It doesn't take a regression analysis to know that the mainstream media ("MSM") presents, from diction to camera angle, a negative picture of the Democratic Congress. It's not all negative, but the tilt is clear. The motives are what interest me. For the MSM, it seems contrary to good sense. Most of us like to be liked, and no one likes to be liked more than those who beg to be read and watched in return for money (btw, that's the big difference from the MSM and the blogworld). Yet the MSM's general audiences aren't really sympathetic to the perspective offered by the MSM writers and TV personalities on most political issues, especially including Iraq. That's revealed by polling that shows virtually every current Democratic position is quite popular, especially including the voting on Iraq today. So why would the mainstream media continue to adopt points of view that are at odds with their audience?

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It's impossible to pay Supreme Court justices or indeed any judges at any level anything remotely approximating the value of what they produce for society, even when they make decisions I disagree with. Furthermore, there are many people who would take no money at all in return for being Supreme Court justices, just as many people engage in charitable work for the honor and service itself. What then is the theory of paying justices and judges? It can't be pay for performance. It isn't pay for value. It can't be paying a living wage, because we already do that. I have friends who are lifetime judges and the country is lucky to have them on the bench. I'd like them paid more because I know they are good people and they deserve raises. But what really is the Chief Justice's push for more pay about?

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Eventually we will arrive at this point: Either the "surge" is a success, and we can bring our troops home, or the "surge" is somewhere between fiction and failure and we should bring our troops home because that would be the next best tactic for reducing violence in Iraq.

The possibility that pulling out, or "de-imperializing" by the West, can reduce the potential for civil war or terrorism seemed to be proved in many of the withdrawals of European troops from colonial outposts in the wake of World War II. Examples included the British in Egypt and Malaya. You can even argue that the Partition of India in 1947, while tragic, bloody, and perhaps unnecessary, at least embodied the truth that the British were causing more strife by staying than by leaving. Counter-examples that seemed to prove, in retrospect, the wisdom of withdrawal were, among others, the French in Vietnam and Algeria.

The AMT or Alternative Minimum Tax was created in the late 1960s to comabt the super-rich avoiding their responsibilities through massive accounting schemes (shelters, front businesses created for deductions, etc.). However in recent years the AMT has begun to loom over the upper middle class. This issue is just start to become real for middle class Americans as the AMT is just beginning to dig into those Americans with five figure family incomes and is poised to plung more and more middle class Americans into the AMT brackets each additional year.

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Next week at TPMCafe, former Edwards Campaign and and current Pandagon blogger Amanda Marcotte will be joining us to discuss political culture clash. But maybe not the culture clash you're expecting...

As Amanda's brief foray into presidential politics exposed, there appears to be a deep division between the wide open debate culture of the emerging blogosphere and the high-stakes, tightly controlled world of electoral politics. Must every writer tamp down the free flow of thoughts and ideas to have a future in politics? Or maybe our politics can be more accepting of the occasional controversial idea. Is there a middle ground in which the blogosphere and electoral politics can meet, or are we beginning to see a division within the public debate?

Amanda will share her thoughts starting Monday.

I'd like to have the truly rich agree to give $25 million dollar prizes for each of the following -- with the winner being the plan that shows the optimal combination of technical feasibility and cost-benefit trade-off:

1. A way to cause the fresh water from melting ice on the Arctic and Antarctic landmasses to go not into the salt water oceans but instead into fresh water lakes or aquifers in more temperate zones. (Think of a refilled Caspian Sea or replenished underground reservoir in the Dakotas.)

2. The invention of a secure, five 9's reliable, one person = one vote, and recountable voting system that could be conducted on-line so that polling places can be an artifact of the past.

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Max links to the critics. Kevin Drum understands my argument and ably posts a reply.

The truth about the Iranian threat is that the Bush Administration is not telling the real truth. Like any effective propagandist President Bush is using a kernel of truth and, with the help of many in the media, laying the foundation for another war. Only this time it will likely be a war of retaliation rather than one of pre-emption.

The kernel of truth is that Iranian intelligence agents are active in Iraq and are working with a variety of Shia militia and groups. What Bush cleverly omits in his litany is the fact that Iran has been present in Iraq since the early days of the U.S. invasion in March of 2003. Bush and his generals also are ignoring the fact that Sunni insurgents, not Iranian backed Shia militia, have been those responsible for the vast majority of U.S. casualties in Iraq.

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While I understand my friend Ken Baer's concern that blogospheric anger about Iraq is spilling over into demands for a "litmus test" on Iran, I think his own "no option off the table/no nukes" formula conflates two crucially different issues, and misleadingly labels all sorts of people, myself included, as quasi-pacifists.

And when it comes to the question of what Democrats should be saying right now about Iran, there's another legitimate issue to weigh: the complete and absolute and well-earned lack of credibility of the Bush administration, at home and abroad, in assessing security threats. Absent some unlikely immediate threat from Tehran, there's nothing inherently wrong about saying of military action towards Iran: "No way; not on their watch!"

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Ezra dishes.

So does Matt.

I have nothing to add at the moment, except to say that in the matter of Empire, you're either with it or against it.

Today Al Franken announced his decision to seek the Democratic nomination for the Senate seat currently held by Norm Coleman (R-MN).

Following in the footsteps of victorious Democrats from the 2006 cycle (including Senator Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota), Franken is prioritizing middle class economic security as a campaign issue. His announcement video is an eloquent explanation of why that constellation of issues is so important to him.

While President Bush is trying to make the case that Iran is arming factions in Iraq, elements of the liberal blogosphere are trying to make the case that Democratic candidates for president need to meet a new litmus test on Iran: forswear any military action against Tehran.

I’ve always tried to stay out of this debate in this venue, but this setting of this litmus test is not only dangerous – it’s dangerously misguided.

The reason why Obama, Clinton, and Edwards are all refusing to take the military option off the table is because there is no credible expert on Iran, nonproliferation, or any combination of the two who would advise them to do so.

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Alright, today it's more like early afternoon (President Bush's speech threw off our schedule). I'll keep this quick.

Glenn Reynolds (aka Instapundit) got a lot of attention yesterday when he argued that the US should be:

"...responding quietly [to Iranian aggression], killing radical mullahs and iranian atomic scientists, supporting the simmering insurgencies within Iran, putting the mullahs' expat business interests out of business, etc."

Glenn Greenwald went to town.

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The always enigmatic Robert J. Samuelson, grousing about what he describes as the “rise of the American welfare state,” writes that people should stop calling Social Security and Medicare by the “soothing (and misleading) labels of ‘entitlements’ and ‘social insurance’” and recognize them for what he says they are: welfare. One can understand why he feels that way, since without those two programs it would be pretty darned hard to work up a rage -- much less a column -- about America’s overly generous welfare state. Even counting Social Security and Medicare, the U.S. ranks well behind other industrialized countries in the share of GDP it spends on social programs – nudging out only Ireland (see p. 71 of this pdf).

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Across the nation, and especially here in Massachusetts, property tax rates have been a major issue. The problem is that property prices (and therefore property taxes) are rising two to three times faster than incomes. (And that's at the median -- imagine how it works for the worst-off.) What was an affordable home when you bought it may actually become less affordable over time. Eventually the tax liens can lead all the way to foreclosure.

There is a gamut of fairly complex proposals for reform. For example, just today, Governor Patrick proposed to allow cities and towns to impose sales and other taxes, to release some of the pressure on property taxes. (Conservatives are right to worry that the result will just be more taxes overall.) New York is also looking at the problem, as is Indiana. The Feds are even starting to worry.

As far as I can tell, nobody is talking about what may be the simplest and fairest solution, which also encourages individual home ownership: a progressive property tax system.

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Promising to "explode the myths of populism," the Third Way issued a new report today with rosy statistics about the prosperity of the middle class. The problem is that the stats are loaded.

The lead statistic is that median income in the US is "around $70,000, not the $45,000 that most progressive economists cite." The numbers cited by "progressive economists" are plain old Census numbers, not some flukey, small-sample study. What Third Way doesn't say in the press release is that they arrived at the new $70,000 number by cutting out all young earners and all old earners. Since those age groups tend to have lower incomes, income for the remaining subset increases. This is just a third-grade math trick: cut out those who make less money, and the median rises. Third Way might have added that if you cut out those who earn more money, the "median" income is lower. Either way, cutting out wide swaths of the population doesn't change the fact that the family in the middle earns $45,000.

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Now this is interesting. Having litigated against Mr. Libby's lead lawyer many years ago, I know he is brilliant and cunning. What's up? Not having the defendant testify is SOP, but why no more witnesses? Why the disconnect between the opening statement and the evidence? Something's happened.

Despite the disagreements that many of us have with Joe Lieberman about the Iraq War, a good idea is still a good idea. And Lieberman has hit one out of the park with an idea he’s putting forward: a special tax to pay for the War On Terror.

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Garance Franke-Ruta believes there are "Clinton Rules." Citing our own M.J. Rosenberg as evidence, she argues that Hillary Clinton is subject to different standards of fact in political journalism: an absence of them. Our own Greg Sargent makes a similar point about the NYTs piece in yesterday's paper. Matt Yglesias acknowledges Franke-Ruta's general point but hopes that "Clinton's good fortune in her enemies [doesn't] distract people from basic realities." In other words, as Scott Lemieux argues, unfair criticisms should be done away with mostly so that fair ones can be heard.

Kevin Drum, however, leans toward agreeing with M.J. on the substance of the first point: that Obama is better on the issue of Syria and Iran.

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I have a post on The American Prospect magazine website about the recent agreement negotiated between Palestinian Hamas and Fatah factions in Mecca. It's yet another sign of mismanaged--dangerously so, U.S. foreign policy. Condoleeza Rice is scheduled to go to the region on Monday for meetings with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas and Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, but these plans are now in disarray due to this latest development.

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My praise of Obama's unequivocal endorsement of talks with Iran and Syria has stirred up a little tempest in the blogosphere.

At TAPPED, I'm accused of Clinton bashing for implying that her position is not unequivocal but that Obama's is.

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Today was Freedom to Marry Day, introduced ten years ago as an annual reason to focus on the fact that, at the time, lesbian and gay couples' bonds were entirely unrecognized by any American government, state or federal. Recognition for same-sex couples has come an amazing distance since then, as I've written elsewhere, often, including this world round-up last month.

So as a belated happy Freedom to Marry Day notice, here's some good news: last week, Colombia offered unmarried same-sex couples the same property rights as unmarried different-sex pairs, catching up with such other nations as Portugal and Hungary... and surpassing all but four American states.

You probably didn’t notice Princeton economist Alan Blinder’s testimony to the Joint Economic Committee a few weeks ago, but Blinder has peered into the future and identified a crisis that’s just waiting to explode. It’s called offshoring – the movement of jobs or business processes to other countries. So far offshoring has only touched a few areas – manufacturing notable among them – but Blinder thinks that up to 29% of American jobs are offshorable, including many service-industy jobs. Even if only half those jobs go overseas, that’s a crisis of epic proportions.

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This Wednesday the Middle East Subcommittee of the House Foreign Affairs Committee will hold an open hearing on “next steps in the Israeli-Palestinian Peace Process.” It’s a kind of important issue. The Baker-Hamilton Iraq Study Group Report convincingly and firmly asserted that US credibility and leadership in the region, ability to build and lead alliances, and reducing the mobilizing capacity of extremists, are all integrally linked to a re-launched Israeli Palestinian peace process. These are also the first Middle East Subcommittee hearings of the 110th Congress and come at a critical time – with a new Palestinian government in the making and a trilateral Israeli-Palestinian-US summit planned for February 19th. So whose fountain of wisdom on these issues have the Subcommittee chosen to sip from? None other than neocon wing-nut Daniel Pipes – head of the McCarthyite “Campus Watch,” carrier of the bizarre honor of having become a US Institute for Peace Board Member as a recess appointment in the face of Senate opposition (which places him in the same category as John Bolton), and leader of the apocalyptic war-mongering school of so-called pro-Israelism. For him even the most right-wing of Israeli parties in the last election were not hard-line enough. What are we to make of this?

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A Jonathan Alter piece in Newsweek last week set off a flurry of discussion about the history of Rudy Giuliani on Friday. Matt Yglesias remembers Rudy as crazy, mean, and power-hungry. Ezra Klein worries that Rudy's nearly nuts enough to call an end to elections. Stranger at Blah3 has a great rundown of some of Giuliani's less flattering moments as New York's mayor. Mark Schmitt has a hard time remembering Giuliani as "anything other than a vain and dangerous authoritarian."

On Sunday, convervative bloggers Ross Douthat and Andrew Sullivan each pondered Giuliani's actual prospects. Douthat linked to polling showing many Republicans don't know much of Giuliani's social liberalism, but still thinks he has a shot (based loosely on the case originally made by Glenn Greenwald). Sullivan hopefully theorizes that Rudy could be the man to bring the Right back to social sanity.

Of course, the big candidate of the weekend was Barack Obama...

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"Tiger's not kidding about his priorities." Read the headline in the San Francisco Chronicle. What followed was a story that, in incredulous tones, pondered whether Tiger Woods really will skip the British Open to assist at the birth of his first child if the two events conflict. "I just wouldn't go....[i]f she's having the baby during the week of the Open...," said Tiger, even though that would mean losing the chance to top the previous record of the number of consecutive wins at the Open.

Get used to it. Tiger represents the new generations of men, Gen-X, Gen-Y and the Millenials, who are less willing than baby boomers to sacrifice family life for the brass ring at work.

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Last week, I explained why insurance companies would prefer ambiguous policies over policies that provide explicit coverage for some damage, such as hurricane storm surge. This week, we explore why insurers would prefer ambiguity instead of simply excluding coverage altogether? Why not just say – “If your house is damaged by a hurricane that includes storm surge, we will pay nothing, even if 99% of the damage was caused by wind alone.”

The short answer: The insurer likes being in the position where it knows that it will never pay such claims, but where the consumers and the regulators tacitly expect payment of such claims. An explicit exclusion of coverage would signal that fact to the market and regulators, and thereby reduce the monetary value of the policy. From an economics perspective, “when information is asymmetric between the parties, the better-informed party may refrain from proposing a more complete contract because, in doing so, she may communicate private information to the other party and thereby compromise her share of the contracting surplus.”[1]

Now for the details of the argument:

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President Bush is calling on the Democrats to join him in solving the Social Security crisis. Quite a few Democrats share the president’s notion that indeed there is a Social Security crisis. Moreover, sadly large numbers of young people, polls show, believe what they have been told by their elders: that they will never collect a penny from Social Security, after paying for it during their working years. 60% of all workers today believe that there will not be enough money in the system to pay their benefits when they retire, according to a 2005 Pew poll. Worse, they believe that the taxes used to fund Social Security will have to rise sharply to cover its deficits.

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For those who wondered if Sen. Obama would speak out on controversial issues, risking campaign funds, we have our answer.

Obama, on Sixty Minutes tonight, was asked if he would negotiate with Syria and Iran.

His answer; "I would."

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Dougie Feith appeared on Faux News Sunday with Chris Wallace today and emphatically denied that he or anyone in his office ever said there was an operational relationship between Saddam Hussein and Osama Bin Laden. How sad. Mr. Feith apparently has early on-set Alzheimer's disease. He's forgotten that someone in his shop at DOD leaked his October 2003 memo to the Senate Intelligence Committee to one Mr. Stephen Hayes, an enterprising journalist, who in turn published the breathless findings in the Weekly Standard.

So what? The Weekly Standard is not an official government publication. Why should we take it seriously? Well, let's ask Vice President Dick Cheney. Here's what the Weekly Standard Editor, a guy named Bill Kristol, wrote three years ago:

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Joe Nye reminds us that soft power is the power to get others to want what we want. By that definition, soft power advocates haven’t done so well. Ironically, they have failed to use soft power to get others to want what they want – that is, more soft power.

It’s easy to beat up on the current administration for failing to understand and deploy ‘soft power’ and public diplomacy in their toolkit of foreign policy. Bush, Cheney and the gang prefer coercion, i.e. hard power.

But the previous Democratic campaigns have not done such a good job either.

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In this morning's LAT, Kim Murphy writes ("Iran reformists want U.S. to tone it down") of the twisted dance of the belligerent paranoids that is leading toward more and crazier war.

Murphy quotes "Saeed Leylaz, a business consultant and advocate of economic reform and greater dialogue with the West," as going so far as to advocate that Washington shut up about reform in Iran altogether, "because in 100% of the cases, it benefits the right wing." Such absolute proclamations rub me the wrong way. But Leylaz goes on wisely:

"Mr. Ahmadinejad tries to make the international situation worse and worse. And now with the U.N. Security Council resolution, he can say, 'Look, we are in a dangerous position, and nobody can say anything against us, because the enemy is coming into the country.' Exactly like George W. Bush in Washington, D.C. They are helping each other. They need each other, I believe."

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