ANOTHER TAKE. Ezra, in his post below, inadvertently (or perhaps advertently) points to exactly why Salinas and Santa Cruz make the top ten list of least affordable housing markets: large numbers of retirees and day laborers. These are segments of the population that generally live off of fixed incomes or low wages, and considering that the study’s results were based on comparing local income with house prices, it’s understandable why those two communities made the list. Retirees tend to live in warm, safe communities with lively cultural scenes, which all adds up to high property prices. As for day laborers, they have to live within close proximity of their work site, which is typically either on a farm (that, per acreage is relatively cheap, but all together is expensive) or at the home of a high-income family. The rest of the top ten list of least affordable housing markets for 2005, as well as those for five and ten years ago, is what you’d imagine a list of the communities with highest concentration of retirees of day laborers would look like: Miami-Fort Lauderdale, West Palm Beach-Boca Raton, Los Angeles, Fresno, Merced, and so on. Therefore, this isn’t so much a story about high density versus low density or East and West coast versus the rest of the U.S. It’s about a lack of available housing for those who aren’t able to increase their earning power.

--Alec Oveis

RETIREMENT WATCH.It’s that time of year again: the Christmas recess, and thus the spate of retirement announcements that will surely follow. Legislators return to their districts, gather their families and advisors, and decide that, for whatever reason, it’s not worth another run. So far Financial Services Chair Mike Oxley (R-OH), International Relations Committee Henry Hyde (R-OH) and Rep. Jim Kolbe (R-AZ) have already said they won’t be returning to Congress next January. Some think that Rep. Joel Hefley (R-CO), who could face a retired lieutenant colonel in next year’s general, will call it quits. Meanwhile, the wife of Rep. Bill Young of Florida has expressed interest in filling her husband’s seat, leading some to speculate whether he will soon take up a more lucrative career as a lobbyist.

In the Senate, Ted Stevens said goodbye after ANWR got stripped from the Defense spending bill and Hotline on Call reports that he “didn't know if he would be coming back,” though it seems likely he will finish out his term. (Gov. Murkowski of Alaska also looks to be on his way out.) Trent Lott, in a desperate attempt to boost his bid for Senate majority leader against Majority Whip Mitch McConnell, has hinted at a retirement at the end of this term. And rumors about Olympia Snowe’s future continue to circulate.

Other than Sens. Mark Dayton and Paul Sarbanes, I can’t think of another Democratic senator or even representative that is considering not returning in 2006. Likely retirees on the Democratic side -- Sens. Akaka (HI), Bingaman (NM), and Reid (WV) -- have all committed themselves to another run, thanks largely to the coaxing of Chuck Schumer. The high number of retirements, or potential retirements, on the Republican side along with the high retention on the Democratic side would suggest something that is already evident in a lot of the polling data -- that the Democratic outlook for 2006 is quite strong. It wouldn’t be all that surprising if, in January, a Republican or two from a competitive district suddenly feels overwhelmed by familial obligations and decides that 2006 will be it for them.

--Alec Oveis

SPRAWL IS CHEAP; DENSITY IS EXPENSIVE. As Matt and Ezra have been noticing, there's a lot of great housing out there in the flyover that we coastal folk tend to forget about. More locally, I've been noticing that you can buy a four- to six-bedroom house one to one and a half hours outside of Washington, D.C., for about the same price as a D.C. studio apartment. According to the Times, the D.C.-Arlington-Alexandria metro area requires buyers to pony up 30 percent of their pre-tax monthly income to buy a home, while the highest percent required by any other Virginia county is just 23.8 percent. That's the real force driving suburban sprawl: cheap land and cheaper houses.

Prices are high in certain areas because interesting cities with good job markets attract people who want to live in them. (Sun clearly helps, too.) In contrast to the popularity of Southern California and Washington, the Times' list of least expensive metro areas looks like a compendium of every place you never wanted to live: Cleveland, Buffalo, Pittsburgh, St. Louis.

But even in some of these cities, the low prices are starting to attract residents. I hear Pittsburg is really coming along, as is St. Louis, where enormous, gorgeous Victorian homes can be had for a pittance, allowing members of the mere middle class to live in homes equivalent to what millionaires buy on the coasts.

Lest these posts be mistaken for idle holiday-blog chatter, the fact that different parts of the country face completely different economic realities has serious political implications. What impact do stagnant wages have on people's self-assessments of economic well-being if they can also more easily purchase a home and achieve that central part of the American dream? What do average incomes even mean if the costs of living are so different in different parts of the nation? A couple earning $70,000 in St. Louis, for example, can live in a very lovely three-bedroom house in a nice neighborhood, while a single person earning the same amount in New York City can afford only a bedroom in a shared apartment in Chelsea.

I think the single most important thing to take into consideration when assessing the economy is what kind of lifestyle the incomes in question can buy in their region. Phrases like "working class" are kind of meaningless when a couple with three years of college between them who work in say, the I.T. department of a business services firm (him) and as a part-time human resources manager at a bank (her), are able to live a lifestyle that far exceeds that of a couple with a PhD (her) and a B.A. (him) in Manhattan because they happen to live in part of the country with low housing costs.

--Garance Franke-Ruta

PAY MORE, GET LESS. A fair number of libertarian and conservative economists tend to claim that the high costs of care in America are a simple result of how much we pay for services. They, predictably, ascribe the impressive sums to the awesome technologies and complicated operations we deploy, a quality of care apparently inconceivable in any other country. But it's more structural than that. In their (damn good) paper on the variance between U.S. health spending and costs in other countries, Uwe Reinhardt, Peter Hussey, and Gerard Anderson explain:

Distribution of market power and prices. In a previous paper we argued that Americans pay much higher prices for the same health services than citizens in other countries pay. There are a number of reasons why this might be so.

First, the distribution of compensation in the United States is wider than in most of the other industrialized countries. The highly trained and highly talented health professionals employed in health care must be recruited from the same talent pool used by other industries offering high compensation, such as law and finance. Because health care is a labor-intensive industry, labor is one factor driving up the cost of producing health care in the United States.

Second, the highly fragmented organization of the financing of health care in the United States serves to allocate relatively greater market power to the supply side of the health system than to the demand side. As we have argued in previous papers, multiple purchasers of care allow U.S. prices to rise above the level attained in other industrialized countries that either endow the demand side of their health systems with strong, monopsonistic (single-buyer) market power (such as the Canadian provincial health plans) or allow multipayer systems to bargain collectively with the providers of health care, sometimes within government-set overall health care budgets (as, for example, in Germany).

So our system, due to the weird structural incentives and glorification of the supply-side, is inherently more expensive. But that doesn't prove we don't use more services and better technologies. For that, you turn to "It's The Prices, Stupid," written by the same team of researchers:

A study by the McKinsey Global Institute followed that more in-depth approach. The research team, which was advised by a number of prominent health economists, based its analysis on four tracer diseases: diabetes, cholelithiasis (gall stones), breast cancer, and lung cancer.31 Using PPP-adjusted U.S. dollars as the common yardstick, the McKinsey researchers found that in the study year of 1990 Americans spent about $1,000 (66 percent) more per capita on health care than Germans did. The researchers estimated that Americans paid 40 percent more per capita than Germans did but received 15 percent fewer real health care resources. A similar comparison revealed that the U.S. system used about 30 percent more inputs per capita than was used in the British system and spent about 75 percent more per capita on higher prices.

So, when tracking the utilization of resources for a variety of treatment-intensive diseases, we spend more and receive less than residents of other countries. It's not that we're offering more or better treatment, but that our "medical-industrial complex" charges exorbitantly for the same treatments available elsewhere.

--Ezra Klein

THE BREWING HILLARY BACKLASH. Matt rightly notes that rising antiwar sentiment among Dems -- and inevitable saturation coverage of Hillary’s war position -- will make her vulnerable to criticism from Russ Feingold and others in 2008. In addition, there’s a broader question to be asked than the rather narrow one about Iraq raised in this Times article. Specifically, just how long will the Democratic base tolerate not just her war position, but her generally cautious, noncomittal approach as senator -- which includes her careful hedging on Iraq, of course, but also her too-clever-by-half cultural positioning on meaningless matters like flag burning, and her resolutely low profile on big polarizing issues that really matter?

As I argued here, the general approach of rank-and-file liberal Dems to Hillary has been to grant her a great deal of ideological maneuvering room in the knowledge that her first political task as senator was to begin affecting her big transformation from harridan first lady to respectable, nonthreatening legislator. Thus, they’ve overlooked their discomfort with her failure to become a kind of liberal trumpet in the Senate a la Ted Kennedy. But liberals have gotten precious little in return for their tolerance, aside from the pleasure of seeing her defy her enemies and succeed, which isn’t much in the way of payback, and patience among libs is wearing mighty thin. Sure, polls show she’s overwhelmingly popular in New York, but that has a lot to do with the fact that she has, in fact, been successful in delivering materially for the state’s various constituencies. But voters in other primary states haven’t benefited this way, so it seems obvious that there will be less residual good will to draw on.

The Times notes that “the senator's advisers do not appear to be very troubled” by the rumbling over her Iraq vote. They shouldn’t be so smug, however. It isn't hard to imagine that come the 2008 primaries, Hillary may find herself vulnerable to a far broader case against her than just her Iraq stance: That the last thing the party needs is another pol at the top of the ticket who seems to exhibit the same hedging, caution and incrementalism that proved disastrous last time around. If that argument erodes the Dem base beneath Hillary's feet -- and if, as Matt suggests, other Dems like Mark Warner use the "electability" argument to sop up more centrist Democrats -- that could prove seriously problematic for Hillary.

-- Greg Sargent

THIS JUST IN: GOP CUTS TAXES FOR THE RICH. It's sort of the ultimate modern "dog bites man" story but it certainly isn't going away. The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities offers a rundown of two tax provisions concerning exemptions and itemized deductions -- set to take effect on Monday -- whose destructive (and, of course, entirely regressive) budget effects will only exponentially increase several years down the road due to obfiscutory gimmicks written into the original legislation:

The Joint Committee on Taxation estimates that, over the next five years, the two tax cuts that take effect on New Year’s day will cost about $27 billion— about two thirds of the approximately $40 billion that the budget-cut reconciliation bill saves. Once the tax cuts are fully in effect and if they are made permanent, as the Administration proposes, the costs will be much larger: almost $150 billion over ten years (even without considering the effects on interest payments on the federal debt).

The cost of these two tax cuts between 2005 and 2010 exceeds the savings from all of the reductions in low-income programs in the reconciliation bill over the same period. In other words, if Congress halted the implementation of these two tax cuts and eliminated all of the low-income program reductions, there would be a net reduction in the deficit.

More than half of the gains from the two tax cuts — 54 percent of them — will go to the 0.2 percent of households with annual incomes above $1 million, while 97 percent of the tax-cut benefits will go to the 4 percent of households with incomes above $200,000, according to the Urban Institute-Brookings Institution Tax Policy Center.

Paul Krugman wrote a great column last week detailing how "starve the beast" has proven to be just as fraudulent a justification for tax-cutting as supply-side economics. Krugman hypothesizes that Republicans have simply turned into "tax-cut zombies" who keep voting for cuts without even worrying about coherent reasons to justify them. It's actually not all that necessary to search for deep explanations here: Republicans are simply being incredibly and willfully irresponsible.

--Sam Rosenfeld

THE LIBERAL HAWKS' LAMENT. On a related note, I find the sort of self-pity of hawkish Democrats reflected in this post from Marshall Wittman a bit baffling:

The Moose would readily sign up for the Democratic Party of FDR, Truman, JFK, LBJ and Scoop. Alas, it doesn't exist and there is no sign that it will return anytime soon. And it is hard to believe that any of those great Democrats would recognize their party. Neither party represents their followers. Progressive hawks dwell in a political Diaspora.

That's absurd. Progressive Iraq hawks are hardly some beleaguered minority. They compose maybe ten percent of the population at most, but count among their number the Democrats' 2004 presidential nominee, their 2004 vice presidential nominee, the last Democrat to serve as president, the minority leader of the United States Senate, the minority whip in the House, the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, the leading candidate for the 2008 presidential nomination, the ranking members of the House Armed Services and International Relations Committees, a majority of Senate Democrats, the country's most prominent foreign affairs columnist, and all of the leading candidates for foreign policy jobs in the hypothetical Kerry administration.

Considering that their views have virtually no support in the country, that's an awful lot of power and influence inside the Democratic Party. There's been a very strange effort on the part of these people to re-write history to make themselves out to be some kind of beleaguered minority watching from the sidelines as a militantly dovish Democratic Party goes down in defeat after defeat. But Democrats were following their advice during the fiasco of 2002, and it was their people who went down to defeat in 2004. If Democratic doves have gained strength since then, it's because the war keeps going badly and the hawks' promises to lead the party into the electoral promised land keep turning out wrong.

--Matthew Yglesias

YOU CAN NEVER GO HOME AGAIN. Mainly, because you can't afford to. As an addendum to Matt's post on the counterintuitive affordability of housing, I urge folks to check out the New York Times' great graphics tracking the most and least affordable areas, the largest changes, and so forth.

As it turns out, of the top 10 least affordable housing markets (measured by necessary share of income), a full nine are in California. Number two, Santa Cruz, is where I went to college, a majestically beautiful outpost that contentedly chews up the income of retired boomers hoping to rediscover their hippy cores. But number one, Salinas? Salinas is heavily agricultural -- the setting, in fact, for John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath -- and 46 percent Hispanic, many of them day laborers. It's not where I'd expect the country's most inordinately expensive housing to lie. Weird. In any case, I keep telling friends in DC that, given the weather here (and elsewhere in the country), it's a wonder folks don't simply empty out into the California sun. Given this list, I think I've figured out the answer.

--Ezra Klein

THE DEAN REPENTS. In early September, David Broder penned a truly deranged column praising the president's swift and commanding early response to Hurricane Katrina. Today, in Broder's annual compendium of his own hits and misses over the past year, he dutifully berates himself for that little bout of Run Amok Broderism -- though he doesn't really bother to explain what he was thinking in the first place offering the president kudos "[w]ithout waiting for him to actually do anything." The 2005 column he is proudest of -- the one praising John Roberts' selection as Chief Justice -- is, meanwhile, no surprise at all.

--Sam Rosenfeld

THE BASE A NON-PROBLEM? Via Mike Crowley regarding an article about Hillary Clinton's continued strength among New York Democrats and the lack of enthusiasm, even from MoveOn, for an anti-war primary challenge. Mike comments:

So the key question is whether Hillary has the golden political touch that allowed Bill to mitigate his breaks with liberals. The Quinnipiac poll cited by the Times suggests she might. But New York voters may be a special case. I'd guess that when it comes to Hillary they feel a certain pride of ownership. It might not be so easy for her nationally if she decides to run for president.

I'd note a couple of things. One is that Bill Clinton sort of lucked out in the 1992 primary and wound up facing his strongest challenge from Paul Tsongas who was arguably to his right, rather than needing to fend off a viable orthodox liberal. The other is that I think it's tough to generalize from an incumbent senator to a wannabe president. In an actual primary with real opponents, Clinton's position on the war will presumably come in for a lot of criticism from Russ Feingold and others. That criticism will get a lot of media coverage and primary voters will be familiar with it. Back in 2004, when there was a lot less anti-war sentiment among Democrats, John Kerry wound up needing to lean very hard on the "electability" argument to put himself over the top. That'll be harder to pull off a second time around since it didn't work and it's easy to name other centrist Democrats -- Evan Bayh, Mark Warner, etc. -- who fit the "electable" bill in more obvious ways than she does.

Last but by no means least, Clinton has yet to feel the full wrath of American Prospect bloggers, which, when unleashed, will be utterly devastating.

--Matthew Yglesias

HOUSES FOR CHEAP. A fascinating New York Times story says that nationwide buying a house is cheaper than it was twenty years ago, relative to the growth in income. Apparently, that's true almost everywhere except "New York, Washington, Miami and along the coast in California." But of course the national media is overwhelmingly located in New York, Washington, or along the coast of California, so coverage of the issue tends to reflect the trends in those areas. Personally, I've spent more-or-less my whole life in New York or Washington so these alleged facts ring massively false to my ear, but the truth is the truth whether or not it seems true. I guess I should consider relocating to Denver or something.

--Matthew Yglesias

THE TRUTH ABOUT MEXICO Mexico's public relations hire is catching some flak from his own side, says this New York Times story:

Rob Allyn, the political consultant, meet Rob Allyn, the punching bag.

A longtime Republican strategist, Mr. Allyn has found himself in the cross hairs of conservative critics in the last week after signing a contract with Mexico's foreign ministry to lead a campaign to strengthen the country's image in the United States.

A CNN anchor asked Mr. Allyn whether Mexico was "dabbling in U.S. policy" by hiring him as a marketer. Bill O'Reilly of Fox News, describing Mexico as a "corrupt, chaotic country" with 40 percent unemployment (it is closer to 4 percent) told him in another interview that he had his work cut out for him.

And that work will start with people like O'Reilly, apparently.

Now that the GOP is suffering growing divisions on the question of immigration, conservative commentators are going to have to learn that handling this issue with their accustomed bomb-throwing delicacy carries a high risk of creating trouble for their favored political party.

For example, while it is true that the Mexican government suffers from historic and persistent corruption, there is only one possible reason to think that Mexico, a country with a less than four percent official unemployment rate, according to the CIA's World Factbook, had a 40 percent one -- and that reason is anti-Mexican bias. Either that, or O'Reilly has a really sloppy research assistant; the 40 percent Mexican poverty rate is listed right below the 3.2 percent unemployment rate in the CIA Factbook, which O'Reilly cited as his source.

The stereotype of the shiftless Mexican might seem archaic in today's political environment, where Americans are more likely to worry about American jobs being given to Mexican workers in Mexico, or Mexicans illegally immigrating to the U.S. in search of work, but O'Reilly's ignorant and ugly comment proves it's still there, informing the debate on immigration.

Economists estimate that roughly 25 percent of Mexicans (and that's 25 percent, not 40) are underemployed -- but that doesn't mean that they're not working. What that means is that roughly a quarter of Mexicans are working to survive but could, potentially, be doing more economically remunerative or higher-skilled work if it existed. For example, a subsistence farmer who ekes out an existence by tilling a small hillside milpa with his sons, while his wife tends a couple of chickens and weaves cloth with the daughters for sale at the local tourist market (a not uncommon scenario in the mountainous Chiapas region, for example, which is the part of Mexico I know best), are both employed and working as hard as they can at what they know how to do to survive. But an economist might call them underemployed, since the combined monetary intake of that entire hard-working household is likely to be minimal.

Indeed, many Mexicans work in a kind of 19th century labor environment that would appall most Americans and which also requires them to approach work life differently than in the U.S. For one thing, poorer Mexicans start working at much younger ages than Americans are allowed to, and are tasked with tremendous intra-family and community responsibilities at ages when U.S. kids aren't even allowed to stay home alone. Part of this is because, at least in the more rural parts of Mexico, people still live in peasant economies centered around household production of goods, like food and clothing, for sale. But part of it is also the absence of U.S.-style labor laws, or any real enforcement mechanisms for them -- the adoption of which is something I don't expect O'Reilly to get behind any time soon.

When O'Reilly spews lies and misinformation about liberals or Democrats, it's only annoying or (at this point) boring. But when he spews lies based on sloppy research and negative stereotypes about our closest neighbor, his approach suggests a much darker kind of animus. No wonder, then, that the government of Mexico felt compelled to hire a GOP insider to try to influence people like O'Reilly and his peers.

--Garance Franke-Ruta

STRANGE BEDFELLOWS, ETC.. In a meeting of the minds that doesn't happen often, I agree with both Thomas Sowell and Matt Stoller. Not only should congressmen have salaries of at least $1 million (along with a massive tightening of campaign finance and lobbying regulations), but Hill staffers should make enough money so that those without external financial support can afford to involve themselves in the legislative process. There's no reason working in our government shouldn't pay well -- it both sends the wrong message and harmfully restricts the pool of candidates for the positions. More to the point, the hungry staffer or the over-mortgaged pol are easier targets for graft and corruption. Even slightly lessening the potency of lobbyists would save much more than the increased salaries would cost.

On a related note, young writers for small, progressive publications should also make a ton of money, if only so the rest of the world would stop bothering them about law school. Rich, liberal funders take note.

--Ezra Klein

THE DARK TIMES COMETH... You thought the oil crisis was bad? Wait till society gets roiled by the coffee crunch (via Graham Walker):

A world coffee shortage is looming two years from now as yields from Brazilian trees dwindle and a global surplus in 2006-07 will fail to replenish stockpiles in producer countries, predicts commodity analysts F.O. Licht.

"In 2007-08, stocks could be at a critically low level," F.O. Licht managing director Helmut Ahlfeld said Thursday.

In related news, I hear Brazil and, for that matter, Columbia, Indonesia, Vietnam, and/or Mexico have weapons of mass destruction programs...

--Ezra Klein

EDUCATION AND REGIONALISM. Yesterday's Wall Street Journal editorial page contained what struck me as a fairly inoffensive self-assessment of contemporary conservatism by Jeffrey Hart that produced an awful lot of discontent over at the Corner. Much of the ire is directed at Hart's assertion that a total abortion ban isn't a realistic policy goal, though this seems pretty clearly true. Weirdest to me, though, was Ramesh Ponnuru taking issue with this observation:

The most recent change occurred in 1964, when its center of gravity shifted to the South and the Sunbelt, now the solid base of "Republicanism." The consequences of that profound shift are evident, especially with respect to prudence, education, intellect and high culture.

You can give that a highly pejorative reading that I imagine conservatives will want to dispute, but the basic point here seems very clear-cut to me. Can anyone seriously dispute that the vast majority of America's premiere institutions of education and high culture are located in the "blue" areas? That's not to say the South is some kind of total wasteland -- I visited the Fort Worth Modern Art Museum earlier this year and it's first-rate, albeit a bit small -- but on the whole this stuff is primarily in the Northeast and to a lesser extent on the Pacific coast. At the same time, these institutions used to be bastions of conservatism and now -- as conservatives are wont to complain -- go the other way politically.

There's a bit of a chicken-and-egg problem here, but this is clearly entangled with the rise of a kind of populist anti-intellectualism as an increasingly prominent strain of American conservatism and that, in turn, is a non-trivial break with the past, albeit a break that's been useful to conservatism's electoral success. Somewhat strangely, the only really substantive critique of modern conservatism in Hart's article -- the charge that it's taken up a form of misguided Wilsonianism in foreign policy -- has gone more-or-less undiscussed by the NR crew. John Derbyshire nitpicks a bit as to whether or not Woodrow Wilson would have wanted to break up Iraq, but the core complaint is clearly supposed to be with the general notion of armed democracy-promotion as a core foreign policy tool.

--Matthew Yglesias

THE UNIONS, THEY ARE A-CHANGING. Robert Fitch's New York Times op-ed on the history of unions and nationalized health care would've been a better read a few years back. He's right, of course, that any list of the forces that have arrayed against national health care would have to include the union movement, which historically chose to champion the employer-based system over a government-run structure. But it's 2005 (and well within the margin of error for 2006), and invoking Samuel Gompers to characterize Labor while ignoring Andy Stern makes about as much sense as defining the Republican Party through the prism of Teddy Roosevelt.

The union movement is changing. And it's not just the new guard. The older unions, UAW included, are rapidly realizing that the corporate welfare state they so lovingly constructed is readying to collapse, with them beneath it. Today, the transit workers grudgingly accepted a deal that cuts into health benefits -- they had no other choice. Corporations have established similar beachheads in the benefit packages at Ford, GM, Delphi, and countless others. Where Old Labor used to focus on preserving what they'd already won, the swift disintegration of those gains is forcing them to search out more durable delivery mechanisms for health care, pensions, and the like. Their hostile posture from decades back isn't sustainable, but unions aren't stubbornly clinging to it, something Fitch fails to mention. No reason to let facts obstruct a perfectly good point, I guess.

Moreover, the new breed of unions -- SEIU, UFCW and the other service and low-wage unions Fitch never mentions -- have long been enthusiastic supporters of national health care. UFCW's homepage is anchored by a photo of a grocery cashier saying:

“Bottom line: contract negotiations are all about health care now. Unless something happens for health care nationally, I don’t see it getting any better.”
--Laurie Piazza, Local 4289

The way forward is for the unions to throw their considerable resources behind statewide efforts to universalize coverage, much as AFCSME is doing in California and SEIU is doing in Massachusetts. The older unions should spearhead similar efforts, particularly in Michigan, where benefit insecurity is most acute. Nationally, the union movement simply lacks the strength to overcome the conservative entrenchment, but more locally, unions could be the prime movers in creating statewide templates for a secure welfare state. And so they should.

--Ezra Klein

GOOD NEWS FOR PEOPLE WHO LIKE BAD NEWS. Thanks to revelations that the government has been engaging in massive illegal surveillance, terrorism suspects are now trying to get the evidence against them thrown out in court (via Praktike). This is one big underappreciated problem with both the illegal surveillance program and the parallel system of illegal detentions and illegal treatment to which detainees have been treated. A counterterrorism policy divided against itself cannot long stand, and our efforts to fight terrorists can't remain half legal and half illegal on an enduring basis.

The reason is that the illegality of the unlawful operations winds up poisoning the operations of the normal legal process, as we're seeing today, rendering it increasingly ineffective and forcing more and more things to be pushed into the "off the books" illegal side of our policy. You can't, in the long-term, suspend due process and normal legal procedures "just a little." Once you reach a critical mass of outside-the-law activities, their scope will keep on expanding unless you reach a point where you're prepared to disavow them entirely. The longer this administration refuses to do so, the closer we'll come to the total breakdown of the federal criminal justice system. If the threat of terrorism were a temporary emergency likely to end in a year or two, this might not be the case, but that's obviously not the circumstances we face -- we're looking at a quasi-permanent situation here, so unless our means of coping with it can be brought into the ambit of the law, the corrosive effects will keep spreading for decades.

--Matthew Yglesias

THE HORROR, THE HORROR. In an extensive post about right-wing warbloggers and other war supporters, James Wolcott points to the desire of Anna Benson and others to subject antiwar critics to beheadings and other varieties of horrific punishment. He says:

[W]hat their decapitation odes reveal is that what they'd really like to do is permit torture closer to home. Domesticate it. Trivialize it. Completely destigmatize it as a tool of the state....It's a sign of impotence, this lurid fury of theirs. It bugs the hell out of them that those of us who opposed the war have turned out to be right.

Wolcott is asking an important question: Why does opposition to the war inspire such rage, savagery, and lust for violence among some pro-war folks? After all, they’ve got the war they wanted, right? So why the rage at those who dissent? Wolcott suggests that it infuriates them that antiwar people “turned out to be right,” but I’d argue that something more primal is at work. What really drives some pro-war types batty about war critics is that they don’t automatically countenance violence.

I’m no shrink, but I’ve always felt that the very idea that any sort of debate or discussion -- any sort of reasoned argument, really -- should precede the use of violence is deeply threatening to the militaristic right. They want war, because war holds out the tantalizing possibility of violent national triumph. George Orwell once wrote that Christianity is as weak as straw in the face of nationalism. A corollary might be that reason -- or even the notion that any sort of reasoned discourse should inform the fateful decision of whether to resort to violence -- often seems as weak as a twig in the face of violent, triumphalist nationalism.

Is this quantifiable? No, it’s just an impression formed from scores of conversations with pro-war types and way too much reading of sites like LGF. There’s also, of course, an enormous difference between imagining horrific punishment and actually carrying it out. And yes, there are many pro-war people who are genuinely horrified by violence and had hoped to avert war at all costs.

Still, there’s a rich irony here. Pro-war folks point to beheadings as the number one example of the irredeemable savagery of “the enemy” -- because it seems to reveal that they are in the grip of a pathology that no longer allows for any glint of reason or mercy to intrude on their lust for violence. And they’re right, of course. What’s amazing -- and ominous -- is how easily some of our colleagues and neighbors fall prey to the very same collapse of rationality they claimed to be appalled by in the first place.

-- Greg Sargent

THAT'S...NOVEL. This argument, being rapidly replicated across the right but here coming from David Rivkin and Lee Casey, is very odd:

Although the administration could have sought such warrants, it chose not to for good reasons. The procedures under the surveillance act are streamlined, but nevertheless involve a number of bureaucratic steps. Furthermore, the FISA court is not a rubber stamp and may well decline to issue warrants even when wartime necessity compels surveillance. More to the point, the surveillance act was designed for the intricate "spy versus spy" world of the cold war, where move and countermove could be counted in days and hours, rather than minutes and seconds. It was not drafted to deal with the collection of intelligence involving the enemy's military operations in wartime, when information must be put to immediate use.

Put another way, although the administration could've followed the law, it chose not to because the law is cumbersome and dusty. So, of course, is the Constitution (which was fully ratified in 1790, when they didn't even have e-mail!) and any number of largely uncontroversial statutes. The question here is whether the Bush administration is really prepared to brandish a theory of law that renders legislation optional when it requires procedural steps and was enacted 30 or more years prior.

--Ezra Klein

HILLARY'S TURNS. Robin Toner has a piece ruminating on two new books about Hillary Clinton by Dick Morris and Susan Estrich, respectively -- a combo that doesn't exactly send me racing to Barnes and Noble. Morris's book (written with his wife) is about how the only thing that can stop Clinton from seizing power in 2008 and destroying the country is Condoleezza Rice; Estrich's is an argument for supporting a Clinton candidacy aimed at liberals who (of course!) love the senator but worry that she's unelectable since the right hates her so.

From Toner's description, it doesn't sound like Estrich spends any of her book making the substantive liberal case for a Clinton candidacy -- it's apparently a given that liberals naturally love her and that they're only hesitant due to electability calculations. (Again, I haven't seen the book; I'm just going by Toner's description.) But of course among liberal writers, activists, and blog folk, Clinton's liberal bona fides are hardly immune to questioning -- and indeed, it sometimes seems hard to fathom how someone with an array of positions that the Democratic base finds odious should be considered the odds-on favorite to win the nomination and the unquestioned favorite of said Democratic base. It's a bit striking how two entirely distinct strands of liberal anti-Hillaryism have emerged from nearly opposite angles, apparently without everyone yet realizing that both exist. This will presumably change quickly as 2008 approaches.

--Sam Rosenfeld

THE RULE OF LAW. Bill Kristol doesn't really care:

Now, General Hayden is by all accounts a serious, experienced, nonpolitical military officer. You would think that a statement like this, by a man in his position, would at least slow down the glib assertions of politicians, op--ed writers, and journalists that there was no conceivable reason for President Bush to bypass the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) court. As Gary Schmitt and David Tell explain elsewhere in this issue, FISA was broken well before 9/11. Was the president to ignore the evident fact that FISA's procedures and strictures were simply incompatible with dealing with the al Qaeda threat in an expeditious manner? Was the president to ignore the obvious incapacity of any court, operating under any intelligible legal standard, to judge surveillance decisions involving the sweeping of massive numbers of cell phones and emails by high--speed computers in order even to know where to focus resources? Was the president, in the wake of 9/11, and with the threat of imminent new attacks, really supposed to sit on his hands and gamble that Congress might figure out a way to fix FISA, if it could even be fixed? The questions answer themselves.

This is honestly just dumb. The story we're all talking about isn't a story about how, in September and October 2001, the president authorized some kind of illegal program on a temporary emergency basis before getting things sorted out. That would arguably be forgivable, depending on the details of the hypothetical. The story we're talking about is that today, on December 27, 2005, more than four years after 9/11, the president is still authorizing some sort of illegal, secret surveillance program. The administration has had ample time to make his case to Congress -- if necessary, in a secret closed-door session -- and ask them to re-write the law to say whatever he thinks it ought to say. If the program is really so wonderful, there's every reason to assume Congress will approve it. If the White House really has no intention of abusing whatever it is they've implemented, then they have nothing to fear from the implementation of some oversight or safeguards. There's no excuse for the way they've behaved, and it's grossly premature to just assume they're doing something useful and innocuous when they won't explain to anyone what it is that's going on.

--Matthew Yglesias

WWBFD? Yes, and a Merry Christmas to you, Bill Frist:

As they prepared to send the spending cuts to the floor, Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist of Tennessee and his GOP lieutenants realized they were headed for defeat unless they secured one more vote. And to get that, Frist had to meet the asking price of one of two GOP senators, Norm Coleman of Minnesota or Gordon H. Smith of Oregon.

Smith vowed not to support the bill unless it was changed so that proposed savings on Medicaid, the federal healthcare program for the poor, were achieved at the expense of drug companies and other providers instead of coming in the form of lower benefits for Medicaid recipients.

Coleman's price for supporting the package was removing from the bill a provision that would have eliminated $30 million in subsidies for sugar beet growers, many of them in his home state.

In the end, sugar farmers got to keep their subsidy and Frist got Coleman's vote.

That, I think, is exactly what Jesus would have done.

--Ezra Klein

POLITICS AND WAR. Conveniently shrouded by Americans' holiday plans, the political situation in Iraq seems to have unraveled even faster than I would have guessed. Insurgent warfare is back with a vengeance showing that there's not a zero-sum relationship between Sunni political participation and Sunni warfare. Meanwhile, Sunni political leaders regard the results of the recent election as illegitimate and are demanding extra seats in parliament, which the winners are refusing, prompting protests in the streets. Relatedly, The New York Times's Richard Opel thought up a clever way to try and look at the sectarian composition of Iraq's security forces and determined, as had been widely guessed, that Sunni Arabs are largely excluded from the new state apparatus.

The big idea in America, now shared by both Sunni political leaders and our man Iyad Allawi, is that there should be a national unity government. That's a decent suggestion, but it puts us in an awkward positition. What if the Shiite parties that won the election refuse? Is America then going to continue to back them in an emerging civil war even though we've previously conceded that we agree with their opponents?

--Matthew Yglesias

PRIVATIZATION ERROR. Over the holiday weekend, Andrei Cherny wrote in to protest my characterization of his book The Next Deal as supporting Social Security privatization. Rather, it argued that we could use the then-extant budget surplus to finance something like the "add-on accounts" that various people (myself included) were talking up during the privatization debate earlier this year. My apologies for the error.

--Matthew Yglesias

'TIS THE SEASON. Looking for a last minute gift for your favorite liberal? Why not a subscription to The American Prospect? They get 12 issues for only $19.95 and in exchange you get a well-informed friend. That’s what we call a win-win situation.

--The Editors

HOW DEMS CELL IN IOWA. Earlier this week, the Republican polling firm Market Strategies released the results of a very comprehensive survey studying Missouri voters and their views on stem cell research. The poll, which was meant to shed some light on where exactly the electorate stands on the Missouri Stem Cell Research and Cures Initiative Amendment, found that an overwhelming majority support the notion of stem cell research, with close to 90 percent supporting adult-type stem cell research and nearly two-thirds backing embryonic stem cell research. Missouri Democratic Party spokesperson Jack Cardetti told Roll Call (subscription only) that the initiative could prove to be a “political minefield” in 2006 for Sen. Jim Talent, who along with Kansas Sen. Sam Brownback co-sponsored a bill that would ban a certain form of stem cell research known somatic cell nuclear transfer.

The politics of stem cell research though has been making waves elsewhere, and the fallout from these skirmishes seem to overwhelmingly favor the Democrats. Yesterday Nevada gubernatorial candidate Jim Gibson, in his first policy announcement, said he would boost state funding for embryonic stem cell research if he were elected. Connecticut Governor Jodi Rell has tried to distance herself from the rest of the Republican Party by pointing to her support of stem cell research. Meanwhile, Senate candidate Tom Kean Jr., from New Jersey, has avoided taking a firm stance on the issue, and Doug Duncan in Maryland has used the issue as fodder for attack against Republican Governor Bob Erhlich.

And of course there’s Iowa. The candidates for governor there are beginning to stake out their positions, and most have shown an interest in overturning the state’s restrictions on stem cell research. Last month at a candidate forum, five of the six Democratic candidates pledged their support for expanding stem cell research, and later that month, Democratic candidate Patty Judge laid out her plan for creating a research center in the state.

If stem cell research turns out to be as hot an issue in Missouri as it’s expected to be, then it’s likely that the effects of the debate will spill over next door into Iowa. Any Democrat with serious presidential ambitions for 2008 would be wise to take up the issue right now and make it his or her pet cause, because come January 2008, this very well could be a top interest for a lot of Democrats in Iowa.

--Alec Oveis

A SUBJECT ON WHICH EVERYONE CAN AGREE. Before the blog goes dark for the holidays, I wanted to note one legislative proposal that crossed my desk this week which seems like exactly the kind of smart and sensible solution to a novel problem that a bi-partisan coalition should be able to support. And yes, there are still policy-making areas, even in today's highly partisan environment, where agreement is not only possible, but likely. One important area is child pornography.

John Kerry and Republican Johnny Isakson of Georgia on Tuesday introduced a bill that would increase penalties for those who download child pornography from the internet, like the men who exploited Justin Berry, and allow the victims to recoup the same substantial penalties as do record companies who file suit over illegal song downloads. Kerry's office wrote (in a release I can't locate on their site):

Under current law, a victim of child exploitation is entitled to civil statutory damages in U.S. District Court in the amount of $50,000. If someone downloads a song off the Internet, federal copyright law provides for statutory damages to be awarded to the copyright holder in the amount of $150,000. Kerry’s legislation increases the statutory damages a victim of child exploitation can recover to at least $150,000. This increased penalty will serve as a deterrent to those who disseminate and possess child pornography, as well as a means of compensating victims of this terrible abuse.

The legislation will also fix a flaw in the current law that prevents adults from suing those who download images of them taken as minors. The current statute states that “any minor who is a victim of a violation [of the act] may sue in United States District Court.” This language has been interpreted literally by a federal district court to restrict recovery to only those victims who are under 18 at the time of the crime. Thus, when victims turn 18 they cannot recover against their perpetrators even if pornographic images of them as children are still being distributed via the Internet. Kerry’s legislation would clarify the statute to include victims of child pornography who are injured after they turn 18 by the downloading of their pornographic images.

This strikes me as likely to be a very effective deterrent and is a welcomed effort to solve a relatively novel problem. More importantly, it's a real intervention on behalf of exploited Americans, and not a symbolic attempt to sound conservative on a cultural issue.

Relatedly, the Washington Post's Laura Blumenfeld produced a very interesting, in-depth look at Republican and Democratic congressional collaboration to increase penalties for pimps and johns, an effort that has united feminists and Christian conservatives who liken prostitution to a form of slavery. Again, rather than positioning representatives on values or cultural issues, these efforts are active interventions to help people. They may have the side effect of showing that Democrats are tough on crime and capable of issuing strong moral condemnations, but their main purpose is to stop the exploitation of children and vulnerable young women and have the government do something good.

So, while Republicans are not in agreement with Democrats on all sex crime policy issues (opposing the distribution of emergency contraception in emergency rooms to rape victims, for example) there is also clearly room for bipartisan collaboration in this arena in a way that benefits both parties, as well as some of society's weakest and most vulnerable.

--Garance Franke-Ruta

WHAT'S THE STORY WITH MARKOS? If you're at all like me you've been letting most of your hard-copy, text-heavy magazine subscriptions lapse because, by the time they arrive in the mail, you've already read everything in the issues that you were going to read, online. So it was a nostalgic pleasure to come home last night and find an issue of The Washington Monthly in my mailbox about which I had not already heard weeks of blogosphere buzz, and that contained a whole set of fresh articles that, at least so far, have not been made available on the web. How retro! And how nice to be able to approach an article without the voices of dozens of online interpreters already in my head, telling me how I should approach a piece.

Those voices will be coming, surely, to interpret Benjamin Wallace-Wells’ excellent six-page profile of Markos Moulitsas Zuniga, tagged on the cover with the simple question, "Who is Markos Moulitsas?" In some ways, a serious, in-depth profile of Markos is such an obvious piece that I'm surprised no one has really done it before. And yet I can't recall ever reading one that treated him alone, rather than as part of larger story about bloggers. Meanwhile, DailyKos has morphed from being the biggest liberal blog in the country to being, well, ginormous:

The site, which has existed for only around three and a half years, now has 3.7 million readers each week. That's more than the top 10 opinion magazines -- of both left and right -- combined, more readers than any political publication has had, ever, in the history of the world.

Newsweek, by comparison, has 3.2 million subscribers, though actual readership is assumed to be higher than that number, because of the way magazines circulate in physical space.

I'm not certain that partisans of Markos will like Ben's piece (some of the descriptions are not very flattering), but they should take it seriously. The piece exactly captures the tension at the heart of the new, online progressive movement, which is that it is fiercely committed to winning above all else, and yet oddly indifferent to and flexible on questions of policy. Ben dubs this "the ideology of winnerism," and says:

Wanting to win very badly is an admirable and necessary quality in politics, and Moulitsas is right that Democrats have needed it in greater quantity. But it is not really a political philosophy.

Standing up, standing firm, and standing tough are all essential for Democrats to win again -- but the single most important deficit cited by voters in survey after survey, and focus group after focus group, is a lack of clarity about what Democrats stand for. A pragmatic, tactical movement can move the ball on the first set questions and carve out space for liberal politics that is at once less dogmatic and more steadfast, but it's not necessarily cut out for the task of redefining liberalism for the 21st century. That, I suspect, will continue to be the work of the smaller, wonkier publications that arrive in the mail (like this one and The Monthly), and of think tanks.

UPDATE: It's online now, as is Markos' first response.

UPDATE II. Atrios responds that there's no point in wonkery in the present political environment, where Democrats can only fight off Republican interventions, rather than enact laws of their own. But it's also worth noting that Talking Points Memo and TPMCafe are both highly wonky (and also popular), as are a range of smaller, usually institutionally-affiliated blogs, so overall the left blogosphere is both activist and intellectual. As Kevin says, "There's plenty of room for all kinds."

--Garance Franke-Ruta

MR. GORBACHEV, TEAR DOWN THESE LOW-PRICED PHARMACEUTICALS! Chalk another one up for socialized medicine:

Prescription drug prices under the new Medicare drug benefit are considerably higher than the prices negotiated by the Department of Veterans Affairs, according to a study by Families USA, the St. Petersburg Times reports (Nohlgren [1], St. Petersburg Times, 12/22). The study found that the median price difference for a one-year supply of the 20 drugs most commonly prescribed to seniors is 48.2% (Families USA release, 12/21). The VA plan negotiates prescription drug prices for its five million members, while the 2003 Medicare law prohibits the government from directly negotiating with drug makers to determine prices for the program's 43 million beneficiaries (Nohlgren [1], St. Petersburg Times, 12/22).

One of the major cost benefits of an integrated, nationalized system is simple bargaining power. The ability of a large market to force down prices accounts not only for Canada's low pharmaceutical costs, but Wal-Mart's success and, yes, the VA's awesome advantage over the Medicare Drug Benefit. A capitalist system should, theoretically, be well-acquainted with this. For Bush to have barred Medicare from negotiating drug prices is an admission that his administration cares more about Big Pharma's contentment than cost control -- it's totally indefensible.

On a sidenote, it's worth noting that the VA is the only actual example of socialized medicine in America. Generally speaking, talk of a single-payer or nationalized systems constrain themselves to a government-run insurance system. The VA owns its hospitals, employs its doctors, runs its coverage, bargains for its pharmaceuticals, and generally exercises autonomy and control over every aspect of health delivery. And guess what? The VA is far and away the best system in the United States. Meanwhile, Bush's absurd public-private structure for Medicare Part D shows every likelihood of making it one of the worst. But that's okay. At least Big Pharma is sleeping easy.

--Ezra Klein

HEAT OR EAT. The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities alerts folks that ANWR drilling wasn't the only provision stripped from the defense appropriations bill yesterday -- when it was taken out, Republicans decided also to take out $2 billion in emergency funding for the Low-Income Home Energy Assistance Program (LIHEAP). (Some money has been set aside in other bills for low income heating assistance.) Says CBPP:

Congressional leaders may claim that the removal from the bill of a provision authorizing oil drilling in the Alaska National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) made removal of the LIHEAP funds necessary, since some of the royalties from ANWR oil production were slated to be dedicated to LIHEAP. Such a claim, however, would be false: the extra $2 billion in LIHEAP funds for this winter was a separate provision from the royalty provision (which would not have taken effect until 2008) and did not need to be removed when the ANWR provision was dropped from the bill.

While there is bipartisan agreement in Congress that additional LIHEAP funds are needed this winter, the congressional leadership has consistently opposed adding the funds to other appropriations bills, preferring to place additional LIHEAP funds first in the House budget reconciliation bill, then in the defense appropriations bill, as a means of attracting votes for these measures. Once the controversial ANWR provision was removed from the defense bill, the $2 billion in LIHEAP funds was no longer needed for this purpose and was dropped.

This latest move means Congress has approved no additional LIHEAP funds to help low-income families cope with the spike in energy prices this year. In fact, this year’s LIHEAP funding will be somewhat below last year’s because of the 1 percent across-the-board cut in discretionary funding contained in the defense appropriations bill. The result will be greater hardship for large numbers of low-income Americans, who will forced to do without adequate heat this winter or cut back on food and other essentials.

As the statement says, extra LIHEAP funding was first used to entice (or blackmail, depending on your perspective) members into voting for the odious reconciliation spending bill, then was attached to Defense approps along with Katrina relief spending as coercion to vote for ANWR drilling. With ANWR defeated, congressional Republicans have taken a nice parting shot -- it's heat or eat for poor folks this winter. Merry Christmas!

--Sam Rosenfeld

IF WISHING MADE IT SO. Jim Hoagland writes:

Not even conservatives will rush to endorse the expansive powers that Bush claims to find in the Constitution to enable the National Security Agency to evade existing law and systematically conduct wiretaps against terrorism suspects on U.S. soil without warrants.

Well, so you would think. I seem to recall that just last week lots of folks on the Corner were excited by Chris DeMuth's essay “Unlimited Government,” warning that such things as an FCC-imposed tax on long-distance telephone calls were a dire threat to American liberty:

The emergence of 24/7/52 legislating is one of many ways in which modern American government has become much busier and more businesslike than it used to be. While busyness is a virtue in most of life, the men who founded our nation would not have considered it advantageous to government. They carefully contrived a state that would be cumbersome and inefficient at getting its act together, with divided and contending powers both inside Washington and between Washington and the states, and a profusion of checks and balances throughout. They wanted government to be robust and decisive in a limited sphere, but also considered government a threat to freedom and happiness, and worried it would engross private society, property, commerce, and culture. “Government,” said John Adams, “turns every contingency into an excuse for enhancing power in itself.” “Government,” said George Washington, “is not reason; it is not eloquence; it is force. Like fire, it is a dangerous servant and a fearful master.” And those were the Federalists.

We also learn that Elliot Spitzer's legal tactics are a similar threat. But today on the Corner, I see Mark Levin arguing that Congress has no right whatsoever to limit or curtail the Department of Defense's operations, either abroad or at home, lest we violate the "commander in chief" provision of the constitution. This view is, dare I suggest, taking us a good deal closer to unlimited government than anything the FCC is doing. Generally speaking, conservatives seem to me to be remarkably willing to toss aside decades-worth of received wisdom about checks and balances and how you can't just assume that some government agency is going to do its job perfectly and without abusing its power. I don't quite know if the issue here is slavish loyalty to the Bush administration or a remarkable loss of nerve in the face of the risks of a terrorist attack, but either way, it's very hard to see on the merits what about the current situation -- either in its political or security aspects -- justifies chucking constitutional government out the window.

--Matthew Yglesias

ROGUE PRESIDENTS. Apologies if you don't have TimesSelect, but there's something a bit odd about this David Brooks column, which seems to concede that the President's wiretap scheme was illegal, but then slides glossily past the point to discuss other issues. Now, obviously, a columnist has a right to focus on whatever he wants to focus on, but this is sort of a big deal. Note that the lawbreaking is ongoing. It's not as if Bush was caught, apologized, changed things up, and wants the country to move on. He denies that he's done anything wrong and insists he's going to keep on doing it.

UPDATE: Brendan Nyhan notes that Brooks was for the rule of law before he was against it. And to reiterate, the point isn't merely that Bush broke the law, but that he's continuing to break the law, plans on doing so indefinitely, and is asserting a constitutional right to break the law.

--Matthew Yglesias

HOW MANY DOZENS? The looming Jack Abramoff plea deal will apparently relate to what prosecutors believe is "a corruption scheme involving at least a dozen lawmakers and their former staff members." But is that twelve or more lawmakers plus an unknown number of former staff members, or is it about a dozen total people including both lawmakers and former staff members? Those are pretty different scenarios.

--Matthew Yglesias

A MORE POWERFUL INCENTIVE. Contra George Bush, Osama bin Laden appears not to have stopped using his satellite phone in 1998 because of revelations in the Washington Times -- Glenn Kessler reports there was a much more probable cause:

President Bush asserted this week that the news media published a U.S. government leak in 1998 about Osama bin Laden's use of a satellite phone, alerting the al Qaeda leader to government monitoring and prompting him to abandon the device.

The story of the vicious leak that destroyed a valuable intelligence operation was first reported by a best-selling book, validated by the Sept. 11 commission and then repeated by the president.

But it appears to be an urban myth.

The al Qaeda leader's communication to aides via satellite phone had already been reported in 1996 -- and the source of the information was another government, the Taliban, which ruled Afghanistan at the time.

The second time a news organization reported on the satellite phone, the source was bin Laden himself.

Causal effects are hard to prove, but other factors could have persuaded bin Laden to turn off his satellite phone in August 1998. A day earlier, the United States had fired dozens of cruise missiles at his training camps, missing him by hours.

Hmmm. Let's see: A story in a right-wing Washington newspaper vs. a U.S. cruise missile attack. Which could it have been?

--Garance Franke-Ruta

THE CONSTITUTION IS NOT A REGULATORY STATUTE. Legal eagle reader J.N. writes in about my item yesterday quoting Vice President Dick Cheney saying:

I served in the Congress for 10 years. I've got enormous regard for the other body, Title I of the Constitution, but I do believe that, especially in the day and age we live in, the nature of the threats we face, it was true during the Cold War, as well as I think what is true now, the President of the United States needs to have his constitutional powers unimpaired, if you will, in terms of the conduct of national security policy. That's my personal view.” (emphasis added)

Writes J.N.:

Here’s the thing, though – there is no Title I to the Constitution. There’s an Article I, to which he is clearly referring, but a Title only appears in the statute books. A big deal? Perhaps not, but for me, I think it’s pretty amazing that the guy who’s served at the highest levels of government for 30 years doesn’t know the basic difference between how to refer to the Constitution and how to refer to the United States Code.

On the other hand, perhaps Cheney is referring to the Constitution as if it were regulatory code because he has started to think of it as such -- and we all know how firmly the vice president supports deregulation.

--Garance Franke-Ruta