That Other Blog

THAT OTHER BLOG IS NOW ANOTHER BLOG:

2003-06-16T09:56:00.000-07:00

And that blog is:

That Other Blog is no more. As the That Other Blog souvenir t-shirt says, "Hours and hours of backbreaking HTML trial and error, and all I got was this stupid gray template," so it's time to move on up to the East Side of blogging: Moveable Type, a template with actual colors (created by someone other than me), and our very own domain.

From now on, I will be writing with Matt Singer and Ezra Klein over at Not Geniuses. Please update your bookmarks or links, and join us there.

VOUCHERS FOR EVERYBODY?:

2003-06-14T19:41:00.000-07:00

Johnny Bardine is writing favorably about school vouchers on the heels of this Times article that summarizes the mostly inconclusive evidence on their usefulness. He cites this paragraph:

Today, two Harvard University professors, Paul E. Peterson and William G. Howell, whose multiyear study of the 1,300 New York students who transferred remains the largest randomized experiment to date on vouchers, issued a 38-page report defending their conclusion that African-American students who entered private schools scored significantly higher than their public school peers on standardized tests.

Peterson and Howell may be correct, but their conclusion doesn't address the systemic problems that blanket voucher availability may cause.

Surely a couple of kids pulled from the worst of the worst public schools and put into any halfway-decent private school will show signs of improvement. The proven reliability of that idea is why parents who can afford it already put their kids in private school. But what happens if, as logic would dictate if vouchers were available, every parent of a child in a below-average school pulled their son or daughter and sent him or her to a private school? I'm open to arguments for vouchers (the knee-jerk opposition to vouchers on most of the left can get pretty tiring), but there are some serious questions that need to be answered before vouchers make public policy sense.

It seems to me that the sudden introduction of vouchers for everyone could have at least two potential downsides:

(1) There may not be enough desks in private schools to accomodate a mass exodus. Private schools would need to raise tuition (and therefore the amount of tax dollars necessary to provide a voucher) for construction and the hiring of teachers to keep student/teacher ratio low and manage to do all of the things that makes their education "better". Thus, vouchers could wind up being more expensive per student than public schools, necessitating tax increases to pay for them.

Also worth considering is the worst case, in which the most dastardly of private schools might simply pocket the money, increase class size, and let the quality of education deteriorate to something barely different than the public schools students were escaping.

(2) While the test cases don't remove enough students from the public schools to really test this part of the pro-voucher case, most proponents of vouchers argue that public schools will improve with fewer students (smaller class sizes, etc.). But in the worst cases, far more than half of the students would likely opt out of their failing schools. There will be a point at which enough students -- 60%? 80%? -- leaving will deprive the public schools of the economies of scale necessary to keep schools rational on a per-pupil cost basis.

In that case we might find ourselves with empty public schools burning taxpayer dollars to stay open for only handful of students. Or worse, some districts may not be able to support any public schools at all, creating a de facto wholesale privatisation of education. While some in the privatize-everything crowd might be happy with that, it may wind up violating state constitutions which require public education, not an outsourced system that effectively mandates that protestant kids faithfully attend Catholic school because it happens to be the only school around.

Some other potential problems with vouchers would take more time to develop, and depend on the scope and nature of implementation. Shall vouchers be available only to the very poor? Does this discriminate against middle-income families that get by well enough but can't afford private school? Or, if private schools accept only the best students, is a primary school system segregated by standardized test scores fulfilling the goal of molding citizens through public education?

It's good news, if a bit of a yawn, that a couple of professors showed that a few of kids plucked from failing schools perform better when you stick them in good schools. But it seems that many of the crucial questions about vouchers have more to do with a large-scale program than the kind of experiment performed here.

CONTROLLING THAT PESKY ANTI-AMERICANISM:

2003-06-14T18:15:00.000-07:00

Flipping around my 2 A.M. Swedish television dial I came across a program that makes me think that there may be a conscious programming effort to keep Swedes feeling good (or, at least not violently bad) about America. For the second time in three months they're broadcasting a two-part mini-series that captures the quintessence of American liberal consciousness (if you can stand the bad acting): NBC's made-for-TV movie "The 60's".

Despite the deeply cheesy cultural "moments" heavy-handedly scripted into the life of one Midwestern family, the series manages to be somewhat moving when it splices real footage of, say, Robert Kennedy's final, brief speech in California into the melodrama. Its overall message is to affirm the political and cultural progress of American society during that decade. Really, the plot boils down to a several hour long humiliation of the not-even-Republican father. Though it winds up rejecting the excesses of the far left, that message comes late. The series mostly glorifies everything not conservative, and Swedes eat that leftist rah-rah shit right up.

So, readers in America, I recommend the series (which comes on VH1 every now and then) for all of you who have liberal leanings. Non-liberal readers may also be interested if they, like me, are inexplicably attracted to the objectively-ugly Julia Stiles, who plays the daughter.

PATAKI:

2003-06-13T19:19:00.000-07:00

Jennifer Senior has a very well-written cover story in the tomorrow's New York Times Magazine for anyone interested in New York politics over the last decade, the plight of the placating centrist, or the prospects of a moderate Republican on the national stage.

I haven't read anything by Senior before, but this piece has several wondering-who-wrote-this moments that will make you check the byline enough times to remember her name.

WHERE TO GIVE:

2003-06-12T05:37:00.000-07:00

Matt Singer is writing about it, Kos is raising money for it, and now I'm going to tell you why I'm not giving to the DNC's new ePatriot program anytime soon. What follows is an amalgam of various comments and emails I have been writing on this.

Is there a compelling argument for me to give any part of my limited political donation budget to the DNC and not to Howard Dean? If my guy gets knocked out, it would make sense. But why on earth would I give to a general election fund now? Seeing as Dean's is a shoestring campaign and he is by no means assured of the nomination, why should I be giving elsewhere?

At this point in the process, it is about choosing who you want to be president, and getting him or her the resources to get their message out. Later, after the nomination is settled, it will be about getting rid of Bush and throwing money at the effort against him without regard to the candidate we put up.

Giving your presidential campaign donations to anyone but your preferred candidate at this point in the cycle only reinforces the position of those in the money lead. It siphons off presidential campaign funds and makes the $7 million of folks like John Kerry and John Edwards that much more difficult to overcome. Of course, the exception would be if you have given the $2000 maximum to your candidate. I'm nowhere near there, and I'm guessing most of the bloggers and netroots-types getting these solicitations aren't either.

Donating to the ePatriots program doesn't help get Howard Dean any closer to being president, and that's what I want. If Democrats wind up nominating Joe Lieberman, I'll still probably vote for him, but I will be significantly less motivated and enthusiastic about it. Sending money anywhere other than to Howard Dean makes that distinctly more likely.

My political passion these days is about Howard Dean's positive vision for this country. That's what I'm giving money to support. The ePatriots campaign is more about an anybody-but-Bush feeling. I am definitely sympathetic -- but that's a movement of last resort.

NOT-QUITE-MASS HYSTERIA:

2003-06-11T13:13:00.000-07:00

Bravenet informs me that this site received its 10,000th visitor today.

The pressing question is, of course: Why is world media domination taking so damn long? (Tentative answer: posts like the one immediately below.)

A TERRIBLY HUMILIATING POST:

2003-06-10T18:15:00.000-07:00

The usual BBC overnight anchor (for Central Europe) is wearing some extra make-up tonight. She's super-cute. And even more articulate than usual. I'm very drunk and need to squint to confirm all this, but I assure you that it is true.

HERTZBERG WORSHIP:

2003-06-08T23:42:00.000-07:00

Rick Hertzberg doggedly refuses to take any time off from being the best political essayist writing today with this amazing piece in the New Yorker juxtaposing the rebuilding of Baghdad and efforts at "national building" right here at home.

TAX POLICY -- NO CHARACTER LIMIT:

2003-06-08T12:40:00.000-07:00

Candace of Five Corners has decided to break out of the draconian 400 character limit and continue on her blog a discussion of tax policy that has been going on in comments on several posts over at Johnny's Truth is a Blog.

Rather than spill more digital ink explaining myself in a language that apparently doesn't translate into Republican, I will use this space to quote at length Peter G. Peterson -- Republican, former Nixon cabinet member, and present chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York -- whose piece in the Times Magazine today is freakishly on point:

I have belonged to the Republican Party all my life. As a Republican, I have served as a cabinet member (once), a presidential commission member (three times), an all-purpose political ombudsman (many times) and a relentless crusader whom some would call a crank (throughout). Among the bedrock principles that the Republican Party has stood for since its origins in the 1850's is the principle of fiscal stewardship -- the idea that government should invest in posterity and safeguard future generations from unsustainable liabilities. It is a priority that has always attracted me to the party. At various times in our history (especially after wars), Republican leaders have honored this principle by advocating and legislating painful budgetary retrenchment, including both spending cuts and tax hikes.

Over the last quarter century, however, the Grand Old Party has abandoned these original convictions. Without ever renouncing stewardship itself -- indeed, while talking incessantly about legacies, endowments, family values and leaving ''no child behind'' -- the G.O.P. leadership has by degrees come to embrace the very different notion that deficit spending is a sort of fiscal wonder drug. Like taking aspirin, you should do it regularly just to stay healthy and do lots of it whenever you're feeling out of sorts.

With the arrival of Ronald Reagan in the White House, this idea was first introduced as part of an extraordinary ''supply-side revolution'' in fiscal policy, needed (so the thinking ran) as a one-time fix for an economy gripped by stagflation. To those who worried about more debt, they said, Relax, it won't happen -- we'll ''grow out of it.'' Over the course of the 1980's, under the influence of this revolution, what grew most was federal debt, from 26 to 42 percent of G.D.P. During the next decade, Republican leaders became less conditional in their advocacy. Since 2001, the fiscal strategizing of the party has ascended to a new level of fiscal irresponsibility. For the first time ever, a Republican leadership in complete control of our national government is advocating a huge and virtually endless policy of debt creation.

The numbers are simply breathtaking. When President George W. Bush entered office, the 10-year budget balance was officially projected to be a surplus of $5.6 trillion -- a vast boon to future generations that Republican leaders ''firmly promised'' would be committed to their benefit by, for example, prefinancing the future cost of Social Security. Those promises were quickly forgotten. A large tax cut and continued spending growth, combined with a recession, the shock of 9/11 and the bursting of the stock-market bubble, pulled that surplus down to a mere $1 trillion by the end of 2002. Unfazed by this turnaround, the Bush administration proposed a second tax-cut package in 2003 in the face of huge new fiscal demands, including a war in Iraq and an urgent ''homeland security'' agenda. By midyear, prudent forecasters pegged the 10-year fiscal projection at a deficit of well over $4 trillion.

So there you have it: in just two years there was a $10 trillion swing in the deficit outlook. Coming into power, the Republican leaders faced a choice between tax cuts and providing genuine financing for the future of Social Security. (What a landmark reform this would have been!) They chose tax cuts. After 9/11, they faced a choice between tax cuts and getting serious about the extensive measures needed to protect this nation against further terrorist attacks. They chose tax cuts. After war broke out in the Mideast, they faced a choice between tax cuts and galvanizing the nation behind a policy of future-oriented burden sharing. Again and again, they chose tax cuts.

The recent $10 trillion deficit swing is the largest in American history other than during years of total war. With total war, of course, you have the excuse that you expect the emergency to be over soon, and thus you'll be able to pay back the new debt during subsequent years of peace and prosperity. Yet few believe that the major drivers of today's deficit projections, not even the war on terror, are similarly short-term. Indeed, the biggest single driver of the projections, the growing cost of senior entitlements, are certain to become much worse just beyond the 10-year horizon when the huge baby-boom generation starts retiring in earnest. By the time the boomer age wave peaks, workers will have to pay the equivalent of 25 to 33 percent of their payroll in Social Security and Medicare before they retire just to keep those programs solvent.

Two facts left unmentioned in the deficit numbers cited above will help put the cost of the boomer retirement into focus. First, the deficit projections would be much larger if we took away the ''trust-fund surplus'' we are supposed to be dedicating to the future of Social Security and Medicare; and second, the size of this trust fund, even if we were really accumulating it -- which we are not -- is dwarfed by the $25 trillion in total unfinanced liabilities still hanging over both programs.

A longer time horizon does not justify near-term deficits. If anything, the longer-term demographics are an argument for sizable near-term surpluses. As Milton Friedman once put it, if you cut taxes without cutting spending, you aren't really reducing the tax burden at all. In fact, you're just pushing it off yourself and onto your kids.

You might suppose that a reasoned debate over this deficit-happy policy would at least be admissible within the ''discussion tent'' of the Republican Party. Apparently, it is not. I've seen Republicans get blackballed for merely observing that national investment is limited by national savings; that large deficits typically reduce national savings; or that higher deficits eventually trigger higher interest rates. I've seen others get pilloried for picking on the wrong constituency -- for suggesting, say, that a tax loophole for a corporation or wealthy retiree is no better, ethically or economically, than a dubious welfare program.

For some ''supply side'' Republicans, the pursuit of lower taxes has evolved into a religion, indeed a tax-cut theology that simply discards any objective evidence that violates the tenets of the faith.

So long as taxes are cut, even dissimulation is allowable. A new Republican fad is to propose that tax cuts be officially ''sunsetted'' in 2 or 5 or 10 years in order to minimize the projected revenue loss -- and then to go out and tell supporters that, of course, the sunset is not to be taken seriously and that rescinding such tax cuts is politically unlikely. Among themselves, in other words, the loudly whispered message is that a setting sun always rises.

What's remarkable is how so many elected Republicans go along with the charade. The same Republican senators who overwhelmingly approved (without a single nay vote) the Sarbanes-Oxley Act to crack down on shady corporate accounting of investments worth millions of dollars see little wrong with turning around and making utterly fraudulent pronouncements about tax cuts that will cost billions or, indeed, even trillions of dollars.

For some Republicans, all this tax-cutting talk is a mere tactic. I know several brilliant and partisan Republicans who admit to me, in private, that much of what they say about taxes is of course not really true. But, they say, it's the only way to reduce government spending: chop revenue and trust that the Democrats, like Solomon, will agree to cut spending rather than punish our children by smothering them with debt.

This clever apologia would be more believable if Republicans -- in all matters other than cutting the aggregate tax burden -- were to speak loudly and act decisively in favor of deficit reductions. But it's hard to find the small-government argument persuasive when, on the spending front, the Republican leaders do nothing to reform entitlements, allow debt-service costs to rise along with the debt and urge greater spending on defense -- and when these three functions make up over four-fifths of all federal outlays.

That's about the long and short of what Johnny and I are saying -- that this tax cut is not only bad policy but that the effort to sell it has been cynically, purposefully dishonest.

UPDATE: Candace replies, asserting that:

Remember that with Reagan's cuts, the actual revenue for the government increased? Thus, the tax cuts can not be responsible for the increase in the deficit. [Emphasis hers]

That's demonstrably false. Virtually all serious economists (including those quoted her beloved Economist newspaper) agree that these tax cuts will have a huge cost when implemented. Presuming that we will eventually have to balance the budget with these tax cuts on the books, the Economist reports that:

According to Peter Orszag of the Brookings Institution, if all this year's tax cuts go into effect, they will be the equivalent of 2.4% of GDP in 2013. To find that amount from discretionary spending, you would have to cut it by two-thirds -- an impossible task seeing so much of it goes on policing and homeland security. [31 May 2003, p. 44 of the European print edition; I can't find it online]

She grounds her "can not" conclusion in the supposed increase in revenues after the Reagan tax cut, but doesn't account for the fact that after Reagan's tax cuts record deficits immediately ensued and continued into the 1990s (or the fact that Reagan actually repealed many of his initial cuts in the face of potentially even huger deficits and ambitious military spending plans).

A few conservative economists and many more conservative politicians claim to believe that cutting taxes eventually increases revenue in the long-term -- what the current president's father called "voodoo economics" -- but even these folks admit that the price of a tax cut will be short- and medium-term deficits in the absence of a willingness to offset the tax cuts by cutting spending. President Bush has increased discretionary spending in each of his budgets. Thus, this tax cut will make the already record-setting deficit even worse.

Candace also writes that:

The tax cuts may not be the wisest fiscal policy, but Bush et al firmly believe they will contribute to economic recovery and provide relief for those who need it. Convictions, not dishonesty, are what drive this president's agenda, and an argument that his convictions are misplaced will be much more accurate and go much further with me ....

The first problem is that this conclusion ignores the reporting by Mr. Peterson, above, that there are "several brilliant and partisan Republicans who admit to me, in private, that much of what they say about taxes is of course not really true."

The second, more complicated problem with this kind of thinking is that it relies on little more than a "feeling" about the president. Is a blanket trust in a given president's virtuous motives (as opposed to, say, electoral/political motives) any better than a blanket cynicism that a given president can never be virtuous or tell the truth? The former tends to afflict the the most partisan members of the president's side (Gephardt/Begala for Clinton, DeLay/Hannity for the younger Bush). The latter manifested itself in the near-constant investigations of the Clintons and can be seen today in the pages of the Nation and around the lefty blogosphere.

Neither is especially useful or convincing in policy discussions. Whether positive or negative in nature, an overarching feeling -- that we "should know this president better than that by now" -- can get in the way of evidence. Especially in the case outlined here, but also more generally, it doesn't seem controversial to suggest that a politician's actions and words (or the dissonance between them) would be grounded in purely political motives.

YET ANOTHER UPDATE: Candace didn't like the ellipses used in the reproduction of her argument above, so they've been removed and replaced; the substance of both her point and my response remains, I think, the same.

She counters the update above with a long analogy to a CEO who sets her own income. At one point the word "debt" finds its way into what I thought was a point about deficits:

Joe, your counter-argument has ignored my basic idea - the percentage decrease is not in and of itself responsible for the increase in debt, whether personal or national. If spending is unrestrained, government has a responsibility to restrain it.

A "deficit" is the difference between revenue and expenditure when that latter is higher (when revenue exceeds expenditure, of course, you have a surplus). Deficits are measured every budget cycle; thus, you could have one year (2000) where there is no deficit and another shortly after (2003) where there is a huge one. Underlying causes may stay the same from year to year, but each year we must sit down and figure out what the number for that year will be.

"Debt" accumulates. It is carried from year to year in the same sense that your credit card debt carries from month to month if you don't pay it off. When we talk about debt, we don't talk about individual years. We talk about the cumulative sum of debt (usually as a percentage of GDP).

Candace says that if "spending is unrestrained, government has a responsibility to restrain it." That's true. When you cut taxes without reducing spending, it immediately increases both the deficit (presuming the tax cut isn't the giveaway of a budget surplus) and the debt (because you have to borrow to send the checks out to people and cover lost revenue). President Bush fails (intentionally, I would argue) to mention this when he sells his tax cuts. He has refused to reduce spending -- he has actually increased it.

Even if you believe that the Bush tax cuts will stimulate the economy (most economists don't) you have to concede that the time frame for that stimulus to produce increased government revenue is in the 10-15 year range. That is the amount of time it would take for capital to be invested and create wealth that would generate taxes. (Most economists agree that a better idea for a stimulative tax cut would a payroll tax holiday, which would boost consumer spending.)

So, keeping in mind that the tax cuts will decrease revenue in the short- and medium-term and that we have to measure our deficits yearly, a tax cut without spending reductions -- i.e. the one we're talking about -- will absolutely increase the deficit. Also, given that debt starts accumulating immediately because we must borrow even more to cover the lost revenue and remembering that the servicing of hat debt will begin right away, this tax cut will increase the national debt.

The only way around these facts is a time machine. We would have to hop in and fast-forward to the moment at which the tax cuts eventually "trickled down" to affect the economy and generate tax revenue. Once we got there, though, we might find that by that time the question is moot because international investors have fled and withdrawn their capital from an economy spinning out of control due to a reckless fiscal policy. Or, perhaps worse, we would find a nation that had fallen (even further) behind the rest of the developed world in education, health and life expectancy, experiencing a resurgence of poverty owing to the massive rollback of spending necessary to address the fiscal crisis created by that Trojan Horse tax cut way back when.

THE CASCADE OF UPDATES CONTINUES: ... In order to point out a very good post by Matt Yglesias describing where the tax burden goes when you cu taxes without cutting spending.

CHECHNYA:

2003-06-06T14:00:00.000-07:00

For the record, I am so supremely convinced that what the Russian government has been doing in Chechnya is wrong and counter-productive that this short post about it won't contain any links to documentation of the gross human rights violations by Moscow or to statements by Russian authorities that demonstrate the deep, deep dangers of giving all our "allies" in the "War on Terror" a free pass to do anything they deem necessary to defeat anything that they decide to label "terrorism."

To be sure, there are terrorists in Chechnya. But if there is anything that is obvious in the post-September 11 fight against terrorism, it is that nation-states cannot stoop to terrorist tactics or punish entire populations in place of extremists among them. This type of policy has failed for Israel and it has failed for Russia.

All of this is by way of the fact that tonight Discovery Europe aired a documentary, The Moscow Siege, about the hostage-taking in a downtown Moscow theatre by Chechen terrorists this past October. Whatever you've heard and whatever you think about what happened -- it's worse. Well over a hundred hostages were killed by nerve gas used by the Russian authorities and the "rescue operation" after the military strike consisted most notably of throwing dead and dying hostages into piles just outside the theatre's foyer.

European readers should be able to catch replays of the film in coming weeks, but I have an icky inkling that most American readers will not have the opportunity since most mainstream Russia-related news tends to concern the personal relationship between presidents Bush and Putin. Those willing to entertain the notion that all may not be well can check out regional news at Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty for the below-mainstream-American-media-radar events of serious consequence to both Chechen and Russian people caught between two groups of terrorists -- one of the more conventional guerilla type, the other operating out of Putin's Kremlin.

NOT-SO-BREAKING NEWS:

2003-06-05T06:39:00.000-07:00

So I started writing a post about Howard Dean's new Moveable Type blog under the impression that I was breaking the news, but a cursory Technorati search reveals that Taegan Goddard's Political Wire broke the story a whopping three days ago.

While there aren't any posts up, Mathew Gross and the Dean team seem to have completely their 'About' section, which is more than can be said about some other impending moves to Moveable Type (stay tuned -- I have a meeting about it tonight). Howard Dean has already won the Best Blog presidential primary, but it's good to see the campaign doing more.

One note: it seems that you can access the new blog both at this address and at this other one, which is on the Dean for America server. It seems to me that an address like deanforum.com is likely to get lost in the shuffle of Dean blogs and Dean forums. The second address, blog.deanforamerica.com, would probably be more indicative to visitors that yes, they are indeed at Howard Dean's official campaign blog.

TRIUMPH OVER BLOGGER:

2003-06-05T06:08:00.000-07:00

Johnny Bardine, sporting a brand new and suspiciously familiar template, is back over at Truth is a Blog after a brief stint here while he sorted through his template mess. His widely-linked post on Howard Dean's appeal to libertarians is a great read and brought some much-lacking class to this operation. We're sad to see him go.

I'll get back to our famously antagonistic blog dialog by noting that he makes a rather dreadful contribution today to the campaign finance reform debate that's been bouncing around here and there.

I have extensive commentary on Johnny's proposals, but opted for the marathon-comments-thread-tirade mode of exposition rather than go into it here. The count presently stands at seventeen comments because while Johnny favors no limits on campaign contributions, by not paying the ten bucks to upgrade he insists on a four-hundred-character limit in blog comments.

MORE CFR:

2003-06-05T05:50:00.000-07:00

Greg Greene of the very smart Green[e]house Effect notes in comments on my campaign finance proposal that he has some ideas of his own. He takes the unusual position -- given that almost everyone (even Johnny) agrees that reporting requirements about who's giving to whom are a good thing -- that we actually have too much information about political donations. He digs deep into his archives to pull out this idea:

Thanks to the advent of the secret ballot in the 19th century, the hardy old tradition of vote buying died out, while people went on casting their votes in peace. Speech wasn't abolished, of course -- people still voted. But pulling a curtain over that speech restored an integrity to the political process that vote-buying wiped away.

In short, we can snuff out the flow of information about voting to stop vote-buying -- and we've been doing it for years. So what, pray tell, would be odd about snuffing out information about giving to stop politician-buying? The ideas sound like long-lost twins to me.

Without further ado, then, let me introduce the donation booth. Stride in and give all the money you please, but remember the catch: nobody but you gets to know about it. Your cash goes into a blind trust, the candidate gets it with no names attached, and all the backslapping in the world won't prove whether you gave your senator $10,000 or a dime.

As for money, forget limits: let a thousand flowers bloom. (Pat yourself on the back, Mr. Sabato; I've come around to your point of view on this one.) Let the big checks fly, hombres -- just remember: no names attached. You can bankroll all the democracy you want, mind you, but you can't buy your congressman.

There are a couple of problems with this. The first is that Larry Sabato -- while very smart -- tends to be unbearably pompous, is somewhat of a GOP hack, and has a terrible mustache that makes him look like way much more of an idiot than he actually is.

But Greg's idea has some problems with it, too. The reason the 'donation booth' won't work is that donations are fundamentally different than votes in some crucial ways.

The first and most important is that votes are democratic -- donations are not. Voting booths make private the sacred act of the citizen. The vote is the great equalizer in a society. One of the important things to remember when discussing campaign finance is that votes and donations are not equally protected either by democratic theory or by law.

Second, the secret ballot was desirable because it prevented a negative effect on the individual voter -- that is, it stopped the parties or local officials from dishing out reprisals for voting "the wrong way." It was in the individual voter's interests to shut up about who he voted for if he could somehow vote in private.

Secret donations are different because they seek to do the opposite -- that is, prevent a positive consequence (influence, access) for the individual contributor. Barring some draconian laws on speech, there would be nothing to prevent people from saying, "I gave $50,000 to George Bush today," and from his campaign trust-watcher to note that the fund went up $50,000. Or what about a black-tie gala with 100 contributors at which everyone together, at their tables, writes their six-figure checks? Or how do you prevent the donor from sending the Bush staff his cancelled check in the mail? Or from faxing them his credit card statement?

Presuming that donors and campaigns would find some way to communicate with each other, the public would be the only one left in the dark -- and that would be a step backward from present reporting requirements.

The secrecy plan only works if the people you're seeking to protect actually want to be protected. In the same sense that the secret ballot doesn't prevent a voter from walking out of their elementary school gymnasium and telling an exit pollster who they voter for, secret donations would only be truly secret insofar as donors saw it as being in their interest that they remain so.

Most probably won't. And the few that do would be the ones who don't need to buy influence -- think Richard Mellon Scaife -- and so would be content to use Greg's repeal of contribution limits to drop a seven-figure sum in a candidate's lap for purely ideological or personal reasons.

CAMPAIGN FINANCE REFORM:

2003-06-04T15:04:00.000-07:00

One could be forgiven for wondering whether there has been any campaign finance reform in America. Despite the passage of something called McCain-Feingold (which bore little resemblance to the far more ambitious bill of the same name which was introduced in the mid-1990's), the president is still planning to raise $200 million for his re-election campaign and law firms are sending bricks of checks from their employees to trial lawyer and presidential candidate John Edwards.

Matt Singer tackles the problem of money in politics with a proposal to tax political expenditures:

Couldn't we have expenditure taxes on political campaigns (this could possibly even be done by states to apply to federal campaigns, since they are entities operating in the state). For different kinds of committees, have different exemption levels. Expenditures beyond that exemption get taxed at a 25% rate. It would be a pretty powerful disincentive, while also raising money for the state. [...]

You aren't limiting speech. You're taxing it. And if money is speech, speech gets taxed (even double-taxed) all the time.

It's an interesting idea, but it seems to me that this idea will put politicians under even more pressure to raise money to make up the difference between what they would have been spending anyway and the new, higher amount they'll have to dish out in order to do it.

Let me say before I lay out this proposal: I don't think that money is speech. If money is speech then wealth is speech, and the vastly unequal distribution of wealth in the United States means that the "public square" is inhabited by those with megaphones and those with duct tape over their mouth. That doesn't sound very democratic to me. In a political system where giving money buys access for donors and having it means credibility for candidates, "free speech" is a joke -- speech is expensive, and every election cycle the price gets more unaffordable for the vast majority of Americans.

For whatever reason, legions of shortsighted opinion-makers and Supreme Court justices disagree with me. Well, they're wrong. But, fortunately, the campaign finance reform ideas that I favor dodge the question of whether money equals speech. Neither of these two points are original, so far as I know, and both build on rules already in place. Implemented together, they would mark a huge improvement in our campaign finance system.

Critical Mass Contribution Limits: We already limit individual contributions. For some reason Congress thought that your previous limit of $2,000 to a candidate ($1,000 for the primary and another grand for the general) was too low; they doubled those limits when they passed McCain-Feingold. Now special interests and assorted other influence-peddling fundraiser-types can wield twice as much influence during the ever-increasing amount of our public servants' time they command. This is a select group; only a fraction of one percent of Americans ever hit the contribution ceiling.

If money is speech, let's level the playing field. Set the contribution limit to something normal people can afford and would be willing to give -- say, twenty-five dollars ($12.50 for the primary, same again for the general). When some percentage of registered voters -- twenty? thirty? -- have hit the ceiling in a given two-year cycle, the limit doubles. This will dilute the influence of money in politics and democratize the donor base.

Public Good Airtime Requirements: The FCC has completely abdicated enforcement of the requirement that broadcasters dedicate some time to pursuing the public good. The above proposal for contribution limits would severely limit the amount of money campaigns have to spend. To compensate, a requirement that candidates for office be given blocks of airtime for free would eliminate their biggest expense. The free time would be a combination of Ross Perot-style blocks and the rotation of thirty-second ads at certain times.

The specifics aside, it seems to me that these two principles are the best starting point -- short of complete public financing -- for getting big money out of politics and letting politicians, who now spend countless hours dialing for dollars, get off the phone and back to a more egalitarian sort of pandering -- and perhaps even the occasional bit of responsible governing.

MY BLOG CRUSHES:

2003-06-03T21:15:00.000-07:00

Girl bloggers are rare, and thus deserve special mention. Yet these two females merit attention regardless of their gender. Both are witty (brutal, when need be) and, consequently, are must-reads for all That Other Blog visitors. You'll find both number-named blogs at the very top of the blogroll to the right.

Two Abes is the brand new blog of long-time friend Kara "I'm Not Sure She Wants Me To Reveal Her Name Is" Murray. She is part of the we-know-eachother-in-real-life blog solar system that includes myself, one Johnny Bardine, and Ms. (not Mr.) Jaime Mulligan. Kara is super-smart (one might even go with scary-smart) and doesn't mince words. In addition to the many benefits to her readers, her blog will hopefully pre-empt the many emailed articles with exceptionally pithy commentary that fill my inbox. The result should be fantastic.

Five Corners is the enthralling blog of a girl named Candace who was, until recently, twenty years old, but apparently now wishes a greater degree of anonymity. Thus, Candace may be fifty; I don't know. Perhaps she'd prefer I not elaborate further. Just go read her; she's brilliant.

THE WELLSTONE LEGACY:

2003-06-03T20:01:00.000-07:00

Readers may or may not be interested to note that the first tear I ever shed over a contemporaneous (read: non-Kennedy brother) political death was over Paul Wellstone. I don't consider myself especially liberal, and I flatly disagreed with the late Senator Wellstone on trade (to name but one issue). But, as a C-SPAN2 junkie, I admired his principles and his untiring struggle to do what he thought was right.

I'm a rather freshly minted twenty-two years old. Never one with much cash on hand, a political donation is low on my list of necessary expenditures. Still, before I gave to Howard Dean a few months ago, I had given two donations to political figures. One was to Sen. John McCain during his presidential campaign. The other was to Paul Wellstone, shortly before he died.

As a result of my contribution I am on a mailing list which has notified me that the Wellstone legacy of compassion and activism lives on at Wellstone.org. Paul's two surviving sons (his wife and daughter, among others, died with him in a plane crash) have set a goal of "nothing less than to jump-start a new generation of professional organizers and grassroots leaders who will run for office themselves." They have founded a camp for political activists that will pass on the lessons of the Wellstone campaigns.

Those who dismiss or otherwise don't mourn the death -- I honestly have a lump in my throat as I type his -- of Paul Wellstone would do well to examine the Wellstone Archive at Cursor for some thoughts on his life and the hole in our society left by his passing.

GOD DAMN TIRED:

2003-06-02T22:23:00.000-07:00

I am, if you'll indulge my profanity, fucking sick of these people who play the know-it-all martyr by saying that they prefer one candidate but have concluded that only such and such other candidate is electable.

The best test of whether a candidate will inspire actual people is for them to actually inspire you. And anyway, isn't a nine-person field eight months before the first vote is cast the one time, if there ever is one, to go with the guy you actually prefer?

QUOTE OF THE DAY:

2003-06-02T13:43:00.000-07:00

Ikram Saeed, of Path of the Paddle, in comments on a post over at Yglesias about how Howard Dean's height could hurt him:

He's short (which is bad), but he looks strong, with a thick neck. Almost blue-collar. It looks like if he punched you, it would hurt. That is a good image.

For those of you scoring at home, note for the record neither being short nor being a guy will get you anywhere with Matthew.

Runner-up for quote of the day goes to Calvin in the same comments thread:

I read Yglesias get catty about how Dean didn't have a fleshed-out health-care plan a few weeks ago before Dean rolled out his plan. I don't recall reading anything substantive on the site about Dean's plan after it came out. Why not?

I seem to recall some mention of the plan when it was released, but Calvin gets the gist of it about right. The complaints about Dean's lack of a fleshed-out plan (he was the second, rather than the first, of nine candidates to release one) surely outnumber commentary and analysis on the plan by a ratio of at least three posts to one. (Precise numbers elude me since most of the relevant posts seem to be 404'ed.)

And now, given this latest post, discussion of Dean's height would appear to be in a dead heat with post-release discussion of his health care plan. As the second runner-up for comment of the day -- me -- asked in the same thread as the other two honorees:

Is this really the state of the "Dean is unelectable" meme these days?

If it is, that bodes well for the governor.

QUESTION OF THE DAY:

2003-06-01T18:33:00.000-07:00

Why is That Other Blog getting hits like this one?

Domain Name: Level3.net ? (Network)
IP Address: 67.26.119.# (ARIN)

Language Setting: English
Operating System: Microsoft WinXP
Browser: Internet Explorer 6.0 Mozilla/4.0

Time of Visit: Jun 01 2003 7:49:21 pm
Page Views: 1

Referring URL: google.com
Search Engine: Google
Search Words: ariel sharon nude

Time Zone: UTC-5:00 EST - Eastern Standard
Visitor's Time: Jun 01 2003 1:49:21 pm

Answer: Because of this post which, it should be said, generated far less response than I had hoped.

And by "response" I mean discussion, not hits from a person -- who I hope is, at least, female -- searching for nude photos of the septuagenarian Israeli Prime Minister.

AM I MISSING SOMETHING?:

2003-05-31T20:39:00.000-07:00

So I'm poking around the Open Secrets database of political donations, as is my right as a citizen of the democratic wonderland where wealth equals speech equals political contributions equals access for the wealthy, and I come across the following:

Contributor: REED, BRUCE N, WASHINGTON, DC 20008
Occupation: DEMOCRATIC LEADERSHIP COUNCIL
Contribution Date: 1/23/2002
Amount: $500
Recipient: Bowles, Erskine B

Contributor: REED, BRUCE N, WASHINGTON, DC 20008
Occupation: DEMOCRATIC LEADERSHIP COUNCIL
Contribution Date: 8/7/2002
Amount: $500
Recipient: Bowles, Erskine B

Contributor: REED, BRUCE N, WASHINGTON, DC 20008
Occupation: DEMOCRATIC LEADERSHIP COUNCIL
Contribution Date: 10/20/2002
Amount: $500
Recipient: Bowles, Erskine B

Seems to me that totals $1,500. I know that the present limit for individuals is $2,000 -- but that is a result of the McCain-Feingold law which came into effect last November, after the election (in which Mr. Reed's candidate, former Clinton Chief of Staff Erskine Bowles, was one of many Democrats who were defeated during what has become known as the Centrist Slaughter).

Was it possible under the old laws to contribute the $1,000 limit to a Senate candidate for the primary campaign and then give another thousand for the general election? Or is this something else? The DLC has been pretty sinister lately. Can someone explain what's going on here?

NON-PEDANTIC QUESTION FROM PEDANTRY:

2003-05-30T07:21:00.000-07:00

Scott Martens of the highly-regarded Pedantry asks in comments:

Joe, maybe you can cast some light on this for me, since you're in Sweden. My boss is Swedish and complains endlessly about the taxes, business regulations and lack of entrepreneurial opportunities. I am in many respects inclined to ignore him since he is clearly someone with a California venture capital background, and has lived in Belgium for quite a few years without learning French or Dutch. However, I am unable to judge how accurately he is able to judge Sweden. You've basically described Sweden in a manner consistent with an American leftist who is used to seeing the near diametric opposite of social justice. Would Swedes see their own state the same way?

A couple of points come to mind, from which maybe you can cobble together a coherent thesis:

Most Swedes don't have this Manifest Destiny/take-over-the-world view of wealth. Far fewer Swedes than Americans aspire to ridiculously opulent wealth and, in fact, many are turned off by it. My girlfriend (who, it should be said, comes from a particularly red part of the North) thought the brass Home Depot doorknobs at my mother's house in New York were a bit distasteful. Most doorknobs are steel here, for whatever reason.

There is a profound lack of feelings of insecurity about personal finances. Swedes know that (for better or worse) a more tightly restricted labor market means better job security. More to the point, they know that unemployment benefits and placement are not just token programs; benefits are enough to feed your family with and Arbetsförmedlingen, the state employment office, actually places people in jobs. (Incidentally, the agency also works to place immigrants, which -- with the free Swedish classes and the information and assistance new immigrants receive from the Integration (recently switched from Immigration) Office -- helps those who in the US often wind up left up of society and the formal economy.)

The business environment favors small businesses over huge conglomerates. Again, if you want to take over the world, it's possible (Ericsson, H&M, Volvo) but the taxes are high and, because unions are powerful and "the workers" isn't quite as dirty a word here, employer-employee relations can be a hassle from an American businessman's perspective. I know more people in Sweden who have started up a small business than I do in America, for whatever that says. Also worth mentioning are the free classes on starting a small business.

Scott's boss complains about "complains endlessly about the taxes, business regulations and lack of entrepreneurial opportunities." The first two are undoubtedly true. No matter how you measure it, there are more taxes and business regulations in Sweden than in America. That said, there are more taxes and business regulations in America than in, say, Somalia, which has no central government. There, you'd just need a small private army and you could do your business tax-free and with no government "interference". The question is what kind of society you build.

To me, how a nation chooses to regulate its economy places it somewhere on an arch. At one base you have laissez faire, which doesn't build a good society, and at the other you have complete state control, which also doesn't build a good society. The country that finds the magic amalgam of free market and regulation that builds wealth, freedom and justice will be at the top of the arch. If I were president or prime minister, I wouldn't stay the course of either George Bush or Göran Persson. Perhaps controversially, I'm not sure I have a preference as to on which side of the arch it's better to err, as long as you're getting close. In any case, I think the United States is further from top than Sweden.

Sweden consistently ranks higher than the US in the UN Development report and on standard-of-living measures across the board. The Gini index that measures income equality consistently puts the two countries at opposite ends of the field; on a scale where 0 is a perfectly equal society and 100 is a perfectly unequal society, income distribution in the US is nearly twice as unequal as in Sweden.

I guess point for Americans to understand is that where Sweden regulates business and has higher taxes, it is for a moral reason. One entrepreneurial opportunity not available to Swedes is that of starting up a liquor store. The state owns and operates the only store permitted to sell anything stronger than 3.5% alc./vol. beer. That's not because they think that the state monopoly is a better economic model. They do it because they worry (somewhat excessively, I think) about the effects that loosening the monopoly would have on public health. Most Swedes support the status quo.

Americans would do well to remember that the Cold War is over. We won. No serious person on the planet favors a centrally-planned economy. But the far-right and supply-siders in the US have used the residue of Cold War rhetoric against one extreme system to justify further steps down the road towards its opposite, which is equally bad.

Just like in America, no serious person in Sweden believes that a centrally-planned economy is the right way to go. That's why they don't have one. Where they do have restrictions on business and higher taxes, it is for moral reasons. For example, it is a popularly-held moral stance in Sweden that everyone should have access to affordable health care. It is moral stance that everyone should have access to affordable housing. It is a moral stance that society cannot tolerate poverty.

I don't always agree that the way they have implemented these goals has been the best way, but they are (or should be) the goals of every society and Sweden has achieved them. Today's politics here is about how to fill the gaps and do these things in cheaper and better ways. For all its evangelists and moralizers, the United States could stand to learn from this Swedish morality.

PEDANTIC DAALDER:

2003-05-30T04:38:00.000-07:00

Also in the article cited below, Ivo Daalder, late of Clinton's national security council and now with Brookings, slipped in your smart guy's response to Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's distinction between "old" vs. "new" Europe:

Scholars note, however, that Poland and other Eastern European nations of Mr. Bush's "new" Europe date back further than nations like Germany, which Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld infamously derided before the Iraq war as part of the "old" Europe, along with France.

"They're all old — Europe is old," Mr. Daalder said. "In that sense, it's nonsensical. There are countries that are now members of the `new' Europe that predate countries of the `old' Europe. Germany was unified and became a single state long after Poland was an independent country."

I wouldn't advise any of the Democratic presidential contenders to make that the backbone of their case against the Bush foreign policy, however.

SOFT ON FRANCE?:

2003-05-30T04:32:00.000-07:00

Where are the Patriotism Police on this one? President Bush, in an interview with the French newspaper Le Figaro, on the upcoming G8 conference in France:

Mr. Bush said that Évian "will not be a summit of confrontation" and that "it will be a pleasure to talk with Jacques Chirac." He added, "Vive la France."

It will be interesting to see if this remark turns off the spigots from which a rank, xenophobic hate has been pouring of late on the American right.

AND I DON'T PARTICULARLY CARE FOR ABBA, EITHER:

2003-05-28T09:36:00.000-07:00

In the spirit of the great clarifications, I offer the following:

It has come to my attention that some readers are under the impression that I am Swedish. While I do speak (pretty awful) Swedish, live in lovely Stockholm, and partake in both the good (it's light out until after eleven at night these days; there are more beautiful people per thousand inhabitants in Stockholm than anywhere in the world) and the bad (draconian state monopoly on liquor; draconian state monopoly on liquor) of Swedish society, I am not in fact Swedish.

I am originally from New York and, despite my disagreements with the president, somehow retain US citizenship. My last place of residence was Washington, DC, in an apartment just a few short blocks from the White House and, more importantly, The Brickskeller. I have lived here for a little over six months. And to paraphrase another great qualification, yes, universal health care is real, and it's spectacular.

STIRRINGS OF A LEFT-WING CONSPIRACY:

2003-05-28T04:19:00.000-07:00

This seems like good news:

Major liberal organizations, from labor unions to civil rights groups, have begun to meet privately to develop a coordinated strategy to oppose President Bush's reelection in 2004. Their goal is to buttress the Democratic Party and its nominee by orchestrating voter mobilization and independent media in as many as a dozen battleground states.

All of the organizations are free to accept unlimited contributions, or "soft money" from wealthy individuals, unions and corporations. These donations are the kind that the new campaign finance law prohibits political parties and federal candidates from collecting.

Together, these organizations have the potential to target $40 million to $50 million in key states including Florida, Michigan and Pennsylvania. The amount could be much higher if organized labor invests heavily and a new, pro-Democratic committee gearing up to run television advertisements is successful. In addition, these organizations are expected to play a crucial role in Election Day get-out-the-vote efforts.

The conservative cabal has been doing this for years, under the auspices of Grover Norquist, he of the quest to put Reagan on the ten dollar bill and other wacky adventures, and it's a good idea for liberals to get in the game organizationally.

The project only stands a chance, though, if the famously factional liberal interest groups can show the same fascist discipline to the message of the 2004 Democratic nominee that conservative interests have to the White House line. We'll see. Surely a charismatic nominee would help.

MORE ERITREA:

2003-05-27T05:24:00.000-07:00

Incidentally, the Eritrean People's Liberation Front, which led (and won) the war for independence from Ethiopia, has an address in my building here in Stockholm. It seems that they share a tiny apartment/office with several other dodgy businesses and "foundations".

The first time I got a piece of their mail by accident I was troubled by the prospect of bumping into a Communist and/or terrorist footsoldier or financier in the elevator. But Kaplan and Google have led me to tentatively conclude that the EPLF, which now governs Eritrea in some other incarnations, is neither a particularly Communist group nor a terrorist organization in the conventional sense (Ethiopians might disagree).

ANYONE BEEN TO ERITREA LATELY?:

2003-05-27T05:16:00.000-07:00

Ezra's pointing to this Nicholas Kristof piece, which drafts Eritrea as the symbol of all that's wrong with Africa -- a case he sums up, chastises Westerners for not doing more about, and outlines his own solutions for, all in just over 700 words.

But Robert Kaplan took a not-altogether-hopeless view of the tiny country on the Horn of Africa in an April article in The Atlantic Monthly. He portrayed Eritrea far more favorably, casting it as a staunch ally in the fight against terrorism led by a man whose "refreshing, undiplomatic brilliance" could make him "yet turn out to be among Africa's most competent rulers." He also praised Eritrea's people, its culture, and even its former colonial power, Italy, for getting urban planning right (no mention of Mussolini's record on Eritrean train timetables).

So which is it? I'm inclined to go with Kaplan for a few reasons. First, he doesn't look as much like a Chia Pet as Kristof. Second, Kaplan presents more of both the pluses and minuses, largely owing to the fact that he has more space in which to write about them.

It's tempting to give Kristof a pass because of the space consideration. But the better conclusion is that Kristof's goal of describing, wringing hands over, and solving the complex problems facing sub-Saharan Africa is part of the very problem he claims to be fighting: Western neglect. His column's pretensions represent the very arrogance and fitful interest he condemns.

That said, anyone read any good books on Eritrea lately?

NAKEDLY POLITICAL:

2003-05-26T18:45:00.000-07:00

Lots of footage of Ariel Sharon on CNN this week so far. Reports that the Israeli cabinet had accepted the Bush "road map" to piece were occasioned by clips of the prime minister walking through some hallway or other. More recent stories about his defense of the plan against right-wing critics brought pictures of a sitting Sharon. This extensive visual input got me thinking about just how fat Ariel Sharon really is.

Anticipating charges of political bias or, worse, anti-Semitism, I briefly panicked before realizing that Yasser Arafat is no Slim Jim himself. Feeling pretty even-handed, I realized I would object with equal fervor to seeing either man naked. Peace in the Middle East seemed closer at hand than ever. Finally, something Israelis and Palestinians could agree on: both peoples have ugly, obese (and probably smelly) leaders.

Naturally, this raises the more general question: what public figure would you least like to see naked?

The related question of which public official you would most like to see naked seems likely to get sticky (of course I mean "complicated"). I'd rather not open myself and any commenters so charges of sexism by identifying, say, Louisiana Senator Mary Landrieu, or Swedish Foreign Minister Anna Lindh, or Phillipine President Gloria Arroyo, or Michigan Governor Jennifer Granholm, or Norwegian Defense Minister Kristin Krohn Devold as the politician I'd most like to see nude. Far better to ask the equal opportunity question of who's probably most hideous without clothes.

And so, my provisional "bottom five" in no particular order:

Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon

Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat

Former US Attorney General Janet Reno

Chairman of the House International Relations Committee Henry Hyde

Maryland Senator Barbara Mikulski

The first three seem pretty obvious, but I challenge readers to best those last two. It's awfully hard to imagine wanting less to see someone naked, but suggestions are welcome. Be careful not too imagine to vividly.

UPDATE: Reader SD notes in comments that many may not have a mental image of Hyde and Mikulski, so here are two headshots of Hyde that really don't do justice to his DeVito in Batman figure and two more of Mikulski that, well, don't do justice to her DeVito in Batman figure.

TURKEY IS TOPS IN EUROPE:

2003-05-25T10:27:00.000-07:00

Given that most readers probably weren’t glued to their televisions listening to an apparently crazy Austrian guy in suspenders, That Other Blog is pleased to provide a brief recap of the Eurovision song contest in something approaching journalistic prose. Our intrepid reporter caught some of the program before going out, and periodically glanced at the television in the bar, which was tuned to the song contest but on mute.

Turkey’s goal of being welcomed into the community of Europe may be that much closer after their entry in the Eurovision song contest, held last night in Riga, Latvia, was voted the best by the people of twenty-six nations. The contest, a decades-old European tradition, pits pop songs against one another in a night of live performances which viewers call in to rank.

Turkey’s entrant, Sertab Erener performing “Every Way That I Can”, like all of the other participants, won a national contest to decide who would represent their country. Turkey finished just ahead of Belgium and Russia, which was represented by T.A.T.U., the not-so-heterosexual girl duo which is a favorite of the very heterosexual Matthew Yglesias. Russia had been the favorite to win because of the star power of the girls, but caught a tough break when contest officials required that the girls remain clothed.

Britain surprised many by finishing dead last. They received no points in the voting, which means that no country put the British entrant, Jemini, on its list of the top twelve songs. (Viewers call national hotlines that tabulate votes for the best song, with the most popular song receiving twelve points and the twelfth most popular receiving one point.) It was the first time in the history of the contest that Britain didn’t receive any votes; some commentators posited that the collective cold shoulder was backlash over the British role in the war in Iraq.

Here in pop-crazy Sweden, there was disappointment that its duo, Fame, finished only fifth. The male-female pair were both contestants on an American Idol-like program here called Fame Factory, and seemed to have perfected the “art” of very pretty people earnestly singing so-bad-you-hope-it’s-kitschy music.

Latvia won last year and so was the host for this year’s contest. In keeping with tradition, next year the event will be broadcast live from Turkey.

UPDATE: Fellow expat in Europe Vaara has some excellent coverage here and here, where he refers to the event as "an annual campfest" of "utter irrelevance to North Americans".

WHOSE DRUG WAR?:

2003-05-24T05:48:00.000-07:00

Matt Yglesias takes up the role of heterosexual sentry protecting us from hypocrisy in response to a Kos post that uses the phrase "the Bush Administration's ridiculous 'war on drugs'". Matt is mostly right when he says that:

They inherited it from Clinton who inherited it from Bush who inherited it from Reagan and I don't know what the policy was like before that. ... [T]his is a bipartisan screwup and has been for many years. Bush is part of the problem, but just a small one.

He has a point, but I think it's also a matter of degree of wrongness and the fervor with which one pursues the wrong policy.

It seems that these days several billion more dollars are being spent and lots more military "advisers" are being deployed to train a weak national army facing guerilla insurgents, all in the name of winning the War on Commun-- I mean, Drugs -- no, wait, Terrorism? -- down in Vietn-- sorry, Colombia.

Apologies. All these protracted wars being fought with short-sighted, counterproductive tactics against scary, monolithic enemies get confusing. I need to go lie down.

WOE IS ANONYMITY:

2003-05-23T12:58:00.000-07:00

Huge congratulations to fellow DeanBlog contributors Ezra Klein and Matt Singer, who earned mentions in The New Republic today in a piece by Ryan Lizza on the Howard Dean internet phenomenon. The article is great and outlines all the aspects of the Dean campaign's internet presence (so far).

Devoted That Other Blog readers will be delighted to note that Lizza quotes a piece first published right here. He writes:

Anyone who writes critically about Dean can expect his copy to be chewed up by this army of zealous Dean Internet scribes. When I wrote a piece recently that contained a few paragraphs about Dean, a member of the Dean2004 blog team filed an almost 2,000-word entry slicing my article up into sections with labels such as "true," "false," "inadvertently true," and "foolish."

That's me! He's referring to this piece of mine, which dissected his analysis of the 2004 race (it was also posted at the DeanBlog). I'm a fan of Ryan Lizza, so I hope he's not mad. In any event, I plan to consider being less obnoxious in the future in hopes of next time being attributed by name.

Though perhaps he did me a favor by not appending my proper name to such traits as zealotry, membership in a metaphorical army, and (implied) long-windedness.

WRONG QUESTION:

2003-05-23T06:52:00.000-07:00

Ezra Klein cites a recent poll of Pennsylvanians on homosexuality and concludes that:

[Sen. Rick] Santorum's recent remarks didn't hurt him much at all, he was simply representing the feelings of his constituents.

I'm not sure that's entirely true. Culling the figures from the article, it appears that the poll showed the following:

-- Asked whether they "personally believe homosexual behavior is morally acceptable or morally wrong," 58% said it was morally wrong; 27% said morally acceptable; and 14% were undecided.

-- Santorum got the same approval rating he did in April, before the comments (55%).

But those aren't the statistics that matter. It's pretty obvious from those numbers that Pennsylvanians have a less-than-sophisticated view on homosexuality, but some other numbers cast them (or some of them) in a slightly better light:

-- Asked whether they thought that "homosexual relations between consenting adults should be legal or not," 45% said legal; 35% said illegal; and 19% were undecided.

-- Santorum's disapproval rating went from 20% before to 33% after the comments, with the number of undecided voters dropping from 24% to 12%.

Those numbers get more to the point of Santorum's comments: that homosexual acts, in addition to being morally wrong, should be illegal:

"And if the Supreme Court says that you have the right to consensual sex within your home, then you have the right to bigamy, you have the right to polygamy, you have the right to incest, you have the right to adultery. You have the right to anything."

It's a shame he wasn't hurt more by that, but I wouldn't write off the effect completely. The real question is whether this modest outrage will remain salient until the next time Santorum faces the voters in 2006.

HOWARD DEAN & ME: A LIBERTARIAN'S CONFESSION:

2003-05-21T06:45:00.000-07:00

It is marginally painful physically to write this, sort of the same discomfort I felt yesterday when I realized that my new driver's license photo looks a bit like Scott Peterson after he was arrested. I never thought I'd see the day when I'd support a Democrat for president. This is not to say I am a Republican -- far from it. Readers of the now-seemingly-defunct El Blog Regular will note that I have written several anti-Bush posts. But I have never -- and still do not -- adhere to the labels liberal (except in the classical Lockean sense) and Democrat. Indeed, the linear conception of the political spectrum is outdated and obsolete. The cross-pattern model works much better, as Howard Dean demonstrates. So it is with some trepidation that I announce my support for Howard Dean for President in 2004. He addresses the right concerns and asks the right questions, and in the context of present conditions, has most of the right answers. I was never planning on voting for Bush, and the other Democratic candidates make me throw up in my mouth. So if Dean doesn't win the nomination, I don't know what I'll do. I may have to write-in my dad.

Luckily, Howard Dean's very detailed website serves as an excellent guideline for expounding upon the reasons for my support; I have selected a few of the more pertinent issues:

Universal Healthcare
I am a libertarian, and have been for as long as I can remember. But I now firmly reside on planet Earth, and I think that is a fairly new occurrence. In the realm of governance, there is Democratic turf; there is Republican turf. There is not, however, Libertarian turf, so then the libertarian -- when he is not off stockpiling beenie-weenies and starting militias -- must choose which turf makes the most sense. I do not believe that people have the right to health care. But an inescapable fact of reality is that we have a welfare state. America has a government that provides various social programs; they fund these programs through taxation. It is time for reasonable libertarians to give up the fight for a taxless society. Instead, we should work toward spending what we must pay in a cost-effective fashion. That's exactly what Governor Dean's health care plan accomplishes. Health care may not be a right, but it certainly is a desirable thing. And if we can do it in a reasonable way, we should. Dean's does that, which is a far cry from the unworkable monstrosity that is Gephardt's plan. Dean's idea is much less complicated and has actually been implemented on the state level. As he writes, "This plan is affordable and simple, relying on three existing systems -- one for children, one for seniors, and one for those in between -- which all Americans can understand." There are many flavors of libertarianism, but I think this plan sits well with most in the Jeffersonian vein.

The Economy
I am a libertarian who opposes tax cuts. I know; even I can't reconcile it. I buy into the notion that those who earn the most money deserve the most in tax relief, principally, because those at the bottom of the economic ladder hardly pay any taxes as it is. But the Bush Administration's economic plan is deceitful and hugely irresponsible, especially when coupled with the spending orgy in which they are currently engaged. One used to be able to count on the Republican Party for fiscal responsibility, but they seem to have abandoned that notion. With unemployment surging, a weakening dollar, a war to pay for, and lack of investor confidence, now is not the time for astronomical tax cuts that will plunge the nation deeper into debt. If enacted, it will be the most unstimulative stimulus package ever. David Gergen makes a good point of this here. Dean's plan calls for the repealing of the first tax cut -- one that I thought was a good idea at the time, but that was when we were sitting on a huge surplus. Nobody wants higher taxes, but it seems like a reasonable trade-off in order to avoid record deficits.

Homeland Security
President Bush has not made our country safer since September 11. As Governor Dean is fond of saying, Bush hasn't funded local first responders as promised. 98% of all America-bound ships are not inspected. I won't reiterate what Dean wants to do, since it's all right here, but it is substantive, all-encompassing, and protects us at the domestic level. Also, Dean makes it clear that he will not trample over the Constitution, as the Bush Gang is attempting with Big Brother-esque tactics like the USA Patriot Act and the Total Information Awareness Program. At the core of the libertarian model is both the defense of property and the defense of individual rights. Howard Dean accomplishes both.

National Security
Howard Dean is mostly right on national security. He's spot on about Iraq. I'm no fan of the UN or of France, but there's little use squabbling with our friends when there's important work to be done. And a coalition of UN and NATO forces in Iraq will 1) help the rebuilding process substantially; 2) ease the financial burden from us; and 3) dismiss the perception that the US is an occupying force in Iraq. He further rightly understands that the Israel/Palestine conflict and the North Korean crisis are pivotal issues for world affairs, while promising to continue the war on terror.

Where I differ is my concern that Dean's foreign policy could lend itself to over-reliance and dependency on international institutions. It seems to me that refraining from action without broad international consent is as foolish as hegemonic unilateralism. But Dean is essentially right: having a foreign policy in which people like us once in a while is a good thing.

Reproductive Rights, Equal Protection, and Gun Control
These three issues really make up the meat of the libertarian ethos. Dean is right on the mark too, whereas the Republicans have historically dropped the ball on the first two, and has too easily given in to the gun lobby on the latter. The rights of the individual to make decisions freely and live privately is most overtly manifested in a woman's right to choose, and of men and women to choose to marry whom they wish. Dean will uphold these rights. A President Dean will not appoint a zealot like Priscilla Owen to a lifetime judgeship. On gun control, he takes a states' rights stance, and is rational enough to be palatable to most libertarians.

Those are the stances Dean takes on the key issues for this election. Libertarians wondering who to support should ask themselves: "Which candidate will be devoted to fiscal responsibility, peace and security, and the protection of our fundamental rights?" The answer is Howard Dean. Now if only he can do something about that creepy grin.

A HEIGHTENED STATE OF ANNOYANCE:

2003-05-21T05:37:00.000-07:00

Matthew Yglesias likes girls. He doesn't, however, like the color-coded terror alert system, which was raised yesterday to orange (Note that the link is via The New York Times, so it could be a lie, but as I've seen this elsewhere, we'll assume it's true.). I agree that the system is pretty annoying and awfully stupid, but too much criticism seems a bit unfair.

Yglesias says that, "If the government doesn't have any better way of assessing the threat than watching CNN to see if anyone's been blown up lately, then I think we all have reason to worry." That's not exactly what happens. This marks the fourth time the terror alert has been raised from yellow to orange. The three preceding instances were spurred by calendar events--the first was on the eve of the anniversary of September 11, the second coincided with a Muslim holiday, and the third was two days before the war in Iraq began. If anything, it seemed like Department of Homeland Security was raising the level after reading "Islam For Dummies." But this last time is the first time they've changed the terror alert level in response to actual terror, and it seems justified. Also, the Administration would sure be in a mess-up if there was a terror attack and they did not forewarn us.

The chief criticism against the system is that it is unclear what the public is supposed to do. How much more "vigilant" can we be? I have no idea what a "heightened state of awareness" means. We can't very well go around reporting every swarthy guy in a van. But I think the system can be useful to local law enforcement, and the rest of us might be inclined to report something we would otherwise ignore. Also, I'm not an intelligence analyst, as Yglesias purports to be, but I don't really see why the infamous "chatter" is "obviously B.S." Yeah, this terror alert system is a bit silly, but it's what we've got, and it's better than doing nothing.

SELFLESS RICH PEOPLE?:

2003-05-21T04:57:00.000-07:00

I concluded a post below about Warren Buffett's article in the Post opposing the dividend tax cut (despite the fact that stands to gain a lot from it) with the following line:

It's awfully sad that achieving a fair tax policy in this country requires outspoken selflessness from the rich.

But is Buffett really even being selfless? He wants more money just as much as the next guy. It's not like he's retired, even though he could be since he's already filthy rich. His argument is not a charitable one, it's an economic one. He knows that he'll be better off in the long term with a fair distribution of the tax burden, which will create more economic growth and social justice: both essential to wealth building.

The broken record reply to any criticism of tax cuts for the very wealthy is that the rich pay more taxes in the first place, and so it is only logical that they receive a larger cut. This is deceiving.

As Buffett demonstrates, we’re not talking about everyone getting a proportional tax break here, with the rich just getting a higher dollar amount. We’re talking about fundamentally altering the balance of how the tax system works. Eliminating the dividend tax, the capital gains tax, and the estate tax permanently alters the landscape of who pays what -- to the permanent disadvantage of those making less than $350,000 a year (that’s the cut-off for Al Gore’s fabled top 1%).

Of course rich people pay more in taxes (both in dollars and as a percentage of income) than poor and middle-class people. It’s called progressive taxation. The idea is for those who can most afford it to pay for the services -- education, health care, military -- that provide the safe, healthy, well-educated society that makes wealth-building possible.

ONE MORE THING:

2003-05-20T18:40:00.000-07:00

I'm reluctant to even mention this because they guy's not running, but there is one other Democrat who talks a tougher game than the president on national security and opposed the Iraq war: General Coy -- I mean, Clark.

There are two problems with Clark, and they make it risky having him in either slot on the ticket. First, if someone like Howard Dean or John Edwards or even John Kerry chose Clark for the two-slot, there would be a huge risk that he'd be seen as window dressing at best, or that the ticket was light on top at worst.

Second, a run by Clark in his own right faces the obstacles of a very late fundraising start and the huge unknown of the career military officer's campaigning skills. Say what you will about how politicians govern, but running for office is one thing they do well. It's hard to see how Wesley Clark fits into this race.

HEY HOWARD, IT'S GOTTA BE GRAHAM:

2003-05-20T18:36:00.000-07:00

I hate veepstakes speculation this far out as much as the next guy, but I have to get this out.

I've already written that any eventual Democratic nominee is going to have a hard time not choosing Bob Graham as his running mate. But today I concluded that Bob Graham is best suited as a number-two to Howard Dean. He's the only other serious Democratic candidate not to have succumb to the rah-rah cheerleaderism of the Bush foreign policy agenda (Joe Lieberman, I'm looking in your direction) -- and he's resisted it for the same reason as Dean.

Bob Graham is a former governor from the South, both good things in terms of how Democrats have won the White House recent history. But perhaps more importantly, he is "outraged" at the Bush administration on all matters national security-related.

Barring some unforeseen catastrophe during the primaries, he has assured himself a spot on the ticket. Bob Graham needs only to make a respectable third- or maybe even fourth-place showing in the first several primaries in order to secure himself the second spot. No matter who wins the nomination, he'll be an attack dog on terrorism and national security, equally serious and equally credible up against Dick Cheney. And, of course, he's from must-win Florida, where he remains hugely popular.

Graham's virtues notwithstanding, if you've been reading this site at all, it's abundantly clear that I'm for Dean. There's been a lot of speculation that Dean's opposition to the war in Iraq will hurt him if he winds up facing President Bush. I think that's wrong. Dean wasn't (and isn't) opposed to war per se, just this particular war at this particular time.

Surely we could go and overthrow Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe and Alexander Lukashenko in Belarus and that would be a Good Thing in the cosmic sense. But just like Iraq, they're neither here nor there when it comes to assessing threats to the United States. Howard Dean has been making, and will continue to make, the case that while the president has pursued his pet project of deposing Saddam he has dropped the ball on North Korea, Al Qaeda, and homeland security.

Here's where Bob Graham comes in. Many people forget that he's the only other serious candidate to have opposed the war -- he voted against the Iraq resolution. Here's what he said then:

Even if we say the number one issue should be containing weapons of mass destruction, especially nuclear weapons, I frankly do not believe that Iraq should be our first concern.

We do not know the full capabilities of the state of Israel, although we believe it has the full capability to defend itself against attacks or the threat of an attack. We are aware of the significant threats posed by India, Pakistan and Iran. But I can say without fear of contradiction, all of these possess substantially greater capability and means of delivering weapons of mass destruction than does Iraq.

Of all of the issues that we care about, and those over which we have some ability to determine the outcome, in my judgment, the number one priority should be the war on terrorism and the protection of the people in the United States, our homeland. Our top targets should be those groups that have the greatest potential to repeat what happened on September 11, killing thousands of Americans.

Sound familiar?

There is among Democrats a seemingly contradictory consensus that the Democratic ticket must be tough on foreign policy and not concede Bush any ground on the issue. Folks like Dennis Kucinich and Al Sharpton are too peacenik to be credible; footage of Joe Lieberman and Dick Gephardt fawning over the president during and after the Iraq debate will show them giving the president a pass without the benefit of making them look tough.

It seems that the only Howard Dean and Bob Graham resolve this problem. Sort by charisma and you've got yourself a ticket: Dean/Graham in 2004.

RICH GUY SAYS TAX CUT FOR RICH PEOPLE IS BAD:

2003-05-20T17:15:00.000-07:00

Via Kos I see this piece in the Post by Warren Buffett, which I'll just reproduce in full with some editorial emphasis added:

DIVIDEND VOODOO

By Warren Buffett

Tuesday, May 20, 2003; Page A19

The annual Forbes 400 lists prove that -- with occasional blips -- the rich do indeed get richer. Nonetheless, the Senate voted last week to supply major aid to the rich in their pursuit of even greater wealth.

The Senate decided that the dividends an individual receives should be 50 percent free of tax in 2003, 100 percent tax-free in 2004 through 2006 and then again fully taxable in 2007. The mental flexibility the Senate demonstrated in crafting these zigzags is breathtaking. What it has put in motion, though, is clear: If enacted, these changes would further tilt the tax scales toward the rich.

Let me, as a member of that non-endangered species, give you an example of how the scales are currently balanced. The taxes I pay to the federal government, including the payroll tax that is paid for me by my employer, Berkshire Hathaway, are roughly the same proportion of my income -- about 30 percent -- as that paid by the receptionist in our office. My case is not atypical -- my earnings, like those of many rich people, are a mix of capital gains and ordinary income -- nor is it affected by tax shelters (I've never used any). As it works out, I pay a somewhat higher rate for my combination of salary, investment and capital gain income than our receptionist does. But she pays a far higher portion of her income in payroll taxes than I do.

She's not complaining: Both of us know we were lucky to be born in America. But I was luckier in that I came wired at birth with a talent for capital allocation -- a valuable ability to have had in this country during the past half-century. Credit America for most of this value, not me. If the receptionist and I had both been born in, say, Bangladesh, the story would have been far different. There, the market value of our respective talents would not have varied greatly.

Now the Senate says that dividends should be tax-free to recipients. Suppose this measure goes through and the directors of Berkshire Hathaway (which does not now pay a dividend) therefore decide to pay $1 billion in dividends next year. Owning 31 percent of Berkshire, I would receive $310 million in additional income, owe not another dime in federal tax, and see my tax rate plunge to 3 percent.

And our receptionist? She'd still be paying about 30 percent, which means she would be contributing about 10 times the proportion of her income that I would to such government pursuits as fighting terrorism, waging wars and supporting the elderly. Let me repeat the point: Her overall federal tax rate would be 10 times what my rate would be.

When I was young, President Kennedy asked Americans to "pay any price, bear any burden" for our country. Against that challenge, the 3 percent overall federal tax rate I would pay -- if a Berkshire dividend were to be tax-free -- seems a bit light.

Administration officials say that the $310 million suddenly added to my wallet would stimulate the economy because I would invest it and thereby create jobs. But they conveniently forget that if Berkshire kept the money, it would invest that same amount, creating jobs as well.

The Senate's plan invites corporations -- indeed, virtually commands them -- to contort their behavior in a major way. Were the plan to be enacted, shareholders would logically respond by asking the corporations they own to pay no more dividends in 2003, when they would be partially taxed, but instead to pay the skipped amounts in 2004, when they'd be tax-free. Similarly, in 2006, the last year of the plan, companies should pay double their normal dividend and then avoid dividends altogether in 2007.

Overall, it's hard to conceive of anything sillier than the schedule the Senate has laid out. Indeed, the first President Bush had a name for such activities: "voodoo economics." The manipulation of enactment and sunset dates of tax changes is Enron-style accounting, and a Congress that has recently demanded honest corporate numbers should now look hard at its own practices.

Proponents of cutting tax rates on dividends argue that the move will stimulate the economy. A large amount of stimulus, of course, should already be on the way from the huge and growing deficit the government is now running. I have no strong views on whether more action on this front is warranted. But if it is, don't cut the taxes of people with huge portfolios of stocks held directly. (Small investors owning stock held through 401(k)s are already tax-favored.) Instead, give reductions to those who both need and will spend the money gained. Enact a Social Security tax "holiday" or give a flat-sum rebate to people with low incomes. Putting $1,000 in the pockets of 310,000 families with urgent needs is going to provide far more stimulus to the economy than putting the same $310 million in my pockets.

When you listen to tax-cut rhetoric, remember that giving one class of taxpayer a "break" requires -- now or down the line -- that an equivalent burden be imposed on other parties. In other words, if I get a break, someone else pays. Government can't deliver a free lunch to the country as a whole. It can, however, determine who pays for lunch. And last week the Senate handed the bill to the wrong party.

Supporters of making dividends tax-free like to paint critics as promoters of class warfare. The fact is, however, that their proposal promotes class welfare. For my class.

The writer is chief executive officer of Berkshire Hathaway Inc., a diversified holding company, and a director of The Washington Post Co., which has an investment in Berkshire Hathaway.

It's awfully sad that achieving a fair tax policy in this country requires outspoken selflessness from the rich.

ABSENTEE DICK:

2003-05-20T16:49:00.000-07:00

So I was getting ready to point out that the fact that Dick Gephardt has missed 85% of all votes in the House so far this year is bad, but not for the reasons that you might think, when who but RNC spokesman Jim Dyke goes and says something reasonable:

“All of the candidates have been here for all the votes where their vote was needed to win,” said Jay Carson, a spokesman for Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle (D-S.D.). “As long as that remains the case, it’s not an issue.” ...

“It’s not just votes they miss. They miss the negotiations, they miss the discussions,” said RNC spokesman Jim Dyke. “So when Gephardt goes out and talks about energy policy and how important it is, not only did he miss all the votes on energy legislation, but he missed being a part of the discussions that led to the legislation.”

If I find myself agreeing with an RNC spokesman again in the next six months this blog will self-destruct.

TACITUS GOES BRIEFLY CRAZY:

2003-05-19T19:18:00.000-07:00

Tacitus takes time off from being a pretty reasonable conservative to post this monster about why he's not a Democrat. It's not that I expect him to be a Democrat, of course. The problem is that this essay is a strange departure from the usually self-conscious and rational posts many are used to reading. There's something emotional going on -- in particular some lingering fear of Communism and a romanticizing of the American South -- and that's all well and good. Party affiliation has as much to do with socialization (by one's parents, by one's community) as it does with policy preferences.

But Tacitus should just leave it at that. When he moves beyond seeing Reagan's first inauguration in person, living under Communist threat South Korea, and his time spent in the South, what purports to be some sort of "case" about why one guy chooses to be a Republican reads more like a tortured rationalization of childhood nostalgia.

Now, it's one thing to define yourself as not something; it's another to make a positive case for what you are. Leaving aside the fact that he doesn't bother to outline an argument for being a Republican, let's examine a bit of his case against Democrats.

Right off the bat we're in a strange place. In accusing Democrats back in the day of being soft on Communism he makes the following qualification:

Make no mistake, there were some truly great anticommunist Democrats -- men who fully understood and loathed the communist threat and all it represented. Two things happened to those Democrats: first, they lost control of their party's soul around 1968 or so; second, many if not most of them became Republicans.

Yeah, people like Trent Lott and Jeff Sessions -- racists. They left the party with George Wallace, and Richard Nixon gobbled them up. Party shifts from Democrat to Republican occurred almost exclusively in the South and had nothing to do with Communism. Some even took their time and became Republicans well after the Cold War had ended; when the GOP took over Congress in 1994 a few Southern Democrats crossed the aisle to be part of the new majority, knowing that as Democrats they no longer held the balance of power.

Two sentences later things get worse:

The effect of the much-derided Reagan military buildup (including the Star Wars program) on Soviet strategic thinking is well-documented, and the policy of confrontation (including, in places like Afghanistan and Nicaragua, violent confrontation) bore self-evident fruit.

First of all, there is now some contention among academics who immerse themselves in the ever-growing mountain of opened Soviet archives that the massive, unfinished, unsuccessful Star Wars program had any effect at all on Soviet military expenditures. Second, the policy of proxy confrontation in Afghanistan bore one awfully rotten piece of self-evident fruit: Osama bin Laden. Virtually everywhere else this policy propped up the most odious of dictators and in many cases to this day leaves authoritarian rule or failed states in its wake.

You're saying to yourself: But surely the eminently reasonable Tacitus has some refutation for -- or at least acknowledges -- these drawbacks, doesn't he? The very next sentence astounds:

... bore self-evident fruit. You'll hear a lot of rationalization these days that these policies were irrelevant, affecting events not at all or at best hastening the inevitable. Don't believe it: they're the losing side's posturing for the historians.

One can say a lot of things about the decision to arm Islamic militants not just like but including Osama bin Laden, but "irrelevant" and "affecting events not at all" surely aren't among them.

He goes on to criticize Bill Clinton's "precipitate withdrawal from Somalia," forgetting that it was the first President Bush who sent the troops in there in the first place. And then there's the "an utterly pointless Kosovo war" remark, which seems utterly bizarre given that liberation from a mass murdering dictator has become the ex post facto casus belli for the recent Republican-supported Iraq war, and was all that the war in Kosovo was ever about. Of course no critique of Clinton foreign policy would be complete without reference to his "thoroughly inglorious and shamefully un-energetic response to the terrorist threat" which, until several thousand people were murdered on American soil, his Republican successor had addressed with no more glory or energy.

If you can believe it, the rest of the piece is even less convincing than what I've excerpted so far. I hope readers will forgive me for my un-energetic response to the rest of this essay. I am and will remain a regular Tacitus reader, but some arguments simply aren't worth the time to refute -- well, my time, anyway. For some writing more characteristic of the Tacitus many love, see this piece on the budget and this very thoughtful post on the military (one of many).

KEEP PREACHING:

2003-05-19T13:01:00.000-07:00

More from Dean this weekend in Iowa (video here):

When I go to the South -- you know how I plan to win in the South? It's a hard place for Democrats to win. I'm going to say to our African-American base, "We support you, we need you, and we're going to talk to your issues." But then I'm going to say to Souther whites, "You've been voting Republican for 30 years. What do you have to show for it? There are 103,000 uninsured kids in South Carolina; most of those kids are white. Has your job gone to Indonesia? Have you had a raise in the last five years? Are you satisfied with the quality of your public schools? Because if you don't like the answer to that question, you ought to think about voting Democratic again. Because when white people and black people vote together in this country, this country moves forward."

PREACH ON:

2003-05-19T12:51:00.000-07:00

An excerpt from Howard Dean's remarks at the "Hear it from the Heartland" forum in Iowa this past weekend (video here):

A lot of people say, "Well how's this guy from Vermont gonna win? He wants to get rid of the president's tax cuts! How's he gonna win in the South?" Here's what you do: we're not gonna say, "Oh, let's get rid of the president's tax cut -- all the money went to the wealthy." I don't think class warfare works. What we're gonna say is: You have a choice, Americans. You can have the president's tax cut or you can have health care that can never be taken away. You can have the president's tax cut or you can fully fund special education so class size can go down and your property taxes can go down. You can have the president's tax cut or you can have the 20% of the federal highway grants that the president cut to every state this year because he couldn't manage the money. Now, if you put it that way, most people are gonna say, "Well, I want to have the roads, the education, and the health care," -- because they didn't get the president's tax cut.

TWO BLONDES IN JERUSALEM:

2003-05-19T12:37:00.000-07:00

In apparent belief that Americans could stand to know even less about the Middle East, Fox News and CNN have sent two news actors to cover the region. Fox has sent Laurie Dhue, best known for being hot, who will presumably deploy her extensive TelePrompTer-reading experience to help Americans understand the complexity and gravity of the conflict there.

Her competition, Kelly Wallace of CNN, is a former junior White House correspondent whose official bio notes her hard-hitting coverage of "White House reaction to the ... Elian Gonzales custody case." You will recognize her as the woman with the pink sweater tied jauntily 'round her shoulders and the tight-skinned face that looks as if she's just "chosen poorly" in the skin-melting Indian Jones and the Holy Grail sense (note the especially skeletal hand in her publicity photo).

I suppose their deployment means that the foundering peace process is expected to take up more air time, which would seem to be a good thing. But while more attention does need to be paid to the globally-significant continuing violence in Israel/Palestine, I'm skeptical that these non-experts with zero foreign reporting experience and no language skills can do anything but reinforce stereotypes and tow the Bush administration's line.

AN ODE TO OSE:

2003-05-18T10:01:00.000-07:00

C-SPAN watchers are in for even less interesting committee hearings now that Rep. Doug Ose is retiring. I don't have any evidence of this, statistical or anecdotal, but I assure you that Ose is one of the dumbest guys on the planet. He scores some points for not fitting the cunning, cynical manipulator profile of your average Congressman; if he were slightly less dumb he might be a sort of benign joke. As it stands, he's a terrible caricature of of a TV attorney when questioning witnesses at a hearing. He's unbearable and it's scary (and inspiring in a backhanded way) that he could have been elected to Congress.

Come to think of it, some circumstantial evidence does support my dumb thesis. (Wait a minute....) First, there is something unjustifiably dumb-sounding about the name "Doug Ose". And then there's the photo. You make the call.

I CAN TASTE MY COMTEMPT:

2003-05-17T19:04:00.000-07:00

It's been an emotional wander through Blogistan today. Atrios is usually a good place to drum up some rage and Politics, Law and Autism can usually be counted on for some autism-related sorrow, but today the two streams converged like the tandem floodlights needed to produce a clear bat-signal. Today the call is for an asshole's destruction.

So this guy Michael Savage -- whose show I have never seen but who I somehow know is, in reality, named Michael Weiner -- has reportedly characterized increasing autism rates as a "way to drum up business" (for whom? non-profit schools for autistic children that survive on donations?) and questioned whether autism is a disease at all.

If you aren't sure that he's completely fucking wrong, you need to get a clue. For more about autism you can click here for some links to various resources or visit the autism links at P.L.A. (at the left). Dwight Meredith of P.L.A. offered an example of his personal experience with autism in his response to the Savage news:

After my son fell into an autistic shell, he would spend hours sitting on the floor just staring at his latest obsession. We did not yet know enough about autism to know how to break his obsession and gain his attention. For more than two years, I would come home from work each day and greet Bobby with a cheery “dad’s home.” Each day, Bobby would completely ignore me, refuse to even look in my direction and simply continue staring at whatever he was locked into at the moment. To gain Bobby’s attention I had to physically place myself between Bobby and the object on which he was focused. As we gained knowledge and skill, we worked very hard to teach Bobby how to make eye contact and how to attend to people. One day as I came home from work and greeted Bobby, I noticed that he shifted his eyes slightly in my direction. We rejoiced.

Over time, after much more effort, Bobby would turn his head and acknowledge that I was there. Later, he began to come toward me to show me the object of his focus. Today, when I get home, Bobby will see me and smile, pleased with my presence. He will approach me for a hug and a quick spin. He may even pull up his shirt in an effort to get tickled. If I tickle him, he will be sent into spasms of laughter and joy. It took us more than five years to go from a complete disregard of my presence to an interactive game in which he expresses joy in human interaction. What exactly does Mr. Savage find in that behavior that calls out for mocking?

Bobby will be eight years old next month. He is non-verbal. Through many years of speech therapy, applied behavioral analysis and other techniques, my wife and I, Bobby’s teachers and therapists, and Bobby have all worked endless hours to get Bobby to talk. We have been unable break through the autism to attain speech. Last month, Bobby brought me his shoes and my car keys. That is way of asking if we can take a ride in the car. As Bobby and I approached the car, Bobby in tones clear as a very fuzzy bell said, “ride in car.”

My heart leaped. Fighting the urge to run back into the house to tell my wife (which would have provided negative reinforcement for Bobby's success by delaying the reward of a ride), I started saying “good talking Bobby, very good talking Bobby.” When Bobby asks for a ride in car with words, Bobby gets to ride in the car.” With a quick hug I put him in the car for a ride. During the ride I tried to prompt Bobby to say it again. “What is Bobby doing?” Is Bobby riding in the car?” Does Bobby like to ride in the car?” Twice more on the trip, he responded by saying “ride in car.”

After Bobby showed no sign of saying anything further I returned home and rushed into the house to tell Deb the news. As she was lavishing praise and hugs on Bobby for his “good talking,” tears of pride and joy were running down her cheeks and mine.

Our toil is long and difficult, our triumphs rare and Bobby’s progress may seem to others to be marginal. Bobby’s progress is the reward of his hard work and ours. We revel in the successes and try to think of the failures as part of the journey to success.

Two of my nieces are autistic. There is no question that the disease is real. Nor is there any doubt as to the utterly heroic -- there isn't another word -- effort necessary to overcome it. Donate to Ascent: A School for Individuals With Autism and/or beat the shit out of Michael Weiner if you see him.

SOME BLAIR FICTION:

2003-05-17T05:37:00.000-07:00

I didn't comment on the Jayson Blair fiasco at the Times mostly because I find the substanceless vignette journalism in which he engaged -- whether truth or fiction -- to be a boring waste of time. When I want news, give me some imageless facts and ugly graphs in The Economist over a "moving" portrait any day. Save the rest of it for the New York Review or Granta where literary nonfiction belongs.

The piece below, which came in a McSweeney's email this morning, is the most interesting treatment of the episode that I have seen so far. If you're not subscribing to McSweeney's, a quarterly of fiction and journalism, you're not subscribing to McSweeney's. And that's bad.

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A S O M E W H A T L I K E L Y C O N V E R S A T I O N
F E A T U R I N G T W O , A N D P O S S I B L Y T H R E E ,
S H A M E D J O U R N A L I S T S .

A N E W W O R K B Y B E N G R E E N M A N

What follows is an alleged transcript of a conference call between writer Ben Greenman and two other journalists who have recently made headlines: Stephen Glass, who was fired from The New Republic in 1998 after the discovery that several of his pieces were fabricated and has recently written a novel, The Fabulist, based on his experiences; and Jayson Blair, the New York Times reporter who was cashiered last week following revelations of extensive plagiarism and falsification.

Mr. Greenman claims to have contacted both men while on assignment in Washington, D.C., researching the possibility of a previously unknown naked room in the basement of a Congressional building. As he is a journalist, we have no reason to trust him.

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BLAIR: Before we begin, I wanted to remind you that Stephen and agreed to speak with you only on the condition that this be off the record.

Q: I know.

GLASS: That means that nothing we say here can be used in print. You understand that?

Q: You're reminding me about fundamental journalistic principles?

GLASS: I just need to be sure that we're all on the same page.

Q: Got it. Off the record. Let's start with Stephen. While you were a journalist, paid to create nonfiction, you wrote fiction. Then you took a large advance to write a work of fiction and ended up writing a nonfiction, or at least heavily autobiographical fiction. Does this sum up the paradoxical nature of your career thus far?

GLASS: Yes.

Q: And yet, the risk and invention that characterized your nonfiction pieces if largely absent from your novel, which offers up a somewhat traditional narrative that mixes romantic comedy and fuzzy confessional? Through most of the book, you, or your main character Stephen Glass, is paralyzed as a result of his misdeed, doesn't know what course to take, and just wishes that someone would love him: It's like Bridget Jones's Aporia.

GLASS: Well, I wanted to create a trustworthy narrator. That was my main objective. That meant toning down the lying considerably. I think I accomplished that.

Q: I don't know. You may have. I didn't read the book. Okay, now let's turn to Jayson. Before I ask you this first question, Jayson, I should mention that I'm standing on a wooden porch in rural American somewhere. Let's say Georgia. Next to me is Linda Polk, a woman whose nephew was killed in the first Gulf War. Later she became a peace activist. Very moving. It's picturesque here.

BLAIR: I know. I've been there. Say hello to Mrs. Polk for me.

Q: Jayson, why did you do what you did? In its unprecedented correction, the Times painted a picture of an eager young reporter who fell off the rails, who was both disorganized and lazy, and who spent much of his time working on a book proposal while pretending to fly around the country conducting interviews. Is this accurate?

BLAIR: I would have told the story quite differently.

Q: How so?

BLAIR: It might have been set on a wooden porch in rural American somewhere. Let's say Georgia. Next to me there would have been someone sad who represented a national tragedy. I don't know, maybe a woman whose nephew was killed in the first Gulf War and who later became a peace activist. The whole thing would have been picturesque and very moving.

Q: You just stole that from me!

BLAIR: Your word against mine.

Q: But you have no credibility left.

BLAIR: This isn't just about me. As you know, Stephen and I have hurt the credibility of all journalists by violating the trust between reporters and readers. Some people will believe you; some will believe me.

Q: That's what's most interesting about these two cases -- everyone wants to talk about how the two of you have eroded the foundation of American journalism, but have you? Both of you were caught and drummed out in dramatic fashion. Do you think that there's an element of scapegoating, and that you're being selectively prosecuted for large-level deceits that happen all the time, albeit to lesser degrees?

GLASS: Hadn't really thought about it. Mostly I've been trying to forgive and/or promote myself.

BLAIR: Same here. Remember, we're opportunistic narcissists, not philosophers.

Q: You know what? Rather than bother with reporting, I think what I'm going to do is make up some comically exaggerated dialogue for the two of you so that I can recast this as a piece of satire.

GLASS: What do you mean?

Q: I'll show you. Did you consider any other titles for your book?

GLASS: I wanted to call it Empty Glass, after the great album by Pete Townshend, but he said he didn't want to be associated with me. Can you imagine? A guy who was caught with kiddie porn on his computer doesn't want to be associated with me?

Q: See. That's made up. You never said that. But you could have.

BLAIR: This is an outrage. You can't do this!

GLASS: Please, Jayson. Isn't it time we showed some generosity toward another person?

BLAIR: Even another journalist?

GLASS: Yes. Even another journalist.

BLAIR: Now that has to be made up.

Q: No, that's one's legit. He actually said that.

BLAIR: Wow. That's messed up. Steve, you're one conflicted dude.

Q: One final question and then I'll let you go. Did one of you invent the other one?

[Long pause]

Q: Come on. If you did, you should confess. It's good for the soul, remember?

[Long pause]

GLASS: Okay, I admit it. I invented Jayson.

BLAIR: And I admit it. I invented Stephen. I hope that clears the air. You can read all about it in my forthcoming book. I'm thinking of calling it The Fabulist.

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Ben Greenman's collection Superbad is available in hardcover from McSweeney's Books. The paperback will be published in January, 2004, and will include a reasonable amount of new material.

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RULES AND NORMS:

2003-05-16T08:05:00.000-07:00

Taking time off from his pursuit of exclusively female companionship, Matt Yglesias wonders about how other democracies handle judicial appointments:

So do other liberal democracies have these interminable bitter fights about appointing judges? My impression is that they don't. If not, why not. And if we know how other countries can avoid this sort of mess, is there any way we can imitate them?

The only case I have any familiarity with is Canada, where there seems to be nothing besides a strong norm preventing the Prime Minister from abusing his appointment powers in pretty much any way he sees fit. The norm seems to have held up well so far, which is good for them, but not really something we can decide to imitate.

Contrary to the implication that our system is broken, I think that "this sort of mess" is exactly the right way to do it. As the Times wrote in a recent editorial (to which Matt linked approvingly), "Senators who demand that federal judges have a record of standing up for equality for women and minorities are not obstructing — they are doing their jobs."

There is no "crisis" in the judicial nomination process. The present stalemate on two nominees has not prevented the confirmation of many others at a pace similar to that of recent history. That these two nominees (Estrada and Owen) are being held up is the result of a breakdown of political norms, not of the rules of the game.

Matt is right that political norms aren't enough of a safeguard against abuse of power (in any instance, including the appointment of judges). But checks and balances must work in tandem with political norms that run against trying to subvert those rules. As we see presently, the Senate power of advice and consent isn't worth a damn as far as getting seats filled -- it relies on a president being willing to select mutually palatable candidates for judicial vacancies.

If Matt's analysis of Canada's system is correct, a Prime Minister Bush could do bad things. Thankfully we've got checks and balances here that formally restrain those who would disregard political norms for short-term political gain. Where only norms guard against abuse, things can become desperate for the minority party. Regrettably, Texas legislators had to improvise this week when Bush/Rove/DeLay decided to disregard the political norm of only redistricting when there is a new census.

It seems that outside the Anglophone world, established liberal democracies tend to be more consensus-based. Britain addresses this consensus deficit with a fantastically confrontational parliament; the prime minister takes a drubbing in the Commons with some regularity. One of the major faults of the American system is that it lacks both the consensus-building incentive of a multi-party system and the lack of accountability in the executive that is the hallmark of the British system. So we end up with a president not interested in the norms of judicial nominations or redistricting, but who won't be held to account in a direct debate with his main opponent until some fifteen months from now.

If there is to be a change in the system, I think it should be that the president be required to hold weekly press conferences and a monthly televised debate with some opposition figure. It wouldn't build consensus, but it would bring some much-needed accountability.

ENDORSING JOE LIEBERMAN:

2003-05-15T12:11:00.000-07:00

Matt Yglesias, whose sexual practices are not undermining the American family, writes that he's been meaning to blog about endorsements for a while, and then goes right ahead and does:

One can't help but think that endorsements from Bill Clinton or Al Gore would be extremely valuable commodities in the 2004 primaries. Those guys have better name recognition and more street cred than anyone in the race, and as a certified expert on the topic of getting elected, Clinton's views on the important (to me, at least) question of electability carry a lot of weight. I assume, though, that for the sake of party unity Clinton won't endorse anyone and will just get behind the nominee when the time comes. Al Gore, on the other hand, has an obvious candidate to endorse, namely Joe Lieberman. It seems like only yesterday that Al Gore's position was that Al Gore should be president of the United States and that Joe Lieberman should be second in line for the job. Now Gore's out of the running, so that seems to leave Lieberman.

In that context, failing to get behind Lieberman is something of a rejection, even if the stated reason is simply that Gore isn't going to endorse anyone. A Gore endorsement, on the other hand, could help Lieberman out with what is by far his biggest problem, namely the fact that the party base doesn't trust him.

I actually hadn't been meaning to blog about endorsements, because I already did. Indeed, so did Matt; readers who click that archive link will receive the added bonus of a link to a now-404ed Yglesias post on the same subject. In addition to the surreal experience of an archived Blogger post out-living something published with Moveable Type, readers will find an excerpt from that piece in which Matt said pretty much the same thing he said today:

I think, though, that Gore will have to endorse Lieberman, since it wouldn't make Gore look particularly good to turn on him. The question then becomes whether it's a tepid, reluctant endorsement or a serious one. One's also got to wonder if Bill Clinton will decide to involve himself at some point.

In the spirit of repetitive camaraderie, I'll just re-post a version of what I've already said:

I disagree with Matt. I would be surprised if Gore makes an early endorsement. Indeed, it would seem distasteful for him to speak up for Lieberman. His position in the party seems comparable to DNC chair; I can imagine him campaigning for the eventual nominee, but would be surprised if he endorses Lieberman explicitly.

And really, why does Gore owe Lieberman anything? Crystal clear hindsight reveals that Lieberman turned out to be a far worse choice of running mate than Bob Graham, who would have delivered Florida, and possibly even John Edwards, who might have helped Gore in the South. Lieberman was dead weight during the recount in 2000 and even caved into GOP agitprop on Meet the Press. (Military ballots are somehow intrinsically more valid than absentee ballots? Come on, Joe.)

Also, it's not like Lieberman wasn't preparing to run for president while waiting for Gore to decide. He was in New Hampshire and Iowa. He was interviewing staff and building a donor network. Indeed, his coyly vocal conditional candidacy made his one of the first names out there as the candidate field developed. His "I defer to Al" pledge was essentially a self-serving attempt to create the presumption that if Gore was re-nominated (a likely prospect if he had run) Lieberman would be the number two again.

Now that he's out, Gore should stay above the fray, if for no other reason than choosing the wrong horse could be fatal. You've got to expect to see Gore in 2008 if the president is re-elected. He's carrying about as much "loser" baggage as he can afford. Endorsing a losing candidate in the primary -- for whatever reason -- won't ease that load.

And -- digressing -- Lieberman should lose. He's a reactive candidate; he is positioning himself relative to the others in the field (more hawkish, more moralist, more business-friendly) without elucidating just what any of that means for a Democrat other than simply supporting President Bush more of the time.

For all his posturing, I see Lieberman as convictionless. The Third Way has two distinct variations: candidates like Bill Clinton and Howard Dean, who run on a balanced budget and new ideas, are New Democrats. Candidates like Joe Lieberman and several losers of Senate races in 2002, who mimic conservative rhetoric and abandon traditional Democratic values like greater access to health care and better education, are Scared Democrats.

Lieberman's campaign will be as his record has been: lacking a coherent ideal and proposing no clear agenda. Lieberman perfectly represents certain no-vision Democrats on a slow, opportunistic trickle toward a place with a very coherent ideal and a crystal clear agenda: the Republican Party.

HOW TO MORALIZE IN POLITICS:

2003-05-13T13:29:00.000-07:00

Joe Lieberman, take note: Howard Dean is doing the right kind of moralizing when he calls providing access to affordable health care "a moral imperative". He realizes that there are more important moral issues -- poverty, poor education, sick children -- for government to concern itself with than the puritanical revival tent sex-police priorities of the Republican Party.

Whining about Hollywood and calling yourself "pro-family" -- what does that mean, anyway? that you don't want to be single? -- are cop-out moral stands for Republicans, and Democrats aren't going to get elected by imitating them. Phony outrage against rap music and bare butts on TV take the place of what should be real outrage over the fact that in the wealthiest, most powerful country in history millions of people still live in poverty, still can't see a doctor when they need to, and still aren't provided a decent education.

This is exactly what Republicans want. They want government in your bedroom when you're having sex, but not when you're home sick in bed. They would rather pay for you to be in jail for having a certain type of sex than pay for you to be in the hospital for a broken leg.

Howard Dean is right. Health care for everyone is a moral imperative. And he's out there telling Republicans that they should be ashamed of themselves for not supporting it. That's a real moral stand -- and a winning message for Democrats, too.

Also up at the unofficial DeanBlog for those who care about such things.

'NON-PLAN' NOW BEST PLAN:

2003-05-13T11:26:00.000-07:00

Dean gave a great speech (pdf) and the plan is everything I hoped it would be -- that is, it makes affordable insurance available to virtually everyone, costs less than Dick Gephardt's, and actually covers me.

When you take a look at the details, Dean's plan is better for everyone from kids (which means me, since he covers everyone up to age 25) to businesses (Gephardt's plans creates huge new costs for them that drain the economy), and a whole lot better than President Bush's plan to do nothing but ignore the problem and bankrupt the country.

GO READ THIS:

2003-05-13T10:16:00.000-07:00

Tim Judah, in Baghdad, shows once again why he's one of the best in the business.

GAMING EVOLUTION:

2003-05-13T03:50:00.000-07:00

Lots of bloggers track their evolution in the Truth Laid Bear's Blog Ecosystem. It crawls the web and finds links to a given blog, and then ranks them. That Other Blog, for instance, started out like all blogs as an Insignificant Microbe but has evolved into a Flappy Bird. No Men Matt, who maintains a much bigger blog than this one, ranks much higher, coming in at Mortal Human, just on the cusp of Higher Being.

Ezra Klein noted his evolutionary progress in a recent post (congrats, Ezra). I noted in comments that one way to move up the food chain faster than normal is to contribute to another blog and constantly refer to your own site in posts there. (Ezra had made a three-self-referral post at the unofficial DeanBlog on that same day.) This potential to game the system was news to Ezra.

Of course, when playing God with the ecosystem one can be good or evil. The evil tends to get annoying (any more than two or three unnecessary referrals to yourself in a DeanBlog post gets on readers' nerves). But one can do substantial good. For instance, one can give Matthew Yglesias a couple of gratuitous links that have nothing to do with what you're talking about.

This gives Matt a boost in the ecosystem and will help him eventually overtake Little Green Footballs (no link for them), a really, really, really nasty site and the USS Clueless (also unworthy), a monster of verbose stupidity that is for some reason widely read despite its Star Trek theme. This is clearly a Good Thing.

It's important to note that linking to the same post over and over again -- as we do here to the post where Matt lets us know he know that it's girls he likes -- doesn't help him in the ecosystem (we plan to keep it up anyway).

SAME PIECE, SLIGHTLY ANGRIER:

2003-05-12T18:00:00.000-07:00

The New York Review also offers up a more shrill version of the piece excerpted in the post immediately below this one. Russell Smith, a columnist for the Toronto Globe and Mail, gets pretty mad for a Canadian:

CNN was more irritating than the gleefully patriotic Fox News channel because CNN has a pretense of objectivity. It pretends to be run by journalists. And yet it dutifully uses all the language chosen by people in charge of "media relations" at the Pentagon. It describes the exploding of Iraqi soldiers in their bunkers as "softening up"; it describes slaughtered Iraqi units as being "degraded"; some announcers have even repeated the egregious Pentagon neologism "attrited" (to mean "we are slowly killing as many of them as we can"). I don't know if I'm more offended by the insidiousness of this euphemism or by the absurdity of its grammar.

To recite from a Pentagon press release that an Iraqi division has been "degraded by 70 percent" is an astounding abdication of journalistic responsibility. A journalist these days must not just report the facts, but also explain the news, give it color and significance. The graphic reality of "degradation" is a large pile of dismembered bodies. Surely some picture or explanation of what the wiping out of an entire division with high explosives actually looks like is called for.

Many readers and watchers of the news were baffled as the battle for Baghdad came suddenly upon us without any large-scale engagement with the dreaded Republican Guard. What happened to those three or five divisions that were supposedly ringing the city? The facts of their destruction were grudgingly mentioned almost in passing. They were destroyed from the air. This did not make a glamorous or even central story to anyone's coverage of this war, because there were no embedded reporters with the Iraqi troops. It's hard to get a TV camera into a line of trenches that is being puréed by bombs. Instead of reporting that this peripeteia in the war's narrative was happening, and that it entailed thousands of deaths leading to the rapid collapse of the Iraqi regime, the television and the press simply downsized the story. No pictures, no story. This is the real meaning of "degradation."

This shorter, feistier article is -- like it's longer, more detailed counterpart -- required reading for any American whose war media diet was exclusively home-grown.

THE MEDIA AND THE WAR:

2003-05-12T17:23:00.000-07:00

The same article mentioned in the last post, by Michael Massing in the New York Review of Books, has some damning and absolutely dead-on criticism of how the media handled the war:

So stingy is Centcom with information that, at the daily briefings, the questions asked were often more revealing than the answers given. Those posed by European and Arab journalists tended to be more pointed and probing than those from the Americans. The Europeans and Arabs would ask about the accuracy of US missiles, the use of weapons containing depleted uranium, the extent of civilian casualties. The Americans would ask questions such as: "Why hasn't Iraqi broadcasting been taken out?" "Is Iraq using weapons prohibited by the UN?" "Can you offer more details on the rescue of Jessica Lynch?" One US network correspondent told me that she was worried that, if she pushed too hard at the briefings, she would no longer be called on. Jim Wilkinson was known to rebuke reporters whose copy he deemed insufficiently supportive of the war; he darkly warned one correspondent that he was on a "list" along with two other reporters at his paper.

After each briefing, correspondents for the major satellite networks would stand up in back and give a live report before a camera. Sometimes I took a seat nearby and listened. The British correspondents invariably included some analysis in their reports. After one briefing, for instance, James Forlong of Sky News observed that Tommy Franks had left the briefing to his "fourth in command" (i.e., Brooks), and that "very little detail had been provided." Referring to a question about a friendly-fire incident, Forlong noted that Brooks had little to say other than that the incident was "under investigation." CNN's Tom Mintier, by contrast, would faithfully recite Brooks's main points, often with signs of approval. "They showed some amazing footage of a raid on a palace," he said when introducing a clip that had been shown at the briefing, one of many that CNN aired.

Such differences in style were apparent in the broadcasts themselves. Switching stations in my hotel, I often found myself drawn to the BBC. With two hundred reporters, producers, and technicians in the field, its largest deployment ever, the network offered no-nonsense anchors, tenacious correspondents, perceptive features, and a host of commentators steeped in knowledge of the Middle East, in contrast to the retired generals and colonels we saw on American TV. Reporters were not afraid to challenge the coalition's claims. When an anchor asked Paul Adams, a BBC defense correspondent, whether Iraqi fighters were using "quasi-terrorist tactics"—a common Centcom charge—he said it was more appropriate to speak of "asymmetrical warfare," i.e., the use of unconventional tactics by forces that were badly outgunned. At the same time, the BBC presented many stories about the horrors of Saddam's rule. In one chilling piece, it had an interview with an Iraqi woman in London whose family members had been murdered, raped, or tortured by the regime.

At times, the BBC seemed relatively slow and ponderous. When the tape of Saddam's appearance in the streets of Baghdad was shown on al-Jazeera, the BBC took ten minutes longer than other networks to air it. A feature about Günter Grass and his visceral hatred for America seemed to be repeated endlessly. All in all, though, the BBC maintained a consistent standard of skepticism toward all sides. "We're very conscious that our audience is not just a coalition audience but an international one," Jonathan Marcus, a correspondent for BBC Radio, told me. "Tone, style, and terminology are all employed with that very much in mind. That has sharpened our journalism enormously."

The BBC got some stiff competition from Sky News. With a much smaller staff than the BBC, this London-based channel (partly owned by Rupert Murdoch) seemed far more nimble. One of its correspondents, Geoff Meade, became known at the media center for his sharp, if sometimes grandiloquent, questions. When Baghdad was about to fall without the discovery of any weapons of mass destruction, he asked, "Is this war going to make history by being the first to end before its cause could be found?" Among Sky's regular commentators, Con Coughlin, a biographer of Saddam and a Daily Telegraph editor, explained how Baath Party loyalists would likely have been recruited to play a part in Saddam's allegedly spontaneous street appearances.

After watching the British reports, I found the American ones jarring. In my hotel, MSNBC always seemed to be on, and I was shocked by its mawkishness and breathless boosterism. Its anchors mostly recounted tales of American bravery and derring-do. After the US attacks on the Palestine Hotel and the offices of al-Jazeera in Baghdad, MSNBC brought on its resident terrorism expert, Steve Emerson, who insisted—before any of the facts were in—that the attacks were accidental. MSNBC's "embedded" reporters, meanwhile, seemed utterly intoxicated by the war. In one tendentious account, Dr. Bob Arnot—normally assigned to the health beat—excitedly followed his cameraman into an unlighted building where two captured Iraqi fighters were being held near the entrance while a group of women and children could be seen in back. "They're fighting outside," Arnot said with indignation. "Here in the front are RPGs [rocket-propelled grenades] used to kill Marines, and in the back are these women and children—civilian hostages. And they're terrified." But terrified of what? The captured men in the front room? The fighting outside? Were they being held against their will? Arnot never asked.

Before arriving in Doha, I had spent hours watching CNN back home, and I was sadly reminded of the network's steady decline in recent years. Paula Zahn looked and talked like a cheerleader for the US forces; Aaron Brown kept reaching for the profound remark without ever finding it; Wolf Blitzer politely interviewed Washington's high and mighty, seldom asking a pointed question. None of them, however, appeared on the broadcasts I saw in Doha. Instead, there were Jim Clancy, a tough-minded veteran American correspondent, Michael Holmes, a soft-spoken Australian, and Becky Anderson, a sharp and inquisitive British anchor. This was CNN International, the edition broadcast to the world at large, and it was far more serious and informed than the American version.

The difference was not accidental. Six months before the war began, I was told, executives at CNN headquarters in Atlanta met regularly to plan separate broadcasts for America and the world. Those executives knew that Zahn's girl-next-door manner and Brown's spacey monologues would not go down well with the British, French, or Germans, much less the Egyptians or Turks, and so the network, at huge expense, fielded two parallel but separate teams to cover the war. And while there was plenty of overlap, especially in the reports from the field, and in the use of such knowledgeable journalists as Christiane Amanpour, the international edition was refreshingly free of the self-congratulatory talk of its domestic one. In one telling moment, Becky Anderson, listening to one of Walter Rodgers's excited reports about US advances in the field, admonished him: "Let's not give the impression that there's been no resistance." Rodgers conceded that she was right.

CNN International bore more resemblance to the BBC than to its domestic edition—a difference that showed just how market-driven were the tone and content of the broadcasts. For the most part, US news organizations gave Americans the war they thought Americans wanted to see.

That's only a fifth or so of the larger piece, which everyone should go read right now.

AGITPROP CAN GET YOU A JOB:

2003-05-12T16:58:00.000-07:00

I had missed this tidbit during the war:

The Coalition Media Center is managed by Jim Wilkinson, a fresh-faced, thirty-two-year-old Texan and a protégé of Bush's adviser Karen Hughes. Wilkinson made his mark during the 2000 presidential election when he spoke on behalf of GOP activists protesting the Florida ballot recount. To run the media center in Doha, Wilkinson, a member of the naval reserve, appeared in the same beige fatigues as the career officers working under him. Nonetheless, the center had all the earmarks of a political campaign, with press officers always "on message." Many journalists, accustomed to the smoothly purring Bush political machine, were struck by the heavy-handedness of the Doha operation. A week into the war, journalists began writing their own "media pieces," as they called them, comparing the briefings to the infamous "Five O'Clock Follies" of the Vietnam War.

Turns out the Bush administration is even more Bolshevik than I had been aware. Good comrades will have recognized Wilkinson's name from the People's Monument in Miami that commemorates the day the oppressed masses of white Republican Congressional staffers rose up, left their cubicles for Florida, and set about physically intimidated local election officials in a patriotic defense of democracy.

JIM JORDAN IS STILL A BAD GUY:

2003-05-12T04:14:00.000-07:00

Kerry Campaign Manager Jim Jordan is at it again, doing his faux-incredulous thing in the newspaper. We already knew he was willing to discredit himself with the old misrepresent-and-spin routine. This time he's "surprised" at how personal the Dean campaign's attacks on John Kerry and the other candidates have been. Here's the quote, which appears two weeks to the day after Kerry campaign spokesman Chris Lehane questioned Dean's fitness to serve:

"There's no secret that we think Mr. Dean's rhetoric has been hot and a little bit personal — with a number of Democratic candidates, not just Senator Kerry. I think he has questioned their character in a way that is surprisingly personal, surprisingly early."

Needless to say, he didn't provide examples or address Lehane's comments.

The contrast between Jordan's contrived surprise and Dean Campaign Manager Joe Trippi's affability is striking:

"I think they are more tightly wound than we are," said [Trippi]. He stopped and started to laugh as he considered his own words.

That contrast carries over to the candidates. Take this quote from Dean and just try to imagine John Kerry uttering these words:

"I was surprised when I looked at the debate at how grumpy I looked. I think I was just more stressed than I realized."

If any further Dean/Kerry spats play out as this one has, it's fine with me. Though let's hope that Kerry's jackals can control themselves so there won't be any.

MOST DETAILED NON-PLAN SET TO BECOME ACTUAL PLAN:

2003-05-12T02:56:00.000-07:00

The second-most-detailed health care plan in the Democratic race for president is about to become tied for first:

Former Gov. Howard Dean of Vermont will unveil details on Tuesday of a health care plan that his aides argued would cost less than half of one offered by Representative Richard A. Gephardt of Missouri, a fellow Democratic presidential candidate. They also said it would bring more Americans into the system.

Dr. Dean's plan would expand programs that offer health coverage to children of the working poor; provide a new private insurance benefit, with a tax credit, for people who cannot afford even reduced premiums; and give tax incentives to businesses that offer coverage.

"We're going to do it as a side-by-side with Gephardt's plan," said Dr. Dean's campaign manager, Joe Trippi. "It will provide coverage for more Americans than the Gephardt plan and would cost under half of what the Gephardt plan would cost."

Mr. Gephardt would repeal most of President Bush's tax cut to pay for a universal health care plan that by some estimates would cost $247 billion by the third year.

Dr. Dean, a physician, would expand a current program that subsidizes health care for children of the working poor to cover people up to age 25 and to adults who meet income guidelines.

Mr. Trippi said the package also would offer private coverage equivalent to that given to federal workers at reduced rates.

Since many people get insurance coverage through the workplace, Mr. Trippi said the Dean plan also would focus on employers. For employers of more than a specified number of workers, Dr. Dean would put in place tax incentives for providing health insurance. Businesses that drop coverage could face a tax penalty, which he figures would make it more likely that employers would continue coverage.

Even before he reveals his full plan, Dean is the candidate with the most serious health care proposal except for Dick Gephardt, who has a very detailed plan that won't cover me. With Dean putting out his full proposal, the question becomes: how long can the other serious candidates go without publishing theirs?

EDWARDS IS BLEEDING:

2003-05-12T02:33:00.000-07:00

I was actually wincing as I read this article, the product of an extensive investigation by The Hill of donations to Sen. John Edwards's presidential campaign. The details are remarkable and very, very suspicious. Read the entire piece for the seemingly endless cases of apparent shenanigans. Here's the big picture:

Sen. John Edwards’ presidential campaign finance documents show a pattern of giving by low-level employees at law firms, a number of whom appear to have limited financial resources and no prior record of political donations.

Records submitted to the Federal Election Commission (FEC) show these individuals have often given $2,000 to the North Carolina Democrat, the maximum permitted by law.

In many instances, all the checks from a given firm arrived on the same day — from partners, attorneys, and other support staff.

Some of these support staff have not voted in the past, and those who have voted include registered Republicans, according to public records on file with various county registrars of voting.

Edwards’ campaign records also reveal that many of these individuals’ spouses and relatives contributed the maximum on the same day. The Hill found many of them to be first-time givers. Some have no previous demonstrable interest in politics, while others appear to be active Republicans.

These revelations are bad, and the Edwards campaign's response -- saying that the matter "doesn’t concern us" -- is not helping. And the fact that $7.4 million still can't buy Edwards double-digit showing in New Hampshire means that Edwards is bleeding -- badly.

Still, he's got a lot of dough and he could decide to get these allegations under control. I'm not ready to declare him officially dead, as I have Joe Lieberman, but it's getting close.

NOT THE WORST:

2003-05-12T01:34:00.000-07:00

Policy preferences aside, Joe Scarborough was always one of my favorite Congressmen. His retirement was a disappointment for C-SPAN junkies everywhere. He is a sometimes reasonable guy and far from the worst guy who could have represented his heavily Republican district. So far as I can tell, he was one of the few non-whores in Congress and, to compound the disappointment, his successor is kind of a dork.

He's got a talk show now. It is disappointing that his signing came as a result of cable news learning the wrong lesson from the Donahue disaster. Media executives have apparently concluded that it was the liberal in Donahue that sunk him. I'm a pretty liberal guy and I couldn't stand Donahue, so I'm tempted to conclude that it was not the liberal but the boring that was the problem.

Nevertheless, though I don't support the expansion of conservative bias in the media, MSNBC, like Florida's 1st district, could have done worse. At the very least, Scarborough is honest about Fox News, which is more than can be said for most conservatives:

Fox isn't No. 1 because they've got the best talent," he said. "Even though O'Reilly is great TV -- I think he and Larry King are the two real pros on cable TV -- I said, `It's not talent. It's not that they produce the shows better than you guys. It's that they're conservative. It's ideology and ideology alone.

Tabloid-style, sensationalist journalism and people screaming at each other also play a role, but at least he's speaking candidly.

He goes on, though, to say that, "98 percent of the people who watch cable news are conservatives or moderates," which I am not so sure about. Ninety-eight percent? If he thinks that simply being conservative will be enough, he's got another thing coming. What drives the popularity of people like Bill O'Reilly and Sean Hannity is not only that they are conservatives -- it's that they're assholes. If being conservative was the only criterion, then, well -- okay, so I'm having trouble naming a high-profile conservative who isn't an asshole. Elizabeth Dole! If being conservative was the only criterion, then Elizabeth Dole would have a TV show.

More on Scarborough's asshole deficit:

"I don't think you have to come out brandishing your sword and telling everybody, `Agree with me or else you're spinning.' There's sort of a condescending tone with some of the other shows."

Confrontation can distress him. Every time things have heated up with a guest, Scarborough has gone to a commercial break thinking he has failed.

"Everybody will say, `Oh, no, no, that's great TV - people love that,"' he said. "I just don't think they do, over time. I really don't."

By most accounts, Scarborough isn't an asshole. He's witty and interesting, if often wrong. But then, so was Alan Keyes, and his show was unbearable.

GOOD FAITH EFFORT AND A "ROAD MAP TO PEACE":

2003-05-11T21:17:00.000-07:00

Since last fall, on my regular blog I have used the phrase "good faith effort" ad nauseam to describe any number of things -- from Iraqi compliance, to Bush's foreign diplomacy, to the tax cut package, and to this post's topic, the Israel-Palestine Conflict. But I'm certain I've never said "X is making a good faith effort." Rather, it's always been the counterpositive; no one makes a good faith effort at anything anymore. That problem persists with the Road Map To Peace -- a purported plan to solve the Israel-Palestine crisis. This situation is decidedly complicated, but several things remain clear to most everyone.

First of all, it will take more than a "road map" to repair this crisis. It might require the entire atlas (I apologize for the previous sentence; I don't have much map humor in old repertoire, and this situation isn't funny at all). That much was apparent after Secretary of State's Colin Powell's meetings with Prime Ministers Ariel Sharon and Mahmoud Abbas on Sunday. This road map should serve as an impetus to peace, but instead it is an impediment, as Israel refuses to accept it wholly, and both sides stall on who makes the first move.

I don't profess to be an expert on this subject, but it seems to me that at the core of the conflict should be the human desire to stop innocent Israelis from being blown up while grocery shopping and to cease the subsequent bulldozing of innocent Palestinians' homes. But it's not. Again, there's no good faith effort exhibited. Deep mistrust paralyzes both sides, and with good reason.

First, Abbas is suspect. One immutable truth was that the peace process could not move forward until Yasir Arafat was gone. Well he is gone, but now we have to deal with his hand-picked replacement who just finished instating his Arafat-picked cabinet. There is nothing to suggest he is little more than a puppet for Arafat -- and we all know where the puppeteer's hand goes. So not much has changed; we are still left with a Palestinian prime minister with a questionable commitment to peace. But maybe not, if we pay attention to remarks Abbas is reported to have said privately. While speaking cautiously in public, "a senior State Department official said that in private meetings, Mr. Abbas went further than he had previously. The official pointed to a statement by Mr. Abbas about "the oneness of authority in all its aspects" under Palestinian rule, and said those were "code words" to express intolerance of other groups that claimed to represent the Palestinians and carried out acts of violence on their behalf.

"He was much more explicit in private," the official said of Mr. Abbas, adding that he would start a dialogue with militant groups but that if some kind of cessation of violence could not be achieved that way, "he was looking to uproot the violence."

The Washington Post concurs:

A senior State Department official told reporters that Abbas was "much more explicit in private" with Powell about dealing with the violence. "There is already a firm commitment to go all the way" to dismantle the groups, the official said.

The official added that U.S. officials did not sense any disappointment among the Palestinians. Powell was "able to convey from the Israelis a willingness to work together, to meet, to take steps."

I seriously question the truthfulness of the last paragraph, as exemplified in the Times article:

Mr. Abbas, however, was less than conciliatory toward the Israeli side, declaring that the Palestinians had already taken many steps sought by the United States while Israel had taken none.

He cited his own repeated rejection of violence by Palestinian groups and the fact that the Palestinians, unlike Israel, had
accepted the peace plan known as the road map, which was drafted over the last year by the United States, Russia, the European Union and the United Nations.

But the first part is heartening. It is important because it shows Abbas realizes that, in order to gain trust, he must distinguish between terrorist groups like Hamas and "real" Palestinians; he must exhibit that the PA does not condone or aid the suicide bombers. It also show Abbas's understanding that no talk of peace deserves to be had amid a climate of violence. But still, caution is advised. Let's not forget Abbas also goes by Abu Mazen, and you should never fully trust someone with an alias.

A second reason for mistrust is Ariel Sharon's reluctance in accepting the peace plan. He was, by far, the least forthcoming of any participant at Sunday's meetings. His three-year-old-brat posturing has to soften to get the ball rolling. He refused to refer to this plan as a road map, to specifically state any actions Israel will take, and this was abundantly clear to the Palestinian side:

"There is no Israeli commitment to the road map, and this is an extremely negative matter, a matter which shows we face an impasse and real difficulties," said Yasser Abed Rabbo, minister of cabinet affairs under Mr. Abbas.

Powell was equally frustrated:

"I think it's important not to get so hung up on a particular word or a particular statement that we lose the opportunity to get started, to get going," he said. "There will be more than enough time in the future to discuss some of the more contentious issues that will have to be dealt with. But right now, let's get started."

In Sharon's defense, he made -- or said he would make -- some good will gestures to the Palestinians, who were largely unimpressed:

With Mr. Sharon at his side, Mr. Powell also said Israel would take "positive steps in the days ahead" to ease the hardships of Palestinians, perhaps timed with his visit to Washington to meet with President Bush next week. He declined to provide details.

This evening an Israeli official maintained that Israel had lifted travel restrictions today on at least some Palestinians with work permits, allowing them to travel from the West Bank to their jobs in Israel. But it was unclear how extensive this step would actually be, and there were indications that the Palestinians were regarding this step as no more than a token gesture.

Something is better than nothing, I guess.

It seems clear that Israel will have to make the first move to bring this plan into fruition. This does not mean they have to make total concession in order to see reciprocity. Enough of an effort has to be made first, however, to show that Israel wants to see a democratic Palestinian state. Then the PA can show that they acknowledge Israel's right to exist. I think a workable "road map" might look like this:

1. Israel removes 60% of all checkpoints. It allows all those with valid work permits to pass. This is the first step in order to get the process underway, and is substantial enough for the Palestinians to know that Israel is committed.
2. The Palestinian Authority takes decisive steps to suppress, dismantle, and hold accountable all Palestine-supporting terrorist groups.
3. After a sustained period of non-terrorism, and visible action by the PA, Israel removes the remaining checkpoints as well as eases other restrictions on Palestinians.
4. Israel systematically dismantles all settlements, returning all land it seized in 1967 (which is also required by numerous UN resolutions).
5. Palestine does not have the "right of return" for refugees from the 1948 war.
6. If, at any time, Palestinian terrorism resumes, Israel has the right of self-defense, but only insofar as it pursues in earnest the perpetrators. For example, finding the groups responsible is acceptable; bulldozing Palestinian homes is not.
7. Any breach of these terms will go before the United Nations, who can then act as an arbitrator (or punisher), to get the process back on track. The United States will not arbitrate disputes unilaterally, but has input in the UN Security Council.
8. Presto. Democratic Palestine in 2005.

That's my dumb plan. It seems simple enough, in my mind. And painfully obvious. And if an idiot like me can construct it in 10 minutes while writing a blog at 1:30 EST, it can't be that difficult. The real "road map" is similar in its key components, and seems, thusly, simple and obvious. And it is, if both parties can begin to trust one another, and be secure in the knowledge that they share the same objective. A good faith effort will be enough to get the ball rolling. The next test will be on May 20, when Sharon meets with President Bush in Washington. Some think that this meeting will spur real concessions on the part of Israel. We'll see, and we'll hope for a lasting resolution to this problem. This problem is the fulcrum upon which all other regional problems rest.

THE TAX CUT DEBATE:

2003-05-11T10:42:00.000-07:00

Matthew Yglesias, heterosexual male, rightly poo-poos the pathetic Democratic rhetoric against the Republicans' duplicitous and just plain dumb tax cut plan. Democrats' rallying call is "Bush wants tax cuts for the top one percent!" which, however true, is completely meaningless to almost everyone. Not only do almost all Americans not have any idea what the cut-off for the top one percent is, nearly 20% think they fall above it.

Matt directs us to Angry Bear's breakdown of the tax cut's benefits, where we learn that the cut-off for the top one percent is $374,000. Matt is right that Democrats need to be using that number, not the "top one percent" construction. (Do you hear that, Dean campaign?)

But why stop there? As Paul Krugman points out, they're lying about the true cost of the package. Democrats should hit that hard, too. But perhaps the slipperiness of sunset provisions is too complicated for general public consumption.

John Cassidy, writing brilliantly in the New Yorker, outlines something simpler (length of excerpt not indicative of simplicity):

“With a robust package of at least five hundred and fifty billion dollars in across-the-board tax relief, we will help create more than a million new jobs by the end of 2004,” [President Bush] declared in his weekly radio address. “Some members of Congress support tax relief but say my proposal is too big. Since they already agree that tax relief creates jobs, it doesn’t make sense to provide less tax relief and, therefore, create fewer jobs. I believe we should enact more tax relief so that we can create more jobs, and more Americans can find work and provide for their families.”

There is a pressing need for more jobs—another forty-eight thousand vaporized last month—but the link between tax policy and payrolls is a lot murkier than the President made it out to be. If tax cuts automatically created jobs, businesses would be scouring the streets for workers right now, and nobody’s twenty-five-year-old children would still have to live at home. Two years ago, after all, President Bush persuaded Congress to pass the biggest tax cuts in a generation. But since then a million and a half jobs have disappeared. By contrast, between 1993 and 2000, President Clinton raised taxes to reduce the budget deficit, and the economy created more than twenty million jobs. Of course, this doesn’t mean that higher taxes create jobs, either. The number of people working is determined by the over-all state of the economy, to which fiscal policy is just one contributor. Other things being equal, tax cuts can help the economy by putting more cash in consumers’ pockets, but they are an expensive and unreliable way to raise employment, especially when they are aimed at people who tend to save their windfalls rather than spend them.

More than half the President’s tax cuts would come in the form of abolishing the taxation of corporate dividends. The primary recipients would be rich people and senior citizens, since they own most of the dividend-yielding stocks. For example, Sanford Weill, the chairman of Citigroup, would get a tax cut of about six million dollars. Based on 2001 figures, Vice-President Dick Cheney would save about a hundred thousand dollars. The dividend plan might persuade yacht builders and assisted-living communities to hire some extra help, but it won’t do much for the rest of the nearly nine million unemployed.

In view of this problem, the White House has put forward a more subtle rationale for the dividend-tax cut: It will cause the stock market to rise, which will make consumers and businesses feel more confident. This, in turn, will boost spending, which will generate more hiring. But if any of these links fail to materialize, so will the new jobs.

Even taking the President at his word, each new job would cost the government five hundred and fifty thousand dollars in lost revenues, which is about seventeen times the salary of the average American worker. It would be far cheaper for the federal government to give private firms subsidies to hire more people, or to give money to the states, which are facing their worst financial crisis since the Second World War, and which at this moment are being forced to fire teachers, troopers, and health workers. Parks, museums, and libraries are closing; cultural programs are being cut. College-tuition fees are rising, and scholarships are vanishing. Hundreds of thousands of people stand to lose their state-provided health-care coverage. (Meanwhile, taxpayers will be laying out billions of dollars to reconstruct Iraq.)

In other words, even before getting to the fact that most people don't get any real tax relief at all, Democrats or -- gasp! -- the press need to ask: "Mr. Bush, how many jobs did you create when you gave a six-figure tax break to Dick Cheney?"

Of course, if Treasury Secretary John Snow's answer to Wolf Blitzer's question on Late Edition today is any indication, it might be futile. In response to a question along the lines of "Why didn't the 2001 tax cut create any jobs?" he said, "It did," and explained that we would have lost even more jobs during an even deeper recession.

In the absence of any coherent foreign policy (no nukes for Iraq, but North Korea is another story; dictators like Saddam are bad, unless they're from Africa or Eastern Europe), Snow's comments hint at what has become the real Bush Doctrine: tax cuts in surplus, tax cuts in deficit, and more tax cuts no matter what happens after these.

Given the fact that virtually every economist, including Alan Greenspan, believes that these tax cuts are going to make things worse, Bush's re-election prospects seem to hinge on an economic recovery in spite of his policies. But surely neither the president not his advisers would knowingly leave this to chance. This only leaves an astounding conclusion: President Bush and supporters actually believe they are pursuing the right policy.

DELUSION OF THE WEEK:

2003-05-10T03:15:00.000-07:00

The Log Cabin Republicans, the perfectly-named activist group of gay Republicans, met with White House officials this week. Their director left the meetings saying:

"They were substantive and really terrific policy discussions," Patrick Guerriero, the group's executive director, said, adding that no discussion of Mr. Santorum was necessary. "The core of the Republican Party, from the White House to Congress, understands that we're an important part of the American family."

Given that this is demonstrably false, one wonders what kind of [submit your policy-related euphemism for homosexual sex in comments] they had with Karl Rove. In any case, it would be interesting to hear the president say that gays and lesbians are "an important part of the American family." Don't expect to hear that anytime soon.

SHARPTON'S INTENTIONS:

2003-05-09T05:29:00.000-07:00

This account of a recent Sharpton appearance notes that he's ducking the question of whether he'll run as an independent if he loses the Democratic presidential primary. I don't think this is particularly likely. Sharpton doesn't like it when he doesn't get his way, but running as an independent isn't his style. As I noted in my January analysis of the Sharpton Problem, if he feels snubbed he's likely to try to prove his importance by suppressing the black vote in the general election:

[A]nyone that gets fired up by Sharpton tends to end up sitting out the general election (see: his Senate primary loss in 1992, when the Republican went on to win in November despite Bill Clinton carrying New York State by sixteen points; and the race for mayor in 1997, when his primary challenge left a broke and debilitated Ruth Messinger to lose by seventeen points in the general). He's the kid in kickball who, after grounding out, storms off the field declaring that he's not playing anymore.

It would be interesting if the other eight candidates got together and agreed to state in writing that they will support the eventual nominee. The danger with Sharpton isn't so much that he'll mount an independent/third-party campaign, but that he'll spend the months leading up to November 2004 calling the eventual nominee or the Democratic Party racist. A Democratic Compact like this would discredit that ploy before it begins. If the party is welcoming into its process a guy who lives off publicity the least they should do is try to make sure that he won't try to use the attention he gains from being included against the party.

FOXENOPHOBIA:

2003-05-09T04:37:00.000-07:00

I'm not a regular Fox News viewer, but when I do tune in I notice two things. Most obvious is the utter lack of objectivity or credibility of virtually every reporter and commentator. But almost as prevalent is a very creepy xenophobia.

Today I caught The Fox Report with Shepard Smith. The relegation of world news to a mere 80 seconds (with actual timer running in the corner) seemed funny and blogworthy to me, until the next segment showed that world news which has the prospect of stoking anger or indignation at another country can indeed break out into the rest of the program.

That report noted that Mexico, like most of Europe and the rest of the world, won't extradite to the United States accused criminals who face the death penalty. Shep introduced the segment (which would be complete with grieving widow calling for blood) beside a Mexican flag with KILLER'S PARADISE printed above it. And no, there was no question mark.

With Saddam Hussein and Iraq off the xenophobes' radar and, leaving with them, the real lust to bash Jacques Chirac and France, Fox News is casting about for a new hate object. Sane people would do well to start speaking out against some unsavory regimes that might make good candidates for the hate propaganda industry, lest the crazies turn on Britain. My suggestions: North Korea (though the lack of an easy military victory for the run-up to the president's re-election campaign could preclude its candidacy), Zimbabwe, and Belarus. Let's harness the hate.

CLARIFICATION:

2003-05-09T03:00:00.000-07:00

An alarmed reader writes in to express dismay at Johnny's statement below that he "[hates] mistrusting our leaders". I guess the idea is that readers of That Other Blog aren't used to any handwringing over the fact that George W. Bush, et al. can't be trusted. Let's be clear -- they can't. The record is long and damning one and, seeing as there's an election soon, someone should really put together something comprehensive on this.

That said, I agree with Johnny. I hate it mistrusting our leaders too in the civic values sense, but it's probably apparent to regular readers that neither the failure to find WMD in Iraq nor the duplicitous drive to war were the source of that mistrust for me.

VALIDATION, VERACITY, AND VERIFICATION:

2003-05-06T20:29:00.000-07:00

Nicholas D. Kristof writes a serious piece today -- as seriously as you can take a white man with an afro -- about the Bush administration's pursuit of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction, and as yet, its nil findings. I hate agreeing with Kristof, and I hate mistrusting our leaders even more, but he is asking the right questions here.

If there are no weapons of mass destruction found it does not render this effort meritless. In my opinion, human rights concerns were enough to justify force. I might even be on board with the grander mission of restructuring the entire region. But Kristof is right when he says that the absense of wmds will cause a subsequent absense of credibility -- both in the international community and domestically. Our expressed reason for this war was to rid Iraq of these weapons, but Kristof certainly believes that the administration exaggerated its intelligence to justify military action. For instance:

Consider the now-disproved claims by President Bush and Colin Powell that Iraq tried to buy uranium from Niger so it could build nuclear weapons. As Seymour Hersh noted in The New Yorker, the claims were based on documents that had been forged so amateurishly that they should never have been taken seriously.

In intelligence jargon, this is called the "politicization of intelligence." Does sound, reliable intelligence inform the conception and execution of policy, or do pre-determined political goals skew and manipulate intelligence in an effort to bolster its validity? Ousting Saddam has been on the Bush administration agenda since Day 1, and to date, no smoking guns have been found. This does not mean that the weapons are not -- or perhaps, were not -- there. It also does not mean that the administration is not sincerely interested in finding them. Take, for instance, this instant message conversation between two senior administrative officials that That Other Blog, working in conjunction with Truth is a Blog, managed to uncover:

rummy03: hey gt how r u?
tenet007: gr8 u?
rummy03: good. me and gwb r goin 2 c x-men 2nite
tenet007: kewl
rummy03: brb, got 2 find wmd
tenet007: k, hey luv that moab
rummy03: back. i didnt find ne
tenet007: that sux
rummy03: yea well, g2g
tenet007: c u l8r

I think that the administration is sincere in their belief that Iraq possesses weapons of mass destruction. (Does anyone honestly doubt that they did? Did Iraq enjoy the UN-imposed sanctions? If they destroyed their weapons, they would have produced documentation proving it.) I think they are further sincere in their efforts to find them. But I think, as Kristof does, that the government "souped up intelligence, leaned on spooks to change their conclusions and concealed contrary information to deceive people at home and around the world." They were intent on having this war no matter what the reason. Hyping up lackluster intelligence and suppressing conflicting evidence was an expedient way to get there. Credibility has never much interested this administration, and it will be a shame when their perfectly noble vision is rendered impotent because no one trusts them and no one wants to help.

NOTE: The heretofore (and unfortunately) blogless Kara Murray gets the assist here, for providing the link and inspring the faux-IM conversation idea.

NON-PLAN? NONSENSE:

2003-05-06T08:13:00.000-07:00

The decidedly heterosexual Matthew Yglesias has written about Howard Dean's "non-plan" for getting every American health insurance. It's worth noting that this "non-plan" designation -- by Matt's own admission -- excludes Dean's plan to cover the two most vulnerable segments of our population:

Dean either doesn't have an actual plan for the non-child non-senior portion of the population, or else his plan is a secret. If we could see what the plan is, then we could try and decide whether or not it's a good one, but for now, there's nothing.

I agree with Matt that "Dean's Two-Thirds-Plan" probably would not have been as provocative a headline as "Dean's Non-Plan".

He goes on to say that he and Max Sawicky (who is also writing about this) are basing their analysis only on Dean's website, and that anyone with documentation of what Dean's plan actually is should step forward. As it happens, one doesn't need more than Dean's website to figure out his plan for universal health care. But given the currency that this non-plan nonsense is getting from big names like Yglesias and Sawicky, the campaign would do well to get out in front of this one.

Nevertheless, going by the website, this, I gather, is Dean's plan to bring insurance to all people ...

-- under 23: require states to cover not only the poorest of younger kids, but all kids to age 23.

-- over 65: have the federal government take responsibility for drug and acute medical care.

-- who are poor, unemployed, under-employed, or otherwise lack insurance: provide refundable tax credits and direct subsidies to the individual (not his employer) to buy health insurance in the private market.

He plans to pay for this by returning to the tax system in place on January 19, 2001. Moreover, it seems that this plan, either in parts or in whole, could actually pass (Dick Gephardt, I'm looking in your direction), especially if the third element can be sold as a "tax cut".

Not enough of a plan, you say? Not enough detail? Hold your horses. Here are the other candidates' plans:

John Edwards -- "Senator Edwards believes we need to end the national disgrace of more than 40 million Americans without any health coverage, and that universal coverage is a goal we need to achieve." That's all he says about getting people insured (scroll halfway down the page to find it).

John Kerry -- "Senator Kerry believes the [State Children's Health Insurance Plan (S-CHIP)] needs to be expanded." He doesn't say by how much or to cover whom. Like Edwards, he's talking about a patients bill of rights that won't insure a single person, falling victim to the fallacy that says attaching "bill of rights" to a set of policies makes them at all significant.

Joe Lieberman -- Lieberman says that during the campaign he "will talk about the tough fights ahead" and that "affordable health care available to every American" is one of them. He evidently means "will talk" very literally, because he has not talked about it yet. That second excerpt is the only reference I could find to health care on Lieberman's website.

Bob Graham -- Graham doesn't have a website yet, but insofar as he's unwilling to repeal the first Bush tax cut it's hard to see how he would pay for any substantial plan to cover people. I'm not even certain he's for pursuing universal coverage anytime soon.

Al Sharpton -- Sharpton has a site, but doesn't mention any of those pesky issues. The URL for his site does rhyme, though.

Carol Moseley-Braun -- Braun has a site and what is ostensibly an issues page lets us know that "social justice and safe, healthy communities are well within our grasp." Nothing else from her.

Dennis Kucinich -- Kucinich has a plan: raise taxes and create a single-payer system. Brilliant in its simplicity, dead on arrival in Congress -- and, probably, the Democratic primary.

Dick Gephardt -- Gephardt was the first to come out with a truly comprehensive plan. Though after a read-through, it appears that "comprehensive" is merely a stand-in for "complicated". It's not clear that Gephardt's plan would cover everyone. For instance, it's not likely to cover me, a 22-year-old who recently couldn't afford even the relatively cheap university health plan and who, after leaving school, did something other than find a full-time job with a company that provides insurance. Gephardt's plan also isn't likely to cover the unemployed; he provides only "a 65% federal subsidy for COBRA coverage would be created for the eligible unemployed." Nor are part-time workers necessarily covered; they still pay up to 40% of premiums (to say nothing of prescriptions and other out-of-pocket costs). Ditto for the working poor, who must make no more than 100% of poverty -- that is, be really, really poor -- in order to qualify for the full 25% refundable tax credit.

Howard Dean's plan may be less fleshed-out than Gephardt's, but it's the most detailed non-crazy alternative being offered. And it is possible to compare the two. For instance, Dean will expand SCHIP to cover all children up to age 23. Gephardt does not expand SCHIP to cover more children or provide better coverage, but wants to allow parents of already-eligible children to be covered by the same program. Matt and Max missed that potential comparison. I didn't -- Dean covers me, Gephardt doesn't. Guess who I support.

Note: A slightly modified version of this post is also posted at the unofficial DeanBlog.

SOUTH CAROLINA DEBATE RECAP:

2003-05-04T22:01:00.000-07:00

Like most, I had to catch the C-SPAN replay of Saturday night's debate. It took place at 9 PM Eastern and was only available on certain ABC affiliates. This further depressed what probably would have been still very little interest. But in the spirit of Ezra Klein's motto "I watch C-SPAN so you don't have to" here are several observations and thoughts of varying relevance in no particular order:

George Stephanopolous did an amazing job. The debate was jarringly substantive, and Steph's questions were smart. Dick Gephardt's health plan seemed to dominate for a while, but it's probably not because Steph worked for him for years.

Gephardt talks a pretty good game. You could view his frankness and something approaching passion as an electoral ploy by a seasoned politician or a Hail Mary to save a career that looked pretty bad after failing to take back the House of Representatives yet again last fall. Either way, I don't trust him to actually implement any of his mostly acceptable agenda, and he's wrong on trade. He's part of the problem with the Democratic Party and with Washington generally.

John Edwards wants to take on Big [insert industry here]. He's running against corporations. Not, one would assume, huge corporate law firms.

Carol Moseley-Braun is refreshingly not Sheila Jackson-Lee. Good for her.

Moseley-Braun and Al Sharpton need to trade hairstyles.

The Dean/Kerry spat: Advantage Dean. Stephanopolous gets the assist on this one, though. He put the "not fit to serve" remark about Dean by Kerry spokesman/thug Chris Lehane hard to Kerry, and Kerry squirmed. Dean then had the opportunity to reply, saying, in effect, If you want to question my fitness to serve, do it to my face and not through a spokesman. Kerry then played indignant that Dean had questioned his courage on gay issues, and Dean replied that it had been a misquote and that the paper had printed a retraction. He then went on to praise Kerry's record on gay issues, effectively sweeping this series of exchanges.

Sharpton brandished his street cred by calling attention to the fact that he's been stabbed, though it's not clear why that should come up in the context of his calling for the registration of handguns. Regulate cutlery?

Perhaps Dr. Dean could see about helping Joe Lieberman with that mouthful of marbles. Is there anything that can be done?

Bob Graham looks good, and he's feisty. He also mentions again that he didn't vote for the Iraq resolution because it didn't go far enough for him. Rather than fall in line behind Bush like Gephardt and Lieberman, Graham wants call him soft on terror. This is a good political idea, but not really sane policy. It might work electorally, but if implemented as policy it would be a disaster. In other words, keep the veep slot warm for Graham, but he's tough to take seriously for the top spot.

Dennis Kucinich seems like a young guy, but he has this huge, long old-man ears.

Kerry is a good senator. He's smart and far less irritating than most senators. He has a certain presidential feeling about him, but he's not quite there. There should be an office with a stature somewhere between senator and president. The Constitution's answer, the vice-presidency, can be diminishing. Perhaps Kerry could be allowed to call himself Supersenator.

Moseley-Braun went all Bob Graham at one point, listing at length the various constitutional amendments she believes are violated by the Patriot Act.

I want to see Stephanopolous, Kucinich, and Moseley-Braun standing on top of each other to make a totem pole. John Kerry would still be taller.

Edwards asked a very good question of Graham, about how, as Southerners, they can address discrimination. Graham answered that one way would be for Southerners to "put the Civil War behind us."

Dean addressed the claim that he lacks national security experience by pointing to the role that all governors have, particularly since September 11, in protecting people from and preparing for another terrorist attack.

The one-minute closings:

Kucinich has a good line with "take the profit out of health care" but then tosses in repealing NAFTA and leaving the WTO. And what's with the kucinich.us web address? At least he's consistently weird.

Moseley-Braun is trying, but can't get her platitudes in order. Something about bring hope back, blah blah.

Edwards' dad, we're reminded constantly, worked in a mill his whole life. Perhaps he should be running. His son isn't saying much. He manages to take a jab at President Bush's belt buckle, but the main thrust of his remarks is the fight against corporations.

Graham has the resume. He's the perfect guy to take on Dick Cheney in the vice-presidential debate. He has a good line, but can't get it out: "I'm from the electable wing of the Democratic Party." This is an apparent jab at Dean, but the remark is prefaced by pointing out how important it is to have been a governor. Given that Dean was a governor just a few months ago and Graham was a governor almost two decades ago, despite the fact that he stole Dean's line the dig seems to be aimed at the other senators in the race. Among other wings of the Democratic Party from whence Graham comes: the Invade Lebanon Wing, the Stenographers' Wing, the Beady-Eyed Wing.

Gephardt also wants to tell us his story. His dad drove the milk truck.

Dean's closing was thankfully non-autobiographical, but not as good as his stump speech -- and needs to be spoken, not read.

Sharpton is almost convincingly serious. This is getting scary.

Lieberman: "Forty years ago ...." He keeps mentioning that he's thrilled. He doesn't look thrilled.

Kerry: "Thirty-five years ago ...." Sigh. Manages to tie himself to the Kennedys, which seems to be part of the plan. He's eloquent, but, then again, he's a (super)senator and that's his job.

WEEKLY ROUND-UP:

2003-05-04T20:50:00.000-07:00

As Joe explained, I am the maintainer of Truth is a Blog. The powers that be over at Google -- newly established parent company of Blogger -- didn't like what I had to say. So they shut me down (I'm not sure, but I suspect it's part of the vague "corporate culture" Sen. John Edwards (D-NC and host of "Crossing Over") was talking about at last night's debates). Not to worry, I, with the assistance of the incomparable Joe Rospars, forge ahead. Odd bedfellows we make (but not the kind that the still heterosexual Matthew Yglesias doesn't have), but this could prove a lasting partnership -- if by "lasting" we mean "until the blogger tech-geek responds to my e-mail" or, more truthfully, "until I'm fired."

At any rate, plenty happened in a week's time, and I offer the oldest gimmick of block-stricken writers -- the Week in Review.

Carol Moseley-Braun is not obese, contrary to popular belief. She is, however, a bit bottom-heavy, and it's exaggerated by the fact that she is 2'7" tall. While watching last night's debate in South Carolina, ABC shot a camera angle from behind the candidates, and I swear she was sitting on a phone book. Perhaps because of her small stature or because her presence is laughably irrelevant, she was hilariously ignored by all the other participants, including moderator and fellow midget George Stephanopolous.

You think Joe Lieberman and Paul O'Neill have Elmer Fudd impersonation contests against each other in their spare time?

So Kerry wants to be called John F. Kerry now? That's fine. He would also like you to know that the "F" stands for "gentile." I feel that joke is a bit too avant garde for the poli-blog crowd. If Salvador Dali was here he'd laugh.

While we're on the subject of Elmer Fudd ... while channel-flipping, I was delighted to see Yaron Brook -- president of the Ayn Rand Institute giving a speech on C-SPAN. As I am still trying to exorcise the Objectivist demons, it's always nice to see them on TV. The ARI -- because they are looney and have no credibility -- don't get a lot of airtime. Adding to the problem: Brooks cannot pronounce the letters R and L. It's hard to take an analysis of the Middle East seriously from a man who begins sentences with: "Wecentwy, Isweal and Pawestine ...." Dr. Yaron Brook (or Yawon Bwook, as he has been known to introduce himself) later added: "Shh ... Be vewy quiet. I'm hunting cowectivists."

Things I Never Thought I'd Say #543: I went to a car show yesterday. And I enjoyed it. Look for me on the upcoming "White Trash Gone Wild" video series.

Back to the Debate: Did anyone else note Bob Graham's (D-FL) subtle barb at former Vermont Governor Howard Dean, questioning his electability? Graham noted it ... in one of his little notebooks.

Okay, one more word about the debate: With the Democratic primaries still eons away, one thing is abundantly clear: Howard Dean, as Joe pointed out in the previous post, is the only candidate that doesn't drive me to self-immolation.

Talk to me, Goose: Big media as well as the greater liberal blogosphere have been just a bit cynical about the President's fighter jet jaunt the other day. This op-ed by the Times' Maureen Dowd is a good example. Just dial down the criticism for two minutes. We've all played After Burner in the arcade at a rate of about $1.00 for 43 seconds. It's cool, and everyone wants to do it in real life. But it gets to be Bush because he's the President. And he's got the hook up. I mean, really, he's just crossing another item off his "Things To Do When I'm President" list. I'm thinking "Land on an Aircraft Carrier" was "Number 3" behind "Detain Terrorists Indefinitely Without Formal Charges" and ~~"Two Chicks At The Same Time"~~ "Introduce New Vocabulary To English Language." And from here, it seems the strategery is working.
Update: Note Dowd's characterization of this event as Jerry Bruckheimer-esqe. That was mine. I said it first. This marks the second time that Dowd has plagiarized me. I'm not sure which angers me more--that she ripped off me, or that I would ever write the same thing Maureen Dowd wrote.

We'll wrap it up here for the moment. Again, I'd like to thank Joe again for inviting me on board, and I hope I'm half as good as his fine introduction purports me to be.

THAT OTHER BLOG -- NOW TWICE AS RETARDED:

2003-05-04T11:20:00.000-07:00

That Other Blog is pleased to announce that this is now your only functioning outlet for the writing of Johnny Bardine. Johnny is the mastermind of the estimable Truth is a Blog, which is at present a twisted heap of HTML code that for some reason won't publish the hilarity and insight that ooze -- that's right, ooze -- from Johnny. Until his site magically fixes itself, which it must because neither of us know how to, you can find him here.

Johnny Bardine lives in Pennsylvania and, though he hasn't been as clear as some have on the matter, is very likely not gay. He will tilt the ideological balance of That Other Blog rightward a bit because his political thinking still suffers from some Ayn Rand-related problems. He will tilt the funny/not-funny balance of That Other Blog decidedly towards funny because he is very, very funny.

Readers coming from the official and unofficial Dean blogs will be pleased to note that Johnny demonstrates their candidate's crossover appeal, having tepidly endorsed Howard Dean as the only Democratic candidate for president who "doesn't make me want to gouge my own eyes out and light myself on fire when he talks."

That Other Blog will, with luck, continue to be a waste of both our time and yours. I will work doggedly to offset the added relevance, consistency of posting, and quality of writing that Johnny's addition will bring. Welcome, Johnny.

EXCEPTIONAL CONSERVATIVES:

2003-05-03T07:07:00.000-07:00

So when conservative icon Bill Bennett gambles (a lot), that vice is an exception from the list of actions that professional public moralists tell us undermine the family. Conservative cabal mastermind Grover Norquist, quoted in the Times, even calls it -- are you listening Sen. Santorum? -- a private matter.

And when Sen. Pete Domenici's daughter has a mental illness, mental health care spending is an exception to his normally unrelenting quest to shrink the federal budget.

The Republican Party is littered with sundry personal exceptions to its ideological crusades. It's a shame that its takes personal experience for a conservative to come around and recognize the need for a woman's right to choose, the need to control guns, or the need to able to have sex with someone other than your wife without losing your job.

The most serious indictment of the conservative agenda is that it fails to mesh with real-life problems and experience. Conservatism is, at its core, a selfish ideology. Despite the president's protestations, it fundamentally lacks compassion -- until one of its own needs some.

No railing against spending on contracts for old business friends; no public moralizing when the author of the ostentatiously titled Book of Virtues turns out to be a high-stakes gambler. If only students graduating this week with crippling loan debt and gays minding their own business -- among many, many others -- could benefit from similar exceptions.

MATHEW GROSS:

2003-05-02T19:23:00.000-07:00

The gentleman apparently charged with the primary responsibility for Howard Dean's official campaign blog is turning out to be one of the best bloggers around.

Mathew (not Matthew) Gross is the source for official Dean news, but he uses the campaign's blog as more than an outlet for press releases. He references a surprising variety of blogs from people who aren't rabid Dean supporters, from liberal blog icon Atrios to the very straight Matthew Yglesias.

Gross is funny. He'll go to great lengths to avoid plugging another campaign's blog by redacting a quotation like this one from Horrible Howard Kurtz:

Turns out that some candidates – notably Howard Dean, and [snip] – have their own blogs. This raises the disturbing prospect of a blog deficit for the other contenders.

He also nobly sought to pre-empt the recent Dean/Kerry spat with a post very early in the game entitled: "CHILL, CHRIS LEHANE, CHILL".

Even if his conclusions are circumscribed by official Dean policy, Gross is a refreshing voice in the Blogosphere and the Dean campaign has made a fine choice to run the first campaign blog in history.

UPDATE: The above-mentioned (and still not gay) Matthew Yglesias makes two points in two different places in response. First, in comments here, he notes that Canadian Liberal candidate Paul Martin had a blog before Dean. This seems to be the case, as the blog in question has a post from December 2002, several months before Dean's blog began. It's worth noting that Martin seems to have been rather unwilling conscripted by his staff to contribute to start a blog; he doesn't seem terribly enthusiastic about the idea. That said, That Other Blog is run like US foreign policy -- that is, as if Canada doesn't exist -- and thus, Dean has the first campaign blog in history.

Matt's second point, about Dean's blog generally:

I think everyone thinks Howard Dean's campaign weblog is pretty cool, but it seems to me that Kate O'Connor has a serious problem with! the! over! use! of! exclamation! points!

He's right. We have noticed Ms. O'Connor's exclamation affliction as well, but opted not to comment. We buckled to the unwritten rule girl/woman bloggers get more tender treatment. Ditto for people with who aren't really bloggers but rather making a blog cameo to report. Still, the exclamations are excessive. But... ellipses... would be... far... worse....

SANTORUM TRIPS UP AGAIN:

2003-05-02T08:25:00.000-07:00

Sen. Rick Santorum can't get away from his constituents fast enough:

Four parents of gay children had a fiery private exchange tonight with Senator Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania. The meeting did not go well, and Mr. Santorum, who has infuriated gays by likening homosexuality to incest and bigamy, left in a hurry, tripping over a chair, the parents said.

"What we tried to do in this meeting was reach him on a human level, and we found no humanity there," said Melina Waldo, a former constituent of Mr. Santorum who lives in Haddonfield, N.J. She said he was "condescending, belligerent, argumentative and arrogant."

Santorum had a slightly different interpretation of the meeting:

A spokeswoman for Mr. Santorum, Erica Clayton Wright, described the meeting as "a very professional and polite exchange." She declined to give details, however, saying, "Constituent meetings are private."

Relatedly, it doesn't seem that during the whole Santorum flap anyone has asked the question that truly concerns a vast, bipartisan block of voters: does the list of proposed banned sex acts that supposedly undermine the family include masturbation?

BEHEAD STEVE DOOCY AND LET THE REVOLUTION BEGIN:

2003-05-02T06:49:00.000-07:00

Jim Capozzola has a pretty damning post up about the shameful neglect by the media of the kidnapping of a young black girl. He's got all the details, so head over there.

It's hard to be surprised. Capozzola rightly cries racism at the coverage of only white kidnapped children. We went a step further back in March and cried pedophilia at the coverage of only cute little white girls. However far you're willing to go, it's clear that the commercial media aren't behaving responsibly.

It is important to remember that the racist coverage isn't the product of some racist cabal. This type of disgraceful reporting is driven by the same sensationalist roots as the equally disgraceful jingoistic, xenophobic political coverage on cable news. The root of the problem is commercial media.

Conservatives seem content to ride the wave of sensationalism with media tools like Fox News and the New York Post. Liberals, typically, are paralyzed with fear and and reluctant to descend from the supposed high ground. But the best policies of both parties would benefit from the more sober, informative hearing they would get from a BBC-like public service created by expanding or replacing PBS. Given conservative hostility to PBS and huge budget deficits for the foreseeable future, however, this is probably a non-starter.

In the absence of that kind of financial commitment, it seems that some sort of broadcast-license conditions could do the trick. This idea has been batted around as a way to make campaigns (and campaign finance) more sane, by requiring a certain amount of free time to candidates in a given market during the run-up to the election.

The same idea could be used to mandate an hour or two of uninterrupted news coverage daily in exchange for the right to use the public's airwaves. The FCC might even force cable and satellite networks make mandatory contributions to a 24-hour news version of C-SPAN. Lack of commercial interruption wouldn't guarantee a more responsible television media, but it would be a step in the right direction.

IS HE OR ISN'T HE?:

2003-05-01T07:53:00.000-07:00

Is Joe Lieberman going to be The Jewish Candidate or not? Of course, such a distinction would not be mutually exclusive with The Corporate Candidate or the The Republican Candidate for the Democratic Nomination, among other titles. But Lieberman seems to be trying to have it both ways when it comes to his faith.

For instance, Lieberman makes much of "family values" (come on, Joe -- that's so 1992), tying his "concern" about these culture issues to his faith -- unfailingly characterized as "deep" -- which is supposed to distinguish him from the other Democratic candidates. A piece in the Times has this quote from his campaign:

Mr. Lieberman's advisers argued that the spirituality symbolized by the rituals of his observance was central to his appeal as a candidate.

"It reinforces him as a person of faith," Mr. Penn said.

Lieberman always seems a little full of it (and himself), and this rather unseemly use of his faith -- often at the expense of talking about real policy questions -- isn't a new thing for him. But is he willing to answer legitimate questions about how his faith would impact the schedule and performance of a President Lieberman?

More from the Times:

Mr. Lieberman does not refer to himself as an Orthodox Jew, a description that invokes images of ancient solemnity, but rather as "observant." He belongs to an Orthodox synagogue in Georgetown here and engages in rituals associated with the most devout wing of Judaism.

He prays three times a day, and he primarily attends synagogues where men and women are separated.

On the Sabbath, Mr. Lieberman does not drive or enter cars. He does not turn on light switches or cook. He will watch a television set only if someone else has turned it on. Mr. Lieberman does not answer the telephone, check his Blackberry, turn on a computer or engage in e-mail.

When the shuttle exploded on the Saturday before a planned Sunday trip to Iowa, Mr. Lieberman's advisers met and quickly concluded that the trip should be scrapped. But they agonized as they tried to figure out how to consult the candidate. Finally, they dispatched an aide to Mr. Lieberman's front door to obtain his approval.

Faith is fine, but Lieberman has some explaining to do about the nuts and bolts of a Lieberman presidency. All of this was hypothetical when Lieberman was only Al Gore's running mate. After all, the vice president's only constitutional duty is to serve as president of the senate, and most vice presidents delegate even that. Wars don't stop on Saturdays and terrorists can attack on Shavuot. We need to here more from Lieberman on this.

SHORTER EZRA KLEIN:

2003-05-01T06:17:00.000-07:00

Matt Yglesias, who isn't gay, notes the pitched conflict over at Ezra Klein's blog between Ezra and co-blogger Matt Singer. The see-saw battle over the Dean/Kerry spat this week was interesting, but it was surprisingly familiar in tone and content to the recent debate over Dean vs. Hart. In both cases Ezra argues against Dean and Singer argues for him. And that's an important point: Ezra argues against Dean -- if there's something that can be said against Dean, Ezra is saying it.

When he was defending Hart he was doing better. But his "analysis" of Dean and anything relating to Dean has a certain forced quality to it, as if he's trying to do the political professional's job of framing things rather than offering up his until-recently (and on other subjects, still) very good thinking and writing.

We may or may not comment on the specifics of this and future Dean-related controversies at Ezra's blog, but the following first-and-only edition of Shorter Ezra Klein should cover them all, unless things change:

I like Dean -- really, I do. That said, whatever happened, Dean has stumbled badly with this outrageous behavior/comment/response/silence. He will obviously lose the general election. Want an internship with Gary Hart?

PANTSLESS KEVIN DRUM:

2003-04-28T16:51:00.000-07:00

If you haven't been reading the new and improved Calpundit, you should be. The recent upgrade there brought many improvements. One carryover from the previous site, however, is the photo of Kevin Drum at the right-hand side of the page.

Many regular readers of Kevin have been asking themselves the same question: where have I seen this guy before?

Tonight, a Seinfeld re-run provided the answer: Kevin Drum is The Maestro.

The character, Bob Cobb, who demanded to be called The Maestro and took Elaine to Tuscany (where, despite his assurances, villas were indeed available for rent) was played by the actor Mark Metcalf. Most will recognize Mark from his watershed role in the landmark Twisted Sister video for "We're Not Gonna Take It".

The following is, we believe, the first, only and definitive photo comparison of Kevin Drum and Mark Metcalf:

As a service to readers who may need their cultural memory jogged, we also bring you these photos of Drum/Metcalf in his most acclaimed roles:

Even with the identity of Kevin's double out of the way, a similarly pressing question remains: does the Calpundit frequently go sans slacks to prevent wrinkling?

GET THAT MAN A TALKSHOW:

2003-04-28T08:48:00.000-07:00

Via Ezra Klein (well, actually, Matt Singer) we come across this Salon recap of the White House Correspondents Association dinner.

The only good bit is this reported exchange between Al Franken and Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz:

FRANKEN: Clinton's military did pretty well in Iraq, huh?

WOLFOWITZ: Fuck you.

Alan Colmes he's not.

HOWARD DEAN TRUE/FALSE:

2003-04-27T13:04:00.000-07:00

With nine candidates in the field, the race for the Democratic presidential nomination is getting complicated. Ryan Lizza, in an online-only piece over at tnr.com, attempts some analysis. Again, it's complicated, and he's not always right, so for your convenience we present a true/false guide to this Democratic candidate round-up piece using the following format:

RIGHTNESS:
Excerpt.
Reason: If necessary.

From "Field Test" by Ryan Lizza at the New Republic Online:

FALSE:

If Karl Rove had designed the ideal setting to magnify the stature gap between the wartime president and his Democratic challengers on the day tanks rolled through Baghdad, he could hardly have done better than forcing the viable candidates, such as John Kerry, John Edwards, and Joe Lieberman, to share a stage with Al Sharpton, Dennis Kucinich, and Carol Moseley Braun, and making all of the above genuflect before Marian Wright Edelman, the [Children's Defense Fund] president and liberal icon whose husband quit the Clinton administration in disgust over welfare reform.

Reason: No one was paying attention; there was no inter-party consequence to that event.

FALSE:

Howard Dean echoed Moseley Braun's lefty isolationist belief that rebuilding Iraq would simply cost too much. (Only Edwards made the obvious point that Democrats could actually be in favor of spending money abroad on Iraq and at home on health care.)

Reason: Howard Dean argued that the cost of both disarming and rebuilding Iraq should be borne by a truly global coalition. President Bush, by failing to lead the world and effectively losing a popularity contest to a murderous dictator, increased the amount of American blood and treasure necessary to do the as-yet-unfinished job of disarming Iraq and assuring stable, democratic government there.

INADVERTENTLY TRUE:

Dean then added perhaps the most stunning line from a Democratic candidate during the war: "We should have contained Saddam. Well, we got rid of him. I suppose that's a good thing."

Reason: Dean's point is that the US could have neutralized the threat posed by Saddam -- that was the whole point, remember? -- in a number of ways. For all the maligning of Dean's position on the war, it seems that his idea that North Korea represented the more immediate threat (and, even if we ignore the nuclear threat there, that the US should lead something more than the Coalition of Client States into Baghdad) no one has made a convincing case that Iraq was the greatest threat to the United States. In that way, if the US Army had marched on Harare and liberated the people of Zimbabwe, it would be "a good thing" but not the course of action most likely to furthest advance the US national interest. Dean's line was stunning only insofar as he has not allowed himself to be pushed around by the glib mass media storyline that anyone who questioned the Bush policy on Iraq was somehow proven wrong by victory of the world's only superpower over the conscript military of a backward dictatorship.

MAYBE:

[I]f the media's impressive ability to pivot quickly from 24-hour coverage of the war to 24-hour coverage of Laci Peterson's murder is any sign, the Democratic presidential campaign may abruptly emerge from its wartime media blackout when the nine candidates gather May 3 in Columbia, South Carolina, for their first big debate. The format for the evening, 90 minutes split between nine candidates, will only allow for snippets from each of the contenders, but on that day the new contours of the campaign should start to come into focus.

Reason: The relevance of that event will depend on whether each candidate will get a different question or whether all candidates will answer a single question before the next one is asked. The format for the CDF gathering was, as we said at the time, too unwieldy for the size of the field. With nine candidates, debate is impossible unless they are seated around a conference table and allowed to guide the flow of the evening themselves with minimal interruption. That won't happen. At this stage the best way to gauge the candidates would be at an event where each gives his or her stump speech and sits down. To the extent that every candidate speaks on each question there will be the opportunity for some meaningful comparison.

POSSIBLY TRUE:

The first postwar question that the Columbia debate will help answer is whether or not Dean remains a force.

Reason: This will be true only if the format allows candidates enough time to speak and viewers the opportunity to compare responses on the same question.

TRUE, BUT IRRELEVANT:

Until now, Dean has been the darling of Democratic beauty contests, hamming it up and basking in the glow of liberal interest-group cheers, from NARAL Pro-Choice America to the Iowa Federation of Labor to the CDF. But, unlike most of the recent Democratic events, the South Carolina debate will be hosted by ABC News rather than an interest group on the liberal edge of the party. There will be a lot less time for pandering and applause lines.

Reason: Dean was the darling of most of those events, but his best performances were to the California Democratic Party Convention and the DNC Winter Meeting, both less extreme audiences than those Lizza lists. Given that much of Dean's support comes from people who haven't been politically active before and aren't part of the special interest crowd, South Carolina itself -- and, really, what are we talking about as far as this debate goes? the studio audience? -- should not be a problem, and will likely be a strength. Not enough has been made in the press about Dean's line that he will aggressively pursue the white vote in the South, and thus roll back the alarmingly prevalent Republican strategy of covertly playing the race card there, by [paraphrasing] "reminding the white guy with the Confederate flag decal on the window of his pick-up truck that his kid doesn't have health insurance, either." Dean's strength is his plainspoken manner -- see his handling of the liberal-label question at the CDF forum. But, of course, one should never underestimate the ability of all the candidates to work in significant pandering and ample applause lines, no matter how tangentially related to the question.

FALSE:

Dean may also find South Carolina a little outside of his comfort zone. Unlike Iowa and New Hampshire, where Dean has spent most of his time campaigning, South Carolina has a Democratic electorate that is 40 percent African American--not a natural constituency for the ex-Vermont governor.

Reason: Dean has been the most outspoken Democratic candidate against the Bush administration's assault on affirmative action. He has repeatedly called President Bush to task for using the word "quota" to describe the University of Michigan policy, which -- even according to his own subordinates' briefs filed with the Supreme Court -- isn't really true. The Bush administration's case against the Michigan policy rests on the highly contentious claim that the policy "amounts to a quota." Aside from actually being black, it's not clear what more Dean could do than having a more coherent agenda on civil rights (and providing health insurance and better education for the poor) than the two black candidates.

TRUE:

Dean's performance in South Carolina and beyond will have a significant ripple effect on the rest of the field. Kerry, whose status as front-runner was undermined during the war when he placed second behind Edwards in the money race, must soon decide if Dean's candidacy represents a mortal threat or not.

TRUE:

Dean's road to the nomination runs over the carcass of Kerry's campaign....

FOOLISH:

[I]f the governor shows staying power, Kerry will be forced further to the left to dispatch Dean. ... "The question is, can [Dean] keep the lefty real estate?" asks a Kerry adviser. "Do liberals suspend their disbelief on this guy for much longer?"

Reason: This line of reasoning reared its wrong head back in February. The idea then was that the entry into the race of ultraliberal Rep. Dennis Kucinich "leaves Howard Dean without a constituency" and is "Howard Dean's worth nightmare". There has not and will not be any traction to the definition of Dean as the ultraliberal in the race. Those who read Dean's support as coming only from the far left do so at their own peril because the Dean coalition is broader than it is deep and captures something quintessential than his ideology, which is, if anything, pragmatist. Liberals haven't suspended their disbelief; they have swallowed their pride.

TRUE:

Just as Kerry is threatened by Dean in Kerry's must-win state of New Hampshire, Gephardt is threatened by Dean in Gephardt's must-win state of Iowa.

TRUE:

Gephardt's new health care plan, which expands the kind of coverage currently offered by employers (through a new tax credit) and by the government (through opening up Medicare and the SCHIP program), is similar to what Dean has outlined but may be actually more comprehensive--and more expensive--placing Gephardt to the left of Dean on the issue.

TRUE, AND FUNNY:

The other candidates, especially Lieberman and Edwards, neither of whom is expected to win in Iowa or New Hampshire, seem delighted by the prospect of a titanic battle between Dean and Kerry. "Dean could slay Kerry for us," says an aide to a rival campaign. Without the burden of having to win in the two early states, both Edwards and Lieberman are elbowing for advantage in what might be called the February 3 strategy. That's the first primary day after New Hampshire, and, while it originally was to be monopolized by South Carolina, now Arizona and Missouri are also scheduled for that day, with Oklahoma, New Mexico, and Tennessee preparing to move there as well. Aides to both Edwards and Lieberman envisage a strategy where their candidates do respectably in Iowa and New Hampshire but then break out with victories on February 3. ... Edwards [is] the fund-raising champion who, as a Southerner, may be positioned to do well not just in South Carolina, where he has to win, but in the other states that will hold their contests on that day as well.

Reason: Besides the proximity of their home states, Dean and Kerry are doing well in New Hampshire because they are the only candidates that many voters take seriously. There is no other explanation of why Lieberman -- who is from Connecticut, which isn't exactly on the other side of the world from New Hampshire -- and Edwards -- who, despite having raised the most money of all the candidates, can't buy a double-digit showing in polls there -- should be doing so poorly. Pursuing the February 3 strategy and choosing to sit out Iowa and New Hampshire might deprive Lieberman and Edwards of valuable experience and exposure -- and could mean they never get in the game at all.

Note: This is a variation of a piece pulling double duty at the DeanBlog.

NO THINKING ALLOWED:

2003-04-26T10:18:00.000-07:00

Johnny Bardine, writing a good post mocking his state’s junior senator, makes passing mention of the tendency of Matthew “Not That There’s Anything Wrong With That” Yglesias to suddenly, often without warning, start writing about philosophy. Non-philosopher readers of Yglesias tend to disregard these posts, politely ignoring these Tourette's-like outbursts of jargon. After all, they are a small price to pay for access to a very smart blog and one of the most thoughtful groups of commenters around (despite some notable exceptions, including one known to his detractors as Coleslaw).

Anyway, Johnny uses the phrase "to go Matthew Yglesias on everyone" to describe what he was seeking to avoid doing in his post, in which he takes a somewhat philosophical perspective on Rick Santorum’s “man on dog” remarks. Taking Johnny’s coinage a step further, we encourage the use of the term Yglesiastic to describe a person or piece of writing which fails to avoid a hopelessly complex philosophical discussion.

Note about the author: Mr. Rospars was, briefly, a philosophy major in college, like Mr. Yglesias. He subsequently realized that political science offered a less-challenging opportunity to be just as completely full of shit all the time.

HART ATTACK:

2003-04-24T03:50:00.000-07:00

Ezra Klein takes exception to criticism of his support of Gary Hart and replies at length in his own and Hart's defense. The tone of this post reveals a bristled, defensive Ezra, which is understandable given the Pile On Ezra Day that took place earlier this week at the DeanBlog (in which, it should be noted, we did not participate). Ezra is one of the better writers blogging today, and he is very reasonable when not being dogged by the entire Howard Dean grassroots movement.

That said, in his latest post Ezra, playing rubber, fires back the identical point made against his position, casting That Other Blog as glue. Echoing our analysis of his support for Hart, he says that our support for Howard Dean tends to "mistake complexity for vision." That's a bit silly. Anyone who has seen Dean speak knows that he's the most plainspoken and least obfuscating candidate in the race.

Employing a verbal stick and move, Ezra attacks Dean's electability:

I don't, however, want Dean to win the primary. The reason, quite simply, is that I don't see how he can beat Bush. ...

I like Dean and I see his utility as a leader who could marshal the young and excite the base, but I like the idea of having a democrat win in 2004 even better.

But then wonders what all the fuss is about when others do the same to Hart, tacitly acknowledging Hart's long-shot status -- "if Hart doesn't win (imagine that)" -- and appealing for an inclusive, big-tent approach, saying of Hart that, "even if he doesn't win, his presence in the debate is necessary."

Anyone who wants to run for president should run for president. Hart, a very smart man with a lot of (perhaps dated) experience, would be a welcome addition to the field. So would long-gone Mario Cuomo, who at least held elective office in the last decade, or fresh face Mark Warner, the first-term governor of Virginia. The point isn't that Hart should not run; the point is that he won't get our support (though he might sneak into our top three).

Why? Because, despite his outline of Hart's resume in response to the assertion that Hart thinks he's above politics, Ezra's statement that, "[Hart] survived in politics and even excelled" is demonstrably false. He did not survive. He has been politically dead for fifteen years. Political death is less permanent than actual bodily death, mostly because when you're gone for so long people forget that you're dead. Hart may yet come back to life, but as yet he's only been laying there twitching.

SANTORUM:

2003-04-23T23:48:00.000-07:00

Readers will note a long-overdue link now on the sidebar to the Left Leaner, who guest-blogs on the Official Dean Blog with a round-up of the Santorum coverage.

For those not paying attention, that's Sen. Rick Santorum, Republican of Pennsylvania, who wants to regulate sex acts, but not corporate behavior.

It's worth noting that the problem with these "outrageous comments" episodes is often that critics are content to be outraged, presuming that the foolishness of the remarks is obvious. Helpfully, Andrew Sullivan manages to be both shrill and substantive in his approach, so his rebuttal to Santorum is worth reading.

The full remarks by Santorum to an unnamed AP reporter are online, but here are the gems:

SANTORUM: I have no problem with homosexuality. I have a problem with homosexual acts. As I would with acts of other, what I would consider to be, acts outside of traditional heterosexual relationships. And that includes a variety of different acts, not just homosexual. I have nothing, absolutely nothing against anyone who's homosexual. If that's their orientation, then I accept that. And I have no problem with someone who has other orientations. The question is, do you act upon those orientations?

Santorum thinks it's freedom vs. family:

SANTORUM: ... And if the Supreme Court says that you have the right to consensual sex within your home, then you have the right to bigamy, you have the right to polygamy, you have the right to incest, you have the right to adultery. You have the right to anything. Does that undermine the fabric of our society? I would argue yes, it does. It all comes from, I would argue, this right to privacy that doesn't exist in my opinion in the United States Constitution, this right that was created, it was created in Griswold -- Griswold was the contraceptive case -- and abortion. And now we're just extending it out. And the further you extend it out, the more you -- this freedom actually intervenes and affects the family. You say, well, it's my individual freedom. Yes, but it destroys the basic unit of our society because it condones behavior that's antithetical to strong, healthy families.

He also manages to scare the reporter with his choice of analogies for homosexual behavior:

AP: I'm sorry, I didn't think I was going to talk about "man on dog" with a United States senator, it's sort of freaking me out.

According to the Times, Santorum defended himself thusly:

"I do not need to give an apology," he told the Fox News Channel, adding, "I think this is a legitimate public policy discussion."

Matthew Yglesias, sporting a not-quite-five o'clock shadow -- 3.15? -- has a beastiality-free analogy in response:

Well, segregation was a public policy issue, that doesn't mean you can just have any old position on it and still be a swell guy.

Howard Dean, among others, has called for Santorum's resignation as the Republican Conference Chairman, the number-three spot in the Senate leadership. While that seems like a good start, it's not clear that having people like Trent Lott and Rick Santorum on the Republican bench still casting votes is so much better than having them in the leadership. Under-the-radar intolerance is, after all, the hallmark of Republican strategy to appeal to racists and other extreme types. Is there really a point in helping the Republican Party perfect the implementation of its pretty-face/rotten-teeth game by telling them it's okay to just keep shuffling these fools around without repudiating them?

THE EDWARDS INVESTIGATION:

2003-04-23T22:47:00.000-07:00

Long-dormant That Other Blog contributor Jen -- who since this blog began has gotten an Ivy League Master's degree and a great job, for which her That Other Blog colleague is both very proud of her and slightly dismayed at his own lot -- had this to say in instant message in response to news of the Justice Department criminal investigation of donations to the presidential campaign of Sen. John Edwards: "shit, already?"

GETTING MONDALED:

2003-04-23T14:30:00.000-07:00

Previously, the working definition of to be Mondaled was something like "to be demolished in a general presidential election, winning no state but your home state". Thus the hope by Republicans, reflected in this Times piece, that President Bush will Mondale whomever the Democrats nominate in 2004:

Some advisers said they were hopeful that the 2004 contest would mirror the 1984 re-election of Ronald Reagan, who loped to an overwhelming victory over Walter F. Mondale.

Mondale threatened his place alongside Bork and Gerry in the pantheon of political wordmakers when he stepped out of retirement in 2002 to take the spot of late Senator Paul Wellstone on the ballot in Minnesota. But luckily he wound up diversifying possible definitions of his name when, despite being favored against former St. Paul mayor Norm Coleman, Mondale managed to associate himself with another flavor electoral debacle:

Analysts gave the former St. Paul mayor low chances for success, predicting sympathy for Wellstone and respect for Mondale would combine for a comfortable victory.

But Wellstone supporters handed Republicans a second chance at victory by turning a televised memorial service into a partisan foot-stomp. The scene offended Republicans and some undecided voters, and though Democrats later apologized, the fallout lingered for days.

Now back to the Times story:

The president is planning a sprint of a campaign that would start, at least officially, with his acceptance speech at the Republican convention, a speech now set for Sept. 2.

The convention, to be held in New York City, will be the latest since the Republican Party was founded in 1856, and Mr. Bush's advisers said they chose the date so the event would flow into the commemorations of the third anniversary of the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks.

Given the shamelessness of that timing, it would seem that if anyone will be getting Mondaled in 2004, it will be President Bush, by the newer definition of "to pay an electoral price for attempted political exploitation of a memorial service".

DEAN AND HART:

2003-04-22T07:01:00.000-07:00

Via More Sinister Matt we see that Matt Singer and Ezra Klein are dueling over the relative virtues of Gary Hart and Howard Dean.

We step into this debate reluctantly because (a) Gary Hart is not a candidate, though this may change; and (b) the very idea of comparing throwback-candidate Hart with full-time candidate Dean has a certain "Justine Bateman or Jennifer Aniston?" quality to it. Nevertheless, there are some points worth making about Gary Hart generally and about the relative merits of Hart and Howard Dean.

Ezra posted his case for Hart a week or two ago, but it has either been eaten by Blogspot or taken down. We left some also-apparently-lost comments on that post, but had saved them as a draft of the General Theory of Hart to be posted here. (If Ezra or anyone can produce the link to the original post, it will make the following thoughts on it slightly more relevant.) Here was our initial response to Ezra's case for Hart:

It seems like the following statement encapsulates your support for Hart: “He wuz robbed; he’s really smart.” If Al Gore were running you’d be in a real pickle.

I see you dropping a lot of hints that Dean would be a supportable candidate. (It’s also kind of funny that your “I’m tired of ...” mantra mimics Dean’s stump speech in both form and content.) Your big write-off of Dean was this sentence: “Dean's great to listen to, but being a firebrand isn't rocket science, and it's certainly not a substitute for vision.” Excepting Sharpton’s “new constitution” nonsense, Dean was the only candidate among nine on the stage [at the Children's Defense Fund Forum] with a vision. Hart, obviously, wasn’t there -- but I must say that actually running is a prerequisite for my support.

Dean’s speech to the New America Foundation/Atlantic Monthly Forum lays out his vision pretty clearly. (And, as an added bonus because of the think-tank audience, puts it in intellectually-stimulating policyspeak terms.)

I really believe Hart inspires you, but I think you’ll end up in the minority. Clearly history dealt the guy a shitty hand; it’s been argued that his disgrace was the case study for Clinton’s success. And I am also with you on his vision. From what I’ve read I don’t disagree with him one bit about what needs to happen.

But I think you’ll wind up being in the minority as far as being inspired, just as we’ll both end up in the minority of those even willing to read or consider anything complicated. Hart is the geek candidate this year, and shoot me if I’m too self-conscious to support him. His elective service was a long time ago, and he’s retreated to academia. That’s nothing to be ashamed of -- frankly, I’d just as soon skip the hassle of politics and go straight to Oxford. But I think his work and mind are better used elsewhere and that his appeal will be limited to those of us who are/were political science majors and/or really like a good lecture.

I’m with Dean because he has a vision of policy, like Hart, but also has a vision of politics, which Hart thinks he’s above. Hart’s been proved wrong on this once, and I haven’t seen anything indicating he’s willing to go to bat for liberals, Democrats, sane people -- or even himself -- against people like Karl Rove and Sean Hannity.

In the more recent exchange, Matt Singer makes a very good case for Dean. In doing so, he makes an important point about a friend of his who is leaning towards supporting the former Vermont governor:

[H]e's also one of the more thoughtful liberals I know. Many of us are people who characterize ourselves as third-way liberals, but not in the DLC "third-way-as-conservatism" method, more in the New America Foundation sense. And I see Dean as being the candidate who is coming out to embrace the third-way radical center.

That's precisely right. Dean is neither liberal nor conservative in the way we usually think of the terms. He's a hodgepodge of common sense, intelligent policy, and independence from special interests and ideologues.

Matt also, while arguing against Kerry, offers a good job application metaphor for candidates:

The argument Northeast Liberal works, not necessarily because he's a liberal, but 'cause he looks like one. His military background will help. But that alone doesn't make a candidate. The problem with so many Democrats is that they try to formulate the perfect resume for the Presidential candidate and they focus on the job experience, without looking at the interview. The campaign is an interview, not a resume. And the resume just has to be good enough to get in the door.

This is the problem with most analysis of the Democratic primary field and it portends Ezra Klein's response:

Dean, however, has no credibility on foreign policy or national defense. None, zero, nada. He has no chance when the debate moves into that arena. [Emphasis his]

Ezra's support for Hart is supposedly based on Hart's overwhelming credibility on foreign policy and national defense. He fails to appreciate that Hart has no credibility on any issues but foreign policy and national defense. [Emphasis ours]

One could argue -- as Ezra does -- that Hart's strengths in these areas are enough to make him the right candidate, but that argument misses two crucial facts. First, Hart's credibility isn't all that compelling. He served on a commission (who hasn't?) and his argument rests on a tenuous "I told you so" assertion that the commission predicted September 11. The foreign policy aspect of the campaign isn't going to be about who predicted the terrorist attacks. It will be about the vision of America's role in the world and how that role will protect Americans from more attacks. On this, Hart may have a compelling vision, but it's not a given that Bush won't make his "kill the motherfuckers" policy in an equally compelling way.

The second reason why Hart's purported credibility on foreign policy and defense won't be enough is that in the face of lies and dirty tricks, no amount of credibility is enough. Witness John McCain, war-hero POW, demolished by a Bush machine that said he failed to stand up for veterans, and Max Cleland, war-hero triple-amputee, demolished by a Bush machine that called him soft of national security. Are we to think that a docile former senator who left the political stage in disgrace over a decade ago will somehow be able to weather this hurricane of propaganda any more effectively?

Democrats could nominate the corpse of Eisenhower and poor, dead Ike would be torn apart on national security. Rove, Bush, and the credibility-suicide bombers on the right have no shame. The task for Democrats isn’t to try to “neutralize” the national security issue -- no resume or credibility will ever be enough.

The task for Democrats is to nominate someone who can bring a compelling, inspiring message to the American people while standing up for himself, his beliefs, his party, and everyone who doesn’t like where this country is headed under George W. Bush. Gary Hart -- and, for that matter, a few of the actual candidates -- have shown nothing but timidity in the face of challenges to their and their supporters’ patriotism. Supposedly “informed” analysts and those who support candidates they don’t prefer (the “I like so-and-so but he can’t win” people) are capitulating. They have let the other side scare them into a corner.

What’s worse is that they are carrying the poison message among their own, spreading it in the guise of strategy. If folks out there really believe in Gary Hart or Al Sharpton or John Edwards or Joe Lieberman, they should support them and vote for them. But those who support one candidate they speculate can win over the candidate they really want wind up degrading the whole process and truly wasting their vote. (Interestingly, Ezra somehow manages to use this calculation to deliver him to who is, by most accounts, the more quixotic candidate of the two.)

The only hope for Democrats is to find the candidate that inspires them and support that candidate and his or her vision with confidence that the Democratic agenda really can keep America safe and with zero tolerance for the lies and slander that have been the Bush strategy in the past.

BLAIR AND THE DIRTY EURO:

2003-04-21T12:38:00.000-07:00

A new, more sinister-looking Mathew Yglesias writes that hawkish devotees of the paradoxically English-speaking Axis of Cahones -- consisting of the US, Britain, and Australia, in that order -- will have trouble with British Prime Minister Tony Blair's staunch Eurofriendliness:

Lovers of the Anglosphere love Tony Blair and hate the Euro. Tony Blair, however, loves the Euro which creates something of a transitivity problem. The easiest solution for the Anglosphere crowd would be for Blair to become a Euroskeptic, but the Observer reports that despite a few bumps in the road it's not going to happen which leaves the Anglospheristas with the two options of either becoming Europhiles or else admitting that they're really just conservatives who agreed with Blair's position on Iraq.

He forgets that, by force of treaty signed last week, the geopolitical "Europe" grew to more closely match its purely geographical counterpart. Seven of the ten countries which signed the accession treaty at the European Union conference in Athens were, along with such players as Mongolia and the Marshall Islands, part of the "coalition" to disarm Iraq.

That may not mean much in terms of troops and money spent in Iraq, but it does add to Blair's alliance in what both sides will tell you is a battle for the soul of European Union foreign policy. Until recently, President Bush could count six of fifteen EU members supporting the war in Iraq. These new members put the balance at thirteen supporting the US, twelve against.

(But use a pencil for that math. As we explained before the war, support from places like Rome and Copenhagen will vanish when the right loses power. Western European leaders supported US policy even while huge majorities of their citizens opposed the war. Except for Blair, the six "Old" European leaders are all from center-right parties. They had already alienated the anti-war left and so didn't need to pander to it.)

Back to the euro: One expects that, barring any flourishes of nationalism, the ten new members will want to jump into the common currency as soon as the Eurozone will have them. None has a more stable currency than the euro, and each could use the boost in foreign investment that signing up will bring.

While these reasons are separate from Blair's case for ditching the pound, he nevertheless finds himself with seven new European Union members who are both "with" the US and pro-euro. As the debate about the future structure of the EU begins in earnest and a common foreign policy becomes less of a joke, the new balance may mean that Europe will become less complicit in the Fox News effort to peg it as the contemptible "other" at which conservative xenophobic bile should be spit.

PUT PLAINLY:

2003-04-21T12:10:00.000-07:00

Over at Uggabugga there is a pretty comprehensive diagram of how your government works, worth a gander for those who aren't yet really angry about how your government works.

We have one suggestion for improvement: given that both exercise influence on a broad spectrum of foreign and domestic policy issues, Vice President Dick Cheney and Kingmaker Karl Rove should probably both be attributed "major influence" as opposed to only "some influence" for the latter. Rove convinced Bush to run for governor and then president, and has been with him far longer than Cheney. See Elizabeth Drew's recent New York Review of Books piece for the account of their bizarre (though probably non-sexual) relationship.

LIEBERMAN IS FINISHED:

2003-04-16T21:07:00.000-07:00

It's not clear there is any other conclusion to be drawn from this article:

Senator Joseph I. Lieberman burned through 40 percent of the money his presidential campaign raised in the first three months of the year, by far the highest percentage of any major Democratic candidate, according to federal campaign-finance reports filed today.

It looks real, read bad. Lieberman has the best name-recognition and a distinctly underwhelming position in polls in states where other candidates have been campaigning (and thus eating into Lieberman's built-in advantage). He raised a lot less money than most thought he would, and now he's spending it like a lonely man in a nudie bar. Are we missing something?

CAN WE BE HONEST NOW?

2003-04-16T08:46:00.000-07:00

With Republican Senator Peter Fitzgerald not seeking re-election, will the woman he vanquished six years ago finally come clean and just say she wants her seat back, and that that's what all this presidency business is about?

Having a woman in the race is exciting -- though not all in the way such a phrase could potentially mean (there is no Draft Landrieu campaign to our knowledge). Moseley-Braun also ostensibly helps Democrats avoid the Sharpton Problem, though there is a far better candidate for this role.

The jockeying in Illinois is already beginning and it appears that the deadline for Moseley-Braun to make her true intentions known has just been moved up.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY:

2003-04-15T05:15:00.000-07:00

Among the revelations by Jim Capozzola of The Ritenhouse Review about people born on 14 April:

Some people may consider you self-centered.

You are a quick thinking person, rather impulsive in self-expression, even to the point of being rude or cheeky.

[Y]ou may wish to preach your views with considerable intensity.

You have an uncanny ability for seeing the weaknesses in others and exploiting them.

You are overconcerned with making an impression and like to have the last word.

You hate being wrong, and have difficulty admitting it when you are.

You have strong socialist impulses.

For those keeping score at home, those born on that day are evidently vain (twice), stubborn, manipulative, smack-talking jerk Commies.

APOLOGIES, THIS IS BANAL:

2003-04-13T13:22:00.000-07:00

One isn’t supposed to blog on one’s birthday, so here are a few articles -- some much-blogged, some not at all -- the posting of links to which hopefully will satisfy readers that, despite taking tomorrow off, we are serious (perhaps that’s not precisely the word) about all of this.

Michael Kinsley has a thoughtful article over at Slate on how we should be marking our scorecards now that the non-invading-Syria part of the war is effectively over. Ha’aretz has a short piece by Rogel Alper on the impact of Fox “And You Thought the Rest of Our Cultural Exports Were Trash” News Channel in Israel. We will shortly -- as in another day, very soon -- have a bit more to say about this, as O’Reilly’s head also recently splashed down in the Stockholm archipelago, from where That Other Blog presently operates.

Also, in the latest New York Review, Michael Tomasky has an unsettlingly well-written, must-read review of William Langewiesche’s must-read book American Ground: Unbuilding the World Trade Center. In the same issue Elizabeth Drew has a far less brilliantly-written article on the nonetheless-important topic of joint channeling of Richard Nixon by Karl Rove and George W. Bush.

Re the birthday thing, shame absolutely does not preclude a gentle nudging of the reader’s attention toward the links to the left of this body of text, specifically the “generosity” heading.

THAT SEXY STEWART:

2003-04-12T07:40:00.000-07:00

Salon has a very smart, very well-written piece by Laura Miller about "The Daily Show" and its role in our political dialogue:

"The Daily Show" doesn't just make fun of broadcast journalists (as "Saturday Night Live" has for decades), it mocks the underlying know-nothing mulishness that passed for trenchant common sense back when the president's sex life seemed like the most pressing moral issue facing the nation. ...

Political humor used to belong to the left, but that all changed in the 1990s, when the priggishness of political correctitude injected new vitality into a segment of the population that had been shut out of comedy's pantheon: assholes. Suddenly, a guy could flaunt his most petty and vindictive prejudices and still get to feel like a champion of truth and freedom. You could rail against "victimology" when, say, sexually harassed workers dared to resort to it, and then turn around and avail yourself of the same trend by claiming that a pack of censorious puritans was trying to shut you up. In fact, the appeal of shock jocks and other bad boys mostly lies in the idea that they're offensive to somebody else, someone you can imagine gasping in horror at each transgression. Without political correctness (and that's fading fast), a big chunk of what passes for contemporary American humor would be flapping in the wind.

Miller contrasts Stewart and "The Daily Show" with Bill Maher and his new HBO show, which probably isn't fair:

But the sorry truth is that everything on "Real Time" that's meant to be funny isn't, including Maher's opening monologue, regular Paul Tompkins, and (especially) the guest comics who perform at each show's end. It all feels tired and smug. Infinitely pleased with himself, Maher needs to realize that the value of being the smartest guy in the room varies considerably with the quality of the rooms you choose to hang out in. His hodgepodge conglomeration of pet positions -- for the legalization of marijuana, against the demonization of porn, contempt for religion -- developed more of a moral center with his opposition to the Iraq war, but it's still rooted in a self-congratulatory rejection of other people's sanctimony. He's pious about his own impiety.

Stewart and company, on the other hand, can articulate their derision for the state of American public life without demanding that we admire their maverick élan. In fact, "The Daily Show" regularly advances the notion that self-satisfied white guys might sometimes be part of the problem and not just the blameless (yet rakish!) casualties of moral crusaders run amok.

Via Digby, who has actual commentary on the piece should readers yearn for what lacks here.

SAFIRE IS INSANE:

2003-04-12T04:44:00.000-07:00

The Times needs to lock him in a room with his OED and limit his contributions to tickly columns on usage and etymology. Johnny Bardine quotes but doesn't link to (in what is hopefully a sign that this is a vicious joke) a recent piece in which Safire draws us an arc of freedom across the map of the Middle East:

If Iraqis are able to adopt a system of free enterprise and representative government, they will become the center of an arc of freedom from Turkey in the north to Israel in the south (with Lebanon freed from Syrian occupation, if France will liberate the state it created). Egypt, the largest Arab nation, could not long resist such a tidal wave of liberty.

Say what you will about this vision, a sort of Marshall Plan without the money, for consolidating democracy in the Middle East. Far crazier is that he can include Israel's occupation of the West Bank and Gaza in his Arc of Freedom without so much as an asterisk -- but musters some parentheses for an incidental swipe at the French.

Also, we look forward to next week's column calling on the United States to liberate the state it created, the despite-its-name-not-at-all-liberated nation of Liberia, the failure to do obviously being the real obstacle to an Arc of West African Freedom.

CANDIDATE FORUM RECAP:

2003-04-09T18:41:00.000-07:00

Tonight the nine Democratic candidates for president gathered at the Children's Defense Fund Forum, where a panel of journalists asked questions mostly related to education and other policies affecting children. The candidates looked somewhat surprised that this was a panel/debate format and not another opportunity to give the stump speech they've been practicing. They had good reason, because this format is far too unwieldy for a nine-candidate panel. We tuned in late, but have some reactions.

In the spirit of The Agonist, we bring these reactions to you typed in breathless real-time as events unfold. (We regret that no opportunity exists to go all out with our tribute and plagiarize some professional journalism. Indeed, we'll buck the whole lack-of-integrity aspect of the imitation and point out that all quotes are paraphrased.) So:

Sen. Bob Graham looks feisty, and far less full of shit than the Lieberman-Gephardt-Moseley-Braun Axis of Platitudes.

Rep. Dennis Kucinich has the angry thing down, but gets buried on the "is there any social program you don't support?" question. Run, Dennis, run -- not for president, but off the stage, as fast as you can.

Sen. John Kerry looked pretty good. He's fighting to appear not completely contrived.

Sen. Joe Lieberman needs to learn how to talk without clenching his teeth. Can people really stand watching this guy? Is there a pill you can take to avoid wincing as soon as he starts moralizing?

Just as the previous sentence was being typed, Al Sharpton takes a hand to Lieberman on the moralizing, saying something to the effect of, "I'm the preacher on this panel ... [but] we can preach on Sundays. Let's get Americans the legislation they need Monday through Saturday."

Sen. John Edwards: "America needs to lead in a way that brings others to us, not drives others away." Also, in response to why Americans trust Republicans more on national security and military matters: "They haven't heard our case."

Rep. Dick Gephardt goes angry scorned ex-girlfriend on education: "'No Child Left Behind' is a fraud. It is cynical, it is a fraud, they never meant it, they're never going to reform these programs, we need new leadership."

Al Sharpton is still the funniest guy out there, especially on why simply appointing blacks to high office doesn't necessarily help blacks in society, saying that, "Everyone of my color ain't my kind, all my skinfolk ain't my kinfolk."

Howard Dean talks a good game on race. We'll bring you that quote when the transcript becomes available.

John Edwards still needs a haircut.

The one-minute closings:

Sharpton is, unfortunately, very good.

Lieberman: very, very glib, but he has two good lines: "Children deserve more from the White House than a teeball game on the White House lawn." And: "People ask whether anyone can beat George W. Bush. Well, I know we can beat George W. Bush because Al Gore and I did it in 2000."

Kucinich, stepping on Lieberman's ovation: "But with all due respect, let me tell you why this election won't be close. This election won't be close when the people show up because the Democratic Party shows up." He then goes on to list a number of policies like repealing NAFTA and leaving the WTO that will not, in fact, make very many people show up.

Kerry tells a ho-hum anecdote about someone he put in the audience; a little too Professional Candidate.

Graham doesn't have much to say.

Gephardt wants to pay off the college loans of anyone willing to teach for five years, but it's not clear whether he means a token grand or two towards state school or real incentive for those of us with several tens of thousands of dollars in crippling education debt.

Edwards knows that "we still believe in America that the son of a mill worker can beat the son of a president." Not if the son of the mill worker doesn't have anything substantive to say, someone should remind him.

Dean starts off well, gets a little lost, and saves himself by plugging his website for comic relief.

Moseley-Braun: "I'm running for president because I'm a patriot." Oh. Okay. "I want America to believe that a woman can lead the ship of state." Well, sure, theoretically -- but where are you going with this? Surely you don't mean a woman who happens to be an out of work former Ambassador to New Zealand and one-term Senator, do you?

More considered reaction pending. Your comments are welcome in the appropriately titled "comments" section below.

GREAT NEWS:

2003-04-09T15:35:00.000-07:00

There really isn't any other way to characterize these reports from the Times:

During the day, the streets here were full of activity, after days of fearsome warfare.

In Firdos Square in central Baghdad, a group of Iraqi men climbed up the pedestal of a 20-foot statue of Mr. Hussein and smacked it with a sledgehammer. Then they put a chain around the neck of the statue and tied it to an armored American military vehicle.

The crowd then cheered and clapped as the vehicle pulled away, toppling the statue. Several Iraqis danced and jumped on the fallen statue. Several men began dragging the head of the statue through the street as crowds reached out to swat it the soles of their shoes, an especially deep insult in Arab culture.

Elsewhere in Baghdad, the American military emptied jails overnight, releasing their prisoners.

In the neighborhood called Saddam City, a densely populated Shiite area, crowds of men shouted and waved their arms in jubilation. Some carried makeshift flags.

One middle-aged man held up a huge portrait of Mr. Hussein, and in the middle of the street used his shoe to beat the face of the Iraqi leader. "This man has killed two million of us," he yelled as bystanders milled around approvingly.

One American colonel said that there was not a single area of the city that the Iraqi government still controlled, after another night of heavy bombing and intense fighting. A few explosions continued during the day as bombs fell from American warplanes.

And then of course there's this gem:

Iraq's U.N. ambassador, Mohammed Aldouri, said on Wednesday "the game is over" and he hoped the Iraqi people soon would be able to live in peace.
Speaking to reporters in front of his residence as well as Iraq's mission to the United Nations, Aldouri said: "The work now is peace. We hope that peace will prevail."

"The game is over," Aldouri said, his first admission that Iraqi President Saddam Hussein no longer controls Baghdad.

The ambassador, in answer to questions, said he had had no communication with Baghdad for some days.

He'd better get out of New York before he finds himself whisked down to Guantanamo Bay.

Though a secret trial by a foreign power with no right to due process or appeal to civilian authority (among others) could hardly be worse than what he'd get back in Baghdad. A slipper to the face would be the least of his problems.

NORM COLEMAN FEELING THREATENED BY A DEAD GUY:

2003-04-09T05:23:00.000-07:00

With the six-month Don't Speak Ill of the Dead prohibition having recently expired, Senator Norm Coleman of Minnesota, who ran an atypically (by Minnesota standards) combative campaign last year against Senator Paul Wellstone until Wellstone died with his wife and daughter in a plane crash shortly before the election, has decided to lead with his ego in the fight to overcome the Wellstone Myth:

The Capitol Hill newspaper Roll Call quoted Mr. Coleman on Monday as saying: "To be very blunt and God watch over Paul's soul, I am a 99 percent improvement over Paul Wellstone. Just about on every issue."

No word yet on precisely how many present and former Senators lined up to make the appropriate "Senator, I knew Paul Wellstone. I served with Paul Wellstone. Paul Wellstone was a friend of mine. And you, sir, are no Paul Wellstone" remark. But they all should.

As if the nature of his remarks wasn't wrong enough, Coleman manages to get the substance wrong, too: Wellstone was ahead by five points the night he died. It's not clear what poll Coleman is referencing with that 99 percent figure.

BOY, THAT GUY'S GREAT:

2003-04-07T11:35:00.000-07:00

There's a marvelous essay up over at the DeanBlog, a group blog about Democratic presidential candidate Howard Dean. Someone should really hire that guy for... something. Everyone should go read it now.

Seeing as most traffic seems to come from the DeanBlog these days, those readers who have already read the essay in question are encouraged to scroll down this page and enjoy. All visitors are encouraged read about the oft-overlooked That Other Forum and contribute something there.

This site and the DeanBlog are for different audiences, and so have different perspectives. Here we aim for something approximating objectivity, to be reasonable. Actually, that's not really true, given the vicious contempt for this or that person/thing/movement sometimes expressed in this space.

Suffice to say that we try not to be stupid. The DeanBlog is, necessarily, significantly more rah-rah than That Other Blog, but hopefully fails to be stupid just as often. We hope you enjoy both.

BOILERPLATE INVECTIVE:

2003-04-04T20:55:00.000-08:00

Michael Tomasky has a brilliantly-written piece at The American Prospect online. Go for the prose, stay for the utility.

Tomasky takes to task William Kristol, the latest archconservative to offer smug advice to Democrats on what is "wrong" with their party. Predictably leaving aside the fact that the last national election seemed to indicate a dangerous shortage of Supreme Court justices blatantly in their corner, Kristol offers to helpfully show what kind of Democrats are good (the ones who do what President Bush wants) and what kind are bad (the ones who hate America).

Tomasky engages Kristol on his points and demolishes him. But this seminal piece can also serve as a template for rebutting other oh-so-concerned conservatives offering up their vision of what ails the Democratic Party. For instance, this line has near-universal applicability to every such piece:

It is a house -- no, a skyscraper -- of propaganda and lies.

There is also this versatile paragraph:

A seductive line of reasoning. Like much of what the right puts out, it sort of sounds logical -- logical enough not to be challenged by either timorous Democrats (is there any other kind now?) or mainstream journalists who don't know any better. And -- like much of what the right puts out -- it is Orwellian duplicity, straight out of the Oceania Ministry of Truth, known these days as the Murdoch Empire, in whose very fertile soil Kristol [or Noonan, et al.] digs his [or her] spade.

When dealing with multi-layered fabrications use the following:

Propagandizing about the present cannot work without first lying about the past...

Finally, complete the Orwellian circle with:

But legitimate debate means nothing to these people. Only partisan advantage does. The point is to scare the other side, club it into submission, and you do that by setting up a phony argument and repeating it over and over. And, tragically, it works. That's the fun thing about being in the Ministry of Truth: If you say it, it's true.

Tomasky is right when he says that, "Until Democrats learn how to define themselves, there will be nothing to prevent the Bill Kristols of the world from doing so for them." With this outline, you can begin that process -- you too can debunk smug condescension!

KELLY:

2003-04-04T13:30:00.000-08:00

Journalist Michael Kelly, who wrote and edited in various capacities at the Washington Post, National Journal, Atlantic Monthly, and The New Republic, has been killed in what was apparently a humvee accident while with US troops in Iraq.

His resume was enviable and he seems to have been one of the better editors in recent years at several very good publications. His own writing was often very wrong-headed and infuriating, but thankfully -- and far too seldom in today's journalism -- he most times saw the distinction between his roles as editor and columnist.

There is plenty to say about his politics and the already-beginning lionization of him by the right, but his work in recent years shaping the Atlantic Monthly into a magazine of unrivaled breadth and depth earns him a respectful treatment here. That magazine is an achievement that dwarfs almost anyone's foolishness.

WHAT IS 'A TIME OF WAR'?:

2003-03-31T18:30:00.000-08:00

Apparently the US has a new policy of automatically detaining all asylum-seekers from thirty-three countries plus the Palestinian territories until their applications have been processed. You're not supposed to know the part about the Palestinians being detained, though -- actually, you're not supposed to know the the names of any of the countries on the list due to "law enforcement and diplomatic sensitivities". (The New York Terrorist-Collabora... -- err, Times prints the list that human rights groups have pieced together in its article on the policy.)

One supporter of the new policy makes a seemingly fair observation:

David A. Martin, who was the general counsel for the immigration service during the Clinton administration, also said the new policy might be appropriate. "A categorical deterrence policy is in general a legitimate rationale," Mr. Martin said. "In a time of war and a time of risk, to impose it by nationality is defensible."

Since September 11 many Bush administration efforts to enhance our security have been justified by the appeal to consideration that we are in "a time of war". Among them: a new cabinet department, military tribunals, additional surveillance, a huge tax cut, and drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Reserve.

Surely right now is a time of war. Tens of thousands of troops are on the ground fighting and we're attempting to overthrow another government.

But curiously, and to the probable surprise of some soldiers, the war didn't just start. Their own online archives reveal that the White House has used the phrase at least once every single month since September, 2001.

According to the White House we've been in "a time of war" since September 11. Surely we were in Afghanistan. But wouldn't at least some period of time between when Hamad Karzai took power there in December 2001 and the start of hostilities in Iraq in March 2003 count as something other than "a time of war"?

The United States is pursuing a crackdown on international Islamic terrorism that President Bush likes to call the "War on Terror". But since the present Iraq war isn't obviously related to September 11 in any other way than our increased resolve to fight anything that seems remotely threatening, is this really the same war? When the President says today that we're in "a time of war" which of these "wars" is he talking about?

In the context of the president linking virtually every action he takes to the gravity of "a time of war" (actual quote: "Hispanic Heritage Month is an important month for our country -- particularly now that we're at a time of war.") is this a reliable consideration when judging policy?

September 11 changed a lot of things, and certainly the challenge of terrorism requires vigilance. But with two clear levels of war being waged -- one low-intensity pitched battle against terrorist organizations with no logical conclusion, and another of massive bombing and ground troops seeking regime change -- isn't it time we raised the bar for what constitutes "a time of war"?

The Bush administration's continued abuse of this phrase may erode the public's ability to distinguish when the nation really does need to come together and when the president is simply posturing for votes on his tax cut -- leading people to ignore the phrase altogether. Or worse, Americans could take President Bush at face value and face another six years of "unity" government they might not otherwise have chosen. Either way, if Republican campaign strategy last fall and the president's rhetoric are any indication, it seems likely that when this war (no quotation marks there) in Iraq is over we'll still be in "a time of war" no matter how many troops come home.