Time last week got the scoop on Josh Bolten’s Five-Point Plan to protect the Bush administration from that which it fears the most -- subpoena power - through the familiar strategy of firing up their base. All of them seem lame or craven, or grotesque, not least the promise to ratchet up tensions with Iran for political reasons. “In the face of the Iranian menace, the Democrats will lose,” says a source described as “a Republican frequently consulted by the White House.” But let’s focus on point three:

…the Administration will focus on two tax measures already in the legislative pipeline-extensions of the rate cuts for stock dividends and capital gains. … “This is very popular with investors, and a lot of Republicans are investors,” the adviser told TIME.

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Chris Kromm takes the progressive blogosphere to task for our "silence about May 1." "Why," he wants to know, "is the progressive blogosphere so completely out of touch?" In my case, it's because I'm literally out of touch and had no idea anything was happening May 1. Traditionally, I like to wear red and sing the "Internationale" in observation of International Workers Day. Apparently, though, there's going to be a nationwide immigrant strike organized by (some of) the organizers of the big immigrant rallies that took place while I was on vacation. Is this a mistake? Will there be a backlash?

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I'm failing to grasp the nature of the grave threat to American identity posed by a Spanish-language version of "The Star Spangled Banner." I assume that at official events we'll be continuing to sing the standard version of the anthem, but surely translating important texts into Spanish is precisely the sort of thing you'd expect Spanish-speaking Americans to do. Here's, "La Marseillaise" in English (the lyrics are awesomely bloodthirsty, in case you didn't know). And yet la belle France is still alive and with us.

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I like Tim Roemer, the former Congressman from Indiana who now is President of the Center for National Policy as well as his staff -- but I have to give him some push back on his New York Times op-ed this morning.

Roemer is proposing that Dems stop getting lost in the quagmire of developing better policy proposals and trying to sell them to Americans and just make the next elections about how bad the Republicans are. He wants to take a page out of Karl Frost's 1946 Republican strategy posing the question to Americans, "Had Enough? Vote Democratic."

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Yesterday, the State Department, as well as the National Counterterrorism Center, released companion pieces on the state of terror in the world. In a briefing that could only flow from an Administration used to funky interpretations of numbers, and despite the 11,000 terrorist attacks reported worldwide last year, the State Department's top counterterrorism official remarked "Despite the continued violence we see, there's a growing recognition and a realization among civilized societies and countries and individuals that we've got to bond together."  

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Last week the brass at TPM sent me to a pre-release screening of Al Gore’s new global warming documentary, An Inconvenient Truth. My first big field assignment and I couldn’t have asked for something more glamorous!

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John Bolton and the UK’s Emyr Jones Parry seem to be speaking with one voice following today’s IAEA finding that Iran has not even pretended to comply with their month-old demand that Iran stop enriching uranium. Evelyn Leopold and Irwin Arieff report that Britain and the US are pressing for a quick Security Council resolution that would place Iran’s nuclear activity under a legally binding Chapter 7 mandate.

The question is whether or nor China will acquiesce to such a resolution. To woo China demands some deft diplomacy on the part of the US and UK, and presumably requires playing down the potential consequences of invoking Chapter 7. To that end, Arieff and Leopold report that the British draft does not hint at war or sanctions. Of course, one thing that could derail efforts to bring China on board would be a new round of saber rattling by the Bush administration. At this point, should administration officials, including Bolton, publicly hint at possible unilateral military strikes it would not be hard to see why some think that the Bush administration, on its path to war, is setting the Security Council up to fail.

One of the right’s favorite arguments against health care reform is that private insurance is inherently more efficient than public programs like Medicare.

It works as propaganda because it’s consistent with the public’s deeply held skepticism of government. But it’s just not true. And this week Wall Street gave us yet more proof of that.

It happened yesterday after Aetna, one of the nation’s largest insurers, released its first-quarter earnings report. Earnings were up more than 3 percent – the kind of news that, one might suppose, Wall Street would greet with glee. Not so. Shares actually plummeted...

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I am strongly in favor of much greater representation, respect, and appreciation for the contributions of immigrants in general and those of Hispanic background in particular. I could not be more strongly on the record (for those who care, see THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR and CONTEMPORARY SOCIOLOGY). However I suggest it is a mistake to introduce ethnic specific versions of the national anthem.

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Well, of course we're all in favor of the common good--and its appeal to sacrifice, citizenship, and all those progressive words. The hard part is explaining who counts as part of the "common," and exactly what is the "good." Going back to the common good of 1933? I don't think so. That leaves out almost everyone I know, including most of those I grew up with in southern Ohio.

Ruth Rosen is absolutely right that if the Dems can't figure out how to talk about family values, they're going to leave women cold--and (how often do we have to say this?) women are not a minority interest. But Ruth's post strikes me as focusing on a group of women who can get decently-paying, intellectually compelling jobs (much as the highly problematic Prospect article by Linda Hirschman did as well). That leaves out most women, and therefore most families.

Toward the goal of including more working women in the "common good": Here's my article covering the recent Supreme Court oral argument in Burlington Northern v. White, published--I will point out--in Tomasky's TAP Online.

President Bush rejected the idea of a windfall tax on oil company profits today, suggesting instead that companies voluntarily use increased cash flows to build more natural gas pipelines, expand refineries, and invest in renewable energy. OPEC has recently accused oil companies of failing to invest adequately in new facilities, thus driving up the price of oil worldwide.

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In my last post, I argued that the geopolitical terrain upon which America’s global leadership position rests is shifting. The rise of American unipolar power and the erosion of norms of state sovereignty have “flipped” the Westphalian order on its head, altered the logic of order and rule, and made American power more controversial and contested. It has also made it more difficult for the United States to authoritatively assert its leadership on the global stage.

My thesis is that this has created a “security trap” for America. It is a trap in the sense that when the United States tries to solve its security problems by exercising power and wielding force, it triggers resistance and hostility that ultimately makes it harder for the United States to achieve its security goals. Moreover, this is a problem that any American president would encounter.

Liberals beware – you too must tread carefully on this new international terrain.

Now I would like to argue that the Bush administration has walked right into this “security trap” and made it worse.

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There may be legitimate debate about the extent to which currently skyrocketing gas prices are attributable to naturally functioning market forces as opposed to price manipulation by big oil companies.  Getting the information necessary to diagnose the problem will require a thorough investigation with tough questions and honest answers.  Designing a prescription will be similarly painstaking.  For now, one thing on which we should all agree is that middle class taxpayers, not big oil companies, should be the beneficiaries of tax relief and government subsidies.

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Color me underwhelmed by the discovery of the Common Good. The discussion papers over problems going to race and gender that have not gone away.

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Its amazing how the press can be gulping down the administration's ridiculous spin time after time. Its already been discussed by my colleagues how the enrollment statistics being touted are pure garbage and I think everyone is familiar with CMS’s purposely outright lies on the cost estimates before the bill was passed. Now CMS is trying to mislead the American public yet again.

One of the major complaints about the Part D disaster has been how drug plans can change their formularies and drugs covered at any time, and thus can leave seniors stuck without access to the prescription drugs they need. CMS is trying to mislead the public into thinking that this is solved with their latest actions.

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Over at QandO, Dale Franks has a long post up about the French and German health systems that deserves a read but requires some serious corrections and context. As he sort of notes, the French system is a mostly public structure, with the majority of citizens buying private insurance on top of it -- the government provides the floor, your bank account decides the ceiling. The government subsidizes extra insurance for the poor.

Franks also notes that the system has staggering deficits. Well, I guess so. But not as staggering as, you know, our deficits. And it's also not crushing any of their major industries in the way our system has helped destroy our automakers. And France spends about 10% of their GDP to give everyone unlimited care, we spend 15% and have 46 million uninsured, and 15 million more underinsured. Put another way, we spend $5,600 per capita even with the downward drag of the 46 million uninsured. France spends $2,900 and everyone is covered.

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The "common good" commentary's coming down so hard and fast now that I barely know how to keep up. I can't help but think, however, that the whole conversation is to some extent a red herring. Consider this thought experiment in which nothing about the Kerry campaign's domestic message is changed: He does exactly as good (or, if you prefer, bad) a job of appealing to people's economic concerns and exactly as bad (or, if you prefer, good) a job of appealing to people's cultural concerns. But -- and it's a crucial but -- after listening to the two candidates talk national security, most people think that John Kerry would do a better job than George W. Bush at running the country's military and foreign affairs. What would happen? Well, Kerry would have won. But he didn't win, because most people didn't think that. There are lots of problems and issues out there, but this, I think, is the political challenge for the Democratic Party and the failure to focus on it like a laser beam is a big element of the problem.

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United Nation atomic inspectors released a major report on the status of Iran’s nuclear program today which said Iran was not in compliance with the UN. The report is widely seen as paving the way for a Security Council resolution calling on Iran to halt uranium enrichment. Iran is greeting the development with warnings to the West. Javad Zarif – the Iranian ambassador to the UN – told reporters today that Iran would consider any future resolution illegitimate. "If the Security Council decides to take decisions that are not within its competence, Iran is not obliged to obey them," he said.

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It might be good news for New Orleans that Joe Lieberman has lost so much credibility among Democrats due to his various positions on Iraq and other "shilling for the administration" behaviors. Over at Eschaton, about every fifth post is in support of Ned Lamont's burgeoning primary challenge, and of course the Kossacks have a huge hate on for the man. So it's important that Lieberman re-establish himself as a good little Democrat, and it appears that he has chosen New Orleans as one of his high profile issues. So on the same day Bush is in New Orleans doing for a photo-op gutting houses with Mayor Nagin, Lieberman headlines the blistering condemnation of the White House's lack of co-operation with the Senate's Katrina investigation. (Also Yahoo's best headline ever. Read it aloud and just try not to say "one" at the end.)

This builds on the DNC's meeting, where Dean attacked the federal government for its continuing inept response. This is such a slam-dunk issue that the Republicans are reduced to whining that Democrats are looking to score "cheap political points" off the Katrina disaster. (Of course, that's when they're not saying that "Katrina has worn its welcome.- I think the American people are tired of it.")

I think we need to embrace this. There are political points to be had, and every politician that is smart enough to exploit it raises the profile of our very real problems here. So I'm all for it. Various Republicans have cautioned that such a move could "backfire" in November, but, touched as I am by their concern, I think everyone should take the chance. C'mon Hillary, you've never been above a few cheap political points. They're here for the taking. Come get 'em.

We’re pleased to announce that next week’s Book Club will feature a discussion about David Sirota’s Hostile Takeover: How Big Money and Corruption Conquered Our Government—and How We Take It Back. If you’re looking for a debate about political corruption (what to do with all that muck!), the future of the Democratic party, and what Americans need to do to get the government they need, you’ll find it here.

I've been accepting the conventional wisdom that Mitt Romney's going to have a bit of a Mormon problem on his hands. But maybe this is wrong. After all, there are rather a lot of Mormon Senators. Not just Orrin Hatch and Bob Bennett from Utah, but also Mike Crapo in Idaho and quasi-moderate Republican Gordon Smith from Oregon. And, of course, Harry Reid, minority leader of the U.S. Senate. This is pretty much in line with the overall LDS population in the country, so there may well be nothing to alleged anti-Mormonism. Consider, this with, say, African-Americans who are about 11 percent of the population and just one percent of the Senate and who have, generally speaking, not had much success at representing majority-white constituencies.

It's definitely true that "it worked in Massachusetts" doesn't mean it'll work nationwide, but if it works in Oregon and Idaho and Nevada and Massachusetts, then why shouldn't it work nationally? Evangelical Christians genuinely aren't a force in Massachusetts politics, but surely they are important to the Oregon and Idaho GOPs, right?

What are the two biggest things wrong with the Democratic party today? Sure, there are a lot of candidates, but I suspect the two that would top most lists are:

1. Voters and the party itself don't have a clear idea of what it stands for.

2. The party doesn't know how fight--it's slow, unimaginative and ultimately ineffective at responding to political challenges.

Could it be, though, that we're actually starting to make progress?--that we now have reasonable approaches to righting these wrongs and therefore something close to a winning formula? I actually think so.

On the first problem, as described by David Brooks in Thursday's New York Times, there is a school of thought emerging on the progressive/Democratic side that directly addresses the need for Democrats to define themselves clearly. Here's Brooks' take on Michael Tomasky's American Prospect article, Party in Search of a Notion, and my paper with John Halpin, The Politics of Definition: The Real Third Way (posted in four parts on the Prospect website, Part I, Part II, Part III and Part IV)

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Suffolk County (the eastern bit of Long Island in New York) is planning to build the country's largest municipal wireless network, and good for them. When I first got wind of telecom companies pressuring state legislatures to implement municipal wifi bans, I kind of took it for granted that they would swiftly succeed in getting their way in state capitols across the land. It hasn't played out that way so far -- both sides have had their victories. And that should be good enough; as long as enough places try out municipal wifi for it to get a fair shake then it'll spread as long as it leaves up to its boosters' expectations.

It seems that quite some time back John Holbo devised a term for the form of argument critiqued below -- "Poetic Justice as Fairness". That's a little John Rawls humor for the philosophers in the audience. As he says, it's a "vendetta-based, rather than abstract reason-based approach to argument."

As the chatterers have chattered, Tomasky's article is brilliant. Since he looks at the common good in broad strokes of history, I'll use my soapbox to take the story a little narrower and a little closer to home -- in economic regulation.

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Mike Tomasky has a must-read article in this month's American Prospect, (http://www.prospect.org), about the need for the Democrats to have a broad vision of where they want to lead the country, preferably one that links to the notion of creation of a common good."For a republic to thrive," he writes, "leaders must create and nourish a civic sphere in which citizens are encouraged to think broadly about what will sustain that republic and to work together to achieve common goals." For Tomasky and others of us who define ourselves as believers in an agenda that unifies liberals or democratic leftists in a shared project, there is a momentum in the air that bodes well for an agenda of commonality. Tomasky's article was cited this week by E.J. Dionne in his Washington Post column: and by David Brooks in today's New York Times. As E.J. points out, the ideas that Tomasky puts forward means that the Dems have to postulate for something that moves beyond individual rights. Brooks says it differently, and more bluntly: the age of multiculturalism is over.

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The mainstream media is at it again. Tom Friedman and many liberal bloggers and perhaps all economists -- what a collection! -- all agree that it is a good thing gas prices are soaring and only wish that they were sure to go still higher and stay way up there. Why? Because then Americans would trade in their big old cars for little electric buggies, put solar panels on their roofs, walk to work, and save the environment. Meanwhile, the cognoscenti all agree that we have a Congress of Fools because on both sides of the aisle they want to relieve consumers from the gas gouging, although naturally the R's and D's have totally different approaches and can't find sensible common ground in broad daylight.
But but but: I differ. It seems to me that it's in the public interest to have lower energy prices and also not to burn carbon based fuels. The way to solve this dual objective is to create taxpayer subsidized low-price non-carbon fuels. If we can have free roads and subsidized busses, why can't we have very low price non-carbon energy? The "market" doesn't work and has no chance of being liberated to go to work; and if it did, who's to say that the market wouldn't continue to fail to capture the externality of species-killing climate change? Let's treat energy like other public goods and provide lots of it, at very low prices, and just stipulate that it should not be carbon-based. Then throw the public money at the problem in a series of fair, open auctions that enhance efficiency and competition on non-carbon grounds.

Apparently, Condi Rice has jumped on the Bolton bandwagon. She's the latest to suggest that the UN's relevance depends on whether or not it confronts Iran. This isn't the first time the administration has sought to tie the UN's credibility to its support of U.S. goals, but Rice's entry into this game is particularly disturbing.

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I spent the first half of this week in Iran, meeting with officials, think tank types, and academics, discussing both the nuclear issue and the situation in Iraq. It was a fascinating trip – we also visited a key nuclear facility – and I’ll be sharing some more general thoughts from it during the next week. I wanted, though, to post a couple very quick things on the nuclear front before the UN Security Council meets tomorrow to take up the issue.

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As you may know, there's some kind of wind farm proposal that Ted Kennedy is opposed to apparently because it would mess up the view from his summer house. Conservatives find this endlessly amusing but I can never quite figure out what they're trying to say about it. If you think Kennedy is wrong, then that's a black eye for him, but surely a bigger black eye to the vast majority of Republicans who are hostile to wind power generally. Alternatively, if you think Kennedy's correct, then there's really no point in mocking a Senator for taking a correct position on the issue. The central conceit of the right's fascination with this issue seems to be that hypocrisy is the most important thing in the world, certainly far more significant than something as petty as national energy policy.

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As a recent transplant to Virginia, I've never quite understood the appeal of the Junior Senator from the Commonwealth, George Allen. Sure, he's one of many Republican Governors who got an easy ride in the 1990s by benefiting from the Clinton-era national economic boom, and yes, I suppose some voters are attracted to his endless fluency with football metaphors and his carefully cultivated good ol' boy image.

But presidential timber? I don't think so.

 Still, after reading Ryan Lizza's long profile of Allen in The New Republic today, I have a new appreciation of Allen as a man who took a truly weird path to the boring persona he sports today.

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Burst dams along the Danube river have forced hundreds more Romanians to evacuate their homes overnight.  The river began flooding in early April, and now thousands in Eastern Europe have spent days living in emergency tents.

A coalition between Israeli acting prime minister Ehud Olmert’s Kadima party and the Labor party was agreed on today.  Toram Turbowicz, the head of Kadima’s negotiating team, said the deal “is good for Kadima and Labor and will be good for Israel.”  Under the coalition, the Labor party will gain seven cabinet posts, including the Defense Ministry portfolio. 

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If you think its about sexual prowess, you’d be wrong. If you think it’s about size, forget it. And if you imagine we follow the various pissing contests going on among male liberals, you’re too self-absorbed. It’s about what I call the Care Crisis.

During the last week, I’ve had a series of conversations with intellectual, liberal women who, like most of our male friends, companions and husbands, want to restore American democracy, end the war, and free up our nation’s wealth to support the health and well being of our nation’s citizens.

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In another example of how confusing Part D is to seniors, a recent poll by the Kaiser Family Foundation shows that almost half of all seniors do not know about the May 15th deadline and the resulting lifetime penalty. Remember, there are more than 7 million seniors who remain eligible and without coverage. In a little over two weeks, they will start getting lifetime premium penalties, while not even having the option of enrolling until the next open season more than 7 months away.

But the true issue here isn’t just getting people enrolled, its getting people enrolled in the right plan. Without carefully reviewing each plan, you could end up paying thousands of dollars more or end up not even having the drugs you need covered at all!

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Andy McCarthy correctly observes that if we start a war with Iran, Iran will fight back. Then he mentions offhandedly that "The retaliation we most have to worry about is a nuclear attack against our homeland." A nuclear attack with what? The nuclear bombs they don't have? Even more remarkably, McCarthy favors taking action against Iran. I certainly don't, but I certainly wouldn't if I thought Iran could retaliate against our airstrikes with a nuclear bomb. That's crazy. Color me deterred. Is the idea here that the media should just be flooded with as much Iran-related misinformation as possible without regard to the details of whether or not the misinformation bolsters the case for war? Dissemblers first, hawks second?

I'm well aware that many of you are sick of Kaavya Viswanathan, but for the latest BloggingHeads.tv I brought on board Ross Douthat, author of Privilege: Harvard and the Education of the Ruling Class and thus a expert in how to locate the "larger significance" in random bits of Harvardania to talk it over. If you're more inclined toward a serious policy discussion about public sector daycare, we've got that, too. Plus, diavlogging Star Trek which, on its own, is possibly the nerdiest thing ever but you can't fully appreciate exactly how uncool I am unless you realize that later the very same day I went to a They Might Be Giants concert.

After the botched Massachusetts health care bill, it's nice to see Wisconsin is stepping up with a really bold health care plan.

Backed by unions, businesses and municipalities, a bipartisan group of Wisconsin legislators, led by Sen. Russ Decker (D-Schofield) and Rep. Terry Musser (R-Black River Falls), introduced SB 698, one of the most comprehensive health care proposals in the country -- that would cover every employee in the state much like the existing workers compensation and unemployment insurance systems.

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In recent weeks, Felix Rohatyn and Warren Rudman have been peddling a smart proposal aimed at boosting investment in the nation’s deteriorating roads, airports, railways, ports, and school facilities while imposing rationality on the decision-making process. The gist of the idea is to create a quasi-public “national investment corporation” that would have the authority to issue bonds, guaranteed by the federal government, with maturities up to 50 years to finance infrastructure projects. Akin to the European Investment Bank (Rohatyn describes it as “a cross between the World Bank and Goldman Sachs"), the NIC would be the window through which states and groups of states and localities would request financing or grants for all such projects that require federal support. User fees for new highways, airports, or water projects would be calibrated to repay the bonds and enable the NIC to be self-financing.

The problem of inadequate investment in public assets, laid bare when the New Orleans levees gave way, lacks sex appeal but is of huge importance because it directly affects the nation’s capacity for productivity growth, improvements in living standards, and security.

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That’s not so easily answered, according to information revealed in “Boeing Parts and Rules Bent, Whistle-Blowers Say,” published April 17 on the front page of the Washington Post. The investigation was a many months' long collaboration between the Post and the Brandeis Institute for Investigative Journalism (which—full disclosure—is my employer). Here’s what the article reveals: the FAA has failed to check thousands of parts that were reported as unapproved. Think what you might about the individual parts, that suggests a major systemic failure at the FAA. If that is true, the FAA is not doing its job as required by law--and it's not clear where the investigation is going from here. (For more background, look here at some of the FAA’s own documents referred to in the story.)

As we all know, government is being shrunk by the minute. That includes the staff of the FAA, which may help explain the FAA's failures to do its job: if you don't have enough inspectors, can you inspect enough?

So ... do you still feel like flying?

A Senate inquiry into FEMA’s response to hurricane Katrina has concluded that the emergency response agency should be disbanded.  Instead, a new agency called the National Preparedness and Response Authority would take its place.  Senator Joe Liebermann is expected to elaborate on the panel’s findings today.

The chief of al-Jazeera’s Egypt bureau has been arrested on charges that he reported false information about the bomb attacks in Sinia.  Hussein Abdel Ghani allegedly reported that another explosion had taken place yesterday in Sharika.  Ghani denied the accusation and said that police have treated him in an “inhumane” way.

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Tim Lee, facing off against hard-core intellectual property skeptics, argues that his antagonist "seemed not to grasp the point that copyright and copyleft products can perfectly well co-exist side-by-side. Bad legislation like the DMCA aside, there’s no reason a well-designed copyright system should in any way impede the creation and distribution of non-commercial creative works." Well, yes and no.

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Dear CIA Director Goss:

You were once a member of the U.S. Congress. You represented constituents and swore an oath to defend and protect our system of government, our Constitution.

A secrecy-obsessed national security bureacracy may be a necessity on some fronts, but democracy requires that it be limited. Attempting to squelch retired CIA personnel from speaking to the public or media is absolutely outrageous and inconsistent with our form of democracy.

You are completely out of line and have forgotten what your oath to this nation was all about.

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Many of the responses to my last post on America insisting on being no. 1 were excellent. Let me clarify my thinking. First, and most strikingly, questioning whether American has to insist on being no. 1 and "having no peer competitor" is NOT the same as "betting against American power," as Architect claims. I am not arguing that America is certain to decline -- as Ben P reminds us, it was very fashionable to argue that America was in decline at the end of the 1980s, so much so that Joe Nye coined the term "declinism" and wrote his book "Bound to Lead," which looked quite visionary after by the early to mid-1990s. My point was not that we are bound to fall but that other powers are bound to rise -- are rising now -- and what matters most is what kind of powers they are.

Brooksfoe got it right: "What's important is that human rights-respecting democracies remain preponderantly powerful, not that the US do so." Exactly. The U.S. has an enormous stake in making sure that the current human-rights respecting democracies (I think of them as PARR governments -- Popular, Accountable, Representative, and Rights-Respecting) are preponderantly powerful, just as the U.S. has a continuing stake in maintaining its own power sufficient to defend itself and to continue as a great power with a critical leadership role in the international system. But that means working to engage China and helping/encouraging it to democratize in as many ways as possible -- see Teddy Bard's excellent post.

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This is a first for Senator George Allen, a complete paragraph without a single football metaphor. But take out the football, and he inadvertently speaks the truth. Allen on Tony Snow, speaking on Snow’s network: 

The best
thing that Tony's going to do is bring the pulse of the American people
into the White House in those deliberations. People like Laura Ingraham and
Tony and Hannity and Rush Limbaugh, they understand what's going on in the
real world, and I think that's going to be very helpful for the White House
as they develop policy to move this country forward....I think it will
be good for the American people, too, to have one of their advocates
clearly in the White House who's on the pulse of the people in the real
world.

In case you thought that the problem with the White House was that they needed a dose of the Hannity/Limbaugh understanding of the real world, Tony’s the man. 

I’m sure you’ll remember the stirring words of Bush’s second inaugural address: “We are led, by events and common sense, to one conclusion: The survival of liberty in our land increasingly depends on the success of liberty in other lands.” And so, Bush declared, “it is the policy of the United States to seek and support the growth of democratic movements and institutions in every nation and culture, with the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world.”

At the time, not a few wondered how serious we should take all of this. Well, now we know. For this month, the Bush administration is playing host to not one, not two, but three leaders who have done everything possible to undermine democracy and liberty in their own countries. April 2006, it turns out, is the month when Washington waltzed with the dictators.

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With China and Russia abstaining, the Security Council approved sanctions on four people responsible for violating the terms of a March 2005 resolution that called on all sides to cease hostilities in Darfur. As was expected, only one Sudanese government official is among these four.

Maggie Farley of the Los Angeles Times says it all:

The United States, while pushing for a longer sanctions list, lobbied quietly behind the scenes to ensure that one of Washington's key sources on terrorism, Sudanese intelligence chief Salah Abdallah Gosh, stayed off the list.

Meanwhile, any Bolton Watch readers interested in an article that takes on Lawrence Kaplan’s

A House Committee sold out the Internet.

A couple of days ago, I wrote about an amendment in the House Commerce Committee that will go a long way to determining the future of the Internet.

The vote is over, and the amendment from Rep. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) and others to protect the Internet and preserve openness and innovation lost. The vote was 22-34. That's the bad news.

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Karl Rove, Bush’s top White House advisor, is appearing for the fifth time before a grand jury to testify about his role in the leak of CIA agent Valerie Plame’s identity.  Lewis Libby, the former chief of staff to Cheney, has been charged with perjury and obstruction of justice.

The Senate voted today to fund police patrols against illegal immigrants with some of the money that President Bush requested for the war in Iraq.  Some of the diverted $1.9 billion will also be used to give the Coast Guard new boats and helicopters.  The cuts will trim 3% off of Bush’s requested amount.

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A new report from the Commonwealth Fund reveals that health insurance trends are just getting worse. Even for those who are familiar with the uninsurance problem, these numbers, from a survey of 4,350 adults, are startling. Here’s who’s affected:

• Moderate income Americans
• Working Americans
• Insured Americans whose coverage is shrinking
• The American economy

And the consequences are felt everywhere: One in five of all American families is now trying to pay off a medical bill. One in five. The middle class is getting punished by inadequate health insurance coverage.

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Call me crazy, but it seems to me that after the Bush administration gave Iraqi Prime Minister Ibrahim Jafari a firm shove out the door it doesn't make much sense for Rumsfeld and Rice to immediately rush to Baghdad to endorse his successor. Isn't that the kind of thing you would do if you were trying as hard as possible to make New Boss Nuri Kamal al-Maliki look like an American puppet and undermine his domestic legitimacy? I mean, I appreciate that the White House doesn't actually care about Iraqi sovereignty and democracy, but can't they at least pretend? They're really good at pretending for a domestic audience.

My friend Steve Rose has a reprise of his thesis on "The Trouble with Class Interest Populism" on the website of the Progressive Policy Institute. I commend it to all, along with his legendary "Social Stratification in the United States" poster, a copy of which hangs on my office wall. (Wait until the updated version is out.)

To stir the pot, I'll summarize the argument narrowly as a call to discount the importance of economic class interest in progressive, majoritarian politics.

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I have what I thought was a not-so-negative review of David Sirota's book in the print Prospect that's now online. David, in turn, has a rejoinder to me up on his blog. Rather than engage in an endless round of recriminations, I think I'll just leave it at that.

A few things in the health care debate have been riling my feathers lately. The first is yesterday's post by Ezra Klein examining how the folks over at the right-leaning The Corner are busy questioning the definition of "is". Ramesh Ponnuru writes:

I don't think [universal health care] is possible, actually. If you can't get an operation because your country's national health insurance system has you on a long waiting list, in what sense have you enjoyed "universal coverage"?

Ezra goes on to discuss how one can, in fact, define universal, and that definition is "everyone in the population receiving health insurance".

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It's no surprise to see college basketball enthusiast Jason Zengerle full of hand-wringing about the Washington Wizards' successful strategy of making sure LeBron James got a good hard foul or two during his efforts to take it to the hoop last night. I'm not sure I quite see what the problem is here. James is a highly paid professional, as are his opponents, and their job is to win games the best way they know how. As Jeff Van Gundy remarked after Brendan Haywood delivered the first hard hit -- "welcome to the playoffs, kid." And, in the spirit of "all's fair in love and elimination tournaments," Anderson Varejao did slam Wizards star Gilbert Arenas a couple of possessions later. No doubt James will figure out how to deal with it one of these days . . . I'm just hoping that won't be this year.

Why, feminism does, of course! Rape happens when women stupidly put themselves in risky situations: drinking, or earning money by stripping, or--well, just generally consorting with men while not wearing their burkas. All of which is the kind of behavior encouraged by feminism.

Or at least, that was the thrust of Naomi Schaefer Riley's piece in the WSJ recently, "Ladies, You Should Know Better." Fortunately, media critic Jennifer Pozner puts a stake in the heart of Riley's argument over at Women's eNews today. Read Pozner's analysis here.

A while back at a Cato forum on humanitarian interventions Nicholas Gvosdev tossed off one of the most outside the box foreign policy ideas I'd heard in a good long time. Gvosdev's against such interventions for pretty standard "realist" reasons but, he observed, there's lots of civil society agitation for action in, say, Darfur and maybe the groups doing the agitating could just hire private military contractors to get the job done. Rebecca Ulam Weiner fleshes the idea out a bit in The Boston Globe Ideas section. This is, I think, worth thinking about.

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Fox News' conservative commentator Tony Snow will replace Scott McClellan as the White House press secretary, officials said last night.  This is the first outsider to enter the Bush administration as part of the recent position changes that have marked a White House “shake-up.”  McClellan served as press secretary for three years.

Two suicide bombers attacked a Multinational Peacekeeping base in the Sinai today, just two days after three bombs killed 24 people at a Sinai beach resort.  It is not yet known if there have been any deaths.

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On Monday, April 17, 2006, two bodies were found buried beneath what used to be a home in the Lower 9th Ward. Their discovery raised to 17 the number of Hurricane Katrina fatalities that have been discovered in New Orleans in the past month and a half. Katrina is now directly blamed for the deaths of 1,282 Louisiana residents. Eight months after Katrina, the state reports 987 people are still missing.

Chief Steve Glynn, who oversees the New Orleans Fire Department search effort that found the latest two bodies told CNN: “You want to put it to rest at some point. You want to feel like it's over and it's just not yet.”

Eight months after Katrina, there are still nearly 300,000 people who have not returned to New Orleans. While we can hope that our community is nearing the end of finding bodies, the struggle for justice for the hundreds of thousands of displaced people continues.

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On one level, I find this network neutrality issue a little hard to figure out. It involves technology I only sort of understand and some hard-to-fathom considerations about how important it may or may not be to make it easier to deliver video over internet protocal services and other stuff. Besides which, all this takes place in a distinctly sub-optimal environment -- we really ought to have a much faster public sector broadband infrastructure in place that would make all this irrelevant. That said, one can count up the interest group balance of power and draw some conclusions. Kevin Drum notes that the main net neutrality opponents are deeply evil telecom firms. Even more to the point, in some ways, is which companies are for net neutrality.

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I promise I won’t keep talking about this forever, but it is worth pausing to note that foreclosures across the country are up 72% over last year--and 38% in just the last quarter. At this rate, foreclosures will likely hit 1.2 million this year.

It isn’t the super-heated markets on the two coasts that are cracking first. I was knocked out by the increase in Boston, but it seems Massachusetts is behind the curve. Instead, Georgia, Colorado and Indiana lead the country in foreclosures per household, with Nevada, Michigan, Texas, Ohio, Tennessee, Utah and Florida rounding out the top ten. Check out your home state.

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I thought this notion that Tony Snow might be made White House press secretary was, you know, a joke. A joke about Fox News being a GOP propaganda outlet, about Snow's lack of ethics, etc. Apparently, no one was kidding. It's honestly pretty surreal.

The latest public polls reveal that attitudes about the country’s direction continue to trend even further negative, with barely 1-in-4 Americans now saying the country is moving in the right direction and more than 2-in-3 now feeling that the country is headed in the wrong direction.

As I noted in my public polling report released yesterday by Democracy Corps, this represents the lowest ratings of the country’s direction in more than a decade in virtually every poll, and the lowest in history for many polls. There are many factors contributing to this broad pessimism, but Iraq remains the most powerful determinant of public attitudes. Americans continue to question the decision to go to war in Iraq in increasing numbers (58 percent now say the war was not worth fighting), and they see little hope for positive change in the short term. An incredible 78 percent in the CBS poll believe Iraq is already engaged in a civil war, and President Bush – whose personal integrity and persona as a straight shooter were his greatest political assets for much of the last four years – is no longer seen as a credible messenger on Iraq.

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Nepal’s seven-party coalition has chosen former Prime Minister Girija Prasad Koirala to be the new Prime Minister, now that the king has reinstated the parliament.  Nepal’s Maoist rebel group has rejected the king’s compromise with the coalition and said they will continue to isolate Kathmandu from the rest of the countryside, much of which they control.

U.S. Secretary of State Condolleezza Rice, who was greeted with violent protests in Athens today, said despite increased tension over Iran, the U.S. is following a “diplomatic course.”  Yesterday Iranian President Mahmud Ahmadinejad said that Iran would not stop its nuclear program, which the U.N. Security Council has demanded it do by the end of this week.

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Last fall, The US sought to use its leverage over the UN budget to impose its agenda of reform on other member states. The reforms the US sought were indeed important, but Bolton’s tactics backfired. He threatened to prevent the UN from passing its biennial budget. But during the ensuing standoff, the US found itself completely isolated. As Great Britain’s Emyr Jones Parry said at the time, “We are not in favor of holding any individual items or the budget hostage to other issues.”

In addition to the entirety of the EU, Japan( which contributes 19% of the UN’s operating budget) also rejected Bolton’s tactic of tying the budget to the General Assembly’s progress on seeing through important reforms. In the end, an 11th hour compromise was brokered that authorized the full $3.79 billion, but appropriated only $950 million for spending while further reform proposals were being negotiated.

This funding will run out by June, so now is about the time for parties to harden their bargaining positions. Enter South Africa's U.N. ambassador, Dumisani Kumalo.

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One thing you can say-- the current debate on immigration is at last focusing attention on the pervasive violations of our labor laws in sweatshops and other parts of the low-wage economy. But instead of getting national legislation to shut down sweatshops around the country, we are getting policies to punish some of the victims -- while leaving the underground economy that breeds undocumented immigration largely in place.

Across the country, various states and local governments have created innovative laws and programs to take on wage law violators, as a new analysis at PLAN details, although none have put all the pieces together.

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Wow. I've just confirmed that nuclear non-proliferation giant Joseph Cirincione is moving out of his long-time nest at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and is moving to the Center for American Progress.

Cirincione is easily the country's leading progressive voice on nuclear non-proliferation and is widely respected on defense policy issues. He was one of the key personalities in the recent film, "Why We Fight", directed by Eugene Jarecki.

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Today’s Times includes an interesting article about the class dimensions of the New Orleans rebuilding efforts. When I read the piece, two things came to mind.

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Responding to my don't attack Iran column, AaronVB at RedState argues that "claims of a nationalist backlash are somewhat tendentious, given the unpopularity of the theocratic regime with young Iranians and intellectuals." This is a dangerous delusion.

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Some observations coming out of the U.S.-China summit, for U.S-China relations and beyond:

The Bush administration still doesn’t get it about the significance of China’s rise. The agenda was strikingly unambitious for a meeting with the leader of a country that has the world’s largest population, astoundingly high economic growth rates, dynamically global diplomacy, and is generally big and prominent enough to have major impact on most of the major issues on our own foreign policy agenda. On the pomp and respect side, how could you just do lunch with the leader of such a country? And the protocol flubs, even if accidental peccadilloes and not intentional jabs, just should not have been allowed to happen.

While not the new ominous threat that some conservative groups think and want it to be, China also is not the system sustainer that many internationalists are trying to coax it to be.

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At least 30 people were killed and 115 wounded by yesterday’s three explosions in the Egyptian resort town of Dahab on the Sinai Peninsula.  So far, ten people have been arrested.  This is the third attack to hit the Sinai resort area in less than two years.

As gas prices rise to nearly $3 per gallon, President Bush has ordered an investigation to find out if gas prices have been illegally manipulated.  Bush is also expected to call on all 50 state attorneys to keep a close watch on gas price gouging, and he will offer them federal help in doing so.

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An in-depth look at the utter fiasco that's been reconstruction contracting in Iraq. The GOP, as we all know, is desperately afraid of the possibility that the 2006 midterms will put Democrats in a position to hold some hearings. If we do get that lucky, I worry a bit that there may be a temptation to engage in overkill -- a hundred hearings a day on a thousand subjects -- when the smart play is to focus in a few key topics. The wildly underexplored subject of what's been going on with the money being spent in Iraq strikes me as something that should be a prime candidate. You start with the basic mendacity, corruption, and ineptitude we've come to know from Team Bush here at home. Then you subtract such things as "law enforcement agencies" or a "functioning court system" from the equasion, put it all in an environment where the press has a hard time operating, and you're certain to get a very ugly situation.

Since someone asked, there are four categories of meaning to the term "open networks," and the current debate falls quickly into terminological confusion as a result. Networks can be (1) open to all content [like the Web is designed to be, and TV and newspapers are not], (2) open to connection with all other networks [like the Internet is designed to be, and the telephone network is ordered to be by the regulators], (3) open to all people [like free over the air broadcast TV, and not like cable TV], (4) and open to all designs [like Linux, as opposed to MSDOS].
Different folks are concerned in this debate with different strokes of neutrality or openness.

Hm...behind every random thing, there seems to be an interesting story. Is this Kaavya Viswanathan business a simple act of plagiarism, or does it have more to do with the strange world of "book packagers"? Viswanathan says the whole thing was accidental, but her story doesn't quite seem to check out.

Richard Cohen kindly defends Mearsheimer and Walt from allegations of anti-semitism, notes some points of disagreement with them that I would endorse, and then says: "Israel's special place in U.S. foreign policy is deserved, in my view, and not entirely the product of lobbying. Israel has earned it, and isn't there something bracing about a special relationship that is not based on oil or markets or strategic location but on shared values? (A bit now like Britain.)" As far as that goes, that seems correct to me. But, again, we don't give the U.K. anything like the level of aid we give to Israel (we do, of course, help it and our other NATO allies out with security guarantees and other stuff). And the U.K. provides more in the way of concrete assistance to the United States, sending troops to fight alongside ours in Iraq, for example.

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There is good news and bad news in the world of public diplomacy. The good news is that respected observers and senior American officials are now paying more attention and trying to develop public diplomacy strategies. The bad news is that they are getting it wrong.

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Now that Newsweek has slowed the Mary McCarthy lynch mob with its story that Mary emphatically denies she was the source of the leak, it is worth considering whether there are good leaks or nothing but bad leaks. Watching the right wing whackos on this issue is particularly fascinating and entertaining. When it comes to exposing the identity of Valerie Wilson, a case officer who worked most of her career as a non-official cover officer, Bush loyalists do more back flips and rely on more contortionist mental jumps than the Soviet national gymnastic's team in its hey day to justify her exposure. They will say anything to excuse inexcusable behavior. Come to think of it, they are acting like their fearless leader, George W. Bush.

The body of evidence that George Bush lied about the rationale for going to war is increasing at almost the same rate as the price of gasoline. The October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate offered a mixed judgment on whether Iraq was rebuilding its nuclear capability. The CIA and DIA supported the notion and the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research and the Department of Energy said no.

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I'm not nearly as sympathetic to John McCain as Jonathan Chait continues to be, largely because I think McCain's foreign policy views are crazy, notwithstanding his admirable lack of enthusiasm for torture. Even so, I'm not really as sympathetic to McCain's domestic policy approach as Chait is, but I think it's undeniable that he'd be better on this score than Bush. On those grounds, I'd be reasonably happy to see him win the Republican nomination, though the odds would remain overwhelming that I wouldn't vote for him in the general election.

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Two weeks ago, our campaign for the U.S. Senate traveled the entire width of Tennessee by bus. We sought to listen to the people of our great state and to share with them a vision for a new generation of leadership in Washington.

The week was among my most rewarding in public life. In small towns and urban centers, in factories and armories, firehalls and lunch counters, we heard from thousands of Tennesseans, anxious for answers to the questions of our time: affordable healthcare, energy independence, a balanced budget, a secure nation, and college within reach for everyone.

The most memorable moment, however, came not 30 minutes into my first stop at a school assembly in Blountville, Tennessee.

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Excellent column from Justin Logan and Ted Galen Carpenter advocating that we at least try for a grand bargain with Iran. On the other side of the warmongering spectrum, I think the thesis of Gary Schmitt's article on China in The Weekly Standard is that it's per se unacceptable for the United States to have a peaceful relationship with a country that isn't a democracy. When applied to Iraq, this view has had very bad consequences. If it continues to be applied to Iran, the consequences will be significantly worse. But when applied to China, the consequences would be positively horrifying.

Three explosions in the Egyptian resort town of Dahab today may have caused as many as 100 deaths.  The blasts took place around 7 o’clock local time.  A spokesman from the interior ministry said “There were explosions, but the picture is still not clear.”  In July of 2005, 60 people were killed in a bomb attack on another Egyptian resort town.

Iran’s president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said today that UN sanctions against his country would be a “great mistake.”  He also called for the dissolution of Israel and the return of Jews to their own “fatherlands.”  Meanwhile, Israeli Defense Minister Shaul Mofaz said today of Iran, “Since Hitler we have not faced such a threat.”

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A while back, I made this list of Awesome Young People of which it was said that at least one of us would "be justly famous by 2010." Kaavya Viswanathan is now enjoying her fifteen minutes but, sadly, she's making the papers for plagiarism allegations rather than the quality of her novel.

It's been a newsworthy weekend here in the Big Easy, and two big stories stand out. First, the elections were held, and we're down to two in the runoff for mayor. The results are interesting because of the racial byplay and the city-state-federal dynamic.

Second, as I mentioned earlier, the DNC held it's spring meeting here (scheduled pre-Katrina), and did a bunch of community work as well. I was hoping this would lead to some recognition that the Katrina story is not only in the Democratic wheelhouse, but has the potential to be a huge politcal winner.

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More and more people realize that the stories they have been told about the merits of free trade are utterly false. Moving toward less managed trade (there never was and there cannot be free trade other than in economists’ models) means that workers in free nations have to compete head on with those who receive little, if any, health care, retirement or any other benefits; with workers whose corporations keep their costs down by grossly abusing the environment and that pay little mind to workers’ safety and that pirate the products developed at great costs elsewhere.

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That’s what this morning’s headline should have been, instead of “Bin Laden Says West is Waging War Against Islam, and Urges Supporters to Go to Sudan” (New York Times) and “Bin Laden Warns of Long War, Accuses West of Acting as ‘Crusader’” (Washington Post). It’s a given that the Bush administration will replay its tape about Bin Laden being “on the run” and that we’re “on the advance”. And that John Kerry will again wind through the chutes and ladders of Tora Bora. But our major newspapers also sticking to the same script? It’s not surprising but it is disappointing. How about some outrage from the progressive community?

Genocide is being committed against Sudanese Muslims, and Bin Laden is calling for jihadists to go to Sudan to fight any effort the West might make to stop this mass killing of Muslims. If a UN multilateral peacekeeping force ever does get sent, while some NATO and U.S. forces also may be involved, it’s likely based on other UN peace operations that most of the troops will be from Bangladesh, Pakistan, India and Jordan. So Bin Laden’s defense of the Muslim world amounts to killing Muslim peacekeepers seeking to protect Muslim people who’ve already suffered over 400,000 deaths, with over 2 million left as refugees and thousands raped, largely because they are Muslims. The “logic” is breathtaking.

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Seven car bombs across Baghdad have killed six people and wounded dozens today.  The attacks come amid discussions to finalize Iraq’s new Cabinet.  Meanwhile, police have discovered the bodies of 20 Iraqis who appear to have been casualties of sectarian fighting.  

A dam along the Danube that burst from heavy flood waters has forced 1,500 people to evacuate their homes in southern Romania.  In the past few weeks, thousands of acres of land have been flooded.  Heavy rainfall and melting snow have caused the river to surge to record levels.

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In this morning's NYT piece by Elisabeth Bumiller, who seems to be stirring to life now that Bush is bobbing along in the 30-plus-percent approval range, there's interesting confirmation of just how idiotically the White House has conducted itself for five-plus awful years.

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Why would someone in the Inspector General's (IG) office even know of the CIA secret prisons and why would she disclose it?

The CIA's IG office is relatively new, created in 1990 to be the internal watchdog of the CIA. Until the Department of Homeland Security's IG, CIA was the last major agency to finally get an office. And, the legislation creating that office may give some hints as to what happened.

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I've actually heard that Francis Fukuyama has said this before, but that information didn't come to me in reportable form. During a BloggingHeads.tv appearance with Robert Wright, Fukuyama says of Bill Kristol and his circle at The Weekly Standard that during the 1990s "There was actually a deliberate search for an enemy because they felt that the Republican Party didn't do as well" when foreign policy wasn't on the issue agenda. The obvious candidates were either China or something relating to Islamic fundamentalism and, as Fukuyama notes, what they came up with was China. Then 9/11 changed things around, at least for a few years. I think this is very telling, and reveals a great deal about the mentality that's been guiding America's foreign policy during the Bush years.

Recently on Warren Reports, James Weingarten wrote about a new Utah law that allows credit lenders to contractually bar their customers from bringing class action lawsuits. James is right to be worried about the ramifications of this new law outside Utah. Take a look at the following paragraph from Ballard Spahr, the attorneys behind the new law:

 “Not only will the statute apply to class actions brought in Utah, it should also apply to class actions filed elsewhere whenever a valid contractual choice of Utah law provision has been included in the agreement.”

Let that sink in for a moment.

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But don't bother going there. Here's the gist. The deep solution to the immigration issue is to create a Mexico-side job creation and economic improvement engine. The means to that end could be open markets and entrepreneurial competition, but that is a tough road to travel given the realities of Mexican politics. Therefore, the alternative and quite suitable path is the creation of individualized Mexican safety nets -- specifically, retirement pensions, health care purchasing power, unemployment insurance, and individual savings accounts jump started by funding from government, friends and family. This structure would resemble something between the benefits available in the United States and France. Most important, the benefits would be earned and redeemed only in Mexico. The outcome that Mexicans are lured to work in the United States while middle class Americans can't afford to retire except in Mexico is quite insane. Far better for Mexicans to have better reasons to work and retire in their country of origin; under those circumstances eventually the border could be essentially erased without troubling the politics of either country. The root of the immigration issue, with all its complex effects, is the gross imbalance in standard of living between these two neighbors. (You don't see Canadians sneaking across the border, do you, even in search of sunshine?) That imbalance is one of the points of attack for Democrats.
In the wake of the Civil War, President Grant wanted to annex the Dominican Republic. Would have worked out very well! But Congress blocked him, motivated by a strange combination of anti-imperialism and racism. It is neither imperialistic nor racist for the United States to engage with Mexico toward the joint goal of a safety net-oriented Marshall Plan. The outcome does not need to be annexation, but instead economic integration and easy cross-border travel.

Well, only sort of. But via Phoebe Maltz, I see a John Kekes article in City Journal that starts with the fairly banal observation that the Terror was bad, and goes on to argue that "Lenin, Stalin, Hitler, Mao, and Pol Pot are of the same mold" as Robespierre and its other architects. This strikes me as an overstatement in the extreme. Describing Robespierre's crimes, Kekes makes the following remark about the Law of 22 Prairial: "Empowered by this model republican justice, the Revolutionary Tribunal sent to death 1,258 people in nine weeks, as many as during the preceding 14 months." The death of 2,500 people in sixteen months isn't something to approve of, but it's not even remotely close to what happened in the great butcheries of the 20th century; Robespierre deserves better than to be put alongside Mao and Hitler.

Now the purpose of this overstatement seems to be to simultaneously smear the entire revolutionary tradition in France (see my former professor Patrice Higonnet's Goodness Beyond Virtue for a qualified defense of Jacobinism) and -- really -- to implicitly argue in favor of going to war with Iran. Probably in the real world, nothing will hinge on this point, but in light of the importance of the latter question it seems worth pushing back wherever possible.

The other thing I saw on my rare Meet The Press viewing this morning was all these ads featuring cute kids describing the virtues of coal and touting their LearnAbout Coal.org website. A friend wondered whether anyone would actually find that campaign convincing, and I have me doubts. But without wanting to get overly paranoid, the point here seems to be less about convincing the viewers of anything than offering a bribe to the NBC News team. I mean, what are the odds Tim Russert's going to do a hard-hitting interview about global warming under these circumstances? Not a new observation, I suppose, but still I can't help but notice that it seems to be, well, just a bit to impolite to discuss these dynamics in "respectable" circles in Washington.

I don't normally watch Meet The Press and I do normally say mean things about David Broder, but I'm watching this morning and he's kind of kicking ass.

Democrats are muttering that their fall message is...blurred. According to a WP piece by Dan Balz, "former Denver Mayor Wellington Webb, for example, blamed the Democrats for being soft in the face of aggressive GOP campaign tactics. 'We have not demonstrated the mental toughness up to this point -- and smarts,' he said."

If all these years in the wilderness haven't sufficed to train Democrats in mental toughness and smarts, you have to wonder: what the hell will?

One part of mental toughness: Being ready and able to wheel on Republican nasties who start baiting the Dems. At the first sighting of a Swift Boat or Osama image, come roaring back at them with: How dare you gang of crooks, self-serving tax dodgers and raving incompetents blame us for insufficient patriotism? Say it loud. Say it nationally. Throw them on the defensive.

If anyone thinks Karl Rove has been demoted just in time for the next six months of Republican campaigning, think again.

The second part: A proverbial Contract with America. A pungent declaration of what Democrats stand for. The Dems themselves are getting closer to the right list and the right sound, as in this quote from DNC head Howard Dean: "We are all members of one American community and it's up to us to make sure that our country has a government as good as its people."

True, the money quote's a retread from Jimmy Carter in 1976, but it sings, or almost.

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