It's tough coping with the spin, and our reporters and elected officials are getting spun like tops by our very politicized generals. Here are the points of view I use to try to keep my own head on straight.

First, if we arm Sunnis and encourage them to create their own militias, police forces, etc., as apparently our current general-in-charge is doing, then we are following the Baker-Hamilton report, aligning ourselves with the Saudis, trying to make up for the alleged mistake in disbanding Saddam's army, adhering to the perspective of the current DOD Secretary (and not Rumsfeld's). This tactic isn't a strategy; it is just a means to find, at last, a faction we can support.

Second,

Read more »

Michael Gerson, the former White House speechwriter, wrote in his Washington Post column yesterday that he and his fellow neocons worried that this was going to be the summer in which opposition to the Iraq war overwhelmed the Bush administration.

It sure looked that way in the spring when Democrats were mobilizing and popular support for the war and Bush dropped to levels reminiscent of LBJ and Vietnam after the Tet offensive.

But now the ship of state has been righted. The President's popularity has risen a bit. More Americans think the war is succeeding. And the Democrats have lost their zeal about ending it.

Read more »

If you caught the intellectual lightweight, Michael O’Hanlon, on CNN this morning you would have been treated to a masterful display of toadying and sucking up that puts the “sick” in sycophant. O’Hanlon continues to insist that his DOD arranged and controlled trip this summer to limited areas of Iraq proved beyond doubt that the surge is working and we are progressing in Iraq.

Of course his confident claims are not attended by any benchmarks or empirical evidence. So as a public service we will take a look at the specifics in Iraq and you can judge for yourself whether or not we are making progress and whether or not we are getting value for our money and the blood of our sons and daughters.

Read more »

By tomorrow, we are reliably informed, the state of Idaho will have a new Senator, not the poor old gay hypocrite Larry Craig, but most likely the current lieutenant governor, Jim Risch.

Obsessive TPM Cafe readers will remember Jim Risch. In a post last year, I called attention to this quote from Risch, who was at the time the acting governor. Referring to the victims of Hurricane Katrina, Risch said,

"Here in Idaho, we couldn’t understand how people [in Louisiana] could sit around on the kerbs waiting for the federal government to come and do something. We had a dam break in 1976, but we didn’t whine about it. We got out our backhoes and we rebuilt the roads and replanted the fields and got on with our lives. That’s the culture here. Not waiting for the federal government to bring you drinking water. In Idaho there would have been entrepreneurs selling the drinking water."

What a fitting gift to the nation, on the anniversary of Katrina!

Read more »

Megan McArdle:

I'm pretty sure I'll hate whoever gets elected. Rudy might be funny just to see the ACLU get all misty and nostalgic about the current administration, but that probably won't make up for having to wear uniforms and go to bed at 10 o'clock every night.

I've yet to decide whether or not she's one of those "interesting because we disagree bloggers" or just "so so so wrong." But with zingers like this...

I'm going to out myself. I have friends -- lots of them -- inside the American Enterprise Institute. Some of them I can't mention here as they used to work at AEI and then went to work for political players that this blog has been at cross-purposes with. Need to protect those folks.

But I have worked well and collaboratively with Norm Ornstein, James Glassman, Claude Barfield and others there -- even Jeffrey Gedmin and Radek Sikorski, both who would be in the neoconservative camp, but both of whom I respect and get along well with personally. (Though I just couldn't remain quiet during an effort by John Bolton to hire Jeffrey Gedmin as his deputy at the United Nations.)

The American Enterprise Institute is a success story in many ways that other institutions should study. But there are some real tensions inside AEI that should be noted.

Read more »

Eric Kleefeld:

Well, it looks like despite Larry Craig's best efforts, he's going to have to resign today because of this bathroom business. He just can't keep stalling forever.

You know you love it.

This conglomerate newspaper-gobbling game has gotten way out of hand when The Onion steals into Donny Graham's boardroom under cover of darkness and...takes over the leading organ of the nation's capital! I refer to this morning's side-splitting spoof in the Post,

especially this masterful touch:

The ads ran instead with more friendly images of dandelions and cherry-topped ice cream scoops...

Hold on--you mean, it isn't a spoof?

So Tucker Carlson admitted on national television that he and a friend assaulted a person he took to be gay. This drew laughs on MSNBC, and later much ribald humor at CNN.

Later Mr. Carlson issued a statement taking issue with his admission. Presumably, still later he will punch himself in the nose, or bang his own head against the wall, until he wrests the truth out of himself.

But why the laughter?

Remember how Google's motto is "Don't be evil" but they allowed Chinese censors to block out "harmful" stuff like the history of the Tiananmen Square massacres of 1989? Well, they're at it again.

Boing Boing links to a report that Google's new property YouTube has cut a deal similar to Google's in China in which the site will be unblocked on the condition it agrees to work with the government to take down videos "deemed offensive to Thai people or those that violate Thai law." Read: dissident postings that speak negatively of the Thai Monarchy like those that originally caused the site to be blocked.

Read more »

My colleagues and I wrote a piece yesterday analyzing the new findings from the Census Bureau regarding household income, poverty, and health insurance in 2006.

These results are important in that they give us the first close look at how different types families fared last year. Every five minutes, we’re updated on the latest squiggle in the stock market, but it’s only once a year that the Census Bureau tells us how the typical family is getting along or how many kids are poor in America (btw, see section “Trust the Trend” in the EPI report re poverty measurement).

Read more »

Gabbing about Democrats' pre-primary campaigning the other day on "All Things Considered," David Brooks tried to lighten the stress he's under while pretending to be fascinated by Iowa Dems' opinions. He'd interviewed some in Manley, Iowa, he chortled, "because I'm so manly" --a typical Brooksian aside. 

Two days later, on PBS' News Hour, Brooks tried to yuk it up deflecting Harold Meyerson's observation that since markets overreact, they need to be regulated. He smirked that Congress doesn't understand markets well enough to regulate them. Two days after that, in a column disguised as a New York Times book review, he lampooned a liberal academic for arguing that since Republican candidates hawk irrational fears and resentments, Dems should, too. The next day, Brooks was back on the News Hour, trying to put at least some wan, ironic humor on Alberto Gonzales' demise.         

We've been seeing, hearing and reading a lot of pseudo-funny churlishness from Brooks – a lot of Brooks, period. Maybe NPR, PBS, and Times audiences have been calling in, demanding, "More David Brooks!"  More likely, editors and producers think him a conservative congenial to liberals like themselves. It doesn't hurt that many conservatives think him a traitor. But could a sophist be a conservative at all? Can't we have a conservative with integrity? The latest Brooksian overkill forces that question.

Read more »

Field organizing in the Democratic Party for the last 20 years has been built around a marketing model in which the candidate is a product to be sold. First you collect information on a voter by finding out what magazines they subscribe to, what organizations they are a part of, who they've voted for in the past. Then you solicit them for their support with a piece of mail, a knock on the door or a phone call in which your candidate just happens to care most about whatever random issue that person is most likely to care about. If the consumer sounds like they want to buy, they go in the database. Approaching election day, you call (and now email) them to remind them to vote, offer a ride to the polls, and emphasize that your candidate cares about what you believe they care about based on the data you've collected.

It's a charming process that has the three-part effect of losing elections, deadening our civic culture and forcing the progressive movement to rebuild itself from a list of names and preferences every two or four years. And it's got to end.

Luckily, there's a contingent of Democratic operatives and activists (of which I consider myself a semi-absent member) at war with the traditional model. Instead of treating voters like consumers, we believe they should be treated like citizens. It's a radical idea, but it just might work.

Read more »

The New York Times published an excellent editorial on Monday calling on colleges to better educate students about the costs of credit.  With another school year beginning, credit card companies are swarming campuses far and wide with offers and promises that are too good to be true -- and that will too often leave students with unexpected costs, escalating debt, rising interest rates, and broken credit scores. 

Maybe the subprime meltdown will convince lenders that selfish and aggressive lending practices hurt everyone at the end of the day (even lenders and brokers are suffering from five straight months of home sales drops) -- but in the meantime, here's hoping that campuses and Congress heed the editorial's call to educate students and reign in deceptive practices.

The BBC reported this week from “the Parish” (as St. Bernard, a modest suburb of New Orleans, is known throughout the city) for the two-year anniversary of Hurricane Katrina. Two years out, it still resembles a war-zone. One resident told the reporter that she was “ashamed to be American” after the government’s (at all levels) pathetic response to the devastation. On the other hand, the report noted how impressive the robust efforts of other Americans to volunteer have been. The next president needs to shift priorities (less on the military, more on domestic programs, as many responses to my last post helpfully noted) and to mobilize this outpouring, by Americans for Americans. The government, let’s remember, put people on the moon. Americans (at least in “da Parish”) still want that kind of government.

Read more »

A perfect example of why I will be reading local blogs for primary coverage, Iowa political sage David Yepsen explains why the International Association of Fire Fighters union endorsement will help Dodd:

In a precinct caucus fight, support from a local fire fighter can prove pivotal. The neighborhood fire fighter is usually a respected person who is trained to act quickly in a crisis. In the hectic commotion of a Democratic caucus, having that leadership take charge and rally your people can attract others to your preference group. Just ask Kerry.

Seems kind of obvious when you read it. But I would have otherwise thought of the endorsement as a nice media event, a cool picture, a flexing of political strength. But if Dean's failure in Iowa teaches us anything, it's that the caucuses are about very intimate local settings, in which people judge each other as people. With that in mind, a local firefighter is obviously a good ally.

Update: Karen Tumulty should read local blogs.

Passport:

With parliamentary elections due next year, Iran's center-left coalition might be the latest victims of the YouTube effect. The would-be reformers are crying foul over the above video, which has been posted on a number of conservative Web sites and allegedly shows former President Mohammed Khatami shaking hands with a female supporter on a recent trip to Italy.

Somehow the new media gotcha is not quite as satisfying when used by fundamentalists, but democracy's a bitch that way. The video is after the break.

Read more »

Indeed:



Via Yglesias via Tech Liberation Front.

Kevin Drum and Henry Farrel are batting around the possibility that Alberto Gonzales took the relatively unique opportunity of a vacationing Jon Stewart to announce his resignation. As sound a guess as any, I think.

And that's why close readers of TPMCafe will know that you heard it here first, in a comment by Miesjhel. I can only assume this will be the beginning of my awareness that much of the political blogosphere's insights come from TPMCafe threads.

As a part of the soon-to-come relaunch of TPMCafe's design, I'm going to revive this House Brew blog to be a place for management news, my reactions to the variety of content floating around these parts, and other more random ramblings.

The relaunch of this site won't be happening for another week or two, but between now and then I'm going to try to get back into this whole "regular blogging" thing so that once folks actually start to read me, I won't be taking my first crickety steps back into the light. Here goes nothin'.

This week marks the second anniversary of Hurricane Katrina and the decent upon New Orleans of presidential contenders. As Barack Obama exhorted a New Orleans congregation on Sunday, “Let New Orleans become the example of what America can do when we come together, not a symbol for what we couldn’t do.” Now, with the government spending billions every week in Iraq and $10 billion a year on star-wars missile systems (which are yet to intercept anything), Louisiana can’t get the $3 billion it needs to fund the Road Home program. And the Fed didn’t hesitate this week with tens of billions to bail out banks, which are lawyered-up institutional actors. New Orleans symbolizes how much government has been neglecting the non-rich. It’s time for New Orleanians (and the rest of the country) not just to wear clever t-shirts (such as “make levees, not war”) but to vote for big-government, tax-hiking liberals in 2008.

Read more »

On March 6, 2005, I posted my first-ever blog post. It identified Senators Kennedy, Schumer, Durbin, and Dayton as leaders in the fight against the then-proposed Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention Consumer Protection Act. That was only a couple of weeks or so after Elizabeth Warren asked me – one of her first year contracts students – whether I had any thoughts on how to spread the word about the Act’s flaws. It was only a few days after Josh Marshall took my call and, after a quick pitch, generously offered us space on Talking Points Memo. Professor Warren, Michael Negron, Ryan Spear, and I posted furiously as Congress considered the bankruptcy bill. Ultimately the bill passed, but not before the New York Times, other mainstream media outlets, and dozens of bloggers pointed out the bill’s myriad weaknesses and its fundamentally bad policy.

Two-and-a-half years and roughly 150 posts later, I’m done blogging for the foreseeable future. Last week I started work as a soon-to-be (pending passing the bar exam) Assistant Attorney General in the Office of the Attorney General for the District of Columbia. Work and blogging just won’t mix. It has been a terrific experience working with Professor Warren, Josh Marshall, and my fellow student bloggers, sharing space with so many talented, progressive thinkers, and hearing comments and feedback from our readers.

When I started, I was primarily interested in the politics of the bankruptcy bill – whip counts, floor fights, messaging, &c. I knew very little about commercial law or substantive middle class economic policy. Today, these issues are at the core of my thinking on domestic policy. More than anything else, this has been a phenomenal learning opportunity.

Thanks to everyone who helped along the way (particularly Professor Warren), and good luck to the remaining, new, and future Warren Reports bloggers.

This year, half of all American men over 50 will be screened for prostate cancer. Few think that they have a choice. In the U.S. prostate cancer kills one out of every 34 men. Little wonder that many are quick to line up for the “PSA” test which measures levels of prostate-specific antigen in the blood. Yet doctors disagree—sometimes passionately-- as to whether widespread screening does any good. In June, the National Cancer Institute made its position clear: “The evidence is insufficient to determine whether screening for prostate cancer reduces mortality . . .. Screening tests are able to detect prostate cancer at an early stage, but it is not clear whether this earlier detection and consequent earlier treatment leads to any change in the natural history and outcome of the disease.”

The U.S. Preventive Services Task Force agrees. Critics of routine testing also note that the life-changing side effects of early treatment can outweigh the benefits.

Read more »

We have blogs. We have newspapers. We have newspapers with blogs and blogs that act like newspapers. If it wasn't becoming hard enough to draw distinctions between old and new media on the internet, consider an entity such as this: today, Joel Kramer, former editor and publisher at the Star Tribune in the Twin Cities, announced a new venture that falls somewhere between the usual media-endpoints of newspapers and blogs. It's called MinnPost, and it is a site intended to serve as an "internet-based daily."

Kramer isn't the only former print-media staffer in the venture. He has pulled together contributors from across the region who have served the Star Tribune, the Pioneer Press, City Pages, and Minnesota Public Radio. He has also pulled together a total of over a million dollars in startup funds from local sources and from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation.

With this kind of support, it begs the question: how does an internet daily, run and staffed by former newspaper editors and reporters, fit in the usual continuum bounded by traditional newspapers at one extreme and self-published bloggers at the other?

Read more »

In a Financial Times column whose logic escapes me, former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers calls for having the huge government created housing intermediaries, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, step in and start buying up more mortgages and mortgage backed securities. Summers’ says “if there is ever a moment when they should expand their activities it is now, when mortgage liquidity is drying up."

Let’s check the scorecard. The value of hundreds of billions of dollars of mortgage backed securities has just fallen through the floor because investors now realize that a very high percentage of the mortgages that back these securities will go into foreclosure. Now, why do we want a government agency to buy assets that are rapidly losing their value?

Read more »

Fredo has finally gone fishing.  The "why?" is fairly obvious.  The "why now?" is frankly baffling to me.  One of my colleagues compared it to Rumsfeld's departure, saying "after they'd completely lost credibility and all hope of regaining it... only then does the person in question go."

So what do you think?  Why now?  

Bonus open thread question: What is your favorite Gonzales moment?  There are so many.  To get things started, mine:

"I recall making the decision... I don't recall when the decision was made."

Two German social scientists were arrested July 31 and their flats and offices searched. The charge: suspicion of “membership in a terrorist association." The authorities allege that the two men, a sociologist, Dr. Andrej Holm and a political scientist at the Free University of Berlin identified as Dr. Matthias B. (he wishes to protect his name, for fear that his career will be ruined), are members of a "militant group." Their defenders maintain that the scholars were merely studying the militant group.  But maybe studying is not so mere anymore.

After a stretch in solitary confinement, Dr. Holm was released last week. But the charges are still pending.  A German site describing the case is here, and a summary by the sociologists Saska Sassen and Richard Sennett is here.

What was the crime? Their defenders stoutly maintain that the men were doing research on the militants, three of whom were simultaneously accused of attempted arson on four venicles of the German Federal Army. The police may have more evidence than they have made public, but what they have gone public with is laughable. Dr. Holm is alleged to have met one of the three militants twice this year, in “conspiratorial circumstances."

Read more »