A couple bought a house at a foreclosure sale, but when they got inside they learned they found stacks of dead animals and mountains of animal poop. The buyers are scrambling to get out of the deal, but, at least from the news report, there are no obvious grounds for reversing the sale.

The story is pretty gross, but it highlights something that lots of people don't realize: A homeowner is entitled to stay in possession of the home until after the foreclosure sale. No one --not the bank or the potential buyers--have any right to enter the house to see if the room arrangement is pleasing, the plumbing is functional or there isn't poop several inches deep on the floor.

As the subprime market continues its downward trend, keep your eye on the poop.

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Josh draws attention to Karen DeYoung's properly skeptical treatment (as compared to Michael Gordon's credulity) of the Pentagon claim that violence in Iraq is coming under control. There's a reporting-related factor that, probably even more than credulity, helps explain why Democrats are waffling on starting the withdrawal.

To wit:

The war has left the screen, largely. It's remarkably far off the charts, in print, on TV, on the radio, you name it. Hats off to the always keen-eyed Eric Boehlert for noting the figures for total July coverage compiled by the Project for Excellence in Journalism. Total coverage of events in Iraq, in all major mainstream media, in July, the last month monitored, was: four percent.

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You wouldn’t know it from Washington Post reporter Jeffrey Birnbaum’s news story covering yesterday's House Ways & Means Committee hearings on the carried interest tax loophole, but the House bill to close this loophole is rapidly gathering momentum, as objections to the measure are being met with convincing rejoinders.

The bill, introduced by Rep. Sander Levin (D-MI), would end the special tax break that allows private equity fund managers to pay 15 percent capital gains tax on their compensation for services and costs all other taxpayers billions of dollars a year. Everyone else pays the ordinary tax rate of up to 35 percent on such income.

In fact, the big news of the day was that the Democrats on the panel were unequivocal in support of the bill. Considering that four of them represent New York--and that Rep. Thomas M. Reynolds, the only Republican from New York on the committee, said the bill would "further undermine New York's position as the preeminent financial center in the world"--the key development yesterday was the unanimous support for the bill expressed by the Democrats. Yet Mr. Birnbaum made no mention of it in his article.

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There seems to be some interest in my new book Security First; frankly it is doing better than several of my other endeavors. But never mind what I think. Here are excerpts from what others say, and links to their full texts.

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The attention focused on the Justice Department recently has, quite rightly, centered on the firings of the U.S. Attorneys, the politicization and incompetence in the Department’s upper ranks and the general dismissal of civil rights.

We should add one other item to the performance review. Over the past few years, DoJ has become a shill for some of the most powerful industries in the country.

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Todd’s first post here seemed so sane and correct that the only way I could think of to engage with it was to try to figure out who would disagree with it. Todd seems to be striking a middle ground, but between what alternatives?

On one side, I suppose, is the high-minded Washington culture of David Broder and Matt Bai that looks down on all political parties, and the Democrats in particular. Todd’s outline of the basic ideological commitments of a “big-tent” Democratic Party would strike Broder as polarizing (since the truth by definition lies in the middle) and Bai as old-fashioned – where’s the big new idea about life in the post-industrial economy?

Gitlin’s book seems – on a quick read – to be a good answer to Bai’s The Argument, covering much of the same story – the institutional evolution of a robust Democratic Party -- without Bai's insistence that there must be some Big New Idea About the Post-Industrial Economy that he himself can't put his finger on, but Democrats are surely doomed if they can't either. And while Todd doesn’t say it, I think his post is sufficient to establish that the basic moral obligations of liberal government haven’t changed and are unlikely to change just because the economy has changed. Certain aspects of the delivery of basic security such as universal health care will change, but the basic challenge remains the same.

The other disagreement with Gitlin would come from those who would seek to draw the lines around the tent a little more sharply.

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There’s another important reason for Democrats to maintain a “big tent” party beyond those already discussed in this conversation about Todd’s book: if we want to prevent conservative “bulldozers” in the future, we need to embrace traditions and institutions that empower diverse points of view, sometimes at the expense of quick or thorough progressive policy achievements.

It was no accident that Bush-era conservatives steadily descended into thuggish, scofflaw behavior at home and abroad. Building their “ bulldozer” required them to brush aside a vast array of traditional limitations on the exercise of raw power, ranging from international agreements and alliances to the U.S. Constitution itself, along with basic respect for facts and reasoned debate.

Reviving these barriers to “bulldozing” is a task for progressives as urgent as the pursuit of any specific policy goal, however worthy. But we can’t limit the other side without in some respects limiting ourselves

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We were afraid this shoe might drop, and drop it did last month, with a thud, right in the middle of the US job market, which lost 4,000 jobs, the first such loss in four years.

A central question surrounding today’s jobs report was whether it would provide clear evidence of a contagion effect from financial markets.  Are the bursting housing bubble, the credit crunch, and recent financial market turmoil having a negative impact on the job market?

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Although the discomfiture of the Republican Party delights any partisan of the opposing party, after the laughing dies down it seems quite clear to me that Senator Craig should not resign. Indeed, Democrats ought to make themselves quite clear on this topic.

I've read enough of the transcript to conclude that the police shouldn't have arrested him; conduct in question -- no words expressed, no assault of any kind -- shouldn't be criminalized; Senators shouldn't be driven from office for such minor offenses; the Constitution may bar such arrests.

So why aren't those who believe in law and tolerance standing up for (even) Senator Craig?

Critics of "The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy" by John J. Mearsheimer and Steven M. Walt cannot be surprised that the attacks on the book prior to publication have already helped propel it to #10 on Amazon's best-seller list. Not only that, the names "Walt-Mearsheimer" have become almost People magazine famous, odd for two mild-mannered political scientists from the University of Chicago and Harvard.

It just shows you what a little "buzz" will do and a lot of buzz surrounds this book.

And why not? It's an important, heavily sourced and documented book (108 pages of footnotes) by two distinguished professors at two of our best universities. It deals with Middle East policymaking at a time when America's problems in that region surpass our problems anywhere else. And it is a serious book about a subject that is decidedly provocative, a much improved and expanded version of the original London Review of Books article.

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I'm late to the party, and I apologize. (And many thanks to Todd Gitlin for providing me with the unprecedented and exquisite thrill of reading a fascinating book and turning the page to unexpectedly find myself quoted at length!)

It's interesting that Gitlin perceives some hostility to the notion of a Democratic Big Tent. It is, after all, a positive term and one which should make everyone feel good. In Matt Yglesias' case, it seems be a difference of opinion as to whether a "big tent" is necessary to gain political power. But the problem with Gitlin's use of the term, among the netroots anyway, likely isn't going to be one of strategy so much as a reflexive recoil at the term itself. It has the distinct odor of patented Third Way/DLCish scolding that the left needs to compromise again and I think even the pragmatic sorts feel that they have finally hit a wall on that count and it's time to move the other way for a bit.

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Disgraceful, shameful, illegal, and yes, dangerous. These are words that come to mind every time the Bush administration makes yet another attempt to consolidate executive power, while wrapping itself in secrecy and deception.

And its officials never stop. In May, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, a nonprofit group, filed a lawsuit seeking information from the White House Office of Administration about an estimated five million e-mail messages that mysteriously vanished from White House computer servers between March 2003 and October 2005. Congress wants to investigate whether these messages contain evidence about the firing of nine United States attorneys who may have refused to use their positions to help Republican candidates or harm Democratic ones.

The administration's first response to yet another scandal was to scrub the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request section from the White House Office website. One day it was there; the next day it had disappeared. Then, Bush-appointed lawyers from the Justice Department tried to convince a federal judge that the White House Office of Administration was not subject to scrutiny by the Freedom of Information Act because it wasn't an "agency." The newly labeled non-agency, in fact, had its own FOIA officer and had responded to 65 FOIA requests during the previous 12 months. Its own website had listed it as subject to FOIA requests.

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Several comments in response to my original offering on The Bulldozer and the Big Tent and the posts by Heather Booth and Matt Yglesias take offense at the very notion of a big tent party.

I think of movements as energy and parties as vehicles. You elect a party that you don't have to identify with but which you need, if only to pressure. The party isn't your family, your church, or your sect. It's not a warm band of brothers and sisters. It's an immense contraption in a sprawling and nonrevolutionary country, even if it harbors populists of various stripes. Movements get somewhere when there is a party they can pressure. Labor got somewhere with FDR, not Hoover; the civil rights movement, with Kennedy and Johnson; defenders of limited humanitarian intervention, with Clinton, not Bush. The politics we need is not politics that thunders against the powers that be and then ducks into retirement. It's an active politics that understands both the necessity and the limits of parties.

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Ours is such a dispiriting time politically that it’s probably unfair to fault The New Republic for being so often demoralized and confused. But the magazine is offering us no “new republic” partly because it has been a little too busy protesting too much that it isn’t neo-conservative and isn’t envious of inroads on public discourse by the dread “netroots” commentaries and analyses on its left.

Leave aside the meltdowns of TNR editor Martin Peretz (who announced in 2001 that Harvard had “a spring in its step” with Lawrence Summers as its new president and has yet to admit that Summers was ousted because he betrayed civic-republican liberal education). TNR’s younger savants sound almost desperate, too, in their own whining way, to regain high ground by complaining about “the thuggery of William Kristol” (by Jonathan Chait) or -- coming this Sunday in the Neo-Conservative Damage-Control Gazette (aka The New York Times Book Review) -- by dismissing the neo-cons’ biggest embarrassment, Norman “Bombs Away” Podhoretz (in a review by TNR’s Peter Beinart).

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Matt Yglesias makes the good point that in order to have a real progressive revival, we need governing majorities. He then questions whether a big tent is necessary for that. The real question is what we do with what we have and who we reach out and expand to include.

The opportunity is to expand progressive majorities by making the election become a mandate for the values/vision and policies that we care about. And the opportunity is more likely to be there if we both fight for things that matter and educate/organize/mobilize and turn out people to vote for the candidates and the issues that are of concern to us. This way, the election creates the demand and can support the change we want to see in that new administration. Organizing, standing up and fighting, and expanding our numbers (and our tent) leads to both winning and being progressive.

An excellent piece today on Slate by Daniel Gross noted that Tony Snow, the outgoing White House Press Secretary, does not have any money in his 401(k). The only pension he’ll be receiving is from a journalists’ union. The article also reports his gratitude for the excellent medical treatment he’s received for his cancer. “I've been lucky I work at the White House,” he says (meaning for the benefits). How would he fare, asks Gross, under a market-driven plan that treats patients as consumers? I suppose it would be, as Mayor Giuliani contends, "un-American" to suggest that we give everyone the same insurance as the White House (i.e., you and I taxpayers) gives federal employees. The Onion hit a similar theme when it announced, “Cheney Dropped by White House HMO.” It’s a sad day when a Press Secretary making $168,000 (three times the median) a year feels like money is tight yet advocates policy solutions that would make the very things he struggles with---healthcare and retirement---worse for others. If Tony Snow hasn’t saved for retirement, how effective will a system constructed entirely of IRAs be? Perhaps more than Iraq, this presidency nose-dived when the President, as he promised he would, pushed aggressively (and mendaciously) to privatize Social Security. Americans, it turned out, really like social welfare. How about remembering this when we talk about healthcare?

Why the hubbub over a B-52 taking off from a B-52 base in Minot, North Dakota and subsequently landing at a B-52 base in Barksdale, Louisiana? That’s like getting excited if you see a postal worker in uniform walking out of a post office. And how does someone watching a B-52 land identify the cruise missiles as nukes? It just does not make sense.

So I called a old friend and retired B-52 pilot and asked him. What he told me offers one compelling case of circumstantial evidence. My buddy, let’s call him Jack D. Ripper, reminded me that the only times you put weapons on a plane is when they are on alert or if you are tasked to move the weapons to a specific site.

Then he told me something I had not heard before.

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In mid-August, I was flying off to participate in the Australian-American Leadership Dialogue. I was catching an 8 am flight at Dulles Airport and for whatever reason was being escorted to the front of some very long security lines and was given the red carpet treatment by TSA. I have no idea why. I thought that perhaps someone had mistaken me as David Letterman's brother again -- which actually happened once and got me into a restricted but cool night club.

But standing a few layers back in the long line was Chuck Hagel, dressed in a starched shirt and crisp suit and tie. I said howdy to him -- and despite my unshaven state after hiking and camping for a week in the Cascades and wearing jeans and a t-shirt, Hagel was effusive, energetic, real. We chatted about Iran, Iraq, and the general wreck that had become American foreign policy.

And despite my nudge, he would not get out of that long line he was in, though I tried to encourage him to just take my place as the real VIP, since TSA had clearly made a mistake on me.

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The Pentagon has stepped up its PR offensive designed to project the image of a greener military.

At first blush it would seem that the notion of an environmentally friendly military is a contradiction in terms. After all, isn't one of the primary missions of the U.S. military to protect the "American way of life" by assuring access to foreign oil supplies, by force if necessary?

Wouldn't a truly green military imply a change in missions, so that the push for "global reach" meant to enable interventions all over the world against enemies real or imagined is considerably scaled back?

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It's rare that I can beat my friend and office-neighbor Steve Clemons at his own game, and so to divert the wrath of his commentors, I too will “come out”: not only do I know people at the American Enterprise Institute, but I worked there myself. In fact, I worked for Norman Ornstein, whose New Republic diary about being falsely held responsible for the AEI neoconservatives prompted Steve’s post. In my first job in Washington, I was his research assistant in 1988-89. 

Tempting as it is to play the conversion card, I was no kind of conservative, then or now (although I move a bit to the left with each passing year, as I think anyone with either a heart or a brain should do.) But I totally enjoyed working at AEI, at that time, and I've never had a moment's regret about that year and a half.

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Check out the Vanity Fair piece and ask yourself, why do these reporters, having committed this atrocity of coverage, still have jobs? If they were lawyers or doctors, the malpractice claims would have driven them out of the profession. If they were politicians they'd have more accountability than they have now, and that's saying something. And anyone would have more remorse than they show, even with the benefit of hindsight.

There are a lot of reporters I know and respect, but I will never forget the one (not named in VFair, which listed only some of the perpetrators) who put down his pen after a long and cruel interview about my friend and high school classmate Al Gore, and explained that he was so hard on Al because "we expect more from Gore; he knows what to do but just won't show leadership. He just lacks courage to say what he believes."

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The debate about what to do next in Iraq is framed as if Iraq was an island. Should the US troops leave now or later? Only if the Iraqis meet certain conditions? Stay there until “we win”? Roundly ignored is that the effects of the way the US presence in Iraq is called down depend greatly on a closely related decision: what the US and its allies plan to do about Iran.

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Todd Gitlin does a great service by dwelling at some length on the structural differences between the Republican (bulldozer) and Democratic (big tent) coalitions. In particular, attention to these matters helps elevate the notion that Democrats must be a big tent from the level of cliché to substantive analysis.

However, it is precisely consideration of this fact that leads me to sometimes doubt whether we are really, as liberals often say these days, at the dawn of a bold new era of progressive politics. In particular, one should give a cold-eyed look to the question of how big a successful Democratic tent needs to be. The current Democratic majority appears to rest on the shoulders of marginal members who believe the president should have unlimited powers of domestic surveillance irrespective of the constitution, that the war in Iraq should be continued indefinitely, and that hedge fund managers should pay lower tax rates than their secretaries.

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As Josh reports this morning (citing some solid sources), President Bush could be readying a strike on Iran.

Makes sense. Why else would he seem so sanguine about the future? He knows that Iran is one problem he will not leave to his Democratic successor who, possibly if not probably, will not take military action.

I'd say the odds are slightly better than 50-50 that we wake up one morning soon to the news of an attack on Iran.

So what will we do then? Terror-phobe that I am, I'll probably not take the Washington Metro that morning. But other than that, I won't do anything except post on TPM. Will any of us?

Will our Democratic candidates for President say anything bold? (We know the answer to that one).

In this supposed democracy, have we now reached the point where all of us are -- like citizens in dictatorships -- reduced to utter impotence?
The answer is almost surely yes. And Bush and Cheney know it.

Health insurance costs in this country to rise and nobody wants to foot the bill.  Today's New York Times describes how the major American automobile manufacturers are planning to stop providing health care for their workers in upcoming collective bargaining negotiations.  The union, the United Auto Workers (UAW), is also said to be powerless to strike in protest -- for doing so might mean bankruptcy for these financially fragile companies.  The workers may receive a one-time payment in return for the union assuming health care costs, but on the whole, it seems these workers with solid middle-class jobs will be worse off after these negotiations.  What's to be done?

While there is no easy answer, this case certainly seems a good one to support SEIU leader Andy Stern's plan for government-provided health care.  (See, for example, this NYT piece).  It seems that the UAW workers described above would clearly benefit from such a system.  First off, the automakers would remain solvent as they did not need to carry the heavy burden of increasing health insurance costs.  This means a more stable future for the people that work there.  Secondly, the workers would not need to have this cost passed on to them when times are bad -- as they are facing now.  Around the country, many workers are accepting wage freezes or even cuts in order to just maintain their health care package.  If the government was picking up the tab on this though, these workers might be better-positioned to bargain over wages and other issues.  

So it seems like both employers and workers, at least in the present case, might come out better from a quality government-provided health care system.  Perhaps Mr. Stern is onto something.

Todd, as we have come to expect from him, addresses important questions with insight from his life in the movement for justice and democracy. At this moment of ripe opportunity for a progressive revival, with the collapsing of the hold that the right wing has had on the debate and the rise of progressive spirit to fight back, we should pay attention to Todd's analysis to address what we need to do in order to win and be progressive.

Todd describes the Republicans (big business and the Right Wing) and our days in the Wilderness (post 60s Democrats), and now the Emergence (blogs, MoveOn, money and re-finding values and the need for a big tent). All this sets the stage for seeing where we have come from, where we are now so that we can address what we need to do to combine our values and vision and actually win.

We should also start with a caution. Because the old influence of the Right is in decline, does not mean it is no longer present.

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Everyone knows who the Federal Reserve Board is. They are the folks who told us that there was no housing bubble. Then they told us that there might be some problems with housing, but it would be restricted to the subprime market, and was no big deal. Last weekend at their annual meeting of central bankers in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, they seemed to agree that the housing market is somewhat of a problem. However, just like President Bush in Iraq, they were nonetheless confident that everything is under control.

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American Patients for Universal Health Care has announced it will form a “patients’ union” to organize patients across the country to “demand the quality of care for which they are paying and to demand meaningful health care reform.” Frustrated by what it sees as a perverse incentive structure that rewards health care providers for keeping patients just sick enough to need constant care, the organization is launching this union to empower patients to demand higher quality care and to encourage them to patronize only those doctors who support universal health care.

While this "unionization" could prove a powerful building block in the growing grassroots movement for universal health care, the very nature of healthcare presents huge challenges to those who would use market forces for change.

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In light of Hurricane Katrina's second anniversary, I think its fitting to pause for a moment to assess our national priorities. The number of Americans with health care coverage is down over the last year . Forty-seven million Americans were uninsured in 2006 compared to 44 million in 2005. This decline is mainly attributed to the decline in employer and government offered health insurance. This report comes as congress debates the re-authorization the State Children's Health Insurance Program. This program is designed to stabilize health costs for the children of the working poor who are not covered by other governmental programs. President Bush has vowed to veto both a House and a Senate version of the bills. Despite President Bush's unwillingness to support moderate increases in funding for children's health insurance, he is asking congress for fifty billion dollars more to spend on the war in Iraq .

George W. Bush may be in Baghdad today, but that won't change the realities on the ground in Iraq.

The next month, the Bush administration is going to try and convince Americans that what most observers see happening in Iraq is not actually happening and that conversely, things are improving -- with no evidence.

Paul Krugman in his piece, "Snow Job in the Desert" fillets Michael O'Hanlon and Kenneth Pollack for their role in the effort and compares the non-empirical assertions of Colin Powell on WMDs to Petraeus's coming assertions that the surge is working.

A difference I'd suggest to Krugman between Powell and Petraeus is that Powell was lied to by the administration for which he worked and was told that the intel in hand had come from multiple credible sources -- and not just the single, questionable source, later identified as "Curveball." Petraeus, in contrast, is actually a working part of the information collection and marketing operation on the surge.

My New America Foundation/American Strategy Program colleague Nir Rosen framed Iraq realities bluntly in an exchange with CNN's Tom Foreman. I think Rosen's grim read is right:

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The brilliant correspondent and author ("In The Belly of the Green Bird") Nir Rosen was on CNN on Sunday and put the whole Iraq situation into perspective. According to Rosen who has lived in Iraq, has spent months in the war zone and is fluent in Iraqi Arabic, arguing over whether the war is lost or about the merits of the surge is moronic. Iraq no longer exists as a country. We essentially finished off Iraq as a nation.

I could not find a transcript of the CNN report but here is Rosen on DEMOCRACY NOW. He spells it all out. Where will the next Nuremberg Tribunal be held?

I proposed to write this book in the spring of 2004, when I called it Liberal Resurrection. (By the time I went to work in earnest, in the spring of 2005, that title seemed premature at the least, and probably foolish. Later I dumped the religious imagery altogether; and not a moment too soon.)

Partly to get my mind around the Bush emergency and partly to shore up my morale, I felt the need for a comprehensible history—not a detailed chronology but a conceptual one. Part of what was driving me was the need to get Bush right—not just to slime him, but to figure out how he did it. With that, also, came the question: How did we get rolled for so long? Some dumb mistakes, or was it in our political nature to lose? And then too: Were there limits? Several Swift Boats later, I felt even more strongly the need to see Bush’s bulldozer in its setting: the stunning career of the recent conservative movement, its advantages, its conception of leadership, all against a background of liberal failings.

At the same time I wanted, and want, to urge liberals beyond unproductive snarling, either about the irresistibility of the Bush bulldozer, the Democrats’ fecklessness, or Bill Clinton’s sins and errors. I saw MoveOn, the Dean campaign and the emerging netroots, blogosphere, whatever, as the rumblings of a new and indispensable force, carrying the movement spirit (younger, activist, energetic, amateur) into the Democratic Party (older, compromising, staid, professional). For all their respective limits, could it be that at long last liberals and Democrats would accomplish the movement-party synthesis that the Republican-conservatives had accomplished over the course of decades? For only if the two are in synch—the party harnessing the movement’s energy toward practical ends, the movement bringing the party to life—only then does big political change take place, one way or the other.

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Chris Hill of State has cut a deal with North Korea: they will give up the a-bomb for food and oil. It's a bit more complicated than that, but apparently even if they are "evil" we don't have to invade to accomplish our goals.

Why the new approach (same as the Clinton approach, basically) to NK doesn't apply to the Middle East is something Secretary Rice ought to be examining; why in that strife-torn region are we spending hundreds of billions on weapons and war and so little on infrastructure, economic development, education, or anything else useful? It's long past time to insist that the violence must end before we can create jobs or hope. The lesson that butter precedes guns applies not just to Iraq but to all the Middle East. Such is the lesson of North Korea, and the "surge" does not contradict it.

I don't see any point to contributing to a cycle of useless panic, but if Victor Davis Hanson is worried about war with Teheran, I'm worried and then some. "Don't Bomb, Don't Bomb Iran," wrote one of conservativedom's most interesting war analysts on Friday at National Review Online.

It was bad enough that the keen Afghanistan analyst Barnett Rubin took seriously a Washington rumor that the rollout was coming soon after Labor Day--to pick a day at random, say, Sept. 9, or 10, or, what the hell, 11. His source heard the following from "someone in one of the leading neo-conservative institutions":

They [the source's institution] have "instructions" (yes, that was the word used) from the Office of the Vice-President to roll out a campaign for war with Iran in the week after Labor Day; it will be coordinated with the American Enterprise Institute, the Wall Street Journal, the Weekly Standard, Commentary, Fox, and the usual suspects. It will be heavy sustained assault on the airwaves, designed to knock public sentiment into a position from which a war can be maintained. Evidently they don't think they'll ever get majority support for this--they want something like 35-40 percent support, which in their book is "plenty."

Then George Packer raised the threat level to orange, and while I haven't the information to raise it to red, and might only be adding a link to a child's game of Telephone, I'd rather do that than shut up. If there's anything we understand about the occupants of the White House, it is that worst-case scenarios are, if not dead certain, to use the phrase of the day, worth taking seriously.

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