democrats desperately need to close the Social Security fight in a way that strengthens the Democratic brand. But we need some of our people hitting the television in order to do so. As it is, we've got no recognizable, ubiquitous representatives trying to drive the debate. The only one who has the star power to do so, at least theoretically, is Hillary, and she's hanging back in anticipation of 08.

Maybe Matt's fine with that -- I dunno. But I've little interest in just beating back privatization as a policy, I want to smash it as a philosophy. And until we've got some public -- rather than legislative -- strategy for moving that attack forward, we're going to lose our chance on Social Security. When Republicans killed health care, they had Gingrich to twist the knife and, indeed, rip out the heart. His brand of hyper-partisan, wholly public warfare was critical in making Clinton's defeat a Democratic disaster, rather than a foiled piece of legislation. We've got no analogue. And that's why the Social Security fight is hurting us as surely as the Republicans.

What? You didn't know that? Amid all the recent celebration over Social Security, here's some polling you may have missed. Americans don't trust Democrats on Social Security any more than they did before this began. It's simply astonishing that the numbers haven't changed since 1998. Worse, approval of the Democratic leadership in Congress has actually gone down, even among Democrats. Only 37% of voters approve of our titular heads, compared with 38% two months ago and 47% two years ago. Among Democrats, 56% approve, a year ago, 63% approved. Republicans, at 39%, are faring little better, but why the hell are they faring a little better? And why, amidst a stunning victory, are our numbers moving in the wrong direction, even among our partisans?

We here in Blogland have been very happy, very pleased, over the Democrats' performance. But gains in the fight over Social Security have not become Democratic gains. Our message on Social Security, at least the portion that applies to our party vs. the Republican party, isn't getting out. So Matt may want Dean to keep quiet, but he'd better change his reasoning. So far as the Party is concerned, things are not "going quite well so far". In fact, they're going surprisingly badly. As a Party, we desperately need someone with star power able and willing to articulate our agenda and message. Reid isn't the guy, Pelosi ain't the girl. Hillary is worried about herself, Kerry is damaged goods and Obama's too young. That leaves Dean, the very guy entrusted with the party's health. And it'd be a shame if he passed on the responsibility.

Unlike Brad Plumer, I'm going to evince no shame in declaring myself objectively pro-Starbucks -- I love the place. And you know what? I don't even drink coffee. Yep -- shout it from the mountain, this decaffeinated blogger thinks independents are overrated and everyone should enjoy a local emanation of the Seattle-based giant. Starbucks offers all workers, whether full or part-time, paid vacation and sick leave, stock options, a 401(k) plan, and health benefits. The health plan is available with a mere 20-hours a week -- most places demand 40 -- and the company pays 75% of the costs, more than the federal government pays in its plans. Domestic partners are included in the coverage, and in fact were allowed in a year before unmarried heterosexual partners were brought into the fold. The plan also includes dental, vision, and mental care. My friends who work there love the job and consider themselves overpaid. My friends who work at independent shops generally dislike their work and find their compensation paltry. There's no doubt about who gets the better deal.

Moreover, drive through LA some time, particularly the less desirable neighborhoods. Check out the dilapidated street signs, the dirty looking strip malls and restaurants, and the general unpleasantness of the urban architecture, both indoors and out. Then step into the Starbucks there. Burgundy walls, paintings, Ray Charles on the speakers, everything's clean...it's like entering a sanctuary. Any company able to offer haven to groups generally left out of architectural affluence, by which I mean sequestered in unpleasant areas and forced to patronize unlikable stores, should be embraced by liberals. Any company willing to do it while treating their workers in a truly admirable way, especially compared to most of the independents who comprise their ideologically favored competition, should be lauded. Not so much that you shouldn't choose Pete's over them at every opportunity, or support their worker's efforts at unionization, but lauded nonetheless.

Speaking of Dean -- and freaks who read the blog from the bottom-up will know I am -- anyone else a bit surprised at the Chairman's decision to treat the press like he's a groundhog and they're his shadow? The rationale for making him chair rested pretty heavily on his facility in front of the cameras, but the reality of his chairmanship has been a continuing race away from the glare. So while I'm glad he's doing the grassroots thing and encouraged by his focus on local press, which is basically the only kind he's talking to, I fear this is less strategy than phobia.

Folks who rode the Dean train the whole way through its slow-motion explosion have told me how the guv'nor's mistrust and paranoia of the national press rapidly expanded as the campaign fell. Dean, for his part, never liked the press, but at least he tolerated them. I'm a bit concerned that his past experiences have -- rightly! -- soured him on media reliability and fairness, so he's decided to circumvent them. But that judgment, which is perfectly logical considering the guy's past, can't inform his chairmanship. We need Dean to be fairly aggressive with the national press because Democrats lack all the natural points of entry -- the Presidency, the Senate, the House. If this is strategy, as some say it is, and Dean will explode onto the scene in a week or two, that's well and good. If this is character flaw, however, we're in some trouble.

Brad Plumer's post comparing religiously-motivated candidates with candidates attempting to appear religiously-motivated is all sorts of good, read it. But it touches on a personal crusade of mine, that "religious" is nothing more than a heuristic for moral. For Dean to strut on stage and begin talking about the Sadducees is a bit insane -- does he really think red-state voters are just waiting for him to reference an obscure Jewish sect that sought to restore the dominance of the High Priest? Worse, Dean's doesn't need religion, Kerry does. That's because we're not actually talking about religion here, we're talking about conviction.

I'm not sure when we conflated the two, probably somewhere around the moment we cross-tabbed George Bush's poll numbers on conviction and religious faith. In any case, it's straight silly to believe that there's some horde of voters checking off each mention of Jesus on some Church-provided scorecard. It's just not happening. What is happening is that the religious, by virtue of their capacity for faith, radiate a certitude that makes them appear trustworthy and true. The religious mindset is inclined towards full-tilt faith, and anyone trained to obliterate contradictions and questions can and will transfer that talent to other strongly held convictions. So while Kerry may believe the poor should be helped, a natural skeptic like him will never match born-again Bush's dead-simple conviction.

Dean exists across this spectrum, he's the counterexample. Neither religious -- he left his Church over a bike path -- nor given to internal doubt, he nevertheless appears to be a man animated by pure values and conviction. That's where his movement came from, down-and-out Democrats reacting to his quasi-religious -- a term that actually means supernaturally certain -- faith in the power and future of progressivism. Dean need not reference the Sadducees, he shouldn't start sprinkling allusions to the Essenes into his speech. All he needs to do is speak; the guy's values are instantly apparent.

So I agree with Brad, if we want religious leaders, we need to recruit the real articles, not give our politicians a list of terms to inject into their speech. But we don't need them. We need candidates a few steps removed from doubt and uncertainty. We need people, above all, who sound like they believe. If the belief is in Christ, so be it. But the belief is no less powerful if it's on the eradication of poverty or the end of hunger -- we're looking for conviction, not fishing for religion.

And the Bugman's Shakespearian fall continues. Now it's the Wall Street Journal unsheathing the knives. The Wall Street Journal!

Well, kids, it has once again been real, but it's time for me to go. As always, your comments were thoroughly enlightening and a blast to read. Thanks for putting up with me. Here's hoping Ezra rocked some ass in that pillow fight deal he had going on. They have things like that here in NYC, except instead of pillows, we use hookers.

Anyhow, since you've all been so indulgent of my every rhetorical whim, here's one more. I've written a short, one-act play, and I'd like to share it with you. I entitle it "Now, He Tells Us!" Make some popcorn, grab a loved one, and enjoy:

Now, He Tells Us!
A Short, One-Act Play By Daniel A. Munz

Me: Paul, I have to say, I was a little dismayed by your appointment to head the World Bank.

Paul: Really? Well, fuck you.

Me: Right, of course. But there is one thing that makes me optimistic about your appointment.

Paul: [Silence. Licks comb with anticipation.]

Me: Wow, that’s weird. Anyway, what’s encouraging to me is that your passion for democratization and development could actually do some good in the World Bank, as opposed to the Pentagon.

Paul: Actually, it’s funny you say that. I’ve decided not to preach democracy at the World Bank.

Me: [Defenestrates self.]

Fin.

Happy Easter, everybody!

- Daniel A. Munz

Dan Drezner takes issue with Richard Clarke’s NYTimes piece on Iran. Says the Drez:

One would think that this would be the right moment for Clarke, a genuine expert on this question, to introduce his own thoughts on the matter. Instead, we get a “national dialogue” cop-out. That’s a close second behind “mobilize political willpower” on the list of Grand and Meaningless Policy Proposals.

Before March 2003, I would have been with Drezner on this one. But whatever you think of Iraq, it has shown the Bush White House to be more hostile towards honest national dialogue than any modern wartime leader. Facts were fudged, the most reasonable critics were called unpatriotic, reality was ignored, and accountability was dispensed with completely. This was all allowed to happen, of course, because the American people were persuaded that Iraq/Al-Qaeda/terrorism/totalitarianism presented a life-ending, all-consuming, gut-busting, screaming threat to every American and their 2.3 cute, blue-eyed children. I don’t know if we’re going to try to engage Iran militarily, but if we are, Clarke has absolutely the right idea: Job number one has to be setting the stage for an honest debate.

Clarke doesn’t just want “an honest national dialogue.” He says:

Thus, we need an honest national dialogue now on how much we feel threatened by Iran and what the least-bad approaches to mitigating that threat are.

Notice what Clarke calls for: An honest assessment of how big a threat Iran represents, and a realization that some strategies to disarm them could wind up doing us more harm than good in the process. These are two components that were absolutely absent from our dialogue on Iraq, and I think you’d be hard-pressed to argue that we haven’t suffered for it. So I guess Drezner can call Clarke’s op-ed a cop-out if he wants to. Personally, I’m embarassed that Clarke even had to point out that an honest national dialogue might be a good thing. But the fact is, he did. If you don’t think so, just look behind you.

- Daniel A. Munz

This is discouraging:

Despite recommendations by Army investigators, commanders have decided not to prosecute 17 American soldiers implicated in the deaths of three prisoners in Iraq and Afghanistan in 2003 and 2004, according to a new accounting released Friday by the Army. Investigators had recommended that all 17 soldiers be charged in the cases, according to the accounting by the Army Criminal Investigation Command. The charges included murder, conspiracy and negligent homicide. While none of the 17 will face any prosecution, one received a letter of reprimand and another was discharged after the investigations.

I can't believe I have to make this point anymore, but: If we're going to go around spreading democracy, and accountability is a vital part of democracy, could we at least pretend to have some interest in accountability? As I think about this, I'm reminded of something Bill Clinton once said about debt releif: No one talks about it, because no one will lose an election for not talking about it. This seems to be kind of the same issue. Hard as I try, I can't locate a domestic political constituency that would united behind an issue like this. This is a fundamental weakness of Bush's global-democratization strategy: The sacrifices we'd have to make for it to work, in terms of setting a moral example for the world, benefit other nations but get voted on by us. This is not to say that Americans are too selfish to vote for someone else's wellbeing. The problem is that they don't know whether something is beneficial to someone else's wellbeing, because they observe the same local world whether it gets done or not. No American will ever suffer, at least directly and in the short-term, if we fail to promote a culture of accountability in Iraq. As a result, there's just no bloc of voters that punishes politicians for welching on their obligations to other people.

What's the solution? Let Iraqis vote in presidential elections, at least until Iraq is no longer under our control? I don't quite know how to fix this massive accountability gap, but when the Army blithely declines to prosecute its own just because it doesn't have to, the fact that there is such a gap is pretty damned apparent.

- Daniel A. Munz

Andrew Sullivan's unsurprisingly saccharine piece about the Ashley Smith case symbolizes everything I love and hate about religion.

Sullivan gets a big part of it right. Ashley Smith's story is astounding, both for her courage, and the fact that her courage didn't result in her lying dead in an alleyway. And even I, a fairly devout agnostic (Happy Easter!), am deeply moved by the extent to which Smith's faith played a role in producing her courage. But what kills me about the whole thing is that for many who embrace Smith's story, her courage becomes completely peripheral to the goodness of god. TNR's Lee Siegel observed that the story basically turned CNN into an extended Sunday mass:

Reverend Frank Page, who presented himself as Ashley Smith's pastor and spiritual adviser and was going forth and multiplying himself on every news show in creation, told a linguistically bold Soledad O'Brien ("...do you think it's sort of a greater power at work in this sort of thing?") that Smith's encounter with Nichols was "part of God's plan." ... On her show, Zahn endorsed the idea of a benevolent orchestration of four murders leading to many blessed hours and days of crowd-pleasing coverage like this: "For those who believe God works in mysterious ways, Ashley Smith and Brian Nichols will long remain a case in point, but the legions of those who have been touched by Rick Warren's teachings will not be surprised."

You know who doesn't seem to get a lot of credit here? Ashley Smith, that's who. It seems like the modern religious right has lost a vital focus on the importance of faith. It sees people as mortals, moved around on god's chessboard as part of a "plan" they can't possibly hope to comprehend. Instead of advertizing the incredible power of faith, they seem to cut out the free-will middle man and just talk about the power of god.

As an agnostic, I have to say, this kind of rhetorical move makes religion seem completely alien to me. I can't have anything but respect for the power that religious faith gives people, because faith is an experience I can have, too. But if you start talking about faith as an artifact of god's hand moving all of us around, you lost me. And, more importantly, I think you lose the vital part of religion that sees mankind as beautiful and worthy. The thing I love about organized religion is that it gives people, like Ashley Smith, the power to do things much greater than themselves. The thing I hate about organized religion - or at least, the religious right's version of it - is that the people themselves become entirely incidental to the picture. I like thinking of humanity as beautiful and miraculous; their view reduces humanity to cogs in an impressive machine. If Ashley Smith's interaction with her assailant truly was the work of god, is there anything extraordinary about it at all?

- Daniel A. Munz

NYPress’ Matt Taibbi gets it just about right re: the “National Security Democrats”:

The Democratic party leadership’s persistent and bizarre campaign of self-condemnation and Republican bootlicking is one of those things that, on its face, makes very little logical sense. It makes cultural sense; we have come to expect that the cultural figures we call the Democrats will respond to electoral failure first by sniveling and finger-pointing, and then by puffing up their chests and telling their dates they know how to handle themselves in a bar fight. From the Republicans we expect just the opposite; beaten at the polls, they immediately start cozying up to snake-handlers and gun freaks and denouncing school lunches as socialism. It is impossible to imagine a Newt Gingrich responding, say, to LBJ’s Great Society by concocting its own expensive plan to feed the poor black man—but we fully expect that a Democrat who loses an election will suddenly start to reconsider his opposition to preemtpive invasion and Reaganomics.
…

Franklin Roosevelt never argued anything like that, and he fought a global world war against two mighty industrial powers. But now 4000 retards in caves are going to close down the entire American school system. If that is the Democratic idea of looking “strong,” one hates to imagine what weakness would look like.

He raises a fine point: Even if Democrats can reposition themselves to look better on security issues, isn’t the effect negated by the fact that we’re repositioning ourselves? The public can smell a phony a mile away. John Kerry, who was, granted, not the slickest politician in history, tried to reposition the party on a host of issues - and failed pretty utterly. What Democrats need to realize is that we don’t need to move closer to Republicans. We need to find a hawkish Democrat, and move closer to them.

This is one of my favorite things about (braces for thrown tomatoes) Hillary Clinton. She’s probably not much less hawkish than Lieberman, Biden, or Bayh. But where Lieberbayhden spend their time going on Russert and lecturing Democrats about getting tough on this and that, Hillary just quietly votes for hawkish policies and spends her weekends giving speeches to NARAL and MoveOn. She has differences with most Democrats, but she never doesn’t seem proud to be one anyway.

She’s doing exactly what Bush did for the GOP in 2000. He moderated the party, not by lecturing it on moderation, but by leading by example. What Hillary understands, that no one else apparently does, is that a party’s repositioning only works if it appears to be a sincere move, motivated by succumbing to internal principles. It was the liberal wing of the Democratic Party, not Republican pressure, that credibly transformed the whole party into a bastion of civil rights. It was the hawkish wing of the Democratic Party, not Republican pressure, that credibly transformed it into a strong anti-Communist party. Lecturing your party about being as moderate as you are only pulls up the curtain on the whole trick. What our party desparately needs is a moderate candidate who will persuade us to moderate our actual stances, not just the ones we take in public.

Update: Atrios says it better:

I don’t actually disagree with the general proposition that the Democrats need a bit of piss and vinegar in their foreign policy, but they have to figure out where to aim that piss. Peter Beinart and Joe Biden and the rest of the gang didn’t aim their piss, they let George Bush grab their dicks and point them towards Baghdad. And, now, two years later, they want to lecture the rest of us on how to be perceived as “strong.”

The way to be perceived as strong isn’t to let George W. Bush tell you where to point your dick.

Indeed.

- Daniel A. Munz

I'm going to have to go all downer on Matt and Jon Chait -- Cheney isn't going to find himself being pushed into the Oval Office. Chait thinks it'll happen because the Party doesn't want an ideologically soft successor to Bush and they know Cheney sacrifices virgins in Ronald Reagan's name. Matt thinks it's because the absence of an obvious successor and the proliferation of credible candidates will make Bush a lame duck well, now. But all that's presupposing an enormous lack of cynicism onto the Republican party. As Matt argued to Chait, to term Bush's agenda an ideology is an affront to ideologies everywhere, there's nothing recognizable to push into the future save maybe tax cuts and a willingness to take credit for positive developments abroad. But Matt's wrong as well -- no one's uniting around Cheney. Even if Bush were to publicly anoint him, pouring oil atop his bald VP on the floor of Congress (I hear John Ashcroft recommends Crisco fir impromptu anointing), Bush's lame duckeyness still wouldn't be averted.

First of all, no party intent on self-preservation is going to hand Cheney the baton. Sure Bush and a few party bigfoots might give it a shot, but there's not a less appealing candidate out there, the operatives dedicated to advancing the movement would never, ever buy it. Hunting trips with Scalia? Closed door meetings with Enron? Connections to Plame? Cussing Leahy out on the Senate floor? And a scowling visage that makes him look hungry for human flesh? This is the party of Reagan and Bush Jr., these folks aren't going to abandon their taste for outdoorsy, handsome balls of reg'lar guy charisma to give the physical manifestation of greed a shot at the crown.

More to the point, even if Bush did decide Dick was the way to go, he'd only split the party more. Cheney was picked for a number of reasons, but one of the most overt was to calm the many potential presidents in the party by publicly refusing to pick an heir apparent. No small numbers of leading Republicans felt screwed by Bush's crystal stair ascendance, for him to guarantee a successor would've been too much. So he didn't. But having spent all this time laboring under the impression that their shot was next, the current crop of wannabes will not recede into the shadows to give the politically unappealing, weak-hearted VP a chance. They united behind Bush because the party needed to win after eight years of Clinton, but they're not going to have the same team spirit with Cheney.

If Bush picks sides now, particularly a side no one was expecting and no one wants, his power to keep the candidates in line vanishes. Contenders have already lost his endorsement, he's not going to aid their campaigns, so they might as well position against him and his choice in the hopes that the Bush agenda turns sour and Cheney's "political charms" scare the young 'uns. That Bush and Cheney are pushing a host of highly unpopular initiatives only compounds their problem by making them all the easier and more politically-simple to oppose. So Cheney 08? I think not. McCain, Frist, Giuliani, Graham, Santorum, Hagel, Allen, etc have no interest in letting Bush pull the tube from their presidential chances. If he tries, they'll pull the plug on his agenda.

The hypocrisy speaks for itself:

Today, as House Majority Leader, DeLay has teamed with his Senate counterpart, Bill Frist (R-Tenn.), to champion political intervention in the Schiavo case. They pushed emergency legislation through Congress to shift the legal case from Florida state courts to the federal judiciary.

And DeLay is among the strongest advocates of keeping the woman, who doctors say has been in a persistent vegetative state for 15 years, connected to her feeding tube. DeLay has denounced Schiavo's husband, as well as judges, for committing what he calls "an act of barbarism" in removing the tube.

In 1988, however, there was no such fiery rhetoric as the congressman quietly joined the sad family consensus to let his father die.

"There was no point to even really talking about it," Maxine DeLay, the congressman's 81-year-old widowed mother, recalled in an interview last week. "There was no way [Charles] wanted to live like that. Tom knew — we all knew — his father wouldn't have wanted to live that way."

Doctors advised that he would "basically be a vegetable," said the congressman's aunt, JoAnne DeLay.

When his father's kidneys failed, the DeLay family decided against connecting him to a dialysis machine. "Extraordinary measures to prolong life were not initiated," said his medical report, citing "agreement with the family's wishes." His bedside chart carried the instruction: "Do not resuscitate."
...
There were also these similarities [Between Ray DeLay and Schiavo]: Both stricken patients were severely brain-damaged. Both were incapable of surviving without medical assistance. Both were said to have expressed a desire to be spared from being kept alive by artificial means. And neither of them had a living will.

So uh, Happy Easter! Resurrections are for lovers! I'm not sure where you folks got the bunny from, but considering that it resulted in my girlfriend getting a basket with enough chocolate to send me into insulin shock, I'm all for these magical, delicious rabbits that hand out sweets and restore life. So word to the Easter!

Also, I think I forgot to mention it, but Daniel Munz is posting relief this weekend. You know him, curly hair, brown eyes, posts that change your life. Yeah, him. He da man.

PZ Myers sez:

I know what some people are thinking: just don't call them "stupid" or a "moron", it distracts from the scientific argument. Of course it does; but one thing I've learned over the years is that this is not a scientific debate. The scientific part was settled a century ago, and evolution won, hands down. There is absolutely no legitimate, intelligent argument against evolutionary theory right now. This is not to say that we know everything or that the theory is complete or that we expect no major revisions; it means that evolution in a broad sense is an inarguable fact, and what we need to know now are details and mechanisms. The earth is billions of years old, species are all related to one another, and there has been a complex and ongoing pattern of change over the course of all of that time. All of that has been supported by multiple interlocking lines of evidence uncovered by the work of thousands of people, rechecked and verified by thousands more. That's just not going to be seriously challenged by anyone sensible, let alone some ranting guy who took a general science course in high school.

The big picture is done. The ships have sailed, they've discovered the coastline of the New World, they've established a few thriving colonies—and there's a huge, exciting continent to explore. Meanwhile, we have a few lunatics in the Old World who have clamped their eyelids shut and are screaming that they can't see it.

Well put. Liberals do an excellent job of mistaking arguments about ends for arguments about evidence. It doesn't matter if the subject is evolution, weapons of mass destruction, tax cuts, or Terry Schiavo -- all these topics we've recently realized are about values? Values are a rhetorical stand-in, an imprecise word for a precise strategy. These debates, on the Republican side, have little to do with the issue and everything to do with what it signifies. When we get caught up in refuting frustrating, opposite day-esque arguments over evidence that doesn't exist and propositions with such logical snarls that their trains of thought crash into each other, we legitimize opinions which, in polite company, should be entirely illegitimate. So listen to PZ when he advises you call them liars and laugh at their qualifications -- mocking the specific speakers is the only way to win the "values war". Legitimizing them in specific instances is how we lose it.

If you believe the polls, anyway:

More bad news from France for the European Union: A new opinion poll coming out Monday suggests that most French voters would reject the EU constitution if a referendum were held today.

The French will not be called on to vote until May 29, but the poll is the second in less than a week indicating that France could strike down the EU’s historic attempt to adopt a constitution.

As a fan of the EU, I find this worrisome, to say the least. The EU constitution, as written, imposes a lot of new, federal-style institutions on member nations and EU citizens. Among others, it provides for a more powerful EU judiciary, a unified legal personality, and a single EU diplomatic representative. Additionally, being an EU member increasingly means supporting poorer countries; some of the most recent admittees to the EU also have the lowest GDP in the EU. Slate has chronicled what seem to be the dwindling priveleges of EU membership. The European Parliament, theoretically the most democratic of the EU’s three branches, remains structurally the weakest.

While this has all been happening, the EU has done precious little to improve its relations with man-on-the-street Europeans. They see the EU government as a distant, nondescript body. (Jolyon Howorth, an EU scholar and professor of mine, tells a story about the UK placing the draft Constitution on seats at soccer matches, only to have them used as weapons in ensuing riots.)

Especially given the France poll’s emphasis on public apathy, one has to wonder: Is the European public beginning to question the wisdom of their project? I don’t have a clear answer; it’s just a worrying sign. Thoughts?

- Daniel A. Munz

I know, I know: No more about Terri Schiavo. But I just have to flag this astonishing statement from NRO’s Jack Dunphy:

If Terri Schiavo were able, she would go to the nearest telephone, dial 9-1-1, and tell the operator that people are trying to kill her.

“If Terri Schiavo were able”? Why, pray tell, is she not able? Could it be, perhaps, because she no longer has the ability to think?

The one useful thing about this mess is that it’s invited us to figure out what conservatives mean by “culture of life.” I think Dunphy’s statement just about explains it all. They see being alive much the same way that liberals see paying taxes: Not something one just happens to be doing, but something one must do out of an obligation to the rest of humanity. To people like Dunphy, the notion that death is a natural part of life, or that continuing to live could be a net negative, is simply unacceptible. This isn’t a culture of life. It’s a culture of publicly-owned life. It’s a culture of forced immortality.

- Daniel A. Munz

ez

Later today, I'll be attending, and kicking ass in, the "world's largest pillow fight".  You think I'm kidding, but no, the Kiwanis are hosting the largest pillow fight ever at the Anaheim Convention Center.  I'll try and get pictures.  After I kick ass.

Ever since I posted this longish quote from Dick Holbrooke about the U.N., I’ve been thinking about it. Particularly, the part where he says:

The large number of disputes and wars that the U.N. has been unable to prevent or solve since 1945 are a clear demonstration of the limits of the organization. But this is a result of the actions of the member states themselves, not something called “the U.N.” What happens in the U.N. is simply a reflection of the positions of its 191 members, whose ambassadors take positions under instructions from their capitals.

Every time I read that paragraph, it kind of got caught in my mental throat (ew!), and I think I only just now realized why.

Holbrooke is right. The reason he’s right is the reason the U.N. isn’t working now, and the reason that I’m highly optimistic about Kofi Annan’s planned reforms. The problem with the U.N. is that, although it was conceived in the sweet afterglow of democracy’s triumph on the European continent, it’s a fundamentally constructivist institution. For those unfamiliar, constructivism is the school of international relations that sees the world about the same way we imagine a group of people: Their actions are shaped by their views of themselves, and their views of one another. (Contrast this with realism, where nations’ actions are shaped mostly by the ineffable certainty that everyone is trying to kill them.) But one of constructivism’s vital components is that the international world order has no particular direction in which it is inexorably headed. It sees the world as a giant, Mill-ian free market of ideas where the dominant ideologies are simply those with the best salesmen. All it takes for Naziism to triumph is for Hitler to be a more persuasive ideologue than you. All it takes for radical Islam to triumph is for Bin Laden’s ideas to look better than yours. Constructivists see no hard-wiring to history; the dynamic itself is completely malleable.

The reason Holbrooke’s statement bothered me so much is this: The U.N. has a stated goal of promoting ideas like political freedom, peaceful conflict resolution, and human rights - ideas that tend to flourish in democracies, and wilt under dictators. Structurally, though, the U.N. is designed to shrug and embody the consensus of its members, even when this consensus is decidedly opposed to these fundamental goals. It is, just as Holbrooke said, simply an aggregation of the preferences of its member nations. At one point immediately before the Iraq war began, Iraq was set to head the U.N. Disarmament Commission. In January 2003, Libya was given the chairmanship of the Human Rights Commission. Whatever you think of these nations, this seems a little bit like putting, say, Alberto Gonzales in charge of our torture policy. The U.N. simply has no institutional bias towards accomplishing its own goals. Plainly, if it is ever going to be as effective as it should be, this has to change.

That’s why Annan’s reforms, and the conversation they are starting, are so encouraging. Creating a U.N. Democracy Caucus, which enjoys surprising bipartisan support, would go a long way. All indications are that Annan wants to make the U.N. more responsive to American goals; whatever you think of the Bush foreign policy, no nation can do more to encourage democracy worldwide than we can. In fact, this should be especially good news for liberals. It is a chance for the U.N., and our multilateralist instincts in general, to begin regaining much-needed moral credibility.

Annan is, in effect, telling the United Nations to stop being constructivist, and start getting real. I, for one, hope it works.

- Daniel A. Munz

Well, it happened again. Ezra's off for the weekend (it's 67 in L.A.!) [Ezra's note -- not off, I'll be around too], and he's graciously asked me to fill in. So, here I am. I have a few things I plan to post about, but if there's anything you'd specifically like me to publicly meditate on, please do feel free to drop it in the comments. I blog to please.

Thanks for having me again.

- Daniel A. Munz

James Wolcott wants a wide-angle shot of the protesters outside Schiavo's hospice. I don't blame him. But though the cameramen seem unwilling to comply, NPR's nameless voice-on-the-scene did better as I drove to lunch this morning. The Christian Right, he said, had sent out an alert to its faithful, imploring them to come stand vigil and warning the media that the grounds would soon be flooded with hundreds, even thousands of jobless white folks hellbent on inserting themselves into a private matter. So how many showed up?

A few dozen.

This bit from Garance Franke-Ruta is so good I'm going to excerpt it at length:

I've been exceptionally impressed with the quality of the comments on this blog over the past week, which have been wonderfully intelligent, thoughtful, and polite. One question that's come up over and over, however, is why this topic mattered, or should matter, to those outside of elite media circles.
...
Take what is, I believe, the single most important issue facing middle-class families: the rise of the 50-80 hour work week and the disappearance of the weekend. Anne Applebaum wrote about this recently. I bring the issue up in story meetings at the Prospect at every available opportunity. And I’m regularly surprised by the number of young, progressive women I know who tell me that the thing they dislike most about the Democratic Party is its obsessive focus on abortion instead of the question of how to combine work and family and not go crazy. They want to be approached as mothers and potential mothers, as well as people with jobs and aspirations, not as atomized rights-bearing individuals given to crisis pregnancies. But those who raise such issues often cannot get any traction because there are simply not enough voices in high enough positions in the press or the party to create buzz. And so the topic remains a cultural issue on the left, rather than a matter for political consideration and action. Result: middle-class mothers vote Republican, and the Democratic Party has won a smaller fraction of the female electorate each presidential-election year since 1996. Meanwhile, the Democratic Party carries on loudly about the outsourcing of manufacturing sector jobs, which are mainly held by men, and judicial appointments, which are crucial to preserving reproductive rights but, once again, turn the focus back to abortion.

Read the whole thing.

If you've not yet seen John Stewart on the Schiavo case, you're missing out.

Interesting post by Marshall Whittman noting the distinctly pre-9/11, peace-and-prosperity turn our politics have taken:

American politics seems eerily similar to the period prior to 9/11. Before that horrible day, the focus of political discussion was a "culture of life" issue - stem cell research. A celebrity scandal surrounding the death of an intern and a Congressman was the fixation of all the television networks. And the President's domestic agenda was floundering.

And then the world was transformed. We entered a new twilight struggle. The entire nation was on edge about another terrorist attack. We were at war.

While our brave troops are making daily sacrifices in Iraq, our domestic politics has returned to "normalcy" - or what passes for that condition these days. The President is publicly more focused on privatizing social security and one tragic medical case than the war on terror. Our attention is consumed by Terri Schiavo, the Michael Jackson case and the horrible crisis of steroids in baseball. Beyond the commitment of our troops and their families, can it be truly said that America is on a war footing?

I think, however, that he understates the seriousness of the aforementioned issues. Terry Schiavo is nothing less than a battle between the forces of light and the armies of darkness. As Tom DeLay told us:

This is exactly the issue that’s going on in America. That attacks against the conservative movement, against me, and against many others. The point is, it’s, the other side has figured out how to win and defeat the conservative movement. And that is to go after people, personally charge them with frivolous charges, and link that up with all these do-gooder organizations funded by George Soros, and then, and then get the national media on their side. That whole syndicate that they have going on right now is for one purpose and one purpose only and that’s to destroy the conservative movement. It’s to destroy conservative leaders and it’s, uh, not just in elected office but leading.

As for baseball, it's misleading to, in any way, believe the hearings are about the politicians or the players. As Jose Canseco so eloquently put it while preempting my appearance on MSNBC, this is about the children. Children who face a future when roid'ed celebrities pin them to the ground and inject anabolic steroids into their trembling buttocks. Children who, in the words of one weirdo congressman, might someday elect to take a "smart pill" that could massively increase their intelligence but shave 10 years off their life. They could win a Nobel Prize, but they couldn't grow old. I'm sure you'll agree that the Senate must step in and disrupt that dystopian future immediately.

And Michael Jackson? Well, Michael really is about protecting the children. After all, how do you know it's bedtime in Neverland?

When the big hand touches the little hand.

Read Brad Setser's comments on the Wolfowitz nomination, they're the best I've read on the subject by far. If I was a normal person, I could leave it at that. But no, I'm a blogger, so here are some thoughts:

• Brad's right that it makes little sense for the Europeans to block the Wolf. It'll just piss us off and, even if it worked, the next nominee would be no more palatable to them. Nor does it strike me as smart for Democrats to make an issue of him. There's not really an upside to nailing Bush's nominee for the World bank. Americans are not particularly interested in developmental economics and they don't quite care if some high-level Pentagon functionary is going to be taking care over in the area, at least he won't be mucking up Iraq anymore. That stands in contrast to the Bolton nomination, which really does place the Bush administration in flagrant, extreme opposition to a relatively popular institution. Americans generally think we should be working with the UN, so nominating an ambassador who's main interest would appear to be giving Kofi Annan a wedgie makes the Bushies look bad. And I'm all for doing that.

• This really sucks for Blair. Part of his implicit rationale for supporting Bush's every half-cocked adventure was that he could act as a moderating influence. Apparently not. George is leaving Tony at the scene and holding the loot on this one -- if Blair can't even convince Bush not to nominate walking, talking affronts to Europe like Paul Wolfowitz, what good has all the lapdog work done? None at all. That's why Blair is sitting on the telly having voters ask whether he'd wipe asses for $9 an hour and demand apologies for entering Iraq. I almost pity the guy.

So the Deserves More Attention category of the blogroll is stagnating, I think it's time to update. I'm probably going to take four or five of the folks there out and move them into the normal categories -- any traffic help they've gotten from that spot has probably exhausted itself. But who to put in? That's where you come in, rational blog consumers. Nominate your favorite smaller blogs in the comments and I'll go take a look. Remember too that these are the folks I draw from for weekend guest posters.

Ed Kilgore sez:

For the Big Papers, though, the problem is that there are so few editorial spots available, and, unlike their smaller competitors, no real market pressure to turn things over. I don't want to name names, but in my judgment, nearly half of the columnists in the Big Papers, most of them white men, are just filling up space with Left-Right CW that could be, and for all I know, may be written by a computer.

Yep. I'm continually stunned that the big boys don't find themselves some edgier, funnier, more controversial writing. I can't stand Dowd, but she's the most popular of the Times op-ed columnists. Want to know why? Her prose doesn't make you want to kill yourself. My dislike for her exempts her skill with the pen, which is really considerable. But she's not the only one able to wield ink, and it'd be nice if the op-ed sheets would hire a few more bic-slingers to liven things up. Say what you will about them, but Wolcott, Hitchens, Sullivan -- these folks know how to tighten a sentence till it hums. And it makes even their worst writing compulsively readable. More like them, please.

Michael Schreiber makes a good point on the weird Santa Cruz phenomenon of being too at ease. When I mention I'm heading in that direction, I usually get a bunch of astonished comments of the "why'd you leave?" and "why don't you stay?" variety. And yes, it's true, I traded trees for traffic when I transferred from UCSC to UCLA. But it was worth it.

Santa Cruz breeds a very certain sort of complacency. It's a beautiful enclave packed with rational liberals, adorable mystics, and restaurants where tofu is a viable culinary option rather than an ascetic sacrifice. That's all comfortable, no doubt, but it's hard to grow there, or it was for me. If you can afford it, when you're ready to relax and be satisfied, by all means, move to SC. But before that, vacations are your best bet. Living too easily can be its own sort of hardship. If you never have to argue a point, your mental muscles atrophy. If a place is so specifically set to your comfort zone, it becomes harder and harder to understand what's going on in the rest of the world. For me, that was a really dangerous dynamic and I had to leave it. Your mileage may vary. But Michael's right --you really can be too at ease.

After seeing Brad's decided lack of enthusiasm about using the federal employee health benefits plan (FEHBP) as the starting point for increased coverage, I spent some time looking into the program. It's worth saying, first, that the authors of the CAP plan are pretty progressive folks, so they're not trying to derail universal health coverage by using a cruddy coverage mechanism that'll simply turn people off from government involvement.

Anyway, the fruits of my googling were a few think tank papers mainly blasting FEHBP for skyrocketing premiums that were forcing users into cheaper plans. The AFL-CIO's paper believes -- surprise! -- that a primary answer is allowing workers to better bargain with their employers. This has done the job for postal employees, but it doesn't really help us here. They also reference a bill by Steny Hoyer that'd increase the governments share of FEHBP costs from a max of 75% to a max of 83%. Probably helpful. The paper from Families USA just castigates them for premium increases and warns against using FEHBP as a basis for Medicare. So the main complaint seems to be prices and a weak administration.

In addition to the think tanks, I searched the usual suspects of Brad DeLong and Max Sawicky, but turned up with nothing on either site. Brad, however, had recommended this health care primer by Uwe Reinhardt, who certainly seems sold on FEHBP. Nevertheless, I'd love to hear the smart kids chime in. Brad? Max? Angry Bear'ers? How about it?

So what have we got? A bunch of Democrats proposing the expansion of a plan that seems to screw its users. Kind of odd. I think the fix -- theoretically -- hits here:

The affordability of health insurance is overwhelmingly named as the reason why Americans lack health insurance. 22 To address this, the plan would ensure that nobody pays more than a certain percentage of income (for example, 5–7.5 percent) on health insurance premiums. This protection, administered as a refundable tax credit, would apply to employer-based health insurance as well as private insurance obtained through the pool.

If premiums can't move you past a certain percentage of income, than skyrocketing costs can only hurt you so much. That said, I don't quite understand how this'll work. FEHBP allows users to enter into a wide variety of plans, some expensive, some less so. So what's to stop lower-income employees from all choosing the most expensive plan in the hopes that it'd blast their cap and give them more for much less? From what I can tell, Podesta and Co. have proposed a fix, but not one with much hope of working. Maybe those more versed in economics than I could figure this one out (see above plea to smart kids), but, as written, it looks entirely unworkable to me. My best guess is that it's sweetener thrown in with the knowledge that it couldn't, unless heavily modified, pass, but considering our minority status, sounding good is just as important.

That said, FEHBP's problems, at least in my research, seem pretty standard. Costs jumped up, but not more so than they did in the private market. And the AFL-CIO feels the program is bullied by insurance companies. But that strikes me as a management issue with the OPM. If FEHBP does become the standard for insurance, pharmaceutical and insurance companies will have no chance but to work with them, and strong negotiators can negotiate strong contracts. So, from my reading, FEHBP seems eminently fixable. If you could create some sort of income cap (maybe by dictating that the plan you use could only be X percentage of your income in order for you to qualify?), you'd solve the cost issue. If you could give the OPM a spine, they wouldn't be easily bullied. And more people would have access to health care.

As I said before -- I like it.

Responding to my health care post earlier, both Brad Plumer and Kevin Drum argue against incremental strategies and for a campaign towards single-payer. With such opposition, I think I should spend a few moments saying why I disagree. I recently read The System, an exhaustive account of the 1994 health care battle. Also recently, I've watched Bush's Social Security plan -- and yes, he has a plan -- get strung up by its thumbs. Taking the two together, I've basically concluded that it's impossible, in non-crisis (i.e, non New Deal or post-9/11) situations, to push sweeping legislation through Congress. The System, excuse my Broderian terminology, is really set-up, and at this partisan moment, primed, to resist and demagogue such change. And it succeeds.

Americans didn't want Clinton's bill to be defeated. Which is to say, they wanted Clinton's bill to be defeated, but only their perception of it. If you actually polled them on what they wanted in a health care system, it tracked their wishes quite precisely. And if you asked them whether or not we needed reform, they were all for it. But Clinton's plan was complex, hard to explain, and easy to destroy. After all -- selling a proposal like that requires explaining it, killing one merely demands you characterize it. The latter can be done simply -- big government! -- the former, not so much.

Similarly, I don't think voters are against Bush's plan. I think they would be if they understood the long-term economics of it, and they are when it's characterized as a benefits cut (which it is), but if you poll them, they repeatedly say Social Security is headed for a crisis and majorities continually support proposals allowing partial, optional investment of Social Security returns in the stock market. Which is what Bush is proposing. But Democrats have, without really trying, been able to destroy Bush's ability to push his ideas. Americans rightly don't trust him, and so anything that emerges from his desk or party faces enormous skepticism. Even though they still say they want what he says he's pushing. It's quite strange.

Which brings us to the CAP proposal. I agree that, as policy, it's less desirable to simply rejigger, rework, and expand what we have. But it's also simple. The beauty of FEHBP is less the program than the idea -- this is what the Senate uses. And if you want, you can have it too. It's easy to understand and it ties into the "classless" image people want to have of America, a land where the peasants are treated like the kings. Medicaid too is easily understood and already functioning, nothing new nor scary there. And the idea that the government will guarantee premiums don't rise beyond 7.5% of income, that's completely comprehendible and damn attractive. It all works rhetorically -- it can be sold as simply as it can be demonized.

Now, Kevin's fears are not misplaced. It's still a big program and it might lose. But I've become convinced that the only big programs we're able to pass are big expansions of old programs. So you can add a drug benefit onto Medicare, but you can't change Social Security or remake American health care. Down the road, I think, these changes can lead to others shifts: people become familiar with government involvement in their health care and so they're not as stunned by more government involvement in their health care. For now, I think this incrementalism using the familiar is all that can survive the PR wringer. Big, new ideas get shredded, with Social Security privatization and Clintoncare being examples of varying quality, but big, old ideas can be accepted, like the massive expansion of Medicare.

And that's why I support CAP's proposal -- it's a big, old idea that I think can lead to big, new ideas. Brad's no fan FEHBP, and I trust his judgment. On the other hand, what I've read on it has been different, so I'd need to see some pretty damning evidence. For now, I'm not convinced that it's an undesirable tent for health care -- though it's certainly not the most desirable tent -- and I'm quite impressed with it as a politically sellable program. And that, in the end, is what I'm looking for: a way to break the health policy deadlock. I think this sort of proposal is it.

Update: Sorry about the acronym confusion. For some reason, I mentally merged CHIPS and FEBHP to create CEBHP. The joy of alphabet soup. Anyway, the program is actually FEHBP -- Federal Employee Health Benefits Plan. Also, changed the last few sentences for clarity.

I've kind of buried it under other posts, but I spent the morning working up a great big analysis of CAP's new health care plan. If you haven't already, should give it a read.

Anybody remember this op-ed from Tommy Franks, attacking John Kerry during the election? The one where he said:

take Mr. Kerry's contention that we "had an opportunity to capture or kill Osama bin Laden" and that "we had him surrounded." We don't know to this day whether Mr. bin Laden was at Tora Bora in December 2001. Some intelligence sources said he was; others indicated he was in Pakistan at the time; still others suggested he was in Kashmir. Tora Bora was teeming with Taliban and Qaeda operatives, many of whom were killed or captured, but Mr. bin Laden was never within our grasp.

Yeah, me neither. But this admission from the Pentagon (via The Stakeholder) brought it to mind:

A commander for Osama bin Laden during Afghanistan's war with the Soviet Union who helped the al-Qaida leader escape American forces at Tora Bora is being held by U.S. authorities, a government document says.

The document represents the first definitive statement from the Pentagon that bin Laden, the mastermind of the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, was at Tora Bora and evaded his pursuers.

So Kerry knew more than our generals did, huh? Or was the good general lying? Either way, this merits a great big "hmmmmmm".

What? Another revolution? In Kyrgyzstan? It's like a flu going around (somewhere, Malcolm Gladwell heard that and raised a fist in solidarity). In any case, this one seems like it went pretty orderly, which is all you can hope for. I don't pretend to know anything about the situation in Kyrgyzstan so I've no way to evaluate this. Sue, who does, is pretty shocked, and adds that, atypically, it was spearheaded by rural villagers, which warms my proletarian heart.

Anyway, huzzah! Power to the people! But have you ever seen an opposition leader less excited to be liberated from jail than this guy? That's a "who are you kids and why are you waking me up" look if I ever saw one. Caption him in comments if the spirit so moves you.

Timothy Garton Ash is quite right on this -- the EU should be ashamed that it needed White House pressure to maintain its arms embargo on China. Readers know I'm something of an EU booster, mainly because I think their emphasis on diplomatic relations, morally defensible policy-making, and emphasis on soft power are proving pretty powerful as a counterweight to American belligerence. But you can't spend the days pasting gold stars on yourself and then turn around to try and ship armaments to a country with a terrible human rights record and a continuing habit of threatening to invade Taiwan. And to be talked down by Bush? Someone should be apologizing for allowing that gut punch to European dignity.

As Garton writes, it's not that the US is blameless here -- we export 6.7% of China's weapons while Europe only provides 2.7%, and it's hard to fault the EU for wanting to cultivate the Dragon as a primary trading partner (this year, the EU passed America as China's largest source of trade), but they need to keep the moral high ground when doing it. China is an emerging force, no doubt about that. But we have to remember that, eventually, they won't be emerging anymore, they'll be a real force, and the dynamics of the relationships we forge now will dictate our ties later. For now, China is something of a precociously smart, shockingly strong, child. Don't let him think he can just bully the world.

Now for the promised health care post. I don't claim to know as much about health policy as Brad does, so his objections -- that stopgap measures will make bad policy and we really need to go to single-payer -- should be taken seriously. Not only that, but I agree with them. Nevertheless, politics is the art of the possible (and occasionally, the train-wreck of the impossible), and there's simply not a constituency for single-payer right now.

I should back up here. The CAP plan, released yesterday, works like this:

• Coverage for All

• Expand the Federal Employee Health Benefits Program (FEHBP) to anyone lacking job-based health insurance, any employer who wants to buy in, and any individual who wants to buy in. In addition, contributions to the plan would be capped at 5-7.5% of income so no one was felled by health care costs (good call, since the new bankruptcy law allows them to put you in the stocks if a health catastrophe takes out your finances). For those who paid over, a tax credit would be assessed.
• Expand Medicaid to cover anyone below 100-150% (a number would be chosen) of the poverty line. Currently, various states have differing eligibility requirements. No longer. Everybody making X or less is covered. In addition, the federal government would take on all increased costs.
• Health care is mandatory. Now that everyone can buy into a plan, if you don't, you're charged an income-related assessment under the rationale that you will eventually use health services.

• Improve the Value of Coverage

• Create a national focus on disease prevention and wellness. Coverage for preventive services would be carved out of private insurers. Would be directed be the U.S preventive Services Task Force. Standard stuff though, like Brad, I'm a bit unclear on their proposed structure.
• Develop better comparative information on treatments. Currently, most medicines are studied in a vacuum -- do they beat the placebo? This'll put money towards funding studies pitting them against each other in an effort to figure out which drugs and procedures are most cost-efficient and effective.
• Increase the use of IT.

• Financing

• The plan would cost between $100-160 billion a year. The authors think it'd lead to substantial savings, but since they can't be accurately predicted, they're not assumed. So how to pay? The answer is a dedicated financing source -- a 3-4% VAT tax, similar to what the EU uses. Along with us, Australia is the only developed country without a VAT tax. Why a VAT? It's quite fair, hard to get out of, and even some conservatives, like Bill Thomas (he of the "President's privatization plan is a dead horse" fame) support it.

So what? It's not single-payer, which Brad says we need, and I agree with. But I don't think it's possible. Don't believe me? Just check out Jeff Jacoby's scare op-ed from a few days ago, imagine a 24/7 drumbeat of those. This plan, even if the FEHBP is a bit inefficient, is quite good. Most health care economists I've read seem to think it a perfectly desirable way to expand coverage but, more importantly, it's enormously powerful politics. One of the stronger arguments used by Republicans in favor of privatization is that Senators use it -- I assume they mean 401(k)'s -- so why shouldn't Americans? Well, congressmen use FEHBP too. So does most every federal employee. Arguing that every American should have the right to buy into the same health care plan that the country's leaders use is a very, very strong argument. From there, if the plan proves inefficient or problematic, we can set about making the necessary changes, tweaks, and improvements.

The critical thing, for now, is to codify universal coverage as part of the American consensus -- this plan does that, and it does so in a way that I think can pass. And that's the important thing right now. It's not that i don't want single-payer, in fact, i think we'll need it eventually. But for now, we can't get it, and in the meantime, too many languish with nothing. If we can push the conversation to accept universal health care as a given, a necessity, then we can argue about how best to do it, the left can emerge with their single payer plans, the right can try and stop them, etc. At the moment, Democrats need to regain momentum on the issue, recent years have seen all the energy with Newt and his absurd HSA's.

The one downside I see to this proposal is that, assuming Brad's fears are correct and it doesn't work well, it could quell the appetite for government-run health care when the real solution is more government-run health care (God, do I sound like a liberal or what?) or, if it works moderately well, accustom people to this stopgap approach and kill the demand for single-payer. That's in contrast to Arnold Relman's argument from a recent TNR, which is that HSA's would be such a free-market disaster that they'd create a consensus for single-payer.

Maybe so, but I'm always skeptical of plans like that working as we'd expect. Republicans can still demagogue over the few protections Democrats have kept in place, Americans can just think anything promoted by the government is crap, etc. So I don't like those risks. The CAP plan, by contrast, looks to me like an excellent stop-gap measure, and one with the political sweeteners to pass. Havving just read a book on the failure of Clinton's health care proposal and having watched Bush's privatization plan take a battle between the eyes, I've little confidence in America's appetite for major change. So, for now, I come down on the side of single-payer as essentially impossible, and not worth holding out hope for. The promise to cap premiums might be a bit unrealistic, but it's brilliant in a debate of this kind -- you could sell the plan by repeating that point over-and-over. And, looking at how bad health care in this country has become, I think we should.

By the way, I really enjoyed reading the plan and writing this post (hope you guys liked reading it). Brad's right -- I am being assimilated. What's scary is that I like it.

Damn that Brad Plumer. Seriously -- I link and I link, and where does it get me? Fucking nowhere. I was all excited, everybody else had spent the day worrying about the Trustees Report, while my clever self had sidestepped them and read CAP's new health care plan. In full. And made notes in the margins. So while they all talked about solvency and proved smart today, I'd start out tomorrow with a preemptive strike, nailing the plan first and thus winning the wonk competition. But it was not to be.

Plumer, who spent the day poring over the Trustees Report, decided to spend the night on the health care plan. Bastard. Anyway, he's got a lot of stuff on it and, though I do it grudgingly, I'd suggest you read it. But make no mistake -- I'll still be starting tomorrow with a nice big post on it. Though, at this rate, Matt'll beat me too and I'll just look like a poseur. So uh, FEHBP expansion, good call! Medicaid for more, I also like! Emphasis on preventive medicine, IT improvements, Health care as moral issue!, all worthwhile. A cap on percentage of income you can pay on health care premiums, good politics! So is keeping parts of plan vague so it doesn't get destroyed like Clinton's proposal did. Admitting to a 3-4% VAT tax from the outset, not as good politics, but probably the best you're going to get so long as you're being honest. Also, Bill Thomas (R-CA) likes the VAT tax, so bipartisan support until it matters! I disagree with Brad on incremental vs. overhaul! See, I really read it! And damn that Plumer, he's a machine!

Sir Singer writes:

I think I grew up fairly independent. I learned how to cook, clean, launder, etc., as a child, but most of my female friends who live on their own still have cleaner houses than me. They generally are more on their at-home shite than I am. Meanwhile, I’m a good cook, but a house that relied upon me for cleanliness would be a relatively sad site (just ask my roommates).

I'll second that, with a caveat. I'm a really good cook. Don't believe me? Ask my girlfriend, she can field questions in the comments. I just am -- it's a very weird, highly unexpected talent. Things I make turn out way better than they have any right to. Further, I love cooking, so it works out well. But I hate cleaning. Worse, I don't think it important. Not so much cleaning up clutter, I know I need to do that, but mopping, dusting, vacuuming, cleaning mirrors, scrubbing sinks -- if I lived on my own, this stuff just wouldn't be done. Now, if someone tells me to do it and it's my share of the chores, I will, but I'll do it with the same sentiment I use when washing dishes before popping them in the dishwasher -- why!?

Now I don't know if this is a socialization thing, a me thing, or what, but I'll echo Matt. Any house relying on me to cook is fine, any house relying on me to clean will be quarantined within the year. My best guess is that it's a body thing: my stomach hurts if I don't feed it, nothing aches if I don't vacuum, and who cares if there's toothpaste in the sink?

(I had a pretty wonky post on Social Security ready to go, but Ezra beat me to it, so instead you’re getting my latest rant on the increasingly useless John McCain.  Enjoy!)

Not to be all Seinfeldian about this or anything, but what is <b>with</b> this guy?!

Sen. John McCain said Tuesday the conclusions of a commission investigating intelligence failures on weapons of mass destruction should not lead to new questions about whether the Iraq war was justified. "America, the world and Iraq is better off for what we did in bringing democracy," McCain said.

The Arizona Republican is a member of a commission formed by President Bush over a year ago after the chief weapons inspector in Iraq, David Kay, resigned saying "we were almost all wrong" about the pre-war estimates that Saddam Hussein possessed banned weapons.

[…]

In a recent interview, McCain said the report by the panel led by Republican Laurence Silberman and Democrat Chuck Robb was worth the $10 million Congress dedicated to it.

"I think questions had to be answered as to why we were so wrong," McCain said. "We needed to have recommendations as to how to prevent something like this from ever happening again."

Okay, you got that?  $10 million has been spent.  Conclusions have been drawn.  Those conclusions should not lead to new questions.  Even though the assertion that “America, the world and Iraq [are] better off for what we did in bringing democracy” is widely debatable, from its key premise about whether any of the above are, indeed, better off, to whether democracy has actually been brought to Iraq, no more questions are allowed.  Forget it.  Whatever that commission says about intelligence failures, missing WMDs, or anything else, you’d better get prepared to accept it, because ain’t no more questions gonna be allowed.  $10 million buys a lot of answers, and you’re gonna like ’em, got it?

Now for my favorite part:

McCain, in appearances with Bush at Social Security events in the West the past two days, has been offering a glowing endorsement of the president's second-term push for democracy around the globe. In two states Monday and here on Tuesday, he ticked off changes in Afghanistan, Ukraine, the Middle East and Iraq as proof that Bush "is on the right side of history" and deserves credit for advancing freedom throughout the world.

Oh yes.  Freedom, freedom everywhere.  Everywhere I look—nothing but freedom!

Freedom here.

Freedom there.

A little bit more freedom thisaway.

A little bit more freedom thataway.

Look all around you—freedom!

It’s everywhere!

As far as the eye can see.

Freedom.

Thanks, Bush.  And thanks, McCain. As a former resident of the Hanoi Hilton, you would definitely know how to spot freedom, so thanks for pointing out how we owe all this awesome freedom to the Pres.  GO FREEDOM!!!

-- Shakespeare’s Sister

From Daniel Munz:

With the 11th Circuit Court having rejected the Schiavos' appeal, it seems like the Supreme Court is their last recourse. It's sort of inconceivable to me that they would grant cert: Scalia, conservative as he is, must be vomiting at the federal overreach. (Also, does Rehnquist really want to hear a case about impending death?)

Also funny, but in far better taste, is this analysis of which demographics read which newspapers.

That, of course, was the day's big news. Some minor fiddling allowed them to bring the insolvency date a year closer, from 2042 to 2041. An insignificant change economically, but highly significant politically, as it'll allow them to argue that things are getting worse and, in the worsd of Fafblog!, if we don't do anything Social Security will explode!

If I had time, I'd probably go through the report today and talk about things I don't quite understand. But I have to move down for Spring Break. So here's a cliff notes guide to what you need to know and links to what you need to read.

As mentioned above, they moved the date of the trust fund's exhaustion (but I thought the fund didn't exist!) back a year, from 2042 to 2041. They also pushed back the beginning of the cash deficit (when we start using the trust fund) from 2018 to 2017. They seem to be doing this by revising death rates downward -- at this rate, there'll come a point when no one will ever die -- and by using absurdly low assumptions on immigration. Further, productivity increases, which could bring things back into balance, are assumed to be nonexistent. This despite the fact that they've almost doubled projections for the past few years. I'm going to just quote Matt on this, because it's really important:

The 2002 report projected productivity growth of 1.4 in 2002, 2.7 percent in 2003, 2.1 in 2004, 2.0 in 2005 and a long-term trend of 1.6 percent. By the 2003 report they knew that 2002 growth had actually been 3.6 percent, and short-term projections were accordingly revised upwards to 1.9 percent for 2003, 2.3 percent for 2004, and 2.1 percent for 2005. The long-term trend, however, was left at 1.6 percent. Then came the 2004 report, which revised the '02 historical number upwards to 3.8 percent, and showed that '03 productivity had actually been 3.4 percent. Thus, the projection for '04 was revised upward to 2.7 percent, and the '05 number revised downward to 1.8 percent. The long-term projection was unchanged. Now the 2005 report is out and once again past projections were too low. The actual 2004 number was 3.3 percent, and the '05 projection has been boosted to 2.0 percent.

Nevertheless, the long-term projection is unchanged. Why? Because the method used to generate the long-term projection deliberately excludes all this new data. Instead, they come up with 1.6 percent because "The annual increase in total productivity averaged 1.6 percent over the last four complete economic cycles (measured from peak to peak), covering the 34-year period from 1966 to 2000. The annual increase in total productivity averaged 2.2, 1.2, 1.3, and 1.6 percent over the business cycles 1966-73, 1973-78, 1978-89, 1989-2000, respectively." So far, productivity growth in the current cycle has been much higher than 1.6 percent. As a result, there's every reason to believe that, as long as the methodology is held constant, the long-term number will shoot up once we reach the next economic peak.

What's really amazing here is that, even with the tweaked assumptions and the "see no, hear no, speak no" approach to productivity gains, the long-term balance of the program has actually improved from last year to this year. Despite fiddling with some numbers so the president can yell "Crisis!", Social Security is actually healthier down the road than it was last year. Go look at the graph Brad's got, it's all there.

Despite all this, the LA Times' headline blares "Social Security going broke in 2041". Sigh. The article, interestingly, shows that Social Security is not the problem, it's Medicare that matters. Medicare, after all, started paying out more than it's taking in last year (as opposed to Social Security's date of 2017), and total bankruptcy for the program is projected for 2020. Spending so much time worrying about Social Security is like a doctor worrying about early signs of Parkinson's while his patient has a heart attack on the table. Not so bright. Weird note -- the article calls 2041 the date Social Security goes "broke", but 2020 is when Medicare faces "insolvency". Same meaning, but the sense of urgency is drastically different.

So bottom line, things aren't too bad. Politically, the report helps Bush, but the slight changes should blunt its effectiveness. Moreover, Bush himself has begun admitting that private accounts don't do anything for the program's solvency, and since the report is dealing with Social Security's fiscal condition, it shouldn't give any momentum to privatization. Oh, and Medicare is going to kill us all.

For more on this, see Max Sawicky's report from the press conference, Matt Yglesias's comprehensive coverage at TAPPED, and Brad Plumer's analysis at MoJo.

By the way, two years ago, when I was starting at UC Santa Cruz and spending a great deal of my time intoxicated, I really didn't think I'd ever be disappointed because I couldn't read the latest Social Security Trustees Report in a timely fashion. I mean, Jesus, what's happened to me? I can't even drink yet (well, legally), and yet I'm genuinely fascinated by actuarial assumptions regarding the long-term fiscal health of the state-run pension program? You must be kidding me.

So that went badly. Not only did I sleep through my alarm, losing desperately needed study time, but I also had the time of the final wrong, and so arrived an hour after it began. Not that that really mattered, as I didn't know enough to write for three hours anyway. Also, I'm sick. And if you've never sat for two hours leaking from your nose and wishing you had thought to bring a Kleenex, your only distraction your throbbing head and the answers you don't know, you really haven't lived.

Anyway, the bright side is that this quarter is over and Spring Break beckons. Onward.

On Monday, I asked where all the “real Republicans” are, and, if there are any of them left, whether they could be bothered to try to reclaim their party from the lunatics who have hijacked it. Well, it seems like the tenuous stitching that holds together the mangled remains of the party of Lincoln may well have been put under enough pressure by the Schiavo case that the unholy alliance between the corporatists and the Jesus freaks, upon which the GOP depends for its supremacy, is beginning to tear at the seams.

Senator John W. Warner of Virginia, the sole Republican to oppose the Schiavo bill in a voice vote in the Senate, said: "This senator has learned from many years you've got to separate your own emotions from the duty to support the Constitution of this country. These are fundamental principles of federalism."

"It looks as if it's a wholly Republican exercise," Mr. Warner said, "but in the ranks of the Republican Party, there is not a unanimous view that Congress should be taking this step."

In interviews over the past two days, conservatives who expressed concern about the turn of events in Congress stopped short of condemning the vote in which overwhelming majorities supported the Schiavo bill, and they generally applauded the goal of trying to keep Ms. Schiavo alive. But they said they were concerned about what precedent had been set and said the vote went against Republicans who were libertarian, advocates of states' rights or supporters of individual rights.

"My party is demonstrating that they are for states' rights unless they don't like what states are doing," said Representative Christopher Shays of Connecticut, one of five House Republicans who voted against the bill. "This couldn't be a more classic case of a state responsibility."

"This Republican Party of Lincoln has become a party of theocracy," Mr. Shays said. "There are going to be repercussions from this vote. There are a number of people who feel that the government is getting involved in their personal lives in a way that scares them." (Emphasis mine.)

(So much to exploit…if only the Democrats had had the sense to not vote right along with it! Yeesh.)

The truth is, there’s not much room left in the Republican party for “real Republicans,” who don’t want their president’s policy to be a balancing act between catering to corporations and their highly paid lobbyists and mollycoddling the religious wingnuts. But DeLay and his cronies might just have pushed things one step too far this time, and Bush’s leap into action on behalf of a politically expedient symbol has rendered ridiculous their past defenses of his lackluster response to the Aug. 6 PDB, the events on the morning of 9/11, the 9/11 commission, the tsunami, and every other reaction he’s bungled. He’s made a mockery of their belief in him. Worse, he’s proved us right and them wrong.

The hold-your-nose voters who cast their ballots for Bush, despite the deficit and despite the social conservatism, and justified their support for him on the basis of his alleged integrity and consistency (his ability to “stay the course”), always looked like fools to us—one day you’ll find out, we thought—and it’s becoming increasingly difficult for them to defend him as anything but the ineffectual minion of Rove’s Machiavellian machinations that we’ve said he is all along. Welcome to reality, folks.

Now go take back your party and we can get back to the business of debating policy like grown-ups.

-- Shakespeare’s Sister

(Crossposted at Big Brass Blog.)

With a final and moving back down for break on my plate, I've got a pretty busy day ahead of me. So the inimitable Shakespeare's Sister will be helping out today and I'll be popping in and out as time allows.

Update: Argh. Set my alarm for 6:30 so I could study more, and must have turned it off when it beeped. Now it's 8:30 and my final's in 30 minutes. I'm a tad screwed.

You know, maybe that Brooks column is part of a larger strategy -- crucify Abramson and Reed with such vigor and glee that no one notices you're ignoring DeLay. I say that because McCain, eyes on 2008 and ethics in the gutter, has promised to lead a vigorous investigation of Abramoff and Reed that does not, in any way, touch Tom DeLay. That he'll leave to the ethics committee, newly neutered and restocked by, yes, Tom DeLay. Lawmakers, even those involved in scandals that he's investigating, apparently fall outside the ex-maverick's purview, and so he won't touch them.

That's the Republican way, after all. Remember how Ken Starr's expansion of the Whitewater probe to cover Clinton's trysts spurred them into outrage and fierce opposition? "A travesty", they didn't call it. "A textbook case of overreach", no one said. "The only one who deserves impeachment is the partisan prosecutor", I heard them refuse to demand. And now McCain, a guy so wedded to good government and bipartisan ethics that he got the press to staple a symbolic halo to his scalp, is moving forward in the grand tradition of the Grand Old Party. I wonder how he'll feel after he's sold his soul and still lost his bid for the nomination? Will he repent and wonder what he trashed his legacy for? Or will the sputtering out of a storied career be vindicated by the everlasting friendship and PAC donations of the good congressman from Sugarland, TX?

You know, with all the data showing that abstinence education doesn't work, I've always found the government's insistence on using it mildly offensive. But you know what's way, way, way more offensive? That the government has found that torture -- I'm sorry, "harsh methods" -- don't work and yet they're using them anyway. But hey! Look over there! Terry Schiavo!

Over at The Washington Monthly, Amy Sullivan kicked off the women in writing argument with a truly terrific essay, and Kathy Pollitt followed up with an equally persuasive response. You should read both (Sullivan's is longer, but more than worth it). One thing though -- Pollitt wonders why nobody has given Barbara Ehrenreich, who did a great job filling in for Tom Friedman on the NY Times op-ed page, a permanent slot. According to Kinsley, the LA Times tries and was rebuffed. I don't know if the New York Times made the same offer -- I'd think not, because the only slot to open was for a conservative -- but it's worth noting that at least one of the big three made the effort.

Via Digby, I see Tom DeLay is proving my argument from yesterday, namely, that the further Terry gets from the headlines, the more ludicrous become Tom's attempts to keep her under the cameras. Her exit, after all, means the reentrance of his scandals. So on the 18th, Tom argued that she was as "alive as your or I", that she was not "being kept alive", and promised that, on Palm Sunday weekend, she would not be forsaken. Pretty good, huh? Well on the 19th, he accused the Supreme Court, who didn't want to hear the case, of perpetrating a "moral and legal tragedy" and told them they owe it "to the dignity of human life" to explain their decision. Pretty nutty, huh? On the third day of Terry-saving, the 20th, DeLay stumbled in from the bar to explain that "Terry Schiavo is not brain-dead; she talks and she laughs, and she expresses happiness and discomfort" and that "it won't take a miracle to help Terry Schiavo".

So in three days, he went from concerned, to outraged, all the way to issuing press releases from a land entirely of his imagination. But Terry was still slipping from the headlines! How dare she!? So here's Tom on the 21st:

One thing that God has brought to us is Terri Schiavo, to help elevate the visibility of what is going on in America," Mr. DeLay told a conference organized by the Family Research Council, a conservative Christian group. A recording of the event was provided by the advocacy organization Americans United for Separation of Church and State.

"This is exactly the issue that is going on in America, of attacks against the conservative movement, against me and against many others," Mr. DeLay said.

Mr. DeLay complained that "the other side" had figured out how "to defeat the conservative movement," by waging personal attacks, linking with liberal organizations and persuading the national news media to report the story. He charged that "the whole syndicate" was "a huge nationwide concerted effort to destroy everything we believe in."

In three little paragraphs, Tom has called the woman with a liquified cerebral cortex a gift from God, compared her situation to his own, and used her to uncover a vast left-wing conspiracy determined to topple Tom DeLay and the values of America conservatism. Look behind you kids. Yeah, that's right, wave to the shark. Yeah, keep watching the shark. Those men taking Uncle Tom away are doing it for his own good, but he wouldn't want you to watch.

The New York Times has a surprisingly good article on the war of words in the Social Security debate. Is it privatization? Personal accounts? Private accounts? Or the Republican term du jour, "voluntary personal retirement accounts"? I'd have liked a bit more history of the term privatization, and I'd have really liked for this article to have hit two months ago, but it's pretty good nonetheless. And, any piece that starts with an anecdote like this gets my love:

Mr. Bush complained last week that " 'privatization' is a trick word," intended to "scare people." Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, the Democratic leader, interrupted a news conference to correct a reporter who asked about "personal" accounts.

"It's 'privatization,' " Mr. Reid said, adding that "personal accounts" was "the Republican term."

I just love seeing Reid prove he knows how to play this game. And it's kinda funny to watch the press corps get batted around, their own fetish for politician-dictated objectivity being used to confuse and browbeat them.

ALso, the Times seems to have ignored it, but you guys had some pretty good naming ideas a few months back...

The cognitive dissonance has finally overwhelmed poor Brooks. Schiavo, DeLay, Medicare, Bolton -- a lesser man would have buckled long ago. The surprise, however, is that the cognitive won! When a prominent conservative writes a column this blistering, CW is shifting. Abramoff and Reed might want to cash in the chits and go work for the CPA -- I hear the heathens need some preachin'. And DeLay? He's readying to make Newt's tumble look like an honorable discharge...

Update: I agree with Brad Plumer, and many of you in the comments, that Brooks is consciously sparing the Republican party and trying to quarantine this behavior to a few dirty lobbyists he can tut-tut at, right before returning to have tea with the rest of the right. Frankly, that's fine. Look -- you could set your watch by Brooks's hackitude. Whenever the world around becomes too chaotic to bear, I reach for his columns, luxuriating in the knowledge that no matter what else is occurring, it is somehow related to a minor personality quirk in Republicans and the prevalence of psychopathic traits in Democrats. So I don't expect Brooks to peek out of his hole, see Reed's shadow, and take a knife to his throat. I expect him to dive back down and ignore six more weeks of scandal.

That the CW has tipped enough so Brooks, arbiter of the conventional that he's become, has landed on Abramson and Reed and wrestled them into chokeholds is plenty for me. Because his involvement increases the pressure on them, and thus on their story. And as the billions of reporters begin to swarm, they're going to need to find new angles to make their stories fresh. The rampant and unmistakable connections between the scandal-plagued Tom DeLay and Abramson, a lobbyist so favored that DeLay would sing him lullabies at night, assure that some enterprising young guns will begin to roto-rooter around Tom's "kitchen sink", and what they come up with will make all this gambling stuff look like mere prelude. Brooks isn't the final word, but his column brings judgment day closer.

Can I use Greg's?

And, so long as we're being a bit morbid, PZ Myers has written an uncommonly beautiful post on an uncommonly beautiful fluid...

I'm not really sure what Garance Franke-Ruta is getting at in this post. She moves from saying that the task for Democrats is "finding the big story that explains our world and politics today in a way that sounds real and fresh" -- a true, if less than novel, assertion -- to arguing that conservative ideas aren't wrong just because they were thought up by conservatives. Well no, they're not. Indeed, conservative ideas are often quite right, which is why Democrats have adopted so many of them in recent times. Welfare reform was not identified with our side of the aisle, no matter how many times Moynihan is invoked. Deficit reduction was not thought to be a particularly Democratic thing to do, at least not until Bill Clinton did it. And James Galbraith not withstanding, we're not going back on it. We also pushed NAFTA through, passed a crime bill, and began adopting sensible, targeted tax cuts as a cornerstone of our economic policies. In fact, Democrats have been surprisingly willing to betray party dogma over the past 10 years, a trait attributable primarily, but not entirely, to Clinton.

But that shouldn't give us the idea that everything shiny, new, and advocated by Newt is worth adopting. Health Savings Accounts will destroy health care in this country. Seriously. As Matt says, and Arnold Relman argued in a TNR cover story a few weeks ago, HSA's might hasten the coming of a complete health care overhaul and, in that sense, be positive, but there'll be a lot of pain involved in that path. And if Garance is really just being sneaky and cunning and hoping to destroy so we can build, consider my comments moot. But know that HSA's will leave people like my girlfriend, who was born with hypophosphatemia, completely screwed, as the healthy opt into HSA's and those with chronic (though entirely manageable) conditions, like her, have no community on which to disperse costs. Under that scenario, health care becomes prohibitively expensive and many to most of those who need it worst will be unable to pay.

As for Flex accounts, they're fine, but they're really not forward-looking. They're an incremental step which makes things a touch better for folks. That's great -- hell, if the Prospect hires me, I'll be sure to take advantage of them. But this sort of small-bore proposal is only good for a sitting leader, not for a party that needs to prove itself visionary and in-touch. The way to assure voters that you see the future is to promise to radically upend the present. That means that health care can't be fixed by the tiny steps Garance is proposing, and certainly not by a simple willingness to trawl CATO and AEI for good proposals the right may have missed. Democrats need to find the courage put 1994 behind them and propose a radical restructuring of health care in this country. That's tough and dangerous to do, but it's also necessary, important, and the sole way to prove ourselves more than the party of tweaks. And that, in the end, is what forward-thinking means: able and willing to break out of the paradigm we're in and propose answers that the shackled politicians of the day are too scared to reach for. That's not, contra Garance, a call for compromise, but a recipe requiring vision.

This is fucking tragic. Would that our government called special sessions and our president returned from vacations to address the rape that's driving 14 year old girls in the Congo to become prostitutes. Did you know that if a Congolese woman (or, more accurately, girl) is raped, she loses her honor and is barred from marriage? Did you know that a UN employee was found with hundreds of tapes showing him torturing and sexually abusing young girls? Did you know that Congolese children are often either conscripted into militias, hooked on drugs and turned into killers, or raped and left with no options save continual prostitution? Did you know that we could help fix that by committing some cash that would create opportunities for them? Did you know that we don't? But did you know our entire government has mobilized to consider the case of a brain dead woman who has been hooked up to machines for 15 years at a cost of $80,000 annually?

Yeah, I bet you knew that.

It's becoming cliche to point out this or that statement of Tom DeLay's as enough to make you ill, but his latest on Schiavo is really unconscionable:

"She talks and she laughs and she expresses likes and discomforts," he said Sunday evening.

My God, you'd think her a three year old, giggling at Blue's Clues and slapping away the mashed peas-bearing rocket ship when it approaches her mouth. That she's really an inert woman whose cerebral cortex has liquified and whose every twitch is being interpreted as signs of higher consciousness makes DeLay's lie all the sadder -- he's misrepresenting the brain damaged. Over at the Stakeholder, Jesse Lee notes that, unlike Ginny Brown-Waite, a Republican who "burned up" the phones talking to medical experts in Florida and voted against the bill, Tom probably hasn't spent that long doing his research.

Oh how right he is.

The bugman not only didn't do his research, he hasn't been doing his speaking, either. Turns out DeLay only started mentioning Schiavo on the 18th, three days ago. That's kind of a trip. because even I beat the majority leader to the punch, and, unlike him, I don't think of Schiavo as my religious obligation. So what's going on?

Well, Tom DeLay has had better days than March 18th. On March 17th, Rahm Emanuel promised to make his ethics violations a central issue in the 2006 campaign by recruiting "squeaky-clean" candidates to run. On March 17th, the newspapers began calling for his resignation. And so, on March 19th, Tom DeLay found Terry Schiavo, and held. In fact, watch DeLay's progression as he attempts to keep the issue kicking:

March 18th: “Terri Schiavo is alive.  She is not ‘barely alive.’  She is not ‘being kept alive.’  She is as alive as you or I, and as such we have a moral obligation to protect and defend her from the fate premeditated by the Florida courts.  This is not over.  We are still working, so are Mrs. Schiavo’s lawyers, and so is the Florida state legislature.  This is not over.  

“To friends, family, and millions of people praying around the world this Palm Sunday weekend: do not be afraid.  Terri Schiavo will not be forsaken.”

March 19th: “While I respectfully disagree with the Supreme Court’s decision, the justices’ refusal to offer any explanation or guidance – knowing that Congress is working around the clock to save the life of a defenseless dying woman – is a moral and legal tragedy.

“The Supreme Court owes it to Terri Schiavo and her family – and, frankly, to the dignity of human life – to explain their decision so that Congress can properly focus its continuing work to replace Mrs. Schiavo’s feeding tube.

March 20th: “Mrs. Schiavo’s condition, I believe, has been at times misrepresented by the media, but far more often has simply gone unreported all together.  Terri Schiavo is not on a respirator; she can breathe on her own.  Terri Schiavo is not brain-dead; she talks and she laughs, and she expresses happiness and discomfort.  Terri Schiavo is not on life-support.  

“She’s not being ‘kept alive’; she is alive.  It won’t take a miracle to help Terri Schiavo; it will only take the medical care and therapy that all patients deserve.  Mrs. Schiavo is not being denied heroic measures; she’s being denied basic, basic, basic medical and personal care.  

“The legal issues, I grant everyone, are complicated, but the moral ones are not.  What will it hurt to have a federal judge take a fresh look at all this evidence and apply it against 15 years’ worth of advances in medical technology?  We have a bill – the Palm Sunday compromise – that will give her that chance."

We've gone from asserting that Schiavo is alive (a fact), to accusing the Supreme Court of creating a moral tragedy by allowing this "defenseless and dying woman" to perish, to arguing that "she talks and she laughs, and she expresses happiness and discomfort...Terry Schiavo is not on life support". To hear him tell it now, you'd think we could take out her feeding tube, leave her in the woods, and let her wander back home. Of course, this isn't about Terry Schiavo's life nor her death, it's about Tom DeLay's chances for survival. And knowing that the sooner she leaves the news the quicker he reenters it, he's been reaching ever more impressive heights of overstatement and nuttery. All this from a man who'd never noticed Terry until three days ago. I'll say this for Tom -- the slimebag knows how to adopt a cause.

Via Think Progress, comes this new ABC poll:

- 70% of Americans say it is inappropriate for Congress to involve itself in the Schiavo case.

- 67% of Americans “think the elected officials trying to keep Schiavo alive are doing so more for political advantage than out of concern for her or for the principles involved.” (Just 19% believe the elected officials are acting out of concern for her or their principles.)

- 58% of Republicans, 61% of independents and 63% of Democrats oppose federal government intervention in the case.

- 50% of evangelicals oppose federal government intervention in the case, just 44% approve of the intervention.

- 63% of Catholics and a plurality of evangelicals believe Schiavo’s feeding tube should be removed.

Looks like America isn't quite as stupid as the Republicans thought, huh? If you haven't read Digby and Amanda on the subject, it's time you did. As I said this weekend, Democrats should be fanning out to the media and repeating the simple refrain that this is none of the government's goddamn business. Not out of political gain, but because this is truly none of the government's goddamn business! Here, finally, Democrats agree that the government is in full overreach. We agree that in cases like this one, small government is better. Let's take this moment to draw the line.

A few other notes: What, exactly, is the Christian argument against choosing death? Not to be flip about it, but isn't this exactly what God chose for his son/self? God, after all, is an omnipotent being. If He didn't want Jesus to die on the cross, Jesus doesn't die on the cross. But Christ's purpose on earth had been filled, that's why God didn't have him stagger to his feet, dust himself off and continue wandering the countryside. In what way, then, wasn't that a sort of euthanasia? And, given the involvement of the Romans, in what way wasn't it an assisted suicide?

I know the pat response to that is life and death are up to God, not us. But no one denies that the only way for Schiavo to regain cognitive function would be a miracle. We've all seen the scans, her mind has liquified. Assuming her parents want her kept alive in the hopes of recovery and not as some plush toy, isn't a miracle as likely once the feeding tube has been removed as it was when she was still receiving liquified nutrients? Indeed, isn't all this argument over whether or not she should be kept in stasis really a way of denying His will? If He wanted to end all euthanasia, proving that the disconnected and condemned can rise from their hospital beds despite science's most informed predictions would be a pretty nifty way to vindicate his followers.

To be clear, I'm not trying to concoct clever theories to discredit religion. These are general theological issues that are getting little to no attention. We've somehow accepted this mass illusion of Christianity as a simplistic, pro-life, pro-war, pro-Republican force in the world without ever stopping to wonder whether the latest actions conducted in the name of the church sync up in any way with scripture. We've allowed Bush to connect this "culture of life" idea, which so far as I can tell means nothing at all, with the Bible. But the Bible, at least the Gospels, are pretty clear on their role -- Jesus is the Messiah, treat each other well until he gets back (which he clearly stated he'd do before the folks he was talking to died). From there we go to Paul who invents some theology that makes the religion more portable, but the basic nature remains the same. As for "culture of life", whoever would like to define it must somehow unite a distaste for abortion, an appetite for war, a rejection of guaranteed health care, a rollback of environmental protection, and a desperate desire to sustain the functionally dead. Trust me, that's not an agenda prescribed in scripture.

Lastly, I'd love to see some numbers on living wills in the coming months. I bet their numbers will skyrocket.

Ian Duncan Smith, leader of Britain's Conservatives from 2001-2003, has penned an excellent op-ed counseling America's conservatives to keep minority right's sacrosanct, lest they find themselves eventually marginalized and steamrolled, much as their British counterparts have. It's far and away the most convincing broadside I've read against the nuclear option, take a look.

In the aftermath of Volokh's descent into barbarity, I've seen more than a few bloggers rejoice that this should deny him the judgeship he's rumored to be shortlisted for. Probably true. But Volokh knew that. And the truth is, the guy's been pretty damn brave in the face of it. Back when I began blogging I, like most young activists, hoped one day to run for office. And so a friend who worked for Gray Davis told me this maxim: Never write it if you can say it, never say it if you can imply it, never imply it if you nod it, never nod it if you can nudge it, and never nudge it if you can wink it. A long trail of written statements is not exactly conducive to a campaign, nor a nomination fight.

Eugene is no kid, he knows that full well. And so I have to give him respect for hanging out in the blogosphere, enriching what we do he here (except when talking about strangling folks), and doing it all with a stunning lack of regard for his future prospects. Maybe he doesn't want a judgeship, I don't know. But if he does, or thinks he one day might, his refusal to allow that to affect his participation in the blogosphere is pretty admirable. So were his comments on participatory killings abhorrent? Hell yeah -- I could see the blood dripping from his horns. But I appreciate that he made them, and that he's made so many others. Rather than locking up his knowledge in LA's ivory tower so it'd remain fresh and virginal for the expected nomination fight, he's injected it -- good, bad and shockingly ugly -- into the public discourse. Good for him. Good for us.

Eleana Berkowitz reports that the Immokalee workers have won their ongoing campaign against Taco Bell, receiving their long-demanded raise of a penny per pound of tomatoes. Yeah, you read that right. They've spent the last 8 years organizing against the contractor, and turned their attention towards Taco Bell (who buys from the contractor) in in 2001. And yet the chain fought their miniscule demands tooth-and-nail. Be honest -- would you even notice if they added a cent onto the Chalupa? Of course not. Those things are so cheap that my friends and I pause before we eat them to check for rat meat. But now the tomatoes in them, picked by immigrants who haven't received a raise since the 70's (and have watched their real income plummet because of it), will have some modicum of compensation, Si se puede! Pero todavia presionando.

This win holds particular significance for me. My first self-directed political act ever, as a senior in high school, attending an Immokalee march. I brought along three of my friends (one of whom I was interested in -- major points) and we all marched to Taco Bell. To this day, I have the chant sheet hanging in my room, reminding me of the giant puppet I carried for a mile, and the first time I felt like an activist.

In the ensuing period, as I watched the Immokalee merge with students group and kick the Bell off various campuses (including mine) with little coverage beyond school newspapers, I grew more depressed about their prospects. As I watched the anti-war movement marginalized and judged impotent, I discarded protesting as anything but an anachronism. And who knows, maybe I was right. Elana's article argues that the students were actually, sadly, the crucial members of the coalition, as they were threatening the franchises and promising bad publicity. But whichever group pushed the movement over the tipping point, the CIW won, thousands of pickers are about to be lifted out of poverty, and future drives will take heart in this one's success. Si se puede!

Stuff you may have missed:

• The Center for American Progress's Progressive Problem.

• The Unbearable Lightness of Wal-Mart's Fine

• Why Punting Schiavo Back to the Courts is a Stupid Idea for Democrats.

I'm going to quote the Rude Pundit in full on this one:

the AP story, the CNN story, the Fox "News" story and others all say that the Senate "unanimously" passed the thank-Christ-we're-not-talking-about-Social-Security Terry Schiavo bill.

Technically, this is true. But all these articles fail to mention what the Miami Herald does distinctly note: "Only three members were on the floor and the bill's prime sponsor, Republican Sen. Mel Martinez of Florida, served as presiding officer."

And those three members proudly raised their voices, and yes, technically the bill passed unanimously, just as technically Terry Schiavo is still "alive."

Welcome to the circus.

Final Update: So I spent some time tonight reviewing the end of the Killian scandal and looking into CBS's report myself. My conclusion, for what little it's worth, is that Goodall's article (which I summarized in the post) was misleading, if not wrong. Anyway, my original piece follows the jump, so you can read it there. Goodall's analysis is interesting as a review of CBS's report itself, but not reliable as a guide to the controversy over the documents.

I know Rather is old news, older, as he might say, than a fossilized pig in a time machine en route to the future. But a funny thing happened on the way to Rather's retirement -- a report was issued documenting his (mis)behavior and laying out the case against the documents he used. But the report was rarely read, most of us simply assumed its content, allowed the right to high-five about the wedgie they gave the newsman, and returned to blathering about Social Security. So, with the help of this excellent NY Review of Books article by James Goodall, here's what you may not have known about the Rather Report:

• The report never took a position on whether the documents were forged. It concluded, essentially, that it was impossible to know. The criticism leveled at Rather and CBS was that the network failed to hire appropriate experts for the documents and did not adequately establish a "chain of custody".

• CBS hired four experts to verify the documents. Two, James Pierce and Marcel Matley, signed off. Two others, Emily Will and Linda James, had reservations. Of the two who green-lighted the memos, both stick by their original conclusions. Of the two who refrained, James said that without the original documents, authenticity was impossible to establish, and Will said the signatures did not seem to match. Pierce and Matley both believed the signatures were genuine. So two verified, one abstained, and one disagreed.

• The commission investigating the matter did not, despite claiming that this was CBS's mistake, hire independent experts to verify or disprove the documents. One imagines that an ironclad, or even substantial, case against them would have compelled the panel to administer just such a coup de grace.

• Establishing a chain of custody, which is a list of who had the documents and when, stretching back to their creation, would make most investigative journalism impossible. Any documents that powerful parties don't want you to have would be immediately denied, or sued for, when past possessors desperate to keep them secret were notified of the leak. Notifying them, however, would be the only way to establish if the chain is true. Under these rules, The Pentagon Papers would never have been published.

• Rather himself was apparently uninvolved in the authentication of the documents. He relied on his producer, Mary Mapes. And yet he took the fall. If the president exhibited the same sense of honor and responsibility, he would have resigned after Abu Ghraib, and committed Hari Kari after the Duelfer Report.

• Mapes authenticated the documents by meshing them with known events from Bush's military history, which she verified through documents obtained via FOIA requests. Everything fit. The panel believes only three of the six documents fit perfectly, another fit okay, another not so good, and the last, not at all. All judgments were shaky and the panel conceded that "there is nothing in the official Bush records that would rule out the authenticity of the Killian documents."

There's more, and you should read the whole thing (as per usual), but that, I think, suffices to shred the assumptions a lot of us held. We don't know the memos were fake. Nothing proved that they were fake. The experts who believed in them never recanted. They fit with Bush's history. Nothing in his history disproved a single one. The worst you could say about CBS is that they took too long to address doubts about the memos, but have you yet heard Bush step on stage and admit that our rationale for war was completely incorrect?

Yeah. Me neither.

Update: While giving myself a refresher course on the Rather memos this evening (it's amazing what you'll do when you don't want to study for finals), I came across Kevin's opinion on the CBS Report from back in January. While Goodall focuses on what it said about the memos, Kevin zeroes in on its reconstruction of the chain of custody and concludes that "the story should never have seen the light of day". So there ya go, can't get a straight opinion on anything in this damn tale.

That's quite a list of holdings.

Have you visited Big Brass Blog yet? Why not?

Last night, over an extraordinarily good Italian dinner, a buddy of mine explained to my girlfriend and me why ideology doesn't matter, only partisanship. His point was a Kossian one, that the party need not bother itself worrying about conservative Democrats and liberal ones, just whether they're committed to the cause. And at this juncture, that's probably true, the Bush administration's interest in Democratic opinion hovers between "not there" and "are you fucking kidding me". But it presents a pretty large problem: this country, so long as its political parties remain in the state of flat-out warfare they're in, is screwed. Because so long as a single party controls all levers of power, there's no reason for the minority party to negotiate, only to obstruct. Worse, the majority party need never look for counsel, as their inclination is to round up their votes and pass the most ideologically pure legislation they can pen. Caught amidst those dynamics, any issue that Americans care about will languish, doesn't matter which party is in power. Health care? Dead. Social Security privatization? Dead. In this system, it's trivial to obstruct attempts at massive change, and even easier to scare the American people over them. Policy is complex, attacking it is not.

Now Republican strategists are sounding the alarms over massive losses in 2006. Good, I hope they go down in flames. And not just because their leader has horns. Until Democrats regain control over some lever of power, be it the House, the Senate or the Presidency, there'll be no serious legislating done in Washington. Some pet programs might squeeze through, and some under-the-radar bills meant to screw those going bankrupt might slide in, greased by industry cash, but nothing addressing the serious issues in the country will make it. Because until Bush has to negotiate with a solidly Democratic body, he's not going to float anything sane enough to pass. And until Democrats can negotiate from a position of strength, they won't be able to take credit for anything they push through, much less turn out legislation they can proudly tout to constituents back home. So to Republicans demoralized by these reports, buck up. Your best chance of enacting anything approaching a legislative agenda is to have your congressional majorities cleanly ripped away. Until then, gridlock will reign.

So Pete's just sold the last multigrain scone. And it wasn't to me. Those things are like crack! Denied my fix, I have no idea what to do with my Sunday morning. Should probably blog. Or study for finals. Or...bah.

Regular readers know how much I appreciate the Center for American Progress's work -- the tax plan, Think Progress, the Progress Report, Campus Progress, etc, all are excellent examples of what a progressive think tank should be doing. But the one thing a progressive think tank should not be doing is calling itself a progressive think tank. Head on over to CAP's homepage -- once you get past the campaign boilerplate in the banner ("progressive ideas for a strong, just and free America"), you immediately see the topmost (right) sidebar button, a bright orange box direction you to "Progressive Priorities". If you don't click on that, your eyeballs are fairly destined to settle on the facsimile of a Social Security card that rests in the middle of the page promising a "Progressive Guide to the Social Security Debate". Jeez, I wonder which side of the aisle they're on?

One lesson Republicans quickly learned was that you get farthest by couching ideology in empiricism, which is to say you get farthest by hiding ideology and pretending you reach conclusions sympathetic to conservatism solely through dispassionate analysis of the facts. The Heritage Foundation bills itself as "Policy Research and Analysis", while AEI simply references their 60-year history and calls themselves "one of America's largest and most respected 'think tanks'". That both are hotbeds for partisan extremists who use facts the way most of us use fingerpaint never mattered, their simple refusal to trumpet an affiliation, combined with a pliant press corps, allowed them to become a serious force in American politics.

CAP's work is too good to be boxed in as progressive. Because the aim, really, isn't to make the center respect the left, but to make the center become the left. And you don't do that by labeling yourself as just one of the partisan fleas sucking blood from the debate, you do it by marking your opinions as Truth and thus letting your progressive solutions exist as if God himself etched them on tablets and sent them down from the sky. So CAP's banner should read "Ideas for a strong, free and just America", their sidebar should tout "America's Priorities", the site's central feature should be "Your Guide to the Social Security Debate". I understand what CAP's trying to do and I appreciate their attempts to popularize the progressive label, but it's more important that they popularize progressive ideas. Since the media's idea of a fact-checking is to marginalize their sources by listing whatever partisan affiliation they find on the homepage, the two goals are, to some extent, mutually exclusive.

Sidenote: A few months ago I put up a post complaining that the Heritage and AEI site were giving Social Security privatization prominent play and tons of resources, with unsuspecting visitors drowning in a sea of calculators and dishonest reports while CAP featured, well, nothing. It's a nice metaphor for the genesis of the debate that privatization is now marginalized on the conservative sites while the liberal think-tanks have made it central to theirs. Advantage: Us.

Justin Logan says everything that needs to be said on the subject.

That Nathan Newman sure knows how to drive home a point:

Prosecutors announced they were dropping all criminal charges against Wal-Mart for its use of contractors employing undocumented workers in exchange for paying an $11 million fine, a hefty sounding amount but a pittance for a company with $288.2 billion in sales last year. Let's put it this way-- this is an equivalent financial hit to an average person making $50,000 per year being hit with a $1.90 fine for illegal activity.

Wow. I mean, really, Wow. I don't make enough in income to even be taxed, but I spent too long getting books from my room today and got a $40 parking ticket. Let's say, for argument's sake, that I make 20,000 a year. My parking ticket comes to .2% of my imaginary income. Not a whole lot, but remember, all I did was dawdle a bit while my car was in a loading zone. Wal-Mart, having employed illegal workers at wages barely above indentured servitude, was hit with a fine equalling .0038% of their income. Comparatively speaking, their fine for employing illegal immigrants was 1.9% of my parking ticket. Their fine for sustaining illegal immigration was 1.9% of my parking ticket. Fuck class warfare, there are times when I yearn for a French Revolution. And remember, Wal-Mart isn't being protected by those soft-on-illegal-immigration Democrats, this is a Republican company through-and-through. The same Republicans who demand tougher border controls and an end to all illegal, and much of the legal, immigration. And they're shielding the companies who fuel the cross-border fugitives. Beautiful.

The huge fuss the GOP is making over Terry Schiavo would be understandable, if not respectable, if they could marshal some poll numbers that showed, like on gay marriage, that the issue was a political winner for them. But it's not. 65% of Americans think Schiavo's husband should have the final say on her care, and 87% would not want to be kept alive in her condition. 87%! So in case you were wondering, this isn't cynical, lowest-common-denominator politics being played by the right. This is, instead, more proof that a small band of nuts has the party by the balls, and the leadership is happy to embark on the most insane and quixotic of quests in order to please them.

Why the Democrats aren't fanning out into the media repeating the simple refrain that this is none of the government's goddamn business I'll never know. And why they're allowing the GOP to pass legislation making a state court decision eligible for review by a federal court is even stranger, this is exactly the sort of congressional overreach that annoys Americans. Armando thinks they're letting the GOP spend itself expecting that they'll look foolish when the law is struck down as unconstitutional, but I disagree with that entirely. What'll happen then is that the rabid pro-lifers will believe Republicans went to the wall for then only to be foiled by liberal, activist judges, thus redoubling their efforts to appoint a wingnut Supreme Court nominee and pack the courts with sympathetic crazies. And that will all occur under-the-radar.

If we publicized this fight now, while the media is attentive and congress is publicly deliberating, at least the average American will get to see how profoundly unserious and out of control the GOP is. We have to stop letting these battles be fought outside the public eye. They keep motivating their forces by supporting them in high profile fights knowing that, months later, their ridiculous bills will be slapped down and the constituencies they pleased will be all the angrier. It's the cycle of backlash politics and the only way to throw a wrench into it is to bring it out in the open.

Update: File Reid's statement under snatching defeat from the jaws of victory. With polls showing Americans are disgusted by congress's behavior, he decided the rational response was to become part of the disgraceful circus. To put it in terms we're all familiar with, it'd be like Reid joining with Frist to pass privatization and issuing a press release saying the President's personal accounts are an excellent idea offered in good faith and Democrats are proud to be part of their passage. Thanks, big guy.

If I were Joe Lieberman and highly-respected economist Paul Krugman was criticizing me on misrepresenting a fiscal matter, I think I'd assume his exhaustive understanding of the issue trumped my experience as AG of Connecticut and leave the matter there -- who reads and remembers Paul Krugman anyway? But I am not Joe Lieberman and the guy who is Joe Lieberman clearly believes different tactics are in order. So he wrote in to the New York Times to explain why he was right and Krugman wrong. And that was where it stood until highly respected economist Brad DeLong took up the issue and explained to Lieberman exactly where he was wrong and why his statements made no sense.

Saw Gunner's Palace last night. Like others already have, I recommend you check it out immediately. The film brilliantly succeeds in showing the routinization of life in a war zone, taking pains to neither demonize nor canonize the fresh-faced kids who serve as the stars. Unlike many documentaries, there is no plot, the editors have created no characters and they've taken pains to deny us a satisfying story arc. There's no CG added to create cool visuals, and there are no attempts to tie the movie into a larger political context. It's simply the camera's record of day after day after day in Iraq. Some are good, some are worse. Sometimes the troops show striking patience and compassion, sometimes they throw their quarry on the ground and demand they "shut the fuck up". Sometimes patrols are no more eventful than a stroll to the supermarket, and sometimes mobs form to pelt them with rocks. The soldiers spend a lot of time rapping, playing guitar, play games on the computer, trying to recreate the life of a teenager in conditions entirely unsuited to it. They throw pool parties in Uday's palace, where the few female enlists are in high demand, and enormous numbers of guys hang out in groups. They try and teach friendly Iraqis how to pick up women, and then later arrest former friends who turn out to be traitors. Some die, most don't. It's just life.

To me, the film's most affecting moment came during a raid of two brothers suspected of being bomb crafters. Both spoke English, were articulate and defiant, and proudly proclaimed that they were journalists, that the camera had better record the treatment they were receiving, that the troops were harassing them with no reason. No bomb-making materials were found at the home, but the brothers were detained and transferred to Abu Ghraib prison. For me, that recast the torture in an entirely different light. Like everyone else with a shred of conscience, I've been horrified by the pictures and stories emerging from the prison. But somewhere, in the back of my mind, their impact was lessened by the belief that these probably were pretty bad guys and so, in some way, they had a hand in their fate. The problem with Abu Ghraib, then, was what Americans were doing, not who they did it to. Go see these two brothers, defiant, sympathetic, and possibly innocent, and then try and soften the blow of our actions. Torturing innocents who refuse to submit was what Saddam did, knowing that we have likely done the same is devastating. And seeing who we did it to knifes your nationalistic pride and coping mechanisms in a way that news reports and NGO-releases with the same information can never hope to match.

In any case, see the movie. Don't go expecting your biases challenged, as Steve Clemons first wrote, they'll likely be reinforced no matter what your position. If you believe in the war you'll see brave troops adapting to a tough situation in order to courageously carry out their mission. If you don't believe in the war, you'll see a bunch of kids desperately trying to live under circumstances they should never have been thrown into. But in either case, the movie is brilliant and important and seeing it should be required for anyone willing to pontificate on the subject.

Terry Schiavo, if I understand her condition, is an essentially brain dead woman who has languished in a coma for a decade, who shows little to no hope of ever rediscovering consciousness, and who, even if she did snap to attention, would be so desperately brain damaged that she could never function. Her cerebral cortex is gone, replaced by spinal fluid. The main debate about her condition is whether there are a few living tissues left, or whether there are none; in either case, there's nothing near what is required for any level of higher cognitive function. Her condition, short of an act of God, is irreparable, her mental command center gone. And yet, she's been kept alive for 10 years, running through a variety of hospitals and tests and assisted living mechanisms, absorbing an enormous amount of money in what is truly a hopeless cause.

So, in the same week that most Republicans voted for Medicaid cuts that would destroy health care for tens of thousands who could use and benefit from it, and under many of the same lawmakers who proved themselves ideologically determined to keep government out of medicine, and in a party that lauds the primacy of states rights, these same legislators are putting aside all their ideologies and all their anti-government biases in order to ensure a hopeless case continues chewing up money that could be far better spent on other people, on other things. Terry Schiavo has gone from a brain-dead woman to a political prop, a living vegetable that has somehow wedged itself between the Republican party's beliefs and constituencies, and proven decisively that their constituencies win that confrontation. Were I a Republican, watching Tom DeLay desperately clinging to a brain-dead woman's leg in order to deflect attention from his scandals, or seeing Bill Frist release smug press releases with smiling pictures of him next to text bragging about wheeling Schiavo into court, I think I'd be ill.

And now we're seeing talking points released, giving up the whole damn game:

ABC News has obtained talking points circulated among Republican senators explaining why they should vote to intervene in the Schiavo case. Among them: "This is an important moral issue and the pro-life base will be excited..." and "This is a great political issue... this is a tough issue for Democrats."

Grand Old Party indeed.

Jesse Lee, writing at the Stakeholder, makes an important point:

It's hard to say how many headlines away that day is, but as we've said before, something has certainly shifted. The past week has seen literally a half dozen separate stories written on doubts within the GOP Conference about DeLay. That never happens. And DeLay's bizarre news conference and recent meetings to "assuage" his rank & file are also unusual, and smell of desperation.

It's really true. Ten days ago, the DeLay scandals were in the same category as Plame, and the intimidated Medicare actuary, and the 50 other small-bore scandals liberals hoped would undermine the House of Bush but which never seemed find the foundations. At some point in the last week, however, the DeLay's violations, either through new evidence or critical mass of news stories, experienced a phase shift, and now the editorialists are slamming him, the cable shows are dissecting him, the Democrats are planning against him, on and on. That he's embattled is being etched into conventional wisdom, give it three more days and David Broder will tattoo it on his ankle.

The only way for Republicans to derail the ethics attacks, it seems, is to unchain the ethics committee, but that move is almost certainly stillborn. That it's coming from the ethics chair DeLay demoted ensures it's DOA -- Tom would never lose a grudge match like that, bureaucratic warfare is in his bloodstream. To DeLay, party unity is the only way to keep Republicans ascendant, it's the touchstone of his political philosophy. So unless he decides to leave, he'll never let himself be pushed out, because he'd never allow the united front to publicly crumble. All of which may be good for Democrats. Tom DeLay, it seems, will be there to kick around for quite awhile longer.

Over at The Corner, John J Miller asks:

If somebody put a pistol to Schiavo's head and pulled the trigger--you know, to give the "dying process" a little nudge--would the shooter be guilty of murder under Florida law?

If a conservative pundit thought he was being clever but instead made an analogy so flawed that an unwary blogger fell through the logic holes and sprained his brain, can he be sued for criminal negligence?

Actually, it wasn't last night. Last night was probably my fifth Spearhead show. But if you've not seen them live, you really, really, should. For reasons I don't understand, blogospheric music recommendations are sole property of the Indy Music Alliance, and so all we're ever told is "go see Arcade Fire" or "Death Cab for Cutie is great". Now, I like AF and Death Cab just fine, but none of these skinny white boys with guitars can hold a candle to the six-foot-six force of nature that is Michael Franti. His shows are just mind-blowing. From beat-boxers to Louis Armstrong impersonations to covers to music that has left friends of mine in tears -- no joke -- it doesn't get any better. Ever.

What's that you say? You don't know Spearhead? Surely you jest! Well, for you poor souls out there, you can download some of their songs here ("Everybody Loves Music" and "Oh My God" are particularly good choices), or, in less legal venues (actually, iTunes carries them too), you should check out "Stay Human", "Every Single Soul", "What I Be", "Skin on the Drum", "Listener Supported", "Soulshine" and, well, really anything off Stay Human, Home, Live at the BAOBOB, or Everyone Deserves Music. But take my advice for it -- Franti and friends can change your life, or at least your outlook on it.

Aren't conservatives supposed to be for, you know, limited government and congressional restraint and states' rights and stuff? Yeah? So tell me how they can possibly justify following up their subpoenas to Major League Baseball with yet more subpoenas stopping doctors from pulling Terry Schiavo's feeding tube and forcing her and her husband to testify before a committee. As Kevin says:

It's not just that this is an obvious abuse of congressional power, since subpoenas are designed to compel testimony and Terri Schiavo is obviously not going to testify about anything. What's really nauseating is the almost slavering Republican eagerness to treat Schiavo as a common media spectacle. What are they going to do? Wheel her into a committee room under the klieg lights so the whole country can gape in wonderment at a comatose woman? Why not just set up a circus freak show on Capitol Hill and be done with it?

It's weird because I remember their guiding philosophy even as they seem to have completely forgotten it. Congress, under them, is reclaiming its penchant for grandstanding on issues it should never, ever, get involved in. And it's doing so under the very same people who promised to curb its excesses and cut down its power. It's almost Shakespearian.

Centenarian George F. Kennan has died. Historically astute readers will know his as the author of the "containment" doctrine, which essentially guided our foreign policy through the Cold War. What most won't know, what I didn't know, is that Kennan felt his strategy significantly overapplied. As he conceived of it, containment was meant to protect a few spots of great national interest, not become a global policy to plug socialism wherever it uncorked. If we'd followed him, then, there would have been no Vietnam, no Bay of Pigs, fewer national embarrassments. It's all quite interesting. So read the LA Times' excellent obituary, it's a history lesson unto itself.

The special exemptions and rules given to Wal-Mart should really be a national shame. That a case concerning illegal child labor has ended with the transgressor getting a 15-day advance warning before any future inspection of its stores and a 10-day abatement period to rectify any abuses found during the prescheduled inspections is just flabbergasting. Imagine that -- not only does Wal-Mart have half a month to clean up a store before a visit, but in the event that they don't do a thorough job, they get a second chance to sweep violations under the rug. What happened to personal responsibility? To basic logic?

I'm glad that House Democrats are holding Chao's feet to the fire on this, but we should really be throwing her into the furnace. This is a disgrace, it's the kind of deal that's reached in the third world when popular opinion forces a puppet government to "investigate" the guy pulling the strings. This administration isn't just in bed with corporations, it's sweaty and panting and the sheets are tangled around their feet. We should be sending this snapshot of their adultery to every mailbox in the country.

Luntz is such sleaze. His op-ed in the LA Times isn't even the sort of thing you can rebut, you can only point out the slime oozing off every word. The contention that his true aim in life, linguistic humanitarian that he is, is to clear policy debates of obfuscation and inject language that fairly and clearly expresses the policy conflict is enough to make a weaker man retch. But I'm no weaker man. In fact, I'm a highly evolved homo-sapien deeply enmeshed in modern communication technologies that allow me to absorb disparate sources of information and render judgments that inform and amuse thousands of others. And, highly sophisticated creature that I am, Luntz's op-ed pleases me. Because it means he's on the run.

Luntz wrote this in response to the wide play his leaked "New America Lexicon" got. You guys might remember it -- Kos had it, everybody linked, everybody laughed and pored over it...but it got to Luntz. It got to him because he's being dragged out from behind the curtain. Instead of issuing Oz-like pronouncements and watching the words ripple through the Sunday shows, liberals are focusing fire on him, the message-man, and the tactics he uses. And so now he's wasting his time defending what he does and, in true Luntzian fashion, spinning it. Bits and pieces of his offhand framing are impressive, as when he calls the Social Security plans with the highest levels of privatization "the most innovative", but the whole thing is an apologia for the indefensible. So keep up the pressure kids, Oz is emerging, and the sun hurts his eyes.

I'll be on MSNBC's Connected: Coast-to-Coast during the 5 eastern/2 pacific program. They think my segment will hit about 15 minutes in, but you never know.

Update: So that didn't go as planned. You'd think live coverage of a Senate hearing is the sort of thing you'd know about before I was in the studio, but such is cable news. On the bright side, I think today conclusively proved Jose Canseco's assertion that steroid use hurts the youth. If not for it, I'd have been on the teevee.

With DeLay sinking ever deeper in his ocean of ethical violation, DCCC chief Rahm Emanuel has decided to capitalize:

Democratic House leaders are casting about for squeaky-clean congressional candidates — even if they’re long shots — to challenge prominent GOP incumbents who have been tainted by news reports of their allegedly unseemly connection to lobbyists. The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) strategy, still in development, aims to make ethical charges the touchstone of those campaigns and would use several high-profile local races to create a national image of corruption in the GOP-controlled House of Representatives. Several Democratic lawmakers and aides said that Rep. Bob Ney (R-Ohio) will be the first target of this new strategy.

Explicitly borrowing from the anti-corruption planks in Newt Gingrich’s “Contract with America,” and hoping to replicate the 1994 watershed victory that followed, the new plan suggests that Democratic leaders believe they need to weave themes of abuse of power into any successful campaign to recapture the House.

James Joyner snarks this and wonders if the Democrats might consider taking another page out of Gingrich's 2008 playbook and craft a bold and compelling agenda to run on. But the Contract With America didn't appear until six weeks before the election. At this point in the cycle, Newt and his forces were sinking Bill Clinton's health care plan and piling on the ethical violations of congressional Democrats. And judging from how the Social Security fight is progressing and the ever-mounting allegations against DeLay, I'd say Democrats are right on schedule.

I'm not sure Brad Plumer's comments on CAP's tax reform plan are fair. While he's right that raising revenues to 17.2% of GDP isn't enough to close the deficit, this plan isn't really a tax proposal ready for implementation, it's a tax proposal ready for prime time. The aim of it, quite overtly I think, is to offer Democrats something that is responsible (though not perfect), that is attractive, that gives most Americans tax cuts, that broadens the tax base, that solves Social Security, that's pretty progressive, and that lays out a vision of what tax reform should look like. This way, Democrats can spend their time on the Sunday shows debating whose proposal offers larger tax cuts, more help to the middle class, and more incentives for the poor (as in the restoration of the EITC for single-parents who get married), rather than whether tax reform is a good idea or not. We need to be responsible in what we put forth, but considering our ability to pass the plan is roughly commensurate with Nancy Pelosi's ability to leap tall buildings in a single bound, I don't think our proposal has to make the tough choices and tradeoffs that it would if we were in the majority.

Conversely, I think the criticism focusing on the enormous jumps between tax brackets are right on. My feeling is that that's good for selling the plan (three brackets sound pretty simple to people), but deeply counterproductive if the fight turned real. If the CAP plan ever got a serious hearing and found itself being debated as a possible piece of legislation, the brackets would have to be reworked so a pay raise doesn't become an immediate and deep pay cut -- that sort of thing really would retard work. But this proposal won't be seriously scrutinized, it'll be a vague Democratic plan that we can use to counterpoint Republicans and allude to as a "better way". I'd remind my wonky lefty friends that we're out of power and, if we insist on opposing as if we were legislating, we're quite unlikely to regain it. The problem with being in the majority is that you have to make hard choices. When you're in the minority, it's ice cream and fairy tales all the way to the ballot box.

Update: Matt says the same thing, but better.

Update 2: In comments, Kenneth Fair proves me completely wrong:

Ezra, Ezra. You've made the same mistake regarding tax brackets that most Americans do. Getting a raise that moves you to a higher tax bracket can't give you a pay cut. The higher bracket isn't applied retroactively to all your income, just to the portion that's in the bracket.

A quick example: Let's say there are two tax brackets, 25% and 50%, and you have an income that puts you at the very top of the 25% bracket. All of your income is taxed at 25%. Then you get a raise that lifts your taxable income by $10,000. The $10,000 is taxed in the 50% bracket, but all the rest of your income is still taxed at 25%. The net effect of your raise is to give you $5,000 in your pocket.

Unless the bracket you move into is over 100%, it can't possibly turn a pay raise into a pay cut.

So there you have it. On the bright side, I've got a book on tax policy coming this week, so I hopefully won't embarrass myself too many more times. And yes, I said a book on tax policy. 360 pages on the subject. See what I go through for you guys?

Kevin takes another dive into the why-women-don't-blog waters and surfaces with some theory-backing mermaids from the op-ed pages. He also catches this from Dahlia Lithwick:

And so a clutch of women are left on the pink margins of the page, to wring our hands and, well, discuss among ourselves. The subtext will thus remain that anyone choosing to speak out on this is somehow hysterical or overemotional; that this is not a "serious" problem since serious people (i.e., men) aren't addressing it. All of which practically guarantees that nothing will be done about defining, measuring, or redressing the issue in the long term. Claims that no man wants to step on the landmine of political correctness, gender stereotyping, and identity politics should not justify bowing out of the conversation. Maureen Dowd, Deborah Tannen, and Anne Applebaum are smart, serious people. They have taken the time to initiate a conversation. They deserve serious responses from men and women alike.

It's striking, however, that the blogs are just the opposite. You never see women bringing up the dearth of female bloggers (to be clear, it's not that there aren't many, it's that there aren't as many), it's mostly men who publicly scratch their heads, glance into their comments, and find they're being hung in effigy. That's a bit odd, because even the studies cited in defense of women's numbers, like this one from Meryl Yourish, admit to a 14% differential, and that's not restricting the pool to political bloggers.

Now, assuming we're talking about top op-ed pages (and since this conversation is being held in the Washington Post, the LA Times, the NY Times, and Slate, we are) and top blogs, which we often are (though nothing I've seen shows the disparity easing much as we travel down the list), there's not a major difference in the number of female bloggers/writers occupying the slots, it's about 10-20% in each of the venues. So why is the conversation being entirely driven by women in one medium and men in the other? It makes no sense.

Tomorrow, I'll be on MSNBC's Connected: Coast to Coast, doing a round-the-blogs segment. It'll be the 5pm Eastern/2pm Pacific show, towards the middle of the hour, so those who'd like to see me live should tune in. Oh yeah, did I mention it's live? If I call MSNBC CNN, Monica Crowley Michael Crowley, or otherwise make some horribly embarassing gaffe that blackballs me from media forevermore, it'll all be caught on tape. So tune in for me and the possibility of wacky hijinks! How can you lose?

If you read nothing else today, make it Mark Schmitt's piece on merging the security theme Democrats are finding in Social Security with opportunity. I've been beating this drum for awhile (and others have been pounding on it long before me), but it couldn't be more important. The Democrats are currently trapped in a war of outdated critiques. Will we move towards an archaic populism that pretends we can stop outsourcing, or will we embrace a Republican-lite philosophy of corporate cronyism? We've apparently settled on a weird state between the two, and so we spend a few months after every election yelling at each other over the incoherence of our position.

There is, as Joe Klein would term it, an information age (or post-industrial) populism ready to be assumed by the first party to grab it. Better yet, it fits perfectly with the current priorities and crusades of the Democratic party. Simply put, the government exists to reduce risk to the worker so they have more freedom to take chances and seek success in the modern economy. That's why Americans need guaranteed Social Security, so they can take risks with other retirement savings. That's why they need government-assured health care, so they're not stuck in dead-end jobs that waste their talent and stifle their entrepreneurism because they're afraid of losing their medical coverage. That's why we need unemployment insurance, asset-building, universal day care, etc.

Not only does such a critique fit with the proposals we push and the programs we fight to save, it allows us to embrace the modern economy, embrace the spirit of entrepreneurship, embrace the innovation and ingenuity of ordinary Americans, and do so all in the context of a social net. ts steals a number of extremely potent economic themes from Republicans and recasts them as central portions of the Democratic program. And the fight over Social Security is the perfect place to start. Americans, after all, are perfectly aware of how much risk their lives contain. Let Republicans call it potential, nobody who's ever fallen ill will be fooled. So I'm perfectly willing to fight that war, inviting the right to deny the risk facing ordinary Americans and allowing us to offer protection from the vagaries of fate. If President Bush wants to promote risk in Social Security, we can promote security and the freedom that comes from it. And that is the only change I'd make to Mark's framing. it's not mere opportunity, it's freedom. The freedom to change jobs, to start businesses, to tempt fate. It's freedom from fear of economic downturn, and that's exactly what Social Security offers. Indeed, that's exactly what Democrats should be offering.

Responding to me, Matt writes:

the politics of security are largely about image (the politics of everything are), but the important thing to note is that you can't just whip up some issues and an "image" cooked to order when it comes time to run a presidential campaign. You need to have some idea of what it is you're trying to market, and some experience with various people actually trying to market it. And perhaps most important of all, one key element of "image" is not looking uncomfortable discussing these topics, and one easy way to do that is to actually be comfortable and confident that you know what you're talking about and understand where you want to take the country.

That's absolutely correct. One reason it's so much easier for Republicans to be judged tough on security is that any of them can do it, no experience required. Ronald Reagan was a former actor and Governor of California who was elected during the height of the Cold War. His foreign policy background didn't exist. George W. Bush was a former Governor of Texas who mispronounced the names of foreign leaders and hadn't taken any trips overseas. The reason guys like Reagan and Bush can emerge so strong on national security is that, as empty foreign policy vessels, they're filled by the reputation their party already holds. Democrats, conversely, don't have a party held in high esteem on national security to fill in their gaps. That's why, in the last election, Kerry's war heroism and Clark's four stars figured in so highly. Their resumes, we thought, could fill the hole left by our party's poor image on the subject.

This freedom to relax on foreign policy issues allows Republicans to better target candidates to their weaknesses. Their last few national security candidates, war heroes Bush and Dole, lost soundly, because they didn't gain anything through their heroism that the Republicans didn't already have. Conversely, when Republicans run candidates focused on remaking the party's domestic image, they've done much better. Reagan's critique of big government was quite effective, as was Bush's creation of "compassionate conservatism." It's about knowing their strengths and weaknesses, with the party superstructure providing enough strength that individuals can focus on weakness. Democrats enjoy a similar advantage on domestic issues but, contra Digby, I think that hurts us more than it helps. If Americans can be led to fear, most will quickly and happily vote against their domestic ideals in order to elect the leader they figure will leave them safer.

I'm of the opinion that the only way to finally end our deficit on foreign policy is to elect a Democratic president who shows himself strong and competent on international affairs. Carter didn't. Clinton's first four years were unfocused and his last three were consumed in scandal. A future leader, thrown into a 9/11-like situation or compelled to enter a war against a foreign aggressor, would have the opportunity to instantly transform the party's reputation on the subject. But that's not all we need to do. Matt's post talks about a standing room only address Clark gave on foreign policy. Reid and Pelosi have created a brand new National Security Advisory Group. We need to build up the party structure, so when the moment comes, our members will be able to capture it. More to the point, when the crisis ends, Democrats need to be engaged enough in international issues to retain their newfound image of strength. If we remain unfocused and detached, obviously preferring to focus on urban renewal and entitlement programs, we'll just watch our new strength seep through our otherwise-occupied fingers.

Emptywheel calls in with a hell of a post on the people who act as globalization's foot soldiers. A must-read.

During today's press conference, Bush said something striking about Karen Hughes' new position:

I applaud Secretary Rice's decision to include Karen in the process. I thought that was very wise of her to call upon Karen's talents.

This could be nothing more than his usual M.O of pretending total ignorance over everything that happens in government (I still love watching him talk about the privatization plan he doesn't have right before he defend the plan he's put forth), certainly wouldn't be the first time he acted like newborn babe stunned by the strange workings of Washington. But assume he's being honest, that Rice actually did generate the idea to bring Hughes into the fold.

Pretty fucking smart.

I'd take that as evidence that Rice is making determined moves to consolidate her power in the administration. Bring Hughes in, treat her well, and suddenly you have the only force able to counterbalance Karl lined up on behalf of Condi's proposals. It'd make intra-administration opposition almost impossible. A very savvy play, if true. Alternately, Bush could have put Hughes there to watch over Condi, which I don't believe as Rice is reputed to be an integral part of the President's inner circle. He could also have simply felt that she's a good PR person, worked well for him, and could do the same for the Arab peoples. It'd be simplistic, but logical. In any case, it may not be Hughes who's the story here, but what sort of alliance she'll build with Rice. Because right now, you've got two of the President's closest advisors sitting at State, and potentially teaming up. If they got on the same page, State would wield more power than it's had at any time since Kissinger helmed the place.

Finals suck. That is all.

I'm going to second Matt on this one -- the Center for American Progress's brand-spankin-new tax proposal is really very good, even to an untrained eye like my own. Those of you wanting the full rundown can find it here (warning: 32 page PDF), but most will probably opt for the two page executive summary.

Democrats would be smart to find themselves a few days lull during the Social Security fight and switch gears to blitzing for tax reform. Our tax reform. Because CAP has released a proposal that is, in fact, very good politics. Most Americans would love to see the SS portion of their payroll taxes eliminated, with Social Security now being funded through a guaranteed 2.25% allocation of GDP and a removal of the payroll cap on the employer side. Very smart politics, and very relevant to the current battles. And by changing the subject from Social Security and to tax reform, Republicans can no longer accuse us of lacking a plan, but the subject switch will help bog down the privatization process and defeat the president's proposal outright. CAP also offers incentives for marriage (or, more precisely, the elimination of disincentives for lower-income couples, as single-parent women currently lose their EITC when they accept the ring), consolidates everyone into three income brackets, eliminates the AMT, and encourages saving with an across-the-board 25% tax credit on retirement savings and the ability to shield 50% of assets worth less than $1 million from the capital gains tax so long as they're marked for retirement.

You'll probably notice a lot of tax cuts and exemptions in there. You'd be right. The plan will raise revenue as a percentage of GDP from 2004's 16.2% to about 17.2%. That's an improvement, but it's also the second lowest it's been in years. Bush's average (which has been going down, so much of this is balanced out by pre-tax cut revenues) is 17.5%, Clinton's average was 19.2%, Reagan stood at 18.1% -- so in some ways, we're making up just a bit of lost ground, and we're still way behind the Europeans. But the plan is such good politics, and so much sounder than what Bush wants to do, that the sacrifices are well worth it. Democrats should print it out, study it, and begin selling it to the American people. In the same way that Gephardt undercut Dean's momentum on health care by getting a more progressive, more attractive (but less pragmatic) plan out the door first, so too should Democrats sap the urgency from Bush's tax reform by offering a massively appealing plan before he even takes on the subject. CAP's proposal* is an excellent starting point.

* By the way, props to the Center for American progress, huh? This is exactly what we need our Think Tanks to be doing. And they're not leaving the plan alone to stumble about it a cold, cruel world. John Podesta's been hitting the op-ed pages burying Bush and selling progrssive tax reform. Check him out.

Bush is nominating Wolfowitz to head the World Bank. Wolfowitz. Sorry, just have to say that a few times to make it feel real. Wolfowitz. A guy who knows nothing about economics. Wolfowitz. A guy who's detested by Europeans as a main architect of our foreign policy. Wolfowitz. A guy who licks his comb.

I guess I shouldn't be surprised. They want John Bolton to become Ambassador to the UN. He's philosophically opposed to the very idea of it. They want down-home communications guru Karen Hughes to become central in remaking our image in the Arab world. She knows nothing about Islam. As a friend of Steve Clemons' said, "Maybe Bill Kristol should be nominated as successor to Kofi Annan, or Richard Perle. And James Woolsey should get UNICEF."

Steve tries, in his post, to explain that this isn't just another outrage in a long and distinguished line of them, it's the marker of something very different, very radical. "A period of major, dramatic, discontinuity". That sounds about right. This is a slap in the face of intellectualism, of the very idea that the criteria for these positions should be expertise and good intentions. This is a victory for patronage, for a president's power to project his will onto worldwide institutions, no matter how crazy or contradictory that will seems to the other members. Ugh. Wolfowitz.

Update: Think Progress has more on why this is a nightmare.

Update 2: Here's more on the changes Wolfowitz might make. CW seems to be that Bush wants him to reduce the focus on poverty alleviation, to dome on infrastructure, and generally be a bit harder-edged. You can follow a more informed discussion about it here.

Update 3: I should probably note that I'm not certain Wolfowitz will be bad at this job, he may well rise to the occasion. But there's no real way to predict that, he's not a trained economist nor a public figure, like Sam Brownback, who's shown a great and unexpected passion for international development. Without those markers, the only reason to choose him was to anger our allies and irritate the left. That's what pisses me off about the decision, it makes major appointments into just another venue for swagger and symbolism. The head of the World Bank should be the best from the pool of interested individuals qualified for the job. Wolfowitz doesn't qualify.

• Before 9/11, all the Neocons could talk about was the coming confrontation with China and the need to stick steadfastly by our blood-buddy Taiwan. And, if 9/11 hadn't happened, yesterday might've been the first step towards that confrontation. With China passing a (largely redundant) law that authorizes attack if Taiwan seeks independence, a strong America acting in concert with the Neocon philosophy would have made this a showdown, hoping to send the red dragon slinking back to its cave. Not so. With our forces tied up in Iraq, perceptions of America's military might at their nadir, our economy entirely dependent on the whims of Asian bankers, our spending only sustainable through the kindness of Chinese bond-buyers, and our dollar convulsing every time an Asian leader opens his mouth, we've got less influence than a congressional Democrat. So China was testing us to some degree, proving to themselves that we'd recognize reality and let them move further towards regional hegemony. Their hypothesis couldn't have been more right.

• Matt Singer, of Left in the West, is a bit light in the wallet these days. If you could give him a hand, I know he'd appreciate it. And if you read him regularly, as you should, you know he's worth it.

• It's been a long time since I read a story sadder, or more touching, than this profile of a prominent researcher who studies Lou Gehrig's disease, and now has it. Bitterly ironic stuff, but inspiring to see how he's dealing with it.

• Did you know Fox News was biased? Yeah, so did I. But now we have proof. Money quote:

In an interview, Fox's executive daytime producer, Jerry Burke, says: "I encourage the anchors to be themselves. I'm certainly not going to step in and censor an anchor on any issue. . . . You don't want to look at a cookie-cutter, force-feeding of the same items hour after hour. I think that's part of the success of the channel, not treating our anchors like drones. They're, number one, Americans, and number two, human beings, as well as journalists."

Human beings second, huh? That's one dangerous strain of nationalism right there.

True to form -- and God I love saying that in this context -- Reid spent the day leading the Democrats in the fight to defeat "the Nuclear Option". The entire caucus assembled to hear him give the Democratic response (watch it here), and they followed him to deliver a letter to Bill Frist. It was a powerful show of unity, and a warning that Democrats are unafraid to make a media circus of the issue.

If I were Frist, I'd be a bit concerned right now. As Luntz should have already alerted him, nothing called "the nuclear option" is going to sound like a good idea to Americans. The image that Republicans will detonate the Senate if Bush doesn't get every last one of his judges approved is a nasty one, which they'll find out as soon as they began talking about it on the shows and seeing their poll numbers plummet.

More to the point, I'd like to see Reid take a page out of Bob Dole's 1992 playbook and realize he's representing a majority. As many remember, Dole welcomed Clinton's election with a promise to represent the 57% (Bush+Perot vote) of folks who didn't vote for the winner. Reid has an even stronger case. Senate Democrats, despite being in the minority, were actually voted in by the majority. If you total the votes cast for all serving Senators in their most recent elections, you come out with 50.16% for Democrats and 49.84% for Republicans. That should be more than enough reason to demand that Bush and Frist cease attempting to steamroll the minority. If the American people had their way, we'd actually be the majority. We shouldn't concede that advantage simply because the place doesn't work democratically -- after all, isn't Bush's second term all about democracy promotion?

Amanda from Mousewords is assuming my old spot at Pandagon. She's a great choice for the site -- anyone who followed her excellent guest-blogging stint last week knows what a good job she's going to do. So, while I doubt I have too many readers who don't trawl Pandagon as well, those remaining outside the overlap should head on over.

I'm not the first to heap scorn on Marshall Wittman's latest pro-Joe post (see Matt and Atrios taking their shots as well), but I think I win the award for most puzzled by its assumptions. Shoving aside Wittman's weird desire to act as apologist for Joe, even at the expense of his own credibility (unlike Brad, I don't believe Wittman was played for a fool. I believe he thought he could play everyone else for fools), what possesses a perfectly astute centrist to say things like:

What the Moose would like to know was when was the last time a lefty won the White House - Kennedy, LBJ, Carter, Clinton? None of them truly stirred the hearts of the lefty faithful. Perhaps JFK did, but he won running to the right of Nixon on foreign policy. In recent political memory, only hawks have won the Presidency whether they are Democrats or Republicans.

The recent rage on the left is to heap scorn on Joe Lieberman. The Moose is honored to stand with Joe against the dogmatic idealogues of the blogosphere. And he wears their scorn as a badge of honor.

If the plutocratic G.O.P. is ever to be defeated, Democrats will have to win the confidence of the American people that they are a tough party that will vanquish our enemies. That is why Joe Lieberman is so vital to the donkey. If those on the left have their honest disagreements with him or any other Democrat, that is fair and to be expected. However, the Moose would argue that those voices on the left who would transform the party into a dogmatically left-wing party serve the wishes of Rove and company in a profoundly significant way.

Who gave Wittman this idea that Joe is tough on defense? I know the guy votes for torture and warfare, but does anyone truly believe that that's enough? Lieberman is a mild-mannered muppet with a wry wit and a civil tone who's most famous for observing the Sabbath; the very last thing he strikes anyone as is a tough hawk. Doesn't mean his beliefs are soft, but that counts for exactly nothing in today's image-driven world. So sure, laud Joe if you want to, but don't dare do it under some feigned respect for the nationwide respect he commands on national security. Lieberman, in fact, is the worst of both worlds there: A guy desperate to appear tough but utterly unable to make the visual sell. Think back to the primaries -- did anyone vote for Joe because he was tough on defense? Nope, they went for Kerry or Clark. When Gore chose him, did he do it for Joe's foreign policy credibility? Nope, he did it because he was a mild-mannered ethicist -- Kerry was the foreign policy choice.

There might be a place for Joe in the party, but that spot is surely not in front of the cameras, giving the rest of the Democrats lessons on how to dress like a hawk. If we need to learn how to look tough, we can study Bush, Reagan, Kennedy, Truman or FDR -- we can study the triumphant hawks of the past. But as Wittman should realize, these men didn't ascend into the pantheon of soldier-kings through their policies, they were installed because they understood how to transform those policies into an image. Joe doesn't. The Democrats don't. And so it doesn't matter how many times we vote for torture or deployment, when you match our votes against their swagger, we lose every time.

Update: Munz has more.

Easterbrook's article on the hypocrisy of mourning Pope John Paul II's death reeks of the arrogance and too clever by half arguments usually seen among college freshmen just discovering atheism and the attendant joys of Biblical contradiction. Mourning is a rejection of Christian theology? Snort.

When we mourn, we don't mourn for the dead. Unless they were young or cut down in a tragic, painful fashion, we almost always mourn for us. We who'll lack their presence, live with their memories, carry our guilt, leave unsaid words that needed to be spoken. Whether in heaven or oblivion, they're beyond the reach of earthly cares -- we mourn because we're not, and death is often hardest on the survivors. So c'mon Gregg -- none of this bull about grief being an inherent repudiation of Catholic doctrine. Missing someone terribly and believing in heaven are not mutually exclusive positions.

Sayeth Brooks:

Instead, many made demagogic speeches about Republican benefit cuts, as if it is possible to fix the system without benefit cuts. Many ginned up the familiar scare tactics designed to frighten the elderly.

Isn't there an editor of some sort working at the New York Times? Because this quote isn't a subjective opinion or an ideological argument, it's a plain lie. Even if Social Security's problems were orders of magnitude larger than they are, even if the Trustees' most pessimistic projections materialized and the Baby Boom proved even larger than we feared, we could, if we wanted, divert defense-spending and raise taxes. We could cut other programs and sell bonds. We could do all sorts of things that, while painful, would never ever require a reduction in benefits. And, as the situation actually is, the fiscal issues are minor and all we need is something simple and, for most Americans, painless, like rolling back Bush's top-bracket tax cuts or raising the payroll cap. We do one of those things and Social Security is totally, entirely, fixed, no benefit cuts needed.

Y'know, I'm not even sure what to say about this. Brooks is just breathtakingly duplicitous here. Having spent the column doing his reasonable guy schtick ("In this case, both parties are wrong: Republicans should pet puppies more than they do and Democrats should stop throwing them out of moving cars just to watch them die"), he delivers, as an offhand recognition of a reality neither party is honest enough to face, a factually indefensible claim. In most lines of work, you'd get fired for such blatant dishonesty. With Brooks, it's become his M.O. His columns, at least the ones that aren't totally inane, end with a completely incorrect, highly partisan assertion that he makes believable by presenting it as a criticism of both parties but which, in reality, is a critical part of the Republican argument. So Brooks legitimizes the right's case by presenting it as a rejection of both parties. Very effective, but how does he sleep at night?

Well, that's all for me, folks. (For real this time.) My general parting thoughts are already recorded here; read them if so inclined.

In the meantime, I want to thank Ezra again for being such a gracious and encouraging host, and everyone who's read/commented on/linked to my posts for really helping me sharpen and focus my thoughts. It was a great time.

By the same token, I hope I've helped shed some non-zero amount of light on this crazy world of ours. If so, I'll be blogging away the rest of my days over at Politics and War. Y'all stop by and comment some time, y'hear?

Incidentally, I'm sometimes asked why my blog is called "Politics and War." While it is about politics, and occasionally about war, the name actually comes from my favorite political quote:

I must study politics and war that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. My sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history, naval architecture, navigation, commerce and agriculture in order to  give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry, and porcelain. -- John Adams

That's it in a nutshell, for me. We engage this business of politics and war, in some small measure, to make the world safe for the dreams of our posterity. It's been a pleasure.

- Daniel A. Munz

This development seems to have eluded most of the blogosphere, but apparently our new public face in the Middle East looks like an angry transvestite.

But seriously, folks. Here’s what worries me about this: During Bush’s first term, liberals generally lamented his effective neutering of Colin Powell. I can’t remember how many articles I read that contained the phrase "…Condoleezza Rice when he wants to send a serious message." With Rice at State, I think a lot of people assumed that the Secretary of State and The Person Bush Uses To Send Serious Messages would finally be the same person. So far, that has been the case, and the results have been…well, vastly improved. (Witness the 100% reduction in wars!)

What worries me about Hughes is that she could undo this synergy. By all accounts, Bush and Rice are close, but Bush and Hughes are closer. And as far as I can tell, the job to which Hughes has been appointed is explicitly about sending messages, in a region of the world where America's reputation is vital.

I guess it’s only natural that Bush would fill Rice’s old place as de-facto consigliere with someone new. Maybe he disdains hoity-toity institutions. Maybe he just naturally distrusts State, no matter who’s in charge of it. (Hardly surprising for a president that puts such a premium on loyalty.) In any case, if I’m right about this, it’s disappointing. Between Hughes and Bolton (who, while were on the topic, looks like Captain Kangaroo), the Bush-2 foreign policy team is definitely balking on fulfilling its initial promise.

- Daniel A. Munz

As I suspected, Kweisi Mfume’s hat is in the ring. I have to say, even if Steele runs for and wins the GOP nomination, this may not be the old-school/new-school fight I’d been hoping for. Mfume’s opening salvos are distinctly Obamaesque:

"My goal is to give a new voice to the issues that affect every-day working men and working women and the families that they are a part of," Mfume said during a late morning press conference in a lounge at Camden Yards, where he was joined by five of his six sons.
…

He said his campaign would focus on "overcrowded and ill-equipped schools," health-care costs and disparities and fighting "low expectations" for some youths.

I am officially pleased. I like Mfume a lot, and in a race where the Democrat is a heavyish favorite anyway, this kind of rhetoric should make him more than competetive.

- Daniel A. Munz

Commenter Boethius asks: "Science classes might not need the story about "the two naked kids with the apple" but how about literature classes?"

This is actually something I've wondered about for a while. Suppose for a moment that some monolithic "The Left" and "The Right" got together, and The Left proposed a deal: Creationism/ID would be kept out of science curricula, but in exchange, every literature curriculum would be modified to include extensive study of the Bible. Personally, I'd be amenable to this. The Bible is, after all, probably the most important and influential text in the history of Western civilization. My preference would be for additional study of the Torah (i.e. not just the New Testament), Qur'an, and other religious texts, but let’s say for a moment that those aren’t dealbreakers. Would The Right take the deal?

My instinct is "No," and here’s why. I, like Ezra, am no Matt Yglesias. But I do dabble in enough philosophy to be familiar with something called the use/mention distinction, and I think something like it is at play here. Many religious conservatives - for example, the Ten Commandments display advocates - like to say that god is the source of our laws, values, and rights. With this, they justify injecting it into our schools and courthouses. But of course, this claim can’t be literally true. Personally, I’m an atheist-leaning agnostic. Can this mean I bear no rights? Am I just fortunate (a) that the government can’t tell I’m a non-believer, or (b) that god has seen fit to endow me with rights even though I don’t believe he’s there? Both of these propositions seem unreasonable, and neither seems like somethingthe state ought to be endorsing. At the same time, it does just seem objectively true that America’s legal system, and the values it relies on, have some major foundations in religious thought.

The disconnect here is this: The existence of religious roots in our laws and values is not a function of god, but a function of faith. They exist because the men who birthed our nation believed in a higher power, regardless of whether one actually exists. In other words, it is not god, but "god," that is at least partially the source of our laws and values. This distinction may seem trivial, but I think it holds the key to a lot of the conflict we see today between traditional religious values and traditional notions of secularism. One side wants to acknowledge the importance of god; the other side doesn’t. But can’t either side acknowledge the importance of faith? It seems like this reading could satisfy people on both sides who won’t take "ceremonial deism" for an answer.

- Daniel A. Munz

Sorry, Ezra. The dream is dead:

Republican Sen. Chuck Hagel said on Monday he would support John Bolton to be the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, likely clearing the way for Senate confirmation of the long-time critic of the world body.

Hagel of Nebraska was the only Republican on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee who had declined to say whether he would back Bolton, currently under secretary of state for arms control. His support removes a possible obstacle to Bolton's nomination advancing to the full Senate.

I guess we're not the only ones who know there's an election coming up. And, it wasn't even the "up-or-down boilerplate" you rightly predicted:

After meeting with Bolton on Monday, Hagel issued a statement of support. "His experience and knowledge will serve him well as he represents America's interests in the U.N. at a critically important time," Hagel said.

Yeeeesh.

- Daniel A. Munz

Cheap Shot: Is it me, or is Jenna Bush dating the kid from Deliverance?

- Daniel A. Munz

PZ Myers is going to love this one.

I know this is going to come as a galloping shock, but it turns out that our commercial air travel is still vulnerable to terrorism:

U.S. aviation remains vulnerable to attack and groups such as al Qaeda may try to target non-commercial planes and helicopters, the New York Times reported, citing a confidential government report.

The report by the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security says the aviation industry is a tempting target for acts of terrorism due to the spectacular nature of such attacks, the Times said on Monday.

My first instinct here was to attack Bush. And he certainly deserves attack. He’s failed to do about a million simple things you could do to make air travel safer, such as rectifying John Kerry’s much-ballyhooed accusation that we only check about 2% of cargo containers civilians get onto aircraft, and their luggage is X-rayed, but the cargo hold is not.

But then, another thought occurred to me: Of course we’re still vulnerable to terror. What else would we be? Is it even conceivable that the committee would issue a report declaring our invulnerability to terror? "Take the terror alert thing down to blue, Jim! We’re safe!" Terrorism has been around since the 11th century. I’m all for being the safest we can be, but does anyone really think we’re going to eradicate the phenomenon with better customs screening?

This is the biggest problem with Bush’s anti-terror strategy. It’s not that it won’t stop terrorism; it’s that the stated goal is to stop terrorism. He has embarked us, effectively, on a neverending war with an impossible goal. This is why I actually liked Kerry’s "nuisance" line. He acknowledged that maximal safety was important, but realized that failing to acknowledge the reality of terrorism would just leave Americans scared all the time by ominous committee reports like this one, without any meaningful benefit. Of course, Kerry wasn’t the one whose election required a sizeable chunk of the electorate to be constantly terrified.

- Daniel A. Munz

More from TNR: Gregg Easterbrook has a nice, if awkwardly premature, obituary for Pope John Paul II. I’ve always liked JP2, and the article contains some interesting facts about his life, including this:

Born in 1920, Wojtyla was a university student when the Nazis invaded Poland; he joined an underground movement that kept learning alive during the Nazi darkness by holding university classes in secret and sometimes performed as an actor in plays staged in secret.

I did not know that. It certainly explains his modern-seeming attitudes towards acknowledging Holocaust victims, advocating against the USSR, etc. But there was one aspect of the Pope’s modernizing influence that just leapt out at me:

John Paul II moved the Church toward rationalism and reconciliation with science; he was the first pope to say that he believed Darwin’s theory of evolution.

Huh. Is it me, or did this sort of coincide with religious conservatives’ attempts to inject creationism into public schools? Obviously, a lot of those people aren’t Catholic, but still, this strikes me as troubling. It’s nice for the Pope to acknowledge science, but attempting to find a place for science in religion ultimately means finding a place for religion in science. The Pope, essentially, tried to convince millions of his followers to increasingly subject their faith to empirical verification. This degrades both faith and empiricism.

Mixing faith and science is a dangerous business. Sure, modernizing the church’s stance may give devout Catholics a little more purchase in cocktail party conversations with secular friends. But where does it stop? Who draws the line at which empiricism obviates any meaningful idea of faith? The Pope seems poised to die without providing a clear answer to this question; it’s unclear that he still wields enough power to direct world opinion on this anyway. And surely, modification of our textbooks isn’t what he had in mind. But still, it’s hard not to wonder if the nuts on the PTA in Kansas and Georgia aren’t the direct descendants of the Pope’s efforts to give religion a little science.

Clarification: A number of commenters have pointed out that the Pope never came close to advocating the kind of creationism-as-science that's currently invading our classrooms. But my broader point was this: The Pope seemed to couch his acknowledgement of evolution in the idea that the Catholic faith needed to "modernize," without establishing a bookend on the other side to denote where "modernization" needed to end. This lack of an outer boundary, I'm concerned, is the same phenomenon that allows people to think our science classes need more stuff about two naked kids and an apple.

Preemptive Clarification: I know that intelligent design theory isn't "two naked kids and an apple."

- Daniel A. Munz

I think Ezra gets it just about all right in his attempt to understand the mystery that is Chuck Hagel. As far as I can tell, Ezra thinks that Hagel’s biggest challenge will be finding a "constituency for a sober foreign policy realist." This may be true, but I think it’s part of a much bigger problem for Chuck Hagel: G.W.F. Hegel.

Of course, Hegel won’t be running for president. But his shadow will be hanging all over the GOP primary. A while back, TNR’s Jeffrey Herf explained how Condi Rice in particular, and the Bush admin in general, have adopted a troublingly Hegelian view of history:

The idea that a decision cannot be judged at the moment but only retrospectively opens a slippery slope of justification. The future Secretary of State was indulging an understanding of politics favored by advocates of a Hegelian view of history—most of whom have, in the last century, been communists.
…

The capacity of history to absolve political actors is a cynical and immoral doctrine. No one can know for sure how political decisions will turn out. Iraq may emerge as a stable democracy. Yet that fact would not justify having gone to war in spring 2003 based on false premises. It would not excuse the woeful lack of preparation for battle after the major combat operations. Nor would such success justify the use of torture. Nor would it absolve the leading officials of the Bush administration, including Rice, who declined to share their uncertainties about the facts in Iraq with the public. Nor would it excuse their decision to allow rampant speculation that Saddam had something to do with September 11 to percolate among Americans. Nor would it render moot their assertions, made with far more confidence than the facts allowed, that the threat was so imminent that a war could not be delayed until fall 2003 or spring 2004.

Simply put, the Hegelian view of history is what explains the modern GOP’s obsession with striking poses for history’s watching camera. It is the conviction that there can be no such thing as accountability in the present, history will provide absolution.

This is exactly the spirit that Republican leaders have invoked to sidestep questions about why we went to war, whether we planned for it adequately, whether our use of torture is morally problematic, etc. What we are doing will put us on the right side of history, they claim - and it will put critics on the wrong side. To them, history’s vote is the only one that matters. And when you convince an entire chunk of the electorate to think this way, your chances of getting them to embrace a critique are next to nil.

The appealing thing about Hagel, to Democrats, is that he seems to embrace American mistakes as opportunites to do better, to right a ship that’s gone off course. But to Republicans, who are focused chiefly on vindicating themselves instead of improving themselves, this view is anathema. This, I think, will be Hagel’s biggest challenge in a presidential primary: Convincing Republican voters that a sensible, realist critique of American policy can jibe with their need to suppress dissent and criticism, in case Doris Kearns Goodwin is watching.

- Daniel A. Munz

The post Brad Plumer's trying to link to was originally on Pandagon, but since he's unearthing it for the latest round of NYT subscription stories, might as well reprint it here:

I've been meaning to say a word about the reports that the New York Times might move towards online subscriptions. And the word I've been meaning to say is: bull. None of the major papers can move to subscription based reporting first. If the New York Times does it, newly-locked out infojunkies will seamlessly switch to trolling the LA Times, or the Washington Post. Aside from their columnists, the Times offers little in the way of exclusive content, and what they do offer isn't of significantly higher quality (if, indeed, it is of higher quality) than what's proffered by their competitors. To erect a wall when the same product is being distributed for free across the street just isn't smart business.

As an addendum, the Times doesn't necessarily need to switch to subscriptions. I know we're supposed to believe they do, but I was at a conference with the director of their online efforts and he bristled whenever "old media" guys mocked the business prospects of the net and angrily repeated that the Times had been online for two years, and the net operation had been profitable the whole time (If I remember right, LexisNexis pays them $25 million a year to archive their content). So the question likely isn't one of breaking even, it's one of doing better. And unless they figure out some spectacular and heretofore unprovided content or services, such a move would serve only to destroy whatever green they're currently eking out by sending traffic, and thus ad rates, plummeting. Doesn't make sense.

Garance Franke-Ruta's argument that the Democratic advantage on Social Security might be enough to save the program, but might also lose us seats if we don't take the next step forward and create a compelling narrative that protects us from the obstructionist label. I've been arguing this for awhile, but to support it with everybody's favorite historical parallel (I just read 640 pages on that goddamn fight, you better believe I'll turn to it at every opportunity), there's possibly never been so clearly-defined a party as the resurgent Republicans were during 1994. They didn't rest on the health care battle, but instead used it to inform their affirmative agenda. We need to do the same.

That does not, by the way, mean pushing an alternate Social Security plan. We need to win that battle, not reengage it. Rather, we should use the capital amassed in that fight to bolster a progressive philosophy of government with the President's well-killed plans for privatization and benefit cuts being invoked to provide contrast.

Damn that Sam Rosenfeld. Here I was planning to digest the in-depth coverage of the DeLay scandals and summarize the excellent work being done by The Stakeholder, The Daily DeLay, and Think Progress so you could all keep score at home. But he got there first.

Sigh. Go read. But remember, it would've been me getting the links if not for that meddling kid...

All the speculation on Rice is just weird. Is there some natural constituency for her that I'm unaware of? Even assuming support from the Black community, it's not like African-Americans swarm Republican primaries (nor find themselves particularly influential in Iowa or New Hampshire) or Dobson's group is going to warm to a "mildly pro-choice" candidate. I know the speculation is fun and all, but the woman has never campaigned in her life. She's never been elected to public office. She's never dealt with domestic issues. She seems like a perfectly competent Secretary of State, and God knows I'm glad that she's injected some sanity into the Administration's foreign policy, but it's a smidge irritating to watch her get hyped up for being a BLACK person who's WOMAN and a REPUBLICAN, as if the reason that's amazing isn't that Republicans have historically discriminated against blacks and fought the advances of feminism. There's no doubt that it'd be a real step forward for the GOP if they could nominate somebody from so many demographic grews they've spent years screwing, but all the excitement shouldn't overlook the fact that the reason they have trouble with those groups is not some sort of random chance, but a real antipathy between their base and the interests of women and minorities. Thus, for a woman to make it through the GOP primaries she'd have to give up on choice, equal pay, eliminating gender bias in the workplace, universal child care, pre-natal care, etc. And for an African-American to survive, s/he'd have to repudiate support for affirmative action, not to mention sell out on all sorts of issues critical to urban communities, like welfare, Medicaid, food stamps, etc.. In fact, to win, such a candidate would probably have to take a harder line against those issues than white male Republicans do. I somehow can't see an utterly untested candidate making it through that balancing act alive.

Meanwhile, Hillary's image makeover continues unabated. She's creating pre-campaign buzz as the culturally astute frontrunner continually confounding the stereotype conservatives have of her. It's kind of surreal to watch the media swallow the new Clinton, already writing the stories about how Republicans love her and all the CW about her polarization (that they created) is just so much empty hype, but it's hardly unpleasant to watch a Democrat finally figure out how to play the press. In any case, it's impressive to watch her neutralize all these criticisms before the campaign begins. She's created a preexisting storyline, ready to kick into gear as soon as Iowa opens up to contenders. "The formerly controversial First Lady has surprised observers with her moderation and willingness to buck the traditional cultural positions assumed of liberals. From the V-Chip to abortion, she's travelled the country speaking out against liberal overreach and shocking former enemies who considered her something of a radical..."

No storyline, no matter how well-crafted, will ever appease the Hillary-haters. But read this fresh op-ed and try to decide whether such folks will be help or hindrance to her campaign. Stuff this nutty and intemperate may well prove valuable in making the right look crazy in comparison with this candidate constantly being praised for her cultural moderation and ability to prove her critics wrong.

In fighting the Bolton nomination, the guy to watch on the Senate Foreign Relations Commitee is Chuck Hagel. Unlike most Republican internationalists, who've found the ideal out of necessity, and most Democratic internationalists, who've arrived there through convenience, Hagel's got a real commitment to the philosophy. That should make Bolton's nomination anathema to him and, indeed, he's already sounding cautious notes on the guy. But an independent's misgivings would rarely translate into a "no" vote on a presidential nominee, particularly in committee. I think Hagel may be different.

The real question with him is how he figures the vote will affect his 2008 aspirations. If he holds out hope of attracting Republican support, he'll probably fall back on some trite "deserves an up-or-down vote" boilerplate and be done with it. And, two or three weeks ago, I'd have bought that scenario. But the conservative forces massing against Hagel's run are pretty unprecedented. Witness, for instance, the fusillade launched by the American Spectator against the morose-looking Nebraskan. To spend a cover story killing, or trying to kill, a candidacy still three years in the future is reasonably absurd, but a good indicator of the depths that conservative distaste for Hagel have reached.

For his part, Hagel has to make a choice. Can he shed his internationalist label in time for the campaign, and, if not, what's an alternate path out of the primaries? Since he's not going to be an establishment choice like Kerry was -- that'll probably go to Frist or Guiliani -- his only option is as a McCain-esque maverick who sweeps the independents and moderate Republicans. In that role, a principled vote against the UN-hatin' Bolton makes perfect sense. Indeed, running as the candidate willing to return sensible internationalism to a Republican party set ideologically adrift by the neocons becomes his only chance. Which, to me, means Hagel is probably the guy to target in the coming months using e-mails and letters packed with phrases like "principled choice" and "sterling independent reputation". If he votes against and no Dems defect, the count stands at 9-9, and then, who knows what the embattled Chafee does? The odds are probably against that outcome, but they get significantly better if the Senator (Hagel, not Chafee) sense some sort of constituency for a sober foreign policy realist willing to buck the president in order to preserve world order -- particularly considering the enormous press, and thus visibility, the vote would give Hagel. We can help create that critical mass.

Since I failed once again to sleep during the night, I’ll be taking a brief nap, and will resume blogging in the early afternoon. In the meantime, here’s a question to ponder:

The Bush strategy for fighting terrorism, at least in theory, relies on the idea that free countries will breed and export fewer terrorists. I’m open to this idea. But in a world where it takes maybe 50 guys with a modest-to-large bankroll to pull off something like 9/11, is creating fewer terrorists really going to help appreciably? Even if the Bush strategy convinces 95% of potential Al Qaeda recruits not to join up, isn’t it that really, really crazy top 5% that gives us the most (visible) trouble?

Discuss.

- Daniel A. Munz

Just when I think I'm out, they pull me back in!

Ezra has graciously asked me to mind the shop today, and I've gladly obliged. (I guess this is what it's like to be an Army reservist.) Anyway, I want to direct your collective attention to a startling development on the privacy front. Apparently, AIM is Big Brother:

America Online, Inc. has quietly updated the terms of service for its AIM instant messaging application, making several changes that is sure [sic] to raise the hackles of Internet privacy advocates.

The revamped terms of service, which apply only to users who downloaded the free AIM software on or after Feb. 5, 2004, gives AOL the right to "reproduce, display, perform, distribute, adapt and promote" all content distributed across the chat network by users.

I can't remember the last time I wrote something on AIM that could be "performed." Still, it's a vaguely alarming trend. It doesn't seem that bad at first, but consider this: Personally, I communicate with friends, especially faraway ones, with AIM way more than I do on the phone. If the phone company had claimed the right to reproduce, redistribute, or godforbid perform recorded phone conversations, people would go nuts. But when it happens on AIM, which is arguably used more frequently than the phone, people are more or less complacent. Why?

I think it has a lot to do with the Internet being seen as a giant, shared thing. I remember posting a link to my friend's livejournal once, only to have her yell at me for making her innermost thoughts public knowledge. I was baffled. You posted them on the Internet!, I thought to myself. With the advent of blogs, which rely crucially on the idea that communications are non-secretive, this idea has only been reinforced. But in a way, my friend was right. Increasingly, people are turning to the Internet for purposes that are decidedly personal. AIM is just one example. VoIP, a weird (and apparently government-regulated) merger of phone and internet, is another.

The 'net is attractive to companies, because it makes it easy to gather massive amounts of data in what is essentially a public forum. But what happens when people try to carve off small chunks of it for personal use? In other words: Is AIM stepping over the line in trying to copyright your private communications? Or are you stepping over the line by claiming some expectation of privacy within a "publicly available worldwide system of interconnected computer networks"?

Can't wait to see what Lessig thinks of this one. Incidentally, my AIM name is WordOMatic. (Grade school nickname that stuck.) Drop me a line sometime. Just don't tell me anything you wouldn't tell AOL.

- Daniel A. Munz

I'm going to once again be a rude host and directly contradict my guest-blogger. His post below, while cleverly written, is wrong. I've asked him to stay on through tomorrow to help me out, and he's agreed. Considering the bang-up job he's done, you should all be stoked.

As a general explanatory note, I'm currently in a long-distance relationship. My girlfriend and I met during my first two years at UC Santa Cruz, and are currently doing the telephone thing while she finishes up at UCSC and I do my thing at UCLA. As the distance isn't too bad and the Southwest fares amenable, we see each other every week or two. That, in large part, is why I've been leaning so heavily on guest-writers, so I can spend more time with her on the weekends. Tomorrow I'm driving back, starting at 3am, and have class all day, so penning more than three or four posts is going to be tough. With Dan helping out, you guys get a different, and absurdly talented, voice, not to mention more content. That, of course, is the other justification for the guesting weekenders. There's an enormous constellation of small bloggers whose readerships lag for reasons totally unrelated to talent and entirely dependent on publicity. If I can help change that while getting more time with the girlfriend, all the better.

This will, sadly (for me, anyway), be my last post as guest-MC on Ezra's turntables. I want to thank him profusely for having me, and thank all his readers for sharing their thoughts on my thoughts.

I also want to conclude with a brief observation about blogging. A while back, Ezra lamented the fact that campus conservatives, by necesity, tend to be sharper and more well-versed (at least in GOP talking points) than their liberal counterparts. After a weekend here, I think the blogosphere could be our answer. The comments, links, and e-mails I received from commenters, even those who clearly don't take part in my political ontology, exhilerated me and helped me to understand and refine my own thoughts. (And even to have a few new ones!)

So, thank you all for that; it certainly didn't go unappreciated. And again, many thanks to Ezra for opening what amounts, in blogospheric terms, to his home.

If you've enjoyed my blogging, I'm Daniel A. Munz, and I'll be back at my place, Politics and War; I'd love to see some of you there. If you didn't enjoy my blogging, I'm Michelle Malkin, and I'm a virulent racist. Thanks!

Courage.

- Daniel A. Munz

Before I end my Weekend At Ezra's, there's one issue that I've been really eager to put before you, his faithful readers. The category is Legal Philosophy.

Michael McGough, who I'm pretending is Dahlia Lithwick because I have a terrible schoolboy crush on her, argues that the Ten Commandments cases are transforming Antonin Scalia, wolfman-style, into a devotee of the "Natural Law" school of legal philosophy. Although this shift in philosophy is news, the underlying fact that Scalia is crazy as a moonbat pie really isn't, so whatevs.

I've written about this topic before; my previous posts on the topic are here, here, and (sort of) here. But the thing I want to address here is this: The whole Ten Commandments thing was interesting, but there was also another controversy that braced the Court recently. I am speaking here of the kerfluffle over the death penalty for juveniles, in which the majority opinion rested (somewhat uncontroversially) on the Eigthth Amendment, and (totally super-duper-controversially) international legal opinion. But if McGough is right about Scalia, who is also an ardent internationalist anti-internationalist, I think Scalia's in kind of a pickle. Here's why.

Scalia argues that the SCOTUS should not look to international opinion as a substitute for the guiding imperatives of the Constitution. This is, to put it lightly, a trivial observation. No one that I can think of has proposed abrogating the Constitution in favor of any other source. Certainly, I haven't. But, looking at the Eigthth Amendment, the thing begs for some interpretation. Even the most hardened strict constructionist couldn't argue for interpreting the phrase "cruel and unusual punishment" as the founders - who found slavery and mass disenfranchisement palatable - would have.

So, what to do with it? The anti-internationalist would probably argue for strict attention to emerging American standards of justice. But this is where Scalia's naturalism, and that of anyone who defends the Ten Commandments monuments on the grounds that our laws come from god, comes in. If one really believes that our rights come from god, doesn't that make everyone in the world - not just Americans - essentially rights-bearers? Assuming Scalia doesn't believe in a god that only grants rights to Americans, where does natural law leave the anti-internationalists? It seems like if you want to consider what constitutes a violation of human rights - which is what the Eighth Amendment asks us to do - the naturalist view obliges you to pay attention to the considered opinion of everyone in the world. If you're a naturalist, in other words, is there any argument that allows you to avoid consulting international legal opinion?

- Daniel A. Munz

I'm going to be a rude host and flat-out disagree with this guestblogger Dan Munz (who's really doing an excellent job, don't you guys think?). Below, he mentions various plans and shows some willingness to have Democrats fight for one that tracks with our ideals. I disagree completely. No plan, not even one, not even the best fucking plan in the known universe, can be allowed to move forward. Bush began this process in order to destroy Social Security, and I oppose anything that allows him and his party to escape with the ability to brag about the progressive fix they bravely instituted. Bush has long shown a proclivity to lose legislative battles and campaign hard on exactly the bills he spent months opposing. We watched him do it in 2002, with the Deptartment of Homeland Security. We watched him do it in 2004, with McCain-Feingold. And I'll never forget the WaPo article listing all the programs Bush had tried, and often succeeded, in cutting but was using in his stump speeches because local audiences liked them. So he gets nothing.

But this isn't just about Bush. If he was simply an anomaly, a strange aberration from the way Republicans operate, I'd be willing to ignore his fortunes and work for the good of the country. But it's not. These are exactly the tactics they used to kill Health Care in 1994. This from page 448 of The System:

That was the moment, Bennett said later, when he realized the country beyond the Washington Beltway had begun to change dramatically. "The rest of us soon began to get those vibes from the country, " he said. "Pretty soon it was respectable in the Republican [Senate political strategy] conference to say, No bill. Once that scenario became a likely scenario in our mind, the while thing sifter to: We can't let anything pass. We can't let the Democrats get to conference with anything."

Here was the final turning point in all-out Republican opposition. Bennett recalled, "All the co-sponsors of Dole-Packwood were prepared to vote against Dole-Packwood, including Dole and Packwood! I remember Sheila [Burke] saying to dole in my presence as we were bringing up something with respect to Dole-Packwood, and some senator (it may even have been me) saying to Dole, 'I can't vote for that.' Sheila said to Dole, 'And neither can you'!"

When the Republicans were in a position of weakness and health care reform looked certain to pass, they floated compromise bills aimed at watering down the legislation's proposals and creating a final product they could proudly tout to constituents. In other words, they attempted to be legislative partners. But when they had gained the upper hand, that strategy evaporated and the order was put out to simply kill the bill. Which they did. This wasn't just spite, though, there was a real strategy behind it. From page 546:

Even so, Gingrich, the master plotter, feared the Clintons could still escape his trap. Had the President and the First Lady come back to him and said, "Okay, our version of reform is dead, but let's pass yours -- the Rowland-Bilirakis bill, designed by lobbyists, House Republicans and some conservative Democrats as a stopgap to Clinton -- they could have prevailed. "The President could have had a bill-signing," Gingrich told us. "We would have been totally outflanked and we would have helped pass it."

He's right. Even losing the ideological battle, simply being able to say he'd achieved health care reform would've given Clinton, and by extension, the Democrats, a pass on the issue. It would no longer have been relevant in the midterm elections. Same goes for Bush here. If we let him sign a bill, even one that's partially ours, he and the Republicans come out on top for having had the courage to fix Social Security. Never mind that whatever legislation emerges from the effort will be shepherded into a conference committee packed with Republicans and turncoat Dems, who will turn it into a wholly unrecognizable and totally objectionable bill. Even if that wasn't the case, privatization was never begun to shore up Social Security, it has no relationship to the program's fiscal issues. All the linkage drawn by Bush has been simple rhetorical trickery. As such, the logical end of this fight is not a plan to strengthen Social Security, but the passage or rejection of privatization.

This sucks, I know. Trust me, I don't like advocating this position. But the truth is, government is broken. Deliberative Democracy is essentially dead. And, sadly, there's nothing we can do to save it, because to try and play as if the game still has rules will simply leave us broken and bloodied, while the right's mad march to destroy the government will clomp on. So we have to claw and scrap our way through these fights and hope that some sort of bipartisan, return-to-good-government presidential candidate emerges, dominates the election, and changes the face of Congress with his coattails. That's not, by the way, an idle thought, I'd in fact be stunned if it doesn't happen within the next decade. It could come from a known quantity, like McCain or Hagel or Warner, or from a populist who emerges when the rest of us aren't looking, but it's too powerful a message to be ignored. Bush, in fact, ran on it, but quickly proved himself its antithesis. Nevertheless, someone else will take up the mantle and make good on the promise. Until then? No bill. No quarter. No surrender. They wanted to destroy Social Security, and I want them zapped with every bit of juice America's third-rail can provide.

Following up on my last post, it's worth asking: What is our plan?

Well, I think we've been largely hesitant to come up with one, because if we do, press stories about it will begin: "Democrats on Capitol Hill, in a sign that they agree with President Bush's grim assessment of Social Security's future solvency..." That said, my scenario did sort of require that we have a plan. And as a Democrat, I'm not opposed to having one. Social Security is just about the most successful thing our government's ever done, but it could be better, and if it can be bettered without increasing peoples' personal risk, I'm down. Here are some of the more attractive candidates that I've seen:

• The Longman Plan: Basically, this raises the age at which you begin drawing benefits to 72, but keeps the retirement age at 68, and uses private accounts to cover the four-year gap.
• The Dean Plan: Raise the amount of income that Social Security payroll taxes apply to. This sounds like a tax cut hike, but it would be a really minimal one, and it would balance the SS budget.
• The Bipartisanship Plan: Get together with Hagel, Graham, or one of the other more moderate Republicans who have already floated plans. Tweak it a little to make it Democrat-friendly, and back that.

We could get a little think-tank action going on here. If there's any lesson to be learned from HillaryCare, it's that you can only make big changes in small increments. Howard Dean knows it, too; it's how he got health care reform passed in VT. So come on, folks - What little things can we do to catch Bushial Security completely off-guard? What are your favorite candidates for plans that "fix it, don't nix it"?

- Daniel A. Munz

Matt Yglesias reports that the GOP is getting ready to go nuclear on judicial filibusters, thus baiting Democrats into shutting down the Senate, which in turn would...hell, I'll let Matt tell it:

I had to read that a couple of times until I got it. But now I see what the Senator meant. He means that he and his colleagues don't like being stuck between the president's pressure to endorse his plan, and the public's pressure not to pass his plan. The ideal way out of the impasse would be for the GOP to go nuclear on the filibuster issue, which will lead Democrats to shut down the Senate entirely, thus getting Republican Senators off the hook. To the White House and the privateer money bags they can say, "hey! we would have passed it if it hadn't been for those Democrats" and to the voters they can say, "hey! I never voted for any such thing."

It seems weird, but when I read this, my first instinct was: Don't shut down anything. Let 'em do it.

There's an episode of West Wing, which I love like Kevin Drum loves 24, where the president can't get the GOP congress to move on a budget deal. The Speaker offers him a compromise deal, but he balks, the government gets shut down, and his approval ratings tank. Instead of taking the compromise, the president gets on TV, and walks down Penn Ave. from the White House to the Hill and back. (It's actually a little more complicated than that.) It changes the entire dynamic of the conflict: The public no longer sees him as dragging his feet on a budget, but as leading, and the Speaker is forced to cave into some of his demands. Later, he explains to the Speaker why he wouldn't take the compromise: "I'm not going to negotiate with anyone who holds a gun to my head!"

Think about this. I consider the odds of social security actually passing the House or the Senate to be lowish. But really, the only thing saving the GOP from complete armageddon on this is the fact that Bush is just drifting around the country tossing out ideas. It's also the only thing stopping Dems from completely bludgeoning them with it: There's nothing there to bludgeon them with. Yet. But forcing them to codify this plan, at the same time as they bring it from the realm of the hypothetical to the realm of Now All Your Benefits Are Gone seems like the worst of all possible worlds to them.

But more to the point, this whole nuclear thing has been a gun to our head, and we shouldn't bargain with it. Social security, an issue on which a little offense can actually gain us some serious ground for midterms, is the perfect opportunity to forget the whip count altogether and engage the public debate. Let 'em pull the nuclear trigger. We'll propose our own brilliant, moderate plan, and when it doesn't pass anyway, we'll hit the road on the biggest media blitz this nation has ever seen. Let everyone know who tried to fix social security, and who tried to kill it. Majority Leader Reid and Speaker Pelosi will be pleased.

I'm probably missing something huge here. But the GOP plan is already drowning in social security. Why not throw the bastards an anvil?

- Daniel A. Munz

Over at Sirota's place, we get this excellent pic of [Montana Gov.] Brian Schweitzer publicly downing a shot of scotch in celebration of a reopening bar. Looks like fun, not to mention great PR. I've never understood the politician's obsession with ribbon-cutting ceremonies and Rotary Club dinners. It's not that these things shouldn't be attended, but so far as the visibility they bring, headline-hungry congresscritters can really do better. After all, post-Reagan, post-Bush, post-Clinton, post-television, there's no doubt that Americans like their politicians possessing a high "jes' folks" factor, as in that guy's "jes' folks". Speechifying at a brand new grocery store doesn't really play into that. Downing scotch at bar openings does. Some pols understand this, with Guiliani top among them, and Clinton not far behind. Most don't. Not sure why that is though, not only isn't it tough to divine (act like a movie star), but it seems like a hell of a lot more fun.

-Ezra

Matt Yglesias I'm not. Brad Plumer neither. My posts are not, unfortunately, cascading lists of think tank documents I've absorbed, and I rarely feel able to talk about marginal tax rates. But even little substance-free me was able, on Friday (randomly chosen), to write about Bush's atrocious nominee for UN Secretary, Labor politics in Los Angeles, Social Security privatization, the way presidents from different political parties benefit during foreign policy crises, and the DLC's rapidly-shrinking ability to distance themselves from the credit card bill. You're not gonna catch me defending the quality of all those posts, but at least the intent was sound.

So imagine my surprise, as an aspiring journalist consistently certain there's too much fluff and too little meat in my writing, to find the Times op-ed page trumpeting opinion pieces lighter than Splenda. David Brooks, for his part, chimed in with a column about decaf coffee. Worse, it wasn't about waves of decaf drinkers affecting bean growers in Latin America or something of similar significance, it was about how he, David Brooks, had interrupted a sumptuous meal to inquire about the caffeine content of his drink. This, of course, means that all Americans have become health freaks, and forgotten how to live life. Never mind that only 8% of coffee drinkers drink decaf; when reality conflicts with a Brooksian generalization, the real world loses every time.

But hey, that's just one column, right? At least it would have been, if Maureen Dowd hadn't decided to waste her weekend real-estate in a long-winded justification for why her columns are mean. In case you were wondering, it's not because she's actually nasty, it's because guys are afraid of castration. I know, you think I'm kidding, but the link's right here, you can read it yourself. She actually compares herself to Tom Friedman, who, on some alternate universe op-ed page that only she reads (maybe you can view it on one of Bush's "internets"?), writes "plenty of tough columns". Tough on what, tyranny and skinned knees? And Dowd is wondering why people characterize her columns as full of "barbs" and "Clinton-skewering" and "Bush-whacking"? Maybe because she eschews ideas entirely, preferring to pack her word count with, well, barbs and insults and nasty metaphors. It's not her ovaries, it's her content.

On the bright side, I do feel better about my merely-moderate consumption of think-tank reports. I just wish I got to compete with Brooks and Dowd, rather than Matt and Brad.

-Ezra

At Friday's regularly-scheduled Social Security passion play, Bush went on a little elocution safari:

"I believe everybody should have the opportunity to invest," Bush said. "We want people owning stuff. The more people owning something, the better off America is."

The president is ideologizing on a fifth-grade level. Is our children learning? Not from this guy.

- Daniel A. Munz

I'm trying to spruce the place up a bit now that I'm all settled in. First order of business was moving the picture, which I think was too prominently displayed. Those wanting to stare at me can now do so in the "About" section. Next up, I need to find a picture for the top banner. My idea was a photo, maybe black-and-white, of a row of empty chairs, or an auditorium. Always seemed like it'd be cool. But I don't know where or how to find that, so I'm kinda stumped. Suggestions from you guys would be great.

Well Garance knocked that one out of the park.

Over the last weeks, an interesting back-and-forth kind of dialogue has developed over the situation in Syria. It's gone roughly like this:

Good News: Democracy may, in fact, be on the march in Syria. Bush's strategy worked!

Bad News: Pro-Syrian, explicitly anti-American counterprotests dwarfed those staged by the opposition. Bush's imperalist-tinged adventurism in the Middle East has complicated a reform that could otherwise have gone relatively smoothly. It didn't work!

Good News: At least the anti-American protesters protested, and didn't resort to violence. Spreading democracy has worked, after all.

These are often presented point-counterpoint style, but I'm not sure why any of them are mutually exclusive. They seem to me to be the obvious consequences of Bush's confused policies. He deserves applause for adopting a "forward strategy" on democracy in the region, although it's unclear whether he decided to adopt one until it became obvious that WMD would not be found. But reading Fred Kaplan's explication of the dissimilarity between Berlin 1989 and Syria 2005, the thing that leaps off the page is how seriously reform-minded Lebanese lack a Western role model:

[Bush] sees [democracy] as not merely a political right but a God-given trait, humanity's default mode, which gushes forth like a geyser once a tyrant is blown from his throne. History shows us there's hot lava in this geyser, a volcano of energy, which can be creative, destructive, or both. Which way it flows is a matter of gravity, chance, the contours of landscape, or human engineering.

That's it in a nutshell: We haven't shaped the landscape. During the Cold War, we used to talk about promoting Western-style democracy; the sheer power of our example made tyrannical regimes weak enough internally to crumble on their own. Obviously, that paradigm isn't totally applicable to the Middle East. But the ultimate effect of Bush's policy has been to completely reverse America's strategic role in promoting freedom. While we now credibly boast the military might to loose almost any people from the shackles of tyranny, our example no longer shows the direction to run once free. Our cumulative effect on the region has been one of destabilization, not democratization. Considering the muderous butchers that reign in much of the Mideast, a little destabilization might not seem like a bad thing. But it also doesn't seem like arecipe for lasting change in the region. What good is deposing a group of thieves, if your values cannot fill the vacuum their deposition will surely create?

This is why the developments in Syria don't strike me as contradictory. Our intervention there helped expose a tyrannical government for what it was. But as John Kerry learned during the campaign, it is not enough to provide a compelling critique of your opponent. To produce the kind of sweeping attitudinal change that the Mideast cries out for, you also have to provide a compelling positive vision of the future. Today, no one abroad speaks of Western-style democracy. They speak of democracy, but the thought that follows it is: "...and whatever we do next." They speak of democracy, freestyle.

When the prospect of Iraqi elections was raised back in early 2004, observers wondered - and have continued wondering - what would happen if Iraqi citizens democratically elected a theocratic government that was totally antithetical to democratic norms. They wondered if Iraq would produce a government based on free speech, civil rights and liberties, active political parties with repeated non-trivial elections - things that are vital to sustaining a budding democracy. The Bush administration, happy to conflate positive action with a positive example, never answered the question. In Syria, the question is answering itself.

- Daniel A. Munz

drud

Political Wire reports that Paul Sarbanes is getting out of the legislating business. It's too bad; Sarbanes is a very good Senator. He's a strong liberal (he voted against Iraq, both tax cuts, and Ashcroft), but he works harder behind the scenes than Barbara Boxer does in front of the cameras. (Don't get me wrong: I love Barb. But she's not exactly a workhorse.) He was a lawyer, a Rhodes Scholar, and an economic adviser to Kennedy. I'll be sad to see him go.

In terms of replacing The Sarbanator, both parties have deepish benches. For the Dems, there's Reps. Elijah Cummings and Chris Van Hollen, and Montgomery County Exec. Doug Duncan. Republicans have Reps. Roscoe Bartlett and Wayne Gilchrest, '04 Senate candidate and "The Hobbit" character E.J. Pipkin, and maybe even Gov. Bob Ehrlich. But there are two candidates who would produce by far the most interesting race: Republican Lt. Gov. Michael Steele, and recently-retired NAACP President (and former Democratic Congressman) Kweisi Mfume.

For those unfamiliar, Lt. Gov. Steele is currently securing Colin Powell's vacated title of The Republican Black Guy. (Powell left after realizing that "compassionate conservatism" means hugging black people, not listening to them.) Unlike Powell, he is full-throatedly embracing the GOP's "compassionate conservative" message. Also unlike Powell, he is deeply politically ambitious. He represents the vanguard of the GOP's new minority strategy, which relies essentially on the claim that Democrats take black people for granted and have stopped pursuing policies that really help them. (Republicans, apparently, at least have the courage to openly not care.) They've also aggressively pushed a conservative social message, which resonates even with the black community's strongest economic liberals. Obviously, I'm not a fan, but it's an argument that we increasingly need to take seriously, especially if we're ever going to win in the South again. Next to their their push to recruit Latinos (which I suspect is somewhat exclusive to Bush the Texan), politicians like Steele represent the GOP's strongest attempt to cut into our traditional minority coalition. And, unlike the NDN's great outreach with Latinos, we're not doing a whole lot to address it.

Mfume, of course, represents everything opposed to this. There is no organization that more thoroughly embodies the old-school coalition that blacks have with the Democratic Party than the NAACP. Mfume was the one who excoriated Joe Lieberman for failing to speak to the NAACP during the primaries. He has worked to combat the GOP's taken-for-granted arguments, and to moderate his image, going so far as to nominate Condi Rice for one of his Image Awards. But basically, Mfume represents precisely the consensus that people like Steele are out to challenge.

That's what would make this challenge so epic: It would be the first electoral showdown, as far as I can tell, between the emerging Republican message for minorities, and the traditional Democratic strategy. This could have happened in IL or GA, but neither race was competitive enough for a real dialogue to develop between the candidates. MD is also an ideal place for something like this to go down. The state has a strong black community, but they don't vote as a bloc: Baltimore Mayor Martin O'Malley won a primary against two black Democrats with 53% of the vote. O'Malley has also given MD Democrats an unusually strong posture on Homeland Security, making it something close to a fair fight between Democratic economic liberalism and Republican social conservatism (accompanied, of course, by their good friend Cultural Resentment). Both candidates are eloquent speakers who are generally held in high regard, at least by their respective ideological camps. It'd be a fistfight.

Steele/Mfume is a battle I'd love to see. I'm not sure we'd win it, but it's a chance I'd gladly take to see this tired "they take you for granted" meme put to bed in an official, electoral way.

- Daniel A. Munz

With many thanks to commenter Nick, I finally found that Jim Talent quote, and she's a doozy:

But a Republican panel member, Senator Jim Talent of Missouri, signaled that, as far as he is concerned, little if any blame rests on American shoulders. "If our guys want to poke somebody in the chest to get the name of a bombmaker so they can save the lives of Americans, I'm for it," Talent said, according to The Associated Press. "I don't need an investigation to tell me that there was no comprehensive or systematic use of inhumane tactics by the American military, because those guys and gals just wouldn't do it."

Set aside for a moment the fact that torture is wildly ineffective at procuring information. Set aside that 70-90% of those we tortured were non-combatant civilians. Set aside the fact that Iraqis knew about Abu Ghraib long before we did, and our failure to acknowledge and deal with it seriously only added fuel to the insurgency's fire. And certainly, set aside Talent's gut-wrenching reference to torture as a "poke in the chest," though I bet McCain loved that one.

What absolutely kills me here is this: Of course our military men and women would never institute a systematic program of torture. They wouldn't do it, because they understand that things like the Geneva conventions, and our respect for human rights in general, are what separate us from the enemy by more than a matter of degree. No, Sen. Talent, they'd never do that, but you know who would? The guy who you voted to make our Attorney General! Almost nothing that's gone wrong with this war has been the sole fault of the military. Gen. Shinseki knew we'd need more troops than we did, and we all know how that story goes. The story of our failures in Iraq can be hung on a timeline of civilian war planners putting the actual safety and effectiveness of our troops at Priority M or so. So, Jim, if you really believe in the goodness of our men and women in uniform - as I do - then what say you stop promoting the leaders that slander their good names with their ruthless incompetence? Or would that just be too much darn accountability for you to handle?

Incidentally, during his comments, I remember Talent saying something like, "I think this is what Sen. Lieberman was getting at." Indeed, it was:

A prominent Democrat on the committee, Senator Joseph Lieberman of Connecticut, agreed with Church's conclusion that the incidents of abuse, however deplorable, were few, at least in terms of statistics. "Seventy cases out of 50,000 detainees is about one-tenth of 1 percent," the senator said.

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA.

- Daniel A. Munz

This week's TNR features dueling pieces on Social Security. The second, by Jon Chait, is a principled case for obstructionism, hitting all the points you blog-readers have now committed to memory. The first, however, is by Greg Mankiw, former Chair of Bush's Council of Economic Advisors, and it argues -- I'm not making this up -- that Social Security privatization is a good thing because he and his colleagues at Harvard have similar pension plans (also known as 401(k)s and they like them fine.

Excuse me?

Putting aside the ivory-tower elitism that should have O'Reilly rushing to retch, can conservative arguments reach any lower? Maybe we should stop funding defense, just for a single year, and give each American an equal share of the savings, which would mean everyone gets a check for $1,332.43. With that money, they can invest in stocks, weapons, whatever they want. It'll be an enormous economic boost, allow consumers to make wise decisions for the future (defense or assets? Hmmm...), and best of all, not touch the deficit in any way! We can encourage savings by making the giveaway tax free so long as they're socked away in -- you guys will love this! -- Defense Savings Accounts! Damn are we gonna create wealth!

That's a good idea, isn't it? So why don't we do it? Well, it's risky. Even if we didn't tell the rest of the world that the money was coming from Defense, there's always the possibility that we could be attacked. I mean, it's rare that attacks are launched on our soil, and even when they are, we're generally unable to stop them, but you don't want to take the risk, you know?

And that's why I'm genuinely interested in the conservative pathology on this. Because they do know that. So why is it so tough for them to understand that Social Security is a system of insurance, not a wealth creation program? I have no problem with wealth creation, hell, I think we need a lot more of it. And I'm a fan of many of the excellent plans floating around that'll do just that. But we can repeal the tax cuts or not launch wars or something if funding one of those is our aim. But all the wealth creation in the world can't compete with a poor economy and a touch of bad luck. That's why Americans need at least one layer of protection between them and the fluctuations of fate.

What's weird is that this is Mankiw speaking, not some hackish Senator; he should have read enough economic history to realize that the stock market occasionally crashes. But it's really the most amazing thing; these otherwise smart folks join the Bush administration and it's like all sense of history or caution is zapped out of their psyche. It's the great sucking sound of our generation. Really one of the stranger phenomena in modern politics.

DHinMI is wondering whether young voters, who seem to support private accounts, will help Karl Rove create the enduring Republican majority he seeks.

Nope.

Young voters barely care about politics, Social Security excites them about as much as Golden Girls cliffhanger. From 15 years ago. Seriously -- whether or not my generation likes Bush, and the election results resoundingly proved we don't, we're not going to flock to his side because he'll grant the opportunity to transfer 4 percentage points of payroll taxes into private acZZZZZzzzzzzzzz.

I like my peers, and I don't mean to feed the stereotype that we're apathetic, but most of us are and, even among those who aren't, the idea that pension plans are going to spark some sort of realignment is absurd. It ain't* going to happen.

* See? I'm a populist, sho' nuff.

John Judis's article on the AFL-CIO's need to replace Sweeney makes a lot of excellent points, none of which relate to replacing Sweeney. Read the piece for an all-too-rare counterpoint concerning SEIU's Andy Stern and his restructuring proposals, but don't go looking for the argument it claims to contain -- why the AFL-CIO needs to dump Sweeney.

Matt Welch has an idea so crazy it just might work:

There's a better and arguably more attractive ideological option than being anti–"pro–free market," and it's sitting right in front of the Democrats' noses. When the party you despise controls most of the levers of government, it's an excellent time to run against government.

Disparate threads of limited-government rhetoric have begun to pop through the seams of the New Old Left unity. In the wake of the gay marriage wipeout and unpopular federal laws concerning the environment and medical marijuana, many Blue Staters are rediscovering the joys of federalism. "Fiscal responsibility" has cemented itself as boilerplate Democratic rhetoric, and not just as an excuse to jack up tax rates: Rising Democratic star Bill Richardson, governor of New Mexico, has been drawing praise from Cato for slashing his state's income taxes, and pushing his fellow Democratic governors to follow his lead.

I couldn't disagree more. (I tried, and sprained something.) For one thing, we'll have the same problem John Kerry had when he tried to say he opposed gay marriage: No one will believe us. Unless we're willing to abandon things like Medicare, Social Security, and good public education, we'll never be able to take the argument to its logical conclusion. Opponents will say we're  half-assing an ideological commitment because it polls well. And if we adopt any strategy that garners Megadittoes from the guys at Cato, they'll be right. More importantly, it's not who we are. Liberals don't dislike government. To many liberals, Reagan's declaration that "government is the problem" amounted to political hate speech. I still bristle at Clinton's "era of big government" schtick.

Worst of all, Welch's suggestion is short-sighted. Suppose Democrats do define themselves as opponents of big government. Fast-forward that tape to 2008, when there's a Democrat in the White House. What's our agenda? We can't promote gay rights or universal health care; those would be Big Government things to do. It gives us nowhere to go, and further calcifies the frame that Reagan spent a decade constructing.

Interestingly, the second thing Welch said hints at a much more appealing option. None of the causes he listed - none of them - are supported by liberals because of a belief in limited government. Our support for gay marriage stems from a belief in equal rights; how many liberals would use the limited-government argument to oppose a constitutional amendment guaranteeing gays the right to marry? Support for environmentalism and marijuana legalization stem from a belief in providing the best natural environment and health care possible, irrespective of ideology. Our paeans to fiscal responsibility are premised largely on our disgust with what created our current deficits: A dubious foreign adventure, and two unnecessary tax cuts that screwed the middle class with their pants on. (Would liberals object as harshly if Bush had spent the money ensuring universal health care?) Even Richardson's tax cuts were aimed at the middle class; he calls them "sensible" so often in the course of a single article that you'd think he had Tourette's. Democrats have lots of values, and small government isn't one of them. But, these issues do have a common thread that unites them: They all emphasize material benefits over ideological goals, and are premised on facts, not beliefs. In short, they are a microcosm of the two fundamental values that are liberalism's secret weapon: Relying on facts and making people's lives better. So, let me propose an alternative Democratic message: We are the party of Real Solutions That Help Real People.

We ought to end the conversation Goldwater started, and pull up the curtain on the big government/small government dichotomy, exposing it for the ruse it is. We should make the case that government is just like anything else: In good hands, it does good. Bill Clinton got this; at his best, he dissolved Americans' resentment towards Washington, and showed that wise leaders could use its power to produce tangible, shared benefits. Unsurprisingly, Hillary has picked up the idea, asking pro-lifers (as William Saletan put it): How many abortions are you willing to endure for the sake of avoiding the word "condom"? Quoth Lord William:

Once you embrace that truth—that the ideal number of abortions is zero—voters open their ears. They listen when you point out, as Clinton did, that the abortion rate fell drastically during her husband's presidency but has risen in more states than it has fallen under George W. Bush. I'm sure these trends have more to do with economics than morals, but that's the point. Once we agree that the goal is zero, we can stop asking which party yaps more about fighting abortion and start asking which party gets results.

Is there any doubt which party would win that conversation? (Hint: FDR was one.)

It is counter-productive and foolish to try to become the party of small government. The entire idea of small-versus-big is, to paraphrase Lincoln, a dogma of the quiet past that is inadequate to our stormy present. Instead, we should convince Americans to stop tying their votes to an arbitrary bureaucratic statistic, and award them to the party that doesn't let ideology cloud its emphasis on results. This is what Howard Dean is asking when he asks southerners what they have to show for forty years of voting Republican: Do you want leaders who get you angry and resentful? Or do you want leaders who get you low abortion rates and good health care? Democrats should spend the time between now and 2008 making a persuasive case for reality-based, results-oriented leadership. If we do it right, the party of Real Solutions That Help Real People will soon be the party of Picking Our New China Pattern For The State Dinners.

Update: I have a brief follow-up back at my place.

- Daniel A. Munz

Hello, fellow Klein enthusiasts! I'm Daniel A. Munz, and I run things down the road at Politics and War. Continuing his admirable experiment in editorial altruism, Ezra has given me run of the place for the weekend. I am, as they say, pleased as punch. I've admired Ezra's writing for a sight longer than he's known about mine. I'm looking forward to posing some questions that have been on my mind to you, his predictably insightful cabal of commenters; there's nothing more instructive than arguing in front of an audience.

I'm going to start in very poor form, however, by issuing a bleg: Does anyone know where to get transcripts of Senate committee hearings? (Specifically, the Senate Armed Services Committee.) The normally mild-mannered Jim Talent said something on C-SPAN the other day that just about turned my milk sour, and paraphrasing just wouldn't do it justice.

Anyhow, thanks very much for having me. I hope I will vindicate Ezra's generous belief that I'm worth listening to.

- Daniel A. Munz

Daniel Munz will be pitching in this weekend. I'll be posting as well. Enjoy the show.

Steve Clemons, who's playing doing the Josh Marshall thing and becoming your one-stop shop for anti-Bolton organizing, has an action alert today:

Please immediately call the Senate Foreign Relations Committee (Majority Staff) office at 202-224-4651 and state that while you are not opposed to the Bolton Hearings themselves, you are asking Senator Lugar NOT TO ANNOUNCE THE DATE OF THE HEARINGS TODAY.

The committee staff is now aware that this is a matter of contention. If Lugar does not announce the Bolton Hearings today -- then they cannot be held next week. The first opportunity would then be during the week of April 4th.

This is important. Please call today -- Friday -- TODAY.

202-224-4651.

Quick background -- the right is trying to fast-track the Bolton hearings, which'll mean there's no time for the opposition to mass and thus no opportunity to make Bush pay for nominating an anti-UN ideologue. Considering America is broadly supportive of a good relationship with the UN, and even more in favor of the non-proliferation treaties Bolton has spent his timer trying to wreck, this hearing needs to be very, very, very public. It needs to plaster the papers and become a war over the administration's extremist foreign policy ideologies. So make the call, we need this debate.

Nathan's wondering why labor is spending a boatload of cash in LA to oppose the candida