MORE POLLS....It turns out the American public is pretty savvy. Here are the results of the latest New York Times poll:

The poll found that just 29 percent of Americans approve of the way President Bush is managing the war in Iraq, matching the lowest mark of his presidency. Nearly 70 percent of Americans said Mr. Bush did not have a plan to end the war, and an overwhelming 80 percent said Mr. Bush’s latest effort to rally public support for the conflict amounted to a change in language but not policy.

In the generic congressional poll, Democrats now have a staggering 19% lead. As far as I know, this is unprecedented a week before an election.

Other results: The Iraq war is the most important issue by a huge margin. George Bush's approval/disapproval rating for handling the war is a subterranean -35%, and even for the broader war on terrorism it's -4%. More people think the economy is getting worse than think it's getting better by a margin of 22%. The approval/disapproval margin for the Republican Party is -20%, compared to +9% for the Democratic Party. People think taxes will go up no matter who wins control of Congress. 57% are in favor of allowing either marriage or civil unions for gay couples. There's plenty of other good stuff in the full poll results here.

But for the sheer pleasure of seeing his own partisans finally abandon him, my personal favorite questions are the ones below. Heckuva job, George!

"VIRTUAL CENSORSHIP"....Jonathan Landay reports on the latest from the Bush administration:

An internal State Department review has found that U.S. officials screened the public statements and writings of private citizens for criticism of the Bush administration before deciding whether to send them on foreign speaking assignments.

The screenings amounted to "virtual censorship" in the State Department's selection of speakers, said a report by the department's Inspector General's Office. McClatchy Newspapers obtained a copy of the 22-page report, which was completed in September.

I know. I should be outraged, I guess. But is there anyone left on the planet who expects anything different from these guys?

KERRY AND THE CAMERA....I'm sort of loathe to even blog about the whole John Kerry flap. It's not that I'm flatly unwilling to write about idiotic and transparently manufactured political issues, but a man's got to have his limits. This "controversy," along with the almost insane amount of play it's gotten in the mainstream press, is surely a sign of the end times.

Still, there's one part of this that I can't help but comment on. Here's what Kerry said:

You know, education, if you make the most of it, you study hard, you do your homework and you make an effort to be smart, you can do well. If you don't, you get stuck in Iraq.

And here's what Kerry's office claims he meant to say:

Do you know where you end up if you don't study, if you aren't smart, if you're intellectually lazy? You end up getting us stuck in a war in Iraq. Just ask President Bush.

Here's the thing. I believe Kerry. I think that really is what he meant to say. But Kerry has been active in politics for more than three decades. He's been a U.S. senator for more than 20 years. He spent two years running for president. In his career, he's probably given — what do you figure? 5,000 speeches? 10,000? 20,000?

So how could he possibly have screwed up a simple little piece of snark like that? After all these years, does he still get so flustered in front of a camera that he can't even get a simple three-line joke straight? Sheesh.

ALL ABOUT OIL?....During his interview with Rush Limbaugh today, George Bush paused for a bit and then veered off from the subject at hand to explain what really troubles him about the Middle East:

Give me a second here, Rush, because I want to share something with you. I am deeply concerned about a country, the United States, leaving the Middle East. I am worried that rival forms of extremists will battle for power, obviously creating incredible damage if they do so; that they will topple modern governments, that they will be in a position to use oil as a tool to blackmail the West. People say, "What do you mean by that?" I say, "If they control oil resources, then they pull oil off the market in order to run the price up, and they will do so unless we abandon Israel, for example, or unless we abandon allies.

Rush called this "extremely visionary." It's certainly a bracing call to arms for our troops overseas, isn't it?

HOW FAST IS THE ECONOMY GROWING?....Did GDP increase 1.6% last quarter? Only if you believe that auto production increased 26%, the estimate used by the BEA in its calculation of 3rd quarter GDP. But as Nouriel Roubini says, this hardly seems believable:

During Q3 all the major US automakers — Ford, GM, Chrysler — announced production cuts for both Q3 and Q4. So, how could the folks at BEA argue and estimate that production went up by a whopping 26%? These data also do not make any sense as the Federal Reserve Board data on automotive production in Q3 show a sharp fall in production of motor vehicles of 12%

So what's going on? One possibility: the BEA calculation uses a price deflator based on wholesale light-truck prices, which tanked in the third quarter. When you plug that into the formula for all auto production, it gives you a falsely large estimate of auto sales.

Another possibility: the BEA's seasonal adjustment formula (Q3 is when automakers retool their plants and blow out their existing inventory) is wrong. Dean Baker points out that BEA may have a systematic problem here, since the Q3 numbers for the past three years show increases in auto production of 17%, 23%, and 26%, all of which seem rather too high to believe.

Yet another: the BEA is right. The Fed tracks auto production, while the BEA tracks auto consumption, which is the right thing to do for GDP calculations. It's entirely possible that carmakers have reduced production but still increased sales by slashing prices and selling off inventory.

I have no idea which of these is correct. But if you're interested, the commenters over at Brad DeLong's place are holding a seminar on the topic. It's your chance to learn a little bit about how GDP accounts are calculated. And while that may sound dry, anything is better than listening to the latest campaign nonsense, isn't it?

MELTDOWN IN IRAQ.... Here's the PowerPoint slide obtained by the New York Times that shows Central Command's internal view of the situation in Iraq. In short: bad and getting worse.

In fact, here's some fun pseudo-math to go along with it. If you mark off the entire scale in units from 0-100, the "Chaos Quotient" has increased from 55 to 81 in the past eight months, an increase of slightly more than 3 points per month. So how long until we hit 100 at the current rate?

Answer: Just under six months. Even the U.S. military now thinks we have less than one Friedman before Iraq is hopelessly lost.

MALIKI AND THE CORDON....The White House is doing its best to distract everyone's attention from this by feigning outrage over a botched John Kerry joke about George Bush's college study habits, but I wonder if Tuesday's news from Iraq will eventually get any traction?

Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki demanded the removal of American checkpoints from the streets of Baghdad on Tuesday, in what appeared to be his latest and boldest gambit in an increasingly tense struggle for more independence from his American protectors.

....The language of the declaration, which implied that Mr. Maliki had the power to command American forces, seemed to overstep his authority and to be aimed at placating his Shiite constituency.

The withdrawal was greeted with jubilation in the streets of Sadr City, the densely populated Shiite enclave where the Americans have focused their manhunt and where anti-American sentiment runs high.

So: an American soldier is abducted and held in Sadr City, the Army sets up a cordon in an effort to force the soldier's release, but then meekly gives in when Maliki orders them to. This whole situation seems tailor-made for Democrats in an election year: Why have we abandoned an American soldier? Why are we letting Maliki give orders to U.S. generals? Who's in charge over there?

So far, though, Democrats have restrained themselves. Is this because they know in their hearts that letting Maliki call the shots in this case was the right thing to do, and they've decided they don't want to politicize the situation? Maybe, but I wouldn't bet the farm on it. The Dubai port deal was almost certainly the right thing to do too, but that didn't stop Dems from mounting a two-week frenzy over the whole thing. There's probably some other calculation going on. Or maybe they just need a day or two to get their act together.

I mention this mainly because bowing to pressure from Maliki probably was the right thing to do, for at least a couple of reasons. First, it's impossible for Maliki to control the political situation in Iraq, as we want him to do, unless the various Iraqi factions believe he has genuine influence over the U.S. military. If we had swatted him down in a high-profile case like this, it would have been tantamount to a death sentence.

Second, Maliki might very well have saved us from ourselves. After all, our cordon had already been in place for eight days without result, and there was no indication that it ever would have worked. (Hezbollah endured a thousand deaths and two months of destruction in Lebanon and still wouldn't release the abducted Israeli soldiers that started that war.) My guess is that the militants who held the U.S. soldier would never have released him, and that they even viewed the growing chaos in Sadr City as a positive benefit. Keeps the locals riled up against the American occupation, you know.

So Maliki probably did us a favor by giving us an excuse to back down yesterday. In a broader sense, though, the story of the Sadr City cordon is the story of Iraq in a microcosm: tactics unsuited to the fight, no exit strategy when those tactics turn out not to work, and eventually a clear demonstration of the limits of American power. The military set up the cordon because they didn't want to simply do nothing, but then had to stick with it forever because anything less would show a "lack of resolve." In a way, Maliki rescued us from our own folly on Tuesday.

GEORGE ALLEN....In a campaign season filled to the gills with ginned up absurdities, perhaps the most absurd of them all has been George Allen's desperation last-minute attacks on Jim Webb over some racy scenes in one of his war novels. This ranks high on the short-list of campaign stunts that deserve to blow up in the most gruesome possible way, if only to serve as a warning to future politicians: No, the American public is not willing to put up with literally anything. Yes, you can go too far.

That, along with revelations of Allen's youthful — and possibly lingering — racism really ought to be enough to send him packing. But in case it's not, Ed Kilgore provides more:

I personally think the most damning thing about the Allen Story is that he has been exposed as the ultimate Golden State Child of Privilege who has spent much of his life trying to impersonate a dirt-farm, dirt-track Yahoo, mainly by aggressively embracing the underside of Yahoo culture, without the mitigating circumstances of actually growing up that way, or any indication that he shares the positive features of that culture (e.g., a healthy disrespect for economic elites). To put it another way, most true southern white crackers may well have contempt for those well-heeled cultural elitists who look down on them, but they'd also kill to give their kids the kind of advantages that George Allen had, and, if confronted directly with the full Allen Story, would probably consider his efforts to remake himself as a 'bacca-chewing, thuggish redneck the ultimate insult.

Allen is a fake in much the same way that George Bush is a fake — except that he's not quite as good as it. Perhaps Virginians will finally cotton to Allen's peculiar brand of condescension next week.

FORMER REPUBLICANS....Former Republican John Cole on why he's a former Republican:

I am not really having any fun attacking my old friends — but I don’t know how else to respond when people call decent men like Jim Webb a pervert for no other reason than to win an election. I don’t know how to deal with people who think savaging a man with Parkinson’s for electoral gain is appropriate election-year discourse. I don’t know how to react to people who think that calling anyone who disagrees with them on Iraq a “terrorist-enabler” than to swing back. I don’t know how to react to people who think that media reports of party hacks in the administration overruling scientists on issues like global warming, endangered species, intelligent design, prescription drugs, etc., are signs of ... liberal media bias.

That about sums it up. The modern Republican Party — definitely not the party of Dwight Eisenhower or even Ronald Reagan — had full control of the government for a mere four years before they overreached so far that the American public became disgusted by them. It took Democrats 50 years to do that. So, you know, congratulations on that. Apparently pandering to the most extreme elements of the Christian right and selling their soul to K Street turned out to be less popular than they thought. Imagine that.

SURVEILLANCE....Speaking of Nancy Pelosi, here's part of the latest tirade aimed in her direction from desperate conservatives. This is from Thomas Sowell over at National Review:

As regards the war on terrorism and the terrorists’ war against the west, Nancy Pelosi has opposed having international phone calls to and from terrorists monitored by American intelligence agencies.

This is, flatly, a lie. Pelosi, like many Democrats, opposes NSA surveillance of American residents without a warrant. That is all she opposes. Period.

The rest of the piece isn't much more honest. But this business of liberals "opposing surveillance of terrorists" is McCarthyish mendacity of the worst kind. Even National Review should be embarrassed to peddle it.

A SEARING SYMBOL?....The New York Times' Jennifer Steinhauer says that Nancy Pelosi has "emerged as a searing symbol of the country's deep partisan divide." Bob Somerby comments:

The notion that Pelosi “has emerged as a searing symbol of the country's deep partisan divide” is, of course, pure RNC claptrap....Meanwhile, can you think of a single Democrat for whom “Pelosi embodies their raw antipathy for the Republican Party?” Is such a person alive on Earth? Funny — Steinhauer doesn’t name any such person. And no one is quoted saying such things, not even anonymously.

The reason, of course, is that it's solely Republicans who have spent the past few months trying to rally the troops with their laughable Pelosi-as-Grim-Reaper demagoguery. But as Steinhauer knows perfectly well, the truth is that Pelosi is only a symbol of partisan divide to the extent that Republicans have insisted on trying to make her one for their own purely partisan reasons. (Namely, that it's all they've got this election cycle.) In the real world Pelosi has gone to extraordinary lengths to present a moderate face and a moderate agenda. Jon Chait reminds you of that agenda here in case you've forgotten it.

POSTSCRIPT: Speaking of Pelosi, did anyone see the 60 Minutes segment about her a week ago? I read a lot of comments disparaging CBS for "fawning" over her two weeks before the election, but it sure didn't seem like an especially warm profile to me. I didn't write about it at the time, which means my memory has grown dim, but it seemed distinctly unfriendly to me. Am I off base here, or did it strike other people that way too?

NO MORE SEX!....The Bush administration is now in the business of encouraging adults to stop having sex? Seriously? And they accuse liberals of using government power in the service of utopian social engineering?

TIMETABLES....The LA Times reports that high-ranking military officers are warming up to the idea of deadlines and timetable in Iraq:

"Deadlines could help ensure that the Iraqi leaders recognize the imperative of coming to grips with the tough decisions they've got to make for there to be progress in the political arena," said a senior Army officer who has served in Iraq. He asked that his name not be used because he did not want to publicly disagree with the stated policy of the president.

....Some in the military argue that publicizing a timetable for reducing forces is far less damaging to a counterinsurgency campaign than the administration has suggested.

Many officers, particularly those who adhere to the military philosophy of former Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, a retired Army general who served as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, believe that deadlines are necessary to avoid getting mired in an endless war fueled by enmity between Iraq's long-subjugated Shiite population and the Sunni Arabs who ran the government under Saddam Hussein.

Two years ago, this might have done some good. Today, I'm not so sure, though it's certainly worth a try.

Regardless, it's nice to hear that there are at least a few rumblings among the officer corps. Three decades ago, after the Vietnam War, they swore they'd speak up before they'd allow the civilian leadership to lead them into a ditch again without protest, but that's pretty much what they've done in Iraq. If the Iraq debacle reminds them of that promise, at least it will have accomplished something.

LATEST POLLING....Via Mickey Kaus, here's the latest round of robo-polling from Majority Watch. It suggests Democrats will pick up at least 20 seats, and possibly as many as 38 if they run the table in the "Weak D" districts. For now, I'll stick with my prediction of a 23-seat pickup — though it's starting to look like I might be on the low side.

YO-YO MA....This is way off the beaten path, but take a look at Mark Swed's lead in his review of Yo-Yo Ma's performance in Los Angeles on Friday:

Yo-Yo Ma is the world's most popular cellist. That is not to say that he is the world's finest cellist. The Finnish virtuoso Anssi Karttunen, for one, can more effectively make Elliott Carter's Cello Concerto sound like music than can Ma, although it was written for him. Others play bluegrass, tangos and Kyrgyz traditional music more authentically than he.

I don't know much about classical music, and I know even less about Ma. I certainly don't have an opinion about whether he's the finest cellist in the world or not.

But what on earth was the meaning of that paragraph? A Finnish cellist plays one particular piece better than Ma? There are other cellists better versed in Kyrgyz traditional music (!) than Ma? WTF?

Can somebody knowledgable help me out here? What am I supposed to take away from this?