At least that is what Reuters claims. According to Reuters, Senator Clinton has joined John McCain in calling for the elimination of the gas tax over the summer months.

Given the quality of election reporting, this may sound like a populist measure to many voters. In reality, since refineries will already be running near flat out in the summer months, the benefit of the tax break will go almost entirely to the oil companies.

The point is simple. If refineries are at running at capacity then the supply of gas is effectively fixed. It is set at the levels that the refineries can produce. The price is then determined by demand. If the gas tax is reduced or eliminated, then the price will stay the same, you will just get money going to the oil companies instead of the government.

Hillary Clinton wants a Lincoln-Douglas Style Debate without a moderator so the two can ask eachother questions. Obama should accept the offer. Its time to decide whether this election is about reform or restoration.

John McCain said: ""I think it's very clear who Hamas wants to be the next president of the United States. So apparently has Danny Ortega and several others. I think that people should understand that I will be Hamas's worst nightmare."

But I don't understand how McCain would be Hamas's worst nightmare. Would it be by sending American ground troops to hunt out and kill members of Hamas? That would be a bloody, miserable, and intractable conflict, in which notwithstanding large casualties on all sides, the ability of Hamas to recruit new volunteers from now until doomsday would be unbounded. Judicious American Presidents, such as Eisenhower and Reagan and Bush One, have always been reluctant to insert American troops as occupiers of strife-torn Middle Eastern countries.

Would McCain engage in a successful diplomatic effort or an economic redevelopment program of the whole region, so that the root causes of Hamas-like terrorism would be undermined?

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I often refer to the Israel lobby as the "status quo" lobby because, frankly, I view it as advocating very little beyond the status quo. Its entire raison d'être seems to be to ensure that everything stays just the way it is.

True, the lobby pays lip service to the two-state solution and Israeli-Palestinian peace, but no more than that. If you attend its conferences, you can watch the audience sit on its hands when ritualistic endorsements of peace are offered but jump to its feet hootin' and hollering when the Arab bashing begins.

Oh that status quo! Don't engage Hamas. Don't insist on a settlement freeze. Don't push on roadblocks. Don't promote negotiations.

Don't do anything, in fact, except bash Palestinians, and anyone who has a kind word for them, at every opportunity. And, above all, keep Congress and the Presidential candidates in line. That's it.

It doesn't pain me to point to the failures of the lobby. It is, after all, just a conglomerate of organizations.

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Believe it or not, we've finally been able to get the reader blog archives from the old site into our database. For now, they're on a testing site. We need your help, especially if you were a blogger at the old site, making sure that they're working and are all there.

So, help us out. Shoot an email to tpmbugs at gmail dot come and join the beta testing group making sure we've got this right!

Yesterday the House and Senate intelligence committees were briefed by US intelligence officials on the details of a September '07 Israeli strike on a Syrian facility that allegedly had nuclear capabilities. The press then received its own briefing.

Lots of questions though remain unanswered, including why release the information now, what does this mean for an escalation in Israeli-Syrian tensions, or conversely a breakthrough in back-channel peace negotiations, what does it mean for the US-North Korea talks, and why would Syria have been pursuing a nuclear program?

Here is a quick attempt to look at those issues.

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The fastest growing segment of private health insurance is called "Tier 4." Under this system, co-payments for drugs vary with how expensive they are. Expensive drugs are classified "Tier 4" (some plans even have a "Tier 5"), and the co-payments are based on a percentage of the drug's cost. As the New York Times reports, 10% of private plans, and 86% of Medicare plans, now have Tier 4. A person's co-payments can now easily jump from several hundred to thousands of dollars a year. The system began with Medicare drug plans, and it has spread in the private market to employers looking to keep down costs. Those who are healthy can pay less, while those who are sick pay more.

This is a perversion of insurance. The point of insurance is to socialize costs. No one can control or predict when they will get sick. Although the cost of health care can be enormous for an individual, it's entirely predictable how many people overall will get sick and how much money their care will require. Without a deep, visceral commitment to this fundamental concept, universal healthcare will have no chance. Americans will have to reject Tier 4's individualistic ideology, and the new president will need a way of communicating the alternative.

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Hillary Clinton's most eloquent partisan, Paul Krugman says he's "confused by the Obama campaign. With Senator Clinton as the nominee, the coming election campaign is simple--"return with me now to the great days of the first Clinton Administration."

Democrats can justly portray themselves as the party of economic security, the party that created Social Security and Medicare and defended those programs against Republican attacks -- and the party that can bring assured health coverage to all Americans.

They can also portray themselves as the party of prosperity: the contrast between the Clinton economy and the Bush economy is the best free advertisement that Democrats have had since Herbert Hoover.

So is the election of 2008 about restoration or reform? Obama's whole campaign is based upon the notion that our politics have been corrupted and that only a reform agenda will clean them up. Writing about the start of the 20^th Century, Richard Hofstadter noted that the progressive reform movement "was the effort to restore a type of economic individualism and political democracy that was widely believed to have existed earlier in America and to have been destroyed by the great corporation and the corrupt political machine."

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While touring New Orleans yesterday, John McCain declared the government's response to the Katrina disaster "terrible and disgraceful" and pledged that it would never happen again. But McCain also demonstrated precisely the mindset that caused FEMA to revert from what both Republicans and Democrats in the 1990s had called a model agency back into the turkey farm it had been before the Clinton administration. He said: "Too often, government has its own peculiar way of doing things, following practices that in the private sector would invite financial ruin or worse." McCain reiterated the talking point of Newt Gingrich and every other purveyor of right-wing sound bites that UPS, FedEx, and Wal-Mart can tell you where packages are in real time, but FEMA couldn't even locate its own assets or people.

But it's the belief system that the private sector inherently does things better than government that impelled Bush's first FEMA head, Joseph Allbaugh, to dismantle the agency, notwithstanding its greatly improved performance in the 1990s, by farming out many of its activities to purportedly more efficient contractors.

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Having just argued, in agreement with Matt, that progressives need to get out there and argue for the vision that Matt lays out, I offer a playbook for that argument. Working with the excellent US in the World project, whose mission in life is to make us better communicators, the Stanley Foundation (my employer) convened a group to help identify the strongest messages in favor of liberal internationalism. The result is this message builder, How to Talk About the Connection Between US and Global Security.

In response to Blake, the good news is that our recent foreign policy disaster has boiled Jacksonianism down to its core base of supporters. Often when I hear people attribute right-wing views to the American public (except maybe on immigration), I always remind them that it's really a 25-30% minority that holds those views. The majority shares a lot of good progressive instincts, so there is a receptiveness and an opportunity for us. So what are we going to do with it?

Matt's book (have you bought it yet?) deals mainly with major, overarching, consequential, strategic, fundamental questions. This has drawn some skeptical reaction, but I think Matt has a strong case for why it's crucial to talk about things on this level.

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I hate to turn our discussion of Matt's book into a forum for Michael Gerson-bashing (okay, no I don't), but as usual, Gerson is being too cute by half.

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Almost as if he's been reading our exchange, former Bush speechwriter Michael Gerson weights in with a column on how to define the international architecture of the 21st century. It's a great example, I think, of the shoddy logic behind unilateralism. Gerson recognizes that a McCain-style "concert of democracies" scheme is unrealistic, complains that the U.N. Security Council doesn't magically solve problems when member states' will is lacking and (worse!) is sensitive to the interests of countries that aren't even America, and thus concludes that "a coalition of the willing, led by America" will be the only "realistic option . . . when the next genocide commences or the next proliferation threat arrives."

What's missing here is simply the fact that a world order with no rules, in which the United States arbitrarily chooses when, where, and why to intervene while trying to slap together a "coalition of the willing" to join us isn't a realistic option at all. We've just tried it, after all, and what's it gotten us?

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After each primary, the press and pundits go into a frenzy of over-analysis, pronouncing death for the candidate who lost the last primary. To be expected, I guess, in a 24/7 media system where writers have to generate new questions and columns every day. Now that Obama has been chewed over (following a primary in which his opponent netted only about a dozen delegates), it is time for the next round of tough questions -- which should go to Hillary Clinton's overtime campaign::

-- Senator Clinton, a new Harvard Institute of Politics poll shows that -- by a huge 70% to 30% margin -- young Democrats favor Senator Obama for the party's nomination. You consistently lose this group, which Obama has energized and drawn to the polls. Why should party leaders and superdelegates give up the party's future to throw the nomination to you?

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Dana Milbank offers us a good take down on Douglas Feith, one of the two or three principal architects of the Iraq war.

Feith, typical of the ideologues and seekers after profit, feels no guilt whatsoever about the role he played manipulating intelligence to help lie us into the war. But he will give proceeds from his self-justifying memoir to help the troops his actions helped maim or kill. (Big deal. Feith comes from a very wealthy family).

People like me who, in addition to hating this war, are involved in helping Israel and the Palestinians achieve peace, have extra problems with Feith. Long before he decided that a US attack on Iraq would help Israel secure the West Bank, Feith had been a leading Likud activist in the United States. He is no more a Republican than Ariel Sharon was. Feith is all about "securing the realm" (his term for defending the Israeli occupation).

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"There have been a variety of national security questions," Matt writes, "from the initial decision to invade Iraq to Cuba, to Obama's occasional willingness to say something brave on the Israeli-Arab conflict, to approaches to non-proliferation policy, to the Kyl-Lieberman amendment, to different ideas about engagement with rogue states -- that have arisen in the campaign and suggest that Clinton and Obama have substantially different approaches."

When pressed, though, Obama has often tried to elide those differences or speak in noncontroversial generalities. Nowhere is this more true than on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, where his strategy has been to ape Clinton at every turn. That's understandable -- nobody ever wins elections by being more sympathetic to the Palestinians than his or her opponent -- but it kind of makes you wonder how brave he would really be if he won the presidency.

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Tomorrow, the Coalition for a Democratic Workplace will begin its television ad campaign against the Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA). (You can view the ad on their website.) This legislation would require employers to recognize a union after a majority of the workers have signed a card stating their desire to be represented by the union. The alternative, which employer groups like the CDW support, is to continue allowing employers to demand a secret-ballot "election" even after such union support has been demonstrated. Despite what the name of the CDW suggests, employers do not support the right to demand an election because they are deeply committed to democracy and unions are not. Employers want this right because it allows them to have more time to threaten, intimidate and even fire pro-union employees and then re-ask employees if they want the union.

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As the President prepared this morning to meet with Fatah leader Abu Mazen, The Washington Post exposed a secret agreement between Bush and Ariel Sharon to protect the continued expansion of settlements in the West Bank. Reader San Fernando Curt takes a look at the implications.

Project Vote runs down the story behind the Bush administration's recent efforts to deny voter registration assistance to hospitalized vets.

Reader The Gipper bemoans America's gutter democracy.

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You may have noticed that on the sidebar of the site you can now snag two RSS feeds for TPMCafe. The first is for this main column and the second is for all of the reader posts that go up. You can also grab a nifty widget to put up a list of the latest main column posts in the sidebar of your site. Enjoy!

Washington Post reporter Laura Sessions Stepp's recent book Unhooked is a rich sociological vineyard. It revisits a theme flagged by Tom Wolfe in his 2004 novel I am Charlotte Simmons. Both are studies of new sexual norms that have emerged on college campuses in which millions of students have sexual relations with one another while avoiding social relationships. They do not "waste" time on dating, seeking to avoid both the "costs" of developing relationships and the pangs of loss when relationships sour and then break-up. Instead, students engage in sexual relations with partners who are, as the catch-phrase puts it, "friends with benefits"; only the focus is on the (sexual) benefits, not on friendship. The energy conserved by avoiding relationships, we are told, is then invested by students in their careers. Some feminists celebrate this development, arguing that all that has changed is that women now do what men long did: f-- and hurry along.

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This isn't strictly relevant to the issues we've been discussing, but very much relevant to Heads in the Sand as a whole is my disappointment that foreign policy issues really seem to have dropped off the radar as the presidential primary headed into Pennsylvania and show no immediate signs of making a comeback. This is really quite unfortunate. There have been some tantalizing indications that Obama intends to take the country's foreign policy in a substantially different (and better) direction than what currently passes for mainstream allows. Similarly, there have been a variety of national security questions -- from the initial decision to invade Iraq to Cuba, to Obama's occasional willingness to say something brave on the Israeli-Arab conflict, to approaches to non-proliferation policy, to the Kyl-Lieberman amendment, to different ideas about engagement with rogue states -- that have arisen in the campaign and suggest that Clinton and Obama have substantially different approaches. Last, the personnel backing the campaigns is different, with Clinton's team composed primarily (though by no means exclusively) by the kind of Democratic hawks I criticize in the book, and Obama's roster full of people from a more realist or more liberal internationalist perspective.

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Apropos of the previous post about the rise of China, John Ikenberry had a very good treatment of the issue from a liberal internationalist perspective in the January/February issue of Foreign Affairs that's well-worth reading if you're interested in this subject.

Demetri Sevastopulo of the Financial Times is one of the best intelligence/national security journalists in the business -- and by the tone of this article, "North Korea 'Helped Syria Build N-Plant'", which will appear as the top, front page lead in tomorrow's FT, he sounds as if he is convinced that the North Koreans were helping Syria to build a nuclear reactor.

Last year, Mark Mazzetti of the New York Times -- also one of the best young investigative journalists in town -- also ran some pieces that argued this point compellingly. Seymour Hersh of the New Yorker, nuclear proliferation expert Joseph Cirincione, and Arms Control Wonk publisher Jeffrey Lewis have been in the skeptics camp.

I too have been hanging out with the skeptics -- but when this bombing raid occurred on 6 September 2007, I was amazed at the pace of flow of what might have been highly classified information from high level Israeli intelligence officials and compartments within the US intelligence community to people like John Bolton.

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Clinton did not make a dent in Obama's lead by her win in Pennsylvania but what has happened is that the republican attack machine has begun the swiftboating in the wake of her negative attacks rightly decried by the New York Times.

It is bootless to speculate about the self-destructive tactics of the Clinton camp. What matters is going on the offense against the author of the typically bizarre, distracting, and hideous rightwing attacks: John McCain.

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A couple of days ago, we asked the question whether the Federal Communications Commission was up for confronting the reality of Comcast's blocking and throttling of peer-to-peer traffic and, if so, what the Commission would do about it.

Just as Jack Nicholson's character, Col. Nathan Jessep, was arrested at the end of the movie, "A Few Good Men" after telling Tom Cruise's character Lt. Daniel Kaffee the truth, it looks as if the Commission is preparing to take some action against Comcast.

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Blake's point about China is extremely well-taken. I don't think you can write a book about the present day politics of foreign policy without a heavy focus on Iraq, but it seems overwhelmingly likely that when people from 2108 look back on early 21st century U.S. foreign policy they'll be primarily interested in whether or not we dealt with the rise of China or India in a reasonable way. What's more, as Blake says this is one issue at least on which we can be glad that the Bush administration has generally eschewed the counsel of the neocons (recall that back before 9/11, the dynamic duo of Kristol & Kagan took to the pages of the Weekly Standard to pronounce the pragmatic diplomatic resolution of the EP-3 spy plane incident a "national humiliation").

This, I might add, is one of the more troubling things about John McCain. He's spent most of the past ten years being the main political patron of the circle of intellectuals most eager to see the 21st century dominated by Sino-American strategic conflict. McCain himself has tended to be more responsible than some of his friends, but as I argued earlier things like McCain's effort to create an "alliance of democracies" and his position on missile defense could seriously worsen our relationship with China. At the same time, while I don't think any Democrats want to see a new Cold War with China, the combined political temptations of trade bluster and human rights bluster do pose some risks in that direction and certainly militate against any kind of creative efforts to lock in a cooperative relationship.

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Ed Kilgore's fascinating and widely read post here at TPM examines Barack Obama's prospects after the Pennsylvania primary by comparing Obama in some ways to George McGovern and proposing, with commenters, a number of strategic alternatives.

The discussion is refreshing but also disconcerting, because, not once in the post or in the 15 astute comments I'd read by the time I wrote this is there any mention that Obama is black. (One commenter did note that Obama took 90% of the black Pennsylvania primary vote, but that's it.)

It's refreshing because Obama's self-understanding and his campaign give race its due while pointing beyond it. But it's also pretty strange to see no mention of race in a discussion of Obama's prospects just after Pennsylvania reminded us of racism's depth and obstinacy among working-class whites in industrial states -- an obstinacy I illustrated here shortly before the primary.

Nixon carried the industrial states against McGovern in 1972, except Massachusetts, not only because he was the incumbent but because too much was being made of race then, in the streets and in McGovernites' color-coding of the Democratic convention. Subtle appeals to racist backlash worked. And McGovern wasn't even black.

The Clintons have made a lot of race this year, too, reminding everyone that Obama is black -- from Bill's bringing up Jesse Jackson's past South Carolina victory when Obama won there, to Sean Wilentz's falsely accusing Obamaites of playing the race card, to Hillary's jumping into the Rev. Wright loop a week late, and so on.

But there's a way that Obama could turn what the Clintons and some Republicans consider a winning issue into a cornerstone of his own strong victory.

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At the risk of developing a reputation for using The Coffee House as a means for commenting on intramural discussions at The New Republic, I do think there's a lot of value in today's exchange between John Judis and Jon Chait on the former's use of George McGovern's campaign as an appropriate metaphor for fears about Barack Obama's electoral strengths and weaknesses, if only because it nicely crystallizes a lot of issues that have been floating around for many months.

I agree with Chait's two main objections to Judis' use of the McGovern analogy: (1) the "McGovern coalition" of younger voters, minorities, and upscale professionals is arguably a whole lot bigger than it was in 1972; and (2) Obama's voter base in primaries isn't necessarily going to be his voter base in a general election campaign. But I'd add a few other objections of my own.

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I agree with Dana Chasin that the time in act to stop the decline in the housing market is upon us, but I disagree with his weather report on the New York Times editorial. The Times has the central point right: As a practical matter, the proposed housing bill and the bankruptcy bill are alternative--not complementary--approaches. If the housing industry believes it can get millions of bad mortgages off its books by selling them to the FHA (and making taxpayers guarantors), then the industry will continue to fight to the death a bankruptcy bill that will force the industry--not the taxpayer--to eat substantial losses on the worst loans. In other words, they will take the best deal on the table and block any other deal.

So far, the industry has been getting exactly what it wants: useless voluntary non-plans. Next up is a Congressional plan to put the taxpayer in the line of fire. The one plan the industry has lobbied ferociously against has been a bankruptcy bill that would cost taxpayers nothing, would leave hundreds of thousands in their homes with refinanced mortgages, and would cause the mortgage investors to bear the full costs of their underwater mortgages.

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Last week and again this week, the New York Times editorialized disingenuously about the legislative options under consideration as Congress comes to grips with the nation's housing and foreclosure crisis. Last week's "Foreclosure Politics" opened with some important points about the expensive, irrelevant, and counterproductive tax breaks riddling the Senate's inaptly named "Foreclosure Prevention Act." But from there, the editorial swerves off course and confuses readers about the House bill aimed at preventing foreclosures and minimizing economic pain.

The editorial says that, under the plan by House Financial Services chair Barney Frank (D-MA) to provide $300 billion in refinanced mortgage guarantees...

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First of all, many thanks to TPMCafe and to all the contributors here for hosting an interesting and important discussion. And thanks, of course, to the incomparable Matt Yglesias for penning a timely and much-needed book. It's refreshing to hear someone admit that it's not "bold new ideas" that are needed, just a reinvigoration of old ideas that have worked remarkably well over six decades.

I agree with much of Matt's analysis about Iraq. The war has been an unparalleled disaster and a forseeable waste of precious U.S. blood and treasure, all for very little gain. Elsewhere in the region, foolish policies have sent U.S. prestige plummeting and made al Qaeda's recruiting quotas a heck of a lot easier to fill.

As bad as it has been, though, it's comforting that the Bush administration hasn't abandoned liberal internationalism across the board.

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It's not much but it's something. Georgetown University has decided not to renew Doug Feith's contract.

Word from campus is that both students and faculty had pretty much had it with the arch war criminal walking around campus although I also heard that he is such a goofy, pathetic guy that some students felt sorry for him. One told me, "he's like the nerdiest loser I ever saw. He cannot have done the things he's accused of. He's too obtuse."

I told her to read Arendt's "The Banality of Evil."

In any case, the Jesuits have done themselves proud by, at long last, giving Feith his walking papers. I wonder where we'll turn up next. In a McCain administration or in the dock at the Hague?

After Pennsylvania, what's next? The issue now is whether we Democrats can get our act together for the real election -- or, instead, continue to be picked apart by letting our internal struggle over marginally different candidates interact with -- and get magnified and used by -- the conservative attack machine and the media controversy machine. Even several more months of this toxic interaction may not keep us from winning the presidency, but it would reduce our margins for the next Congress, a very serious matter.

Looking back the morning after, this entire PA struggle over the past six weeks was a no-win situation. With all due respect to the idea that we are building networks to mobilize people in the falll, what all this did was merely get Clinton where she was almost bound to arrive in this one contest all along. Despite all the hysteria in the media and among analysts, this nomination contest is an intra-party exercise in marginal differentiation, and there is no surprise that many older voters and women voters chose Clinton -- or that Clinton obviously cannot "close the deal," in fact is doing worse and worse, among African Americans (who will ask her about that?) The sorting out of voters in a Democratic primary does not mean that most won't go with the party's Presidential and Vice Presidential nominees in November. Most older voters and women who support Clinton will go for Obama in the fall, and so will enough white working class men (a demographic that never goes entirely Demoocratic anyway), once the alternative is McCain and his temper and his pitiful pro-Bush and economics.

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Last week in The New Yorker, Rick Hertzberg wrote about Hillary's aggressive style and Barack's response.

She has been relatively unrestrained in her battle with Obama, but he has had one hand tied behind him in his battle with her. He cannot mention many of her biggest general-election vulnerabilities, most of which involve her husband's Administration, the awkward role that he might play in her own, and the potential conflicts of interest posed by the funding of his charitable and commercial activities. Bill Clinton remains popular among Democrats, if not as popular as he used to be. Anyway, all-out attack would undermine the unifying theme of Obama's campaign.

Recognizing that Obama cannot take on the legacy of the first Clinton Administration head on, I've written the speech Obama can't give.

* * * *

I want to speak tonight to the citizens of Indiana and North Carolina. You have it within your power to finally decide the nominee of the Democratic Party. If on May 6th, you decide to entrust the democratic nomination for the Presidency to me, then it will be mathematically impossible for my opponent to win a majority of the delegates. For the party insiders, the establishment built by the Clintons in the 90's, to overturn the will of the majority, would be a mockery of our party's heritage.

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I hope it's not breaking the rules to respond to something Kevin Drum wrote on his blog . . . anyways, he says I was conceding too much in my last post. I think that's true in one respect. It seems to me (and I say so in the book) that one can realistically imagine the emergence/evolution of a doctrine that would legitimate great power military intervention on the say-so of the relevant regional organization. So maybe the OAS for the Western Hemisphere (or separate groups for South America and the Caribbean region), the AU for Africa, some new East Asian outfit for that area, etc. If you could develop some kind of adequate level of consensus around an idea like that, it seems potentially promising. What I don't like are pure forum-shopping proposals -- I don't think it makes sense to say that NATO (an organization of European states plus the U.S., Canada, and Iceland) can in any meaningful sense "authorize" an intervention in Sudan. NATO might play a larger global role logistically (as in Afghanistan) but it's hard to see what kind of authority it could plausibly claim outside of Europe.

Another thing I wanted to say in response to Kevin is that derisive talk of "outsourcing our military policy entirely to the Security Council" is one of the things I'd like to see less of from liberals.

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...will be really hard. I agree with Matt that reforming the UN Security Council would be "desirable." Whether it's achievable, I'm not so sure. This one goes in my if-I-could-wave-a-magic-wand category. If we could accomplish it by magic, I'd be strongly in favor. With all the things we have to do to straighten out our foreign policy, though, I don't think Security Council reform makes the short list.

Changing the Council's composition and taking the veto away from its permanent members is akin to amending the Constitution; it opens a very big can of worms. A lot of today's global problems can be resolved through win-win, positive-sum approaches. Any proposal for the composition of the Security Council will have winners and losers. Suzanne Nossel's first-hand account of Amb. Richard Holbrooke's 1999-2000 push for reapportionment of UN dues is a reminder of how much effort it takes. It's not that reform is impossible, but it certainly presents an opportunity cost problem for other potential priorities. So, are there other ways to skin this cat?

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While we're dealing with house business and waiting for the returns tonight, let me update you on the latest things that should now be working on the site and what's up next. I know things are taking longer than we'd thought, so thanks for your patience. Believe me, we can't wait for it to all be working.

Fixes after the break.

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First off, I want to link to reader Reece's critical response of Matt Yglesias's argument for a revamped liberal internationalism. In my opinion, Reece's critique gets right to the core of the issue.

The Zaftig Redhead gives us the history of the Lily Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, up for a big cloture vote in the Senate tomorrow. Further evidence of the massive effort currently being undertaken by a radically conservative supreme court to roll back civil rights era gains.

Reader Theo exposes the fundamentally deceptive nature of the application process for Federal Student Aid.

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We've had discussions here at TPMCafe of what we should or shouldn't consider acceptable behavior in commenting. We're about to post an official set of guidelines.

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For six weeks, as Democrats' hope of unity rode on Barack Obama's hope that Pennsylvanians would make his national lead more than a wish, press critics ignored some breathtakingly cynical Republican news-media efforts to keep Dems bitterly divided.

Few pundits wondered, for example, why 160,000 Pennsylvania Republicans switched registrations -- most in order to vote for Clinton, if demographics are any guide. That strategy -- promoted by right-wing Clinton scourge and sudden "supporter" Richard Mellon-Scaife and his Pittsburgh Post-Tribune -- is to keep the Dems divided and just maybe to give them the nominee whom Scaife has more reason than most to believe Republicans can demolish this fall.

Few commentators questioned why Clinton didn't reject Mellon-Scaife's endorsement, as she'd challenged Obama to reject Louis Farrakhan's. Few asked why she instead actually courted the Machiavellian funder of a "vast, right-wing conspiracy" that had implicated her in Vincent Foster's murder and more.

Clinton's desperation was one thing, but her abdication of all dignity was another. Yet journalists who'd scrutinized Obama's handling of Farrakhan indulged her collapse into Mellon-Scaife's arms. No prissy New York Times op eds parsed whether she, like Obama, ought to have "denounced" or "renounced" or "rejected" the come-on.

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J-Lo, who I like to keep on hand to make me look mainstream, has gone and written a second post before I got around to responding to his first, but I'm gonna take them in order and write about Kosovo. If legitimacy and the U.N. is so great, then what about Kosovo? The question, of course, can be read both ways -- as a challenge form the hawks and from the non-interventionists.

It's a tough question for the liberal internationalist because generally speaking I would like to have my cake and eat it too here. Kosovo mostly accomplished good things, but the process -- moving in without Security Council authorization -- isn't something I can strictly speaking approve of. And yet, I think some important things were accomplished there. How can the contradiction be resolved? Some thoughts:

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Since the first log I threw onto this fire failed to catch, let me try pouring on some gasoline.

One of my biggest quibbles is, oddly enough, with Matt's take on Gulf War 1. Matt's version of liberal internationalism holds that that war "established a new, long-dreamed-of norm--the principle that aggressive war, long notionally banned by various treaties, would actually be repulsed by concerted international action." He also argues that "the Democrats' political problem with the Gulf War wasn't that they'd opposed it, but that they wrongly opposed it." I'm not sure either of those points is right.

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Defense Secretary Bob Gates is frustrated. He sees trouble in the military everywhere he turns and yet he is relatively powerless to overcome the inertia. Problem 1--the Generals want to fight the last war--the one against the Soviet Union.

In his speeches here and at Maxwell Air Force Base in Alabama, Mr. Gates made clear his belief that the military must focus on unconventional, irregular and terrorist threats -- a view that challenges procurement plans of the Air Force and Army that continue to devote vast resources to expensive weapons designed for traditional adversaries.

"Asymmetrical conflict will be dominant for decades," he said. "Training and procurement has to focus on that reality."

But the Air Force is filled with fighter jocks who don't want to be piloting drones over Afghanistan from an easy chair outside of Las Vegas, so they just ignore Gates.

"I've been wrestling for months to get more intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance assets into the theater," he said. "Because people were stuck in old ways of doing business, it's been like pulling teeth."

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Our long national nightmare is almost over: today, after seven hard weeks of bowlin' and shootin' and drinkin', the people of Pennsylvania will finally get to vote in our primary. It's been a critical time in this electoral cycle, a time during which American news media were able to dig hard and deep into the issues that underlie the moral and constitutional crisis to which the Bush Administration has brought us: did Barack Obama meet August Spies at a fundraiser in 1886 before founding the Muslim Brotherhood in 1928? And what about Cindy McCain - can she really be that perfect?

So I thought I'd write a little something about the candidates' policy positions on disability, because apparently (a) no one knows that the candidates have policy positions on disability and (b) policy positions on disability are not as important as flag pins. Granted, disability policy never swings an election. And why should it? Unless you yourself have a disability, or unless you know someone with a disability, or unless you're concerned about things like employment or health care, or unless you might get sick or injured someday, or unless you're planning on aging, disability policy is irrelevant to you.

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Dedeist speaks up for unilateral preventive war, saying "I also think military action without U.N. approval is generally a bad idea, and should be used only as a last resort. But to rule it out entirely is insane. I would certainly support it if it was the only way to keep Iran from getting Nukes, Russia and China wouldn't go along, and it seemed militarily feasible at a 'reasonable' cost." This is well-put because it's sounds like common sense and captures, I think, why John Edwards didn't succeed in putting much pressure on his rivals to respond to his (correct, in my view) decision to specifically disavow the preventive war doctrine.

The beginning of wisdom here is to recognize that the usefulness of preventive counterproliferation strikes is largely illusory. Joe Cirincione has importantly observed that even Israel's famed raid on Iraq's Osirak reactor actually did more to convince Saddam Hussein to speed nuclear weapons research than to impede his pre-Gulf War quest for nuclear weapons. If you want verifiable nuclear disarmament (something that's been achieved in a number of countries that once had robust research programs or even actual weapons in the case of some post-Soviet countries) you need either a diplomatic agreement, or else you need "regime change" and as we're learning in Iraq, regime change isn't a very practical option.

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With all due respect to Dan K, the debate about first principles is highly relevant to the content of policy, even if it leaves open key questions about hard cases. First of all, the policy of the last seven years has been driven by a set of fundamental assumptions. Second, the counterargument to those philosophical premises hasn't really been deployed, which really is the point of Matt's book. And then there's the fact that we seem to have so much disagreement just within the first day of discussion here in the Book Club.

Let's see if we think the following questions are abstract. Do international norms have a valid claim over the behavior of governments? Do all norms have the same kind of claim? If not, what differentiates them? What role do institutions and decision making procedures have in relation to international norms? Are such multilateral bodies and mechanisms able to induce or enforce compliance with norms, or is the power of the world community's powerful nations critical for enforcement? Is the United States capable of acting on behalf of higher principles and the greater good, or is it bound to be self-serving and generally make a mess of things?

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The Wall Street Journal reports today on a lawsuit brought by the San Francisco city attorney against the National Arbitration Forum, a major provider of arbitrators in consumer vs. company disputes. (Here's the article; subscription required.) The city claims that NAF is biased in favor of the companies that hire NAF's arbitrators. NAF claims that it is not, and that the companies' higher success rates are the result of the companies' greater experience with and knowledge of arbitration. There are court decisions on both sides. My intuition is that San Francisco is right. But there does not appear to be an easy way out of this.

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I thought I might reply to some of the comments left on my opening post before engaging with any of my esteemed co-bloggers. First off, Reece observes that "lots of liberals--presumably liberal internationalists--supported most of Bush's policies. Policies that created specific disasters. If liberal internationalism isn't going to keep that from happening; if it will sign on to bad projects motivated by other theories, then there isn't much use for it."

This highlights a bit of a dilemma I had when writing the book and that I try to address a bit in the text. On page 185, for example, I observe that "A January 2007 New Yorker article by Jeffrey Goldberg, for example, portrayed Joe Lieberman, and to some extent his fellow hawk Evan Bayh, as representing a faction of the the Democratic Party interested in 'enlightened internationalism.' Presidential contenders such as Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, and John Edwards were then rated as internationalists based more or less exclusively on their willingness to prolong the war in Iraq indefinitely and go to war with Sudan and/or Iran." Suffice it to say that this isn't what I mean when I talk about internationalism.

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First off, we needed this book, and Matt has done us a service in writing it so well. So thanks, Matt, for dealing with the root questions -- what does it really mean to be the superpower, what wrong ideas about superpowerdom have led us astray, and why are they so dangerous?

Yes, the problem with circling the wagons of fellow democratic nations is that it's trying to order up legitimacy just the way we want it. Setting aside the question of how many democracies will go along, this is a fundamental misreading of how legitimacy works. Now that the US has a deficit in our moral authority account, we don't get to dictate the terms on which we will bring it back into the black. By definition, legitimacy is not self-conferring.

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First let me thank the hosts here at TPM Café and Matt for inviting me to participate. As an unreconstructed realist, libertarian, and lifelong pessimist, I feel a bit like the proverbial cat among the pigeons, but I'll try my best to add some value to the discussion.

Let me start by praising Matt for having written a thoughtful book about foreign policy that is also a pleasure to read. As an avid reader of Matt's blog, I had wondered if the verve that characterizes his blogging could translate into book form, and I'm pleased to report that it has. Buy a copy, already!

Also, in analyzing the post-9/11 foreign policy debate, Matt gets his diagnosis of What Went Wrong basically correct, and this is an accomplishment to be praised. He's not interested in taking prisoners from either party or any ideology, and while this may keep him outside the innermost sanctums of the Foreign Policy Community, having truth in your possession is a solace all its own.

But enough with the love fest, you're here for the disagreement. So let's get to it.

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The ghost of Col. Nathan Jessep hovered over the proceedings at Stanford University late last week (April 17) as the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) wound up its second hearing on the bad behavior of network owners.

Jessep was most famously played by Jack Nicholson in the movie, A Few Good Men. At the movie's penultimate moment, the Marine colonel barks out from the witness chair in a courtroom to Lt. Daniel Kaffee (Tom Cruise), who says he wants the truth - "You can't handle the truth."

The question now for the FCC is the same - can the Commission handle the truth? Tomorrow (April 22), the Senate Commerce Committee takes up the same topic, although without the technical expertise present at the FCC hearing. We'll see how their response measures up.

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I had a three and a half hour long dinner with a Saudi notable in Jeddah the week before last. I asked him whether the liberalization I felt I was witnessing in various academic, NGO, and government arenas in Riyadh was a function of the King Abdullah's own unique vision for the country or whether the King, or the "Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques" as he is formally referred to, was triangulating between the contending forces of conservatives and progressives in his country, with the trend moving in the progressive direction.

My host said that it was a bit of both -- and more. He said, one needs to listen to the King's own words, to hear him in Arabic and to answer the question not through the filter of handlers and public relations personnel but to the off the cuff remarks the King often made but which Westerners rarely if ever listened to. But my host didn't answer my question about the King's relationship to liberalization.

By numerous accounts, the King is a very blunt person.

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Greetings TPM Café! It’s good to be back. I'’m not sure how many readers out there remember, but I was a regular member of the TPMCafe gang for about a year back in its early days. I left to focus on some other commitments, including most notably a book that eventually became Heads in the Sand: How the Republicans Screw Up Foreign Policy and Foreign Policy Screws Up the Democrats (I liked the working title Untitled Matthew Yglesias Foreign Policy Project better myself, but authors don’t have total control over these things), the book we’'re here now to discuss.

Much of the book covers terrain that should be reasonably familiar to the TPM community -- the Iraq War has been a fiasco, the Bush administration’s policies are disastrous, etc. -- but much of it concerns questions that I think are very much alive among the broad left-of-center community in the United States. These are questions about what alternative strategies progressives have to put forward. My preferred answer is liberal internationalism, a very American approach to foreign affairs that the country has mostly followed in the years following World War II and that has been responsible for most of the successes of the post-war years. The core of this approach is the idea that interactions between nations can and ought to be primarily cooperative in nature. But just as it would be difficult for individuals to cooperate effectively in their private lives in the absence of any kind of effective legal system, it is difficult for countries to cooperate -- or, indeed, for citizens of different countries to cooperate across national boundaries -- when international relations is a series of anarchical conflicts between heavily armed powers.

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George F. Will has been spouting his conservative ideology as a nationally syndicated columnist for almost three decades. He is consistently on the right and can almost always be counted on to support Republican political candidates. But this week Will took a giant leap to the left, suggesting that the Fed should not act as an open-ended piggy bank for the incredibly rich people who run the country's investment banks.

Since the Bears Stearn bailout last month, the Fed has been allowing the investment banks to borrow money at below market interest rates. Even more importantly, the Fed told the banks' customers that it would honor all their commitments, effectively allowing the banks to sell insurance that is being provided by the taxpayers.

These are very generous gifts to the executives of these banks, who apparently can't get by in the free market without the help of the government. The Fed is also handing taxpayer dollars to the shareholders in these banks who would lose lots of money on their investments if the Fed forced the banks to accept market outcomes.

While most Democrats seem to have no objection to these huge welfare grants to the incredibly rich, Georg Will does.

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The New York Times yesterday examined the challenges middle- and upper-middle-class families now face as they try to pay for college with less home equity. Only home-owners, of course, can benefit from home-equity loans, so what makes this story sad is how even the ostensibly well-off are struggling to meet the demands of "the great risk shift" in American society. A number of families, for example, are dipping into their retirement savings to finance their children's education. This story focuses on how expensive private schools are and cites empirical research that the prestige of an undergraduate degree does not impact a student's future earnings. State universities look like bargains in this story, offering the same education for way less money. But we're increasingly privatizing the costs of "public" universities. State universities, receiving ever less state funding, are increasingly turning their students over to financial-services companies, who are, of course, happy to oblige.

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You gotta love The Corner, National Review's semi-blog (you can't post comments). They are worried about the John McCain age issue in the fall.

I hate to bring politics into the inspirational, spiritual visit of Benedict XVI, but could it help John McCain with the age issue? The pope was energetic, engaged and in serene command (in a peaceful way). Since he is 81 years old (ten years older than Mac), could the images of Benedict seen by Americans from Nationals Park in DC, St. Pat's and Yankee Stadium subliminally impact voters regarding Mac's age?

Even though almost all major Pennsylvania newspapers have endorsed Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton finally won an endorsement--from Richard Mellon Scaife's Pittsburgh Tribune Review. This is the man that spent millions trying to destroy her husband. Machievelli said, "Politics have no relation to morals" and Mrs. Clinton is proving out his words. That she so earnestly sought out this endorsement will be pondered by historians in the future. Scaife's views are clear--Hillary is moving towards his view of the world.

Many of her views on domestic issues are too liberal for us, but on others she seems to have moderated. She told the Trib she opposes raising the cap on Social Security taxes, and she is less eager to raise income taxes than Obama.

For progressives with a memory, this should be the kiss of death.