The City Counsel of Washington, DC has capped payday lending at a 24% annual rate, which will reign in an industry accustomed to charging upwards of 400%. As one Counsel Member told the Washington Post, "They don't provide short-term loans. They create long-term debt, and that's the whole point." In this film from the Center for Responsible Lending, a former manager of a payday lending service advises potential borrowers to “run,” since it’s not uncommon for borrowers to spend $3900 a year on $500. Since July, the industry has been launching an aggressive campaign insisting that payday lenders provide an important service for low-income people. According to one ad, a woman would not have been able to get her child medical attention without the loan. And, they truck out the usual argument (reminiscent from the bankruptcy-bill debates) that people who fall into debt are irresponsible. Unfortunately for their argument, though, this would have to include 99% of all borrowers.

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Of late, public debate on Darfur has focused on getting peacekeepers on the ground. No question, there is a definite need to protect the people of Darfur from further atrocities. But its worth asking -- what peace will the “peacekeepers” have to keep? Peace must be made before it can be kept, and that task requires sustained, high-level commitment to diplomacy and motivation for Khartoum to transition from genocidal control of the country to participation in democratic control of the country. A major step towards that goal will be the day that the UN-AU hybrid force is able to legitimately call itself a protection force AND a peacekeeping force. That night, the people of Darfur will no doubt sleep easier.

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When compared to other developed countries, the U.S. ranks near the bottom on most standard measures of health. Many people assume that this is because the U.S. is more ethnically heterogeneous than the nations at the top of the rankings, such as Japan, Switzerland, and Iceland. But while it is true that within the U.S. there are enormous disparities by race and ethnic group, even when comparisons are limited to white Americans, our performance is “dismal” observes Dr. Steven Schroeder in a lecture published in the New England Journal of Medicine yesterday.

Why? It’s not the lack of universal access to healthcare, says Schroeder, though that’s important. And it’s not just that we don’t exercise enough and eat too much—though that is a major cause. But there is one factor undermining the nation’s health that we just don’t like to talk about in polite society: Class. When it comes to health, as in so many other areas of American life, class matters. In fact, it matters more than whether or not you have access to medical care.

Schroeder, who is the Distinguished Professor of Health and Health Care at the University of California San Francisco (UCSF) underlines how poorly even white Americans stack up when compared to the citizens of other countries by pointing to maternal mortality. When you look at “all races” you find that in the U.S. 9.9 out of 100,000 women die during childbirth. Focus solely on white women, and the number is still high—7.2 deaths out of 100,000 –especially when compared to Switzerland where only 1.4 women out of 100,000 die while giving birth.

Statistics on infant mortality and life expectancy reveal the same pattern. For example: white women in the U.S. can expect to live 80.5 years, only slightly longer than American women of all races (who average 80.1 years). Both groups lag far behind Japanese women (who, on average, clock 85.3 years). “How can this be?” asks Schroeder. After all, as everyone knows, the U.S. spends far more on health care than any other nation in the world.

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Most discussions of foreign policy these days -- in print, on the web, and on radio and TV -- are consumed with the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the possibility of war with Iran. To the extent that most Americans think about Africa at all, it is often as a place of chaos, violence, and disease, where the United States government and private citizens (like the two Bills, Gates and Clinton) are trying to do what they can to help despite steep odds. This view stereotypes an entire continent based on a list of admittedly intractable problems, but it gives little or no attention to positive activities undertaken by civil society groups in Africa.

As for our government, whatever motivation it may have to help address Africa's problems is rapidly being overwhelmed by a narrow military-driven agenda. My colleague Frida Berrigan has described Africa as the Bush administration's "third front" in the war on terror in her recent article for Foreign Policy in Focus.

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I'm sorry for joining the discussion so late - and since I'm jumping in at the end of the week, I'll confine myself to two points.

First, I agree with Greg that some of the ideas that conservatives are associated with today are either impractical, politically unpalatable, or both. I share his view that HSAs are an insufficient response to America's health care problems and may even make them worse, that the anti-tax pledge is a piece of political theater that's outlived its usefulness, that conservative claims that the Social Security system is "in crisis" are overblown, and (of course) that the Iraq War has been a debacle. (I'm less persuaded by his arguments on vouchers, deregulation, and Medicare Part D, among other topics, but I don't want to get too deep into the weeds here.) However, Greg's thesis elides the fact that conservatives are - in part, at least - victims of their own success: They seem out of good ideas at the moment because so many of their ideas are now conventional wisdom. Every political movement needs to renew and reinvent itself periodically, or else risk the irrelevance that the contemporary GOP is courting. I think Greg makes a persuasive case that the Right of the '00s, like the Left of the '70s and '80s, is in need of such a renewal. But I think he takes his case too far.

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You may remember Donna Smith from Michael Moore's SICKO.   Tired of waiting for someone else to do something, she has founded American Patients for Universal Health Care.  She is now involved in more public debates, which has promted this email.  I pass this along with her permission. 

Gotta ask and not being dumb here -- I just truly do not understand.
 
I am called to task for not using enough statistics and facts when I write about the need for health care reform. 
 
But no one answers me when I ask why is it OK for 50 Americans to die every day (many more than are dying in Iraq) and a total of 18,000 to die every year without access to affordable health care in this nation?  That fact, that statistic, comes from the U.S. government and does not include those who may be underinsured.  The actual numbers of dead due to health care system issues are probably much higher, but what of the 50?  Why is that allowed? 

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In researching one story after another tracing the rise and fall of various right-wing ideas, I was struck by how many commonalities arose in each case. To a large extent, those patterns explain a great deal about why each idea failed in practice and, indeed, why movement conservatism generally is failing as a governing philosophy. Here’s a quick rundown of those common threads:

The ideological inventors. Most of the conservative ideas examined in the book can be traced to an individual or very small number of people whose brainstorms lacked supporting analysis grounded rigorously in data and history. Examples include Milton Friedman’s school vouchers, the early supply-siders, Peter Ferrara’s privatization of Social Security, John Goodman’s health savings accounts, and John Yoo’s rendition of the unitary executive concept. The guy who drafted Colorado’s TABOR amendment that we’ve been talking about was a bombastic real estate investor named Douglas Bruce who had previously written three wildly different tax-and-spending referenda that failed before hitting upon the magic formula that passed in 1992. To varying degrees, those individuals put forward fragments of evidence to support their ideas, but at best their claims were superficial and lacking solid research-based footing.

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The next time I’m on Capitol Hill, remind me to stop in and buy Mitch McConnell and John Cornyn a beer or two. Their performance with the MoveOn legislation was masterful. They must have honed their skills for years taking candy from little babies as youngsters. As a result, they excel in the adult equivalent – running circles around Senate Democrats.

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Over at TPM HQ, readers have taken issue with David Kurtz's argument that forcing Republicans to actually filibuster legislation would be a pointless exercise.

I agree with reader JE who wrote: "the Democrats should make them filibuster, and use the term "filibuster" whenever they describe what the Republicans have done, not idiotic characterizations like "we don't have the votes." The only way to counteract Republican falsely blaming the Democrats for being "do-nothing" is to make it abundantly clear that Republicans are being obstructionist. *Make* them filibuster. Make it a true filibuster, which stops all other business until a cloture vote occurs. If anyone complains, or if anyone in the media doesn't get it, tell them that all you want is an up-or-down vote, but a minority of Republicans is preventing the business of the country from getting done, not to keep the bill from passing, but just so their president doesn't have to *bother* to veto it.

Does anybody have any idea by our fearless Dems let the GOP off the hook by going immediately to a cloture vote, losing, and then going on to other business.

Why not force the GOP to stay up all night reading the Bible and The Collected Works of Ann Coulter. Let the electorate see them blocking the will off the people. Why would Dems be afraid of that?

Could it be the same reasoning that led 23 of them to vote today for a resolution condemning Moveon.org which the same number that voted for the original Levin amendment to oppose authorization of the Iraq war in 2002?

Grover and Jon's graphs look at Colorado's growth and gdp per capita rates relative to the nation as a whole. But they don't convey that those growth rates were actually a bit lower over the same period compared to its neighboring Rocky Mountain states. Much more importantly, if you look at the period from 2000 to 2005, which covers the 2001 recession, when TABOR put the state government in the painful vise described in my earlier post, Colorado's gdp per capita growth rate was fourth lowest in the country. See this table.

One of the wonderful things about book club blogging is that when a reviewer either hasn’t read the book carefully (or at all), misinterprets what it says, or leaves out pertinent details that undercuts his critique, the author gets to correct the record fairly efficiently. So, in response to Mr. Niskanen’s rebuttal, readers might be interested to know:

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The assertion that Colorado was damaged by the Taxpayers Bill of Rights (TABOR) is silly.

As Jon Caldara, President of the Golden, CO – based Independence Institute says, “TABOR saved Colorado’s fiscal fanny. It held Colorado’s budget to a reasonable growth level during the go-go-go late 90’s and early 2000’s, while other states allowed their budgets to balloon. When the recession hit after 9/11, most states, like California, saw massive and painful budget cuts. Thanks to TABOR we in Colorado did not. And while California saw the recall of their governor, no muscle building actors became governor in Colorado.

Although the spending lobby will never admit it, TABOR saved Colorado.”

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[ed. note -- Dr. Niskanen originally posted this as a comment on Greg Anrig's post from Tuesday. We are reposting it here for anyone who may have missed it.]

The comments on my first post barely merit a response.  The primary objective of this post was to challenge Anrig's assertion that the policies of the Bush administration have been wholly consistent with long-standing conservative principles; this is a question of fact, not of public choice theory.  The dismissal of the conservative policy institutes as refuges for those who could not earn an academic appointment is absurd; I wonder whether this assertion would also be made about the Century Foundation.  In my case, I have been a full professor at the University of California, both in Berkeley and Los Angeles.

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When one thinks of the crisis in Darfur and which foreign states have leverage to stop it, China invariably is the first to spring to mind; and for good reason. Yet when directing our advocacy efforts, it’s important to remember that it’s not just nation states alone that have influence over Khartoum; it’s also nation states working together in supranational bodies like the UN and African Union. Resolving the crisis in Darfur is not just about helping the people of Darfur obtain the conditions to live in peace and security. It’s also about doing it in a way that proves to ourselves here in the US and to peoples around the world that we are in that endeavor together -- that we can live with each other and not against each other.

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BusinessWeek recently offered another interesting glimpse into the marketing practices of credit card companies on campuses.  As it turns out, university-affiliated credit cards aren't meant to be a convenient service for students as you may have thought.  Instead, they serve as a major money maker for universities.  The University of Tennessee, for example, recently signed a $10 million deal with Chase.

These deals put universities in a tough spot:  do they zealously pursue the interests of their students in negotiations with credit card companies, or sell those interests out to the highest bidder?  This is a conflict of interest you'd think administrators would want to avoid.  But with credit card companies continuing to throw around money on marketing like it's the dot com boom (or the foreclosure one before the subprime meltdown) and state governments covering fewer and fewer costs of higher education -- well, you don't need to be a marketing major to do the math.

The Post rightly beats up on Alan Greenspan for his efforts to worm away from his support for President Bush’s 2001 tax cut. However, they don’t own up to their culpability in accepting the nonsense that Greenspan was selling at the time.

Trivia buffs may recall that Greenspan’s main stated reason for supporting a tax cut was that he was concerned that the projected surpluses were so large that they would lead the government to quickly pay off the national debt. With enormous surpluses projected to continue, the government might then look to buy up private assets (stock and bonds), which Greenspan thought was a bad idea.

The Post says that “in hindsight” this scenario was implausible. WRONG! It was implausible at the time to anyone who understood the economy.

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The Service Employees International Union (SEIU), with 1.9 million members throughout the country, is deliberating over which Democratic candidate to support.  This brief piece on the Times website probes into the thinking of the SEIU delegates.  It seems that the candidate that the union is most excited about (John Edwards) is not that who is viewed as having the best chance of success in a national election.  On the one hand, after the experience in recent presidential elections, one could argue that it is good to see that the union is being pragmatic about how to best advance its members' interests.  On the other hand, it is interesting to note that some within SEIU, despite its vast membership, are playing "follow the leader" instead of shaping which candidate is the front-runner.  This blog is not about politics, but it is about the middle class.  While one union is certainly not equivalent to the middle class, there is an interesting question of whether that segment of American society is able to be an agenda-setting force in the political or policy world, or if it too is only able to play "catch up".

I’ve got a tough travel schedule over the next couple of months.  Conferences, talks, stuff like that.  To ease the pain, I thought I’d share my reflections, including some reporting on interesting developments in economic policy from around the country.

First stop: Minneapolis

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How many people have died as a result of the conflict in Darfur? The answer to this question has been of much debate. And immense care is required in estimating and reporting mortality figures so that effective policy prescriptions can be developed for aiding the people of Darfur in the short-term and bringing peace with justice in the long-term. Yet activists should not lose sight of the fact that despite disparities in estimating and reporting the actual number of deaths as a result of the crisis, the death toll does not change the reality that a fair and inclusive political process is the only lasting solution for the people who are actually living through this crisis.

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Actually, Bruce, my book really is entirely about why right-wing ideas keep failing. And its conclusion is that those failures present an opportunity for progressives to make politicians as uncomfortable describing themselves as “conservative” as the right succeeded in undermining the “liberal” label. The repeated, consistent failures of the conservative policy ideas pushed by the right’s think tanks and echo chamber have nothing to do with ancient history like Gerald Ford’s inability to Whip Inflation Now or Bartlett’s other examples. Rather, movement conservatism has failed as a governing philosophy. And if progressive politicians connect the dots for voters to help them see that conservative candidates who espouse the modern right’s agenda will fail just as surely as George W. Bush did, they can finally regain the upper hand in American politics.

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Is war with Iran inevitable? The short answer is no. My colleague Steve Clemons has a provocative article to this effect posted on today's front page of Salon. I agree with the thrust of the piece, although I will not go into the same level of depth provided in Steve's analysis.

The biggest bar that I see to war with Iran is that the U.S. military leadership is strongly opposed to it, whether in the form of air strikes or boots on the ground. The second major roadblock involves the cluster of potential negative consequences that such an ill-considered move would provoke, from increased Iraniann support for Hamas and Hezbollah to a dedicated effort by Tehran to get nuclear weapons as a possible bar to future U.S. military action.

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In some ways, I think the biggest problem I have with Greg Anrig’s book is the subtitle: “Why Right-Wing Ideas Keep Failing.” The reason is because that isn’t really what the book is about at all. What the book is really asking is why right wing ideas are so successful politically.

There may not be a direct relationship between successful policies and political success, but over time it’s pretty close. Occasionally, a good president who tries to do the right thing is overwhelmed by bad luck—think Gerald Ford. And occasionally presidents are rewarded for pursuing penny-wise/pound-foolish policies—think Richard Nixon.

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My thanks to Cato Institute chairman William Niskanen for enduring what sounded like a highly irritating perusal of the first five chapters of my book (he didn’t even get to the chapter on Social Security privatization, which really would have made him crazy!). I’d like to focus on Mr. Niskanen’s criticism that I am “profoundly wrong” that the Bush administration largely followed the conservative movement’s game plan for governing. In particular, let’s focus on the topic of politicizing the government, which is a conservative movement idea that owes much to Mr. Niskanen’s own public choice theory work. (And it’s the subject of one of the chapters he read).

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Greg Anrig has misunderstood the reasons “Why Right Wing Ideas Keep Failing.” The first reason is that many proposals to change government policy have not been adequately thought through before implementation. The second reason is that the only policies evaluated in the book were proposed by the right; because the left has not made any broadly appealing policy proposals for over 30 years.

I will not comment in detail on the material in the book through chapter 5 for several reasons:

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To Grover Norquist (who will be contributing to this book club) and his lobbying organization Americans for Tax Reform, the “holy grail” is a state constitutional amendment approved by the voters of Colorado in 1992. Dubbed TABOR – for Taxpayer’s Bill of Rights – the amendment among other things restricts state revenues to the level of the previous year, plus the rate of population growth and inflation. Any excess tax collections over that threshold during times of prosperity must be refunded back to taxpayers. When times are bad and tax payments fall short of that year’s limit, legislators have no option but to cut the budget unless they receive approval from voters for a tax increase. That reduced revenue level during a recession in turn constitutes the new, lower baseline for the following year – creating a further tightening of the budget called the “ratchet effect.” The purported benefits of the TABOR law in the eyes of Norquist and his followers is that it will produce stability, tax relief, and economic growth without unduly reducing essential state services.

It’s the holy grail because even among simplistic conservative ideas, this one is the most simple. If you want small, efficient government, just pass an amendment that says it has to be small and efficient.

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This is Ben Naimark-Rowse. This week I’ll be guest-blogging for this salon on the crisis in Darfur. I’ve been involved in Darfur consulting and activism for some time now and professionally in human rights work for seven years. I hope that this blog will provide both insight into the empowering world of Darfur Web 2.0 Activism and an opportunity to engage each other in fleshing out what is, at its root, a story about the use of genocidal violence by a military regime to maintain a stranglehold on political power.

This story has a cast of characters that many of you are familiar with. However, the genocidal nature of this crisis has tended to overshadow its root causes so I’ll begin the story there -- with a brief and basic anatomy of the crisis.

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From the Wall St Journal today:

"He [Greenspan] says he felt 'getting Saddam out of there was very important,'...because he was convinced the Iraq dictator wanted to control the Strait of Hormuz, through which a sizable portion of the world's oil passes...He conveyed that view to [Cheney and Rumsfeld]."

But see (from my atlas, which just made me shrug):

Strait of Hormuz

Through its waters, in giant ocean-going tankers, pass much of the oil from Bahrain, Iran, Iraq, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.

Bordered by Iran, Oman's Musandam Peninsula and the United Arab Emirates, this stretch of water is of obvious military significance, and subsequently, the U.S. Navy and others parole its waters.

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Two years ago the New York Times Book Review published an essay of mine, "Allan Bloom and the Conservative Mind," in which I showed that Bloom rejected conservatives' touting his 1987 bestseller The Closing of the American Mind: How Higher Education has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today's Students as if it were a manifesto for their movement.

True, Bloom's book was properly scathing of leftist racial and sexual "identity" politics and of the political-correctness police. And it inspired a surge in conservative campus funding, pedagogy, and activism intended to rescue liberal education from a vapid, divisive multiculturalism.

Far from rescuing the liberal arts, though, the conservative surge was weakening them. It was inundating undergraduate life with premature training in marketing, self-marketing, national-security strategizing, misplaced religious enthusiasms, and sometimes, as a grace note, jejune affectations of classical virtue. And no one, I showed, had decried all this more loudly than Bloom himself.

Bloom was eccentric, and not, shall we say, my cup of tea. But some of his arguments deserve rescuing from conservative ideologues and from journalists addicted to "left vs. right" scenarios or confused and embittered by what they think liberals did to their own educations. Such journalists thought I must be trying to rescue Bloom from the right in order to claim him for the left. They didn't notice that liberal education is endangered far more now by conservative capitalist surges than by tenured radicals – an important distinction.

As it turns out, some of these confused journalists were working at The Times Book Review itself.

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Welcome to Table for One, the guest-blogging section at TPMCafe.

This week we are joined by Darfur activist Ben Naimark-Rowse, who takes this past weekend's Global Day for Darfur as a launching point for a discussion of the ongoing crisis in Sudan. Naimark-Rowse is joining us from Avaaz.org, where he runs a Darfur advocacy campaign. Read his posts below, and join the discussion.

See earlier Table for One guest-blogs:
Charlie Savage, Congressman Steve Kagen, Congressman Earl Blumenauer, Scott Winship, Robert Hormats, Bill McKibben, Rajiv Chandrasekaran, Sen. John Edwards, the ACLU's Anthony Romero, Rep. Bernie Sanders (I-VT), Andrew Rasiej, Gov. Tom Vilsack,Gen. Wesley Clark, Rep. Sherrod Brown (D-OH), and Sen. Russ Feingold.

After George W. Bush’s defeat of John Kerry in the 2004 presidential election, Paul Glastris, editor-in-chief of the Washington Monthly, wrote with considerable justification: “…at this point, it requires a willful act of self-deception not to see the deeper problem: conservatives have won the war of ideas.” But what about the results of the conservative movement’s ideas, now that they have been put into practice not only at the federal level but in some states and localities as well? The Conservatives Have No Clothes argues that the most important ideas developed and marketed almost exclusively by the right’s elaborate network of think tanks and advocacy institutions, after implementation by conservative Republican officeholders, have demonstrably failed to produce the promised results and in most cases have made conditions worse in concrete ways.

The real-world outcomes that even many conservatives have joined the public at large in bemoaning are a direct outgrowth of governance arising from a movement predicated on the premise that government is the problem, not part of the solution. Any human beings following the conservative playbook for governing will appear to be incompetent because the playbook itself is filled with hopeless Hail Mary passes, ideas that have never worked but remain cherished, and the sort of trickery found on school playgrounds.

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Welcome to the TPMCafe Book Club, where we invite authors to discuss their most recent works with readers and invited commentators.

This week we'll be discussing Greg Anrig's new book, The Conservatives Have No Clothes: Why Right-Wing Ideas Keep Failing.

In the book, Anrig analyzes not only the ideology of the conservative movement, but also the policies that movement has implemented in its years in power. While he works to take conservative ideas on their own terms, he also measures their real effects and finds them wanting. He joins us to explain further, and to lead what promises to be a contentious discussion.

Joining the conversation will be William Niskanen, Bruce Bartlett, Ross Douthat, and Grover Norquist.

Past Book Club authors include Thomas Frank, Anthony Shadid, Larry Diamond, George Packer, Ivo Daalder/James Lindsay, Robert Dreyfuss, Chris Mooney, Gene Sperling, Gershom Gorenberg, Peter Beinart, Kevin Phillips, Sidney Blumenthal, Reed Hundt, Anne-Marie Slaughter, John Ikenberry, Jonathan Cohn, Daniel Gross, Steven Cook, Chris Hayes, Josh Kurlantzick, Glenn Greenwald, Todd Gitlin, and Jonathan Chait.

The recent downturn in the housing market has left me inundated with e-mails from people I know and people I don’t know asking for advice about buying or selling a home. I don’t want to get into the investment counseling business, but I can quickly share what I know.

 

The basic story is that we have had an unprecedented run-up in house prices over the last dozen years. From 1895 to 1995 house prices have just kept even with the overall rate of inflation. Since 1995 house prices nationwide have risen by more 70 percent after adjusting for inflation. There is no economist who has remotely plausible explanation for this run-up, except that the housing market is experiencing a speculative bubble, just as the stock market did in the late 90s.

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It turns out that quite a few states are looking to restrict credit card marketing to college students. The American Banker, a daily newspaper, reports that at least California, Tennessee, Texas, and Oklahoma have adopted laws to this effect. (You need a subscription to access the article. It is "Bill Banning Credit Card Gifts at Colleges Passes in Calif.," published on September 13, 2007 and written by Katie Kuehner-Herbert.)

As the article indicates, this isn't a partisan issue. Jim Reynolds, a republican state senator from Oklahoma, introduced a bill to ban the companies from campus in his state.

However, Sen. Reynolds said the provision was dropped after the University of Oklahoma protested the ban, because it would have lost $1 million a year from its agreement with Bank of America Corp. that gave the Charlotte company the exclusive right to market its credit cards on campus.

Yikes. Enforcement of these laws is also a major concern. But kudos to the states who are stepping up.

Greenspan says Iraq is "largely" about oil. The White House attacks him. But the President in "Dead Certain" identifies "energy... blackmail" as the key strategic concern in the region, and in addition to "a nuclear weapon" is the focus of "strategic thought." So, at least until the "nuclear weapon" is created, oil is "largely" the reason we are there.

Access to oil was also the reason for the first Iraq War. That was translated by James Baker into "jobs" but no one missed the point.

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The Wall Street Journal reports that it has been talking to "people familiar with" the final third of HCR's health care plan, the section that she will unveil tomorrow. According to the Journal, the new Clinton plan will mandate that everyone buy insurance, with the federal government providing subsidies for those who cannot afford the premiums.

Although the mandate will be controversial, I think it is key to creating a sustainable, affordable system that can offer high quality care to everyone. To achieve that goal, we need everyone in the same pool--young and old, sick and healthy, all making an equal contribution to the fund.

I wrote about this on my blog (www.healthbeatblog.org) last week, in a post where I asked "If We Mandate Insurance, Should Twenty-Somethings Pay Less?" My answer was "no" in part because if younger people pay less, premiums for older citizens could become rise beyond the reach of many. (This is now happening in Massachusetts.)

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Economists often claim that they would be glad to help poorer families, but that such efforts would either be a waste or would actually make things worse. In the area of credit regulation, for example, the constant pitch from some academics (and echoed by the banking lobbyists) is that any limits regulating credit cards will result in driving the country's most vulnerable citizens to far more dangerous lenders. The theory, called the substitution hypothesis, has been in vogue for two decades, providing intellectual cover for lobbyists' efforts to checkmate any serious legislative effort to rein in predatory lending practices.

The theory sounds plausible, but a little evidence is an amazing thing. Researcher Angela Littwn has a terrific new piece directly challenging the conventional wisdom regarding the substitution hypothesis. She shows, for example, that those without credit cards simply have less total debt than those with credit cards--not that they take on "worse" forms of credit if they don't use credit cards. But the really unexpected zinger in Angie's paper is that, according to the low-income families she studied, there were no credit options worse than credit cards. In other words, these struggling families think credit cards are as bad as it gets.

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You don't have to plunge too far beneath the lines to see that Wesley Clark, in his WP op-ed, thinks disastrous war with Iran might well be on its way. As Barnett Rubin, George Packer, Victor Davis Hanson and lots of others were warning last week, Team Cheney is revving up for the next episode in their unfurling idiocy.  Will sager Republicans and the remnants of what passes for Wise Men in the Establishment step up to try to yank Bush away from Cheney's apocalyptic embrace?