LOSING GROUND....Is al-Qaeda coming apart at the seams? Two recent articles say so: Lawrence Wright's "The Rebellion Within" in the New Yorker, and Peter Bergen and Paul Cruickshank's "The Unraveling" in the New Republic. Don't go getting your hopes up too much here, but both pieces are worth reading.

TOO MANY SIGNS....In the Atlantic, John Staddon argues that the U.S. has too many traffic signs and tries to control driver behavior too strictly. I've read about this before, and up to a point it seems like it makes sense. Does the main loop in my neighborhood really need stop signs every 200 yards? (Answer: no, dammit!) Do British style roundabouts work better than traffic lights? (Probably.) And this:

Speed limits in the U.K. are also simpler and better. They are set by road type, so drivers know what limits to expect on highways, rural roads, and urban roads — usually without any signs to tell them. These limits are relatively high, set assuming optimum driving conditions, in contrast to the U.S. limits, which seem to be set with something in between the best and worst conditions in mind. (Precisely where on this spectrum U.S. limits fall seems to vary from road to road, engendering mistrust of the signs in some drivers.) Nonstandard speed limits in the U.K. are rare, so you tend to take them quite seriously when they appear, and they are posted frequently — so you don't risk missing them if you're, say, watching the road ahead of you.

OK, I'll buy this. But as someone who just got back from a driving trip around England, let me add a couple of things. First, it wouldn't kill them to occasionally throw up a speed limit sign for the benefit of tourists who don't already know the rules for each specific kind of road. Second, the Brits might not have as many stop signs and speed limit signs as us, but what they do have is an insane blizzard of signs informing you that a speed camera is watching you. I never actually saw one of these cameras (they must be artfully hidden), but the signs were plastered over every road in the country.

And as long as I'm venting a bit here, what is it with Europeans and compass points? Their road signs tend to be gloriously well designed and easy to decipher, but they never include the words north, south, east, or west. So when you get to a crossroad, all the sign tells you is that one direction takes you to, say, Chard, and the other direction takes you to Axminster. Unless you've memorized the map, or happen to be a local who doesn't really need the sign in the first place, you don't know which direction to go. (If you're lucky, one of the cities on the sign is the one you want to go to, which makes things easy. Usually it's not.) But although I might not know every town and village in the area, I always know from a quick look at a map which general direction I want to go. So why not add the words north and south here? Some sort of EU-wide directive to banish directional notation, or what?

On a more positive note, villages in Britain also have seemingly random obstructions placed in the middle of the streets occasionally, and I was charmed to find out that these weren't, in fact, random obstructions designed to catch you unaware, but were actually carefully placed "traffic calming" schemes. Nice name! Still, it just goes to show that driving in the UK isn't quite as free and easy as Staddon suggests.

BUGABOO OF THE DAY....The latest Republican hysteria attack: China is drilling for oil in Cuban waters! Even Dick Cheney says it's true!

But it's not. Surprised?

OBAMA THE CENTER LEFTY....Is Barack Obama selling out the left by hiring center-lefty Jason Furman as his economic policy director? Ezra Klein says no:

Obama's social and economic policy has been relentlessly center-left, focused on tax cuts and renewable energy credits. His health plan was the only one of the major three to not even attempt universality. This stuff is no surprise. Obama has many virtues, but his domestic policy has been consistently center-left. Those who're shocked simply haven't been paying attention.

That's right. Obama has been consistently good on domestic issues, but he's also been thoroughly mainstream. There's never been anything boldly innovative or risky about his domestic proposals.

But that's OK. It's not 1932 and the public isn't calling out for a complete re-ordering of the political system. What's more important than Obama's general direction, I think, is understanding what his priorities are. What's he going to fight for starting on Day 1? And I have to confess that I don't have much of a handle on that.

If, for example, Obama successfully withdraws from Iraq, passes a climate plan that looks something like his campaign proposal, and implements his healthcare plan, that would constitute a stunningly successful first term even if you think he's too much of a milquetoast in every one of these areas. But are these the three things he's most likely to fight hardest for? I don't know. He's consistently solid in almost everything, but that very consistency makes it hard to figure out what he's really passionate about. Now that the primary is over, maybe we'll start to find out.

LITMUS TEST....Scott Lemieux on the veepstakes:

I could see a case for Joe Biden if he hadn't been in favor of the war. As it stands, I think it would be crazy to pick someone almost exclusively for foreign policy message who inevitably blurs the popular message of the Democratic candidate.

I just don't see that. Do we really think that being opposed to the war in 2002 should be a litmus test for VP consideration in 2008? There's an awful lot of rank-and-file Dems who supported the war, and this implicitly suggests that they should all still be in purdah even if they came to their senses years ago. That kind of insistence on ideological purity strikes me as a good way to lose votes, not gain them.

(Yeah, yeah, Drum, and you were one of those people in 2002. Of course you don't think this should be a litmus test. True enough. But do you really want to send a message that supporting the war was not just a mistake, but something so heinous that it makes you unfit for higher office? I don't think so.)

Anyway, it's a sign of how bored we all are that we're all chattering about this so much. I'm sure I'll keep chattering too, but just for the record: I don't think it matters much who Obama chooses. He isn't likely to carry even a single additional state because he did or didn't choose Biden or anyone else as his running mate. And to make it worse, even if his VP pick does make a difference, campaigns are such nonlinear events that it's impossible to predict that difference ahead of time. It's sort of a fun discussion to have, but every possible candidate has a dozen pros and a dozen cons that seem a lot more important at the time than they really are. In the end, VPs rarely swing either particular regions or particular demographics, so Obama's choice probably isn't as important as a lot of people think it is.

And as long as I'm making grand pronouncements that quite possibly might make me look like an idiot in the near future, here's another one: among the states Bush won in 2004, I think Obama will win Ohio, Iowa, Virginia, Colorado, New Mexico, and maybe even Arkansas. That's even accounting for the fact that he'll lose a few points in some of those states for purely racial reasons. This might officially make me the most optimistic Obama supporter in the world, but there you have it.

100 YEARS....Matt Lauer asked John McCain this morning if he now had a better idea of when U.S. troops could come home from Iraq. "No," McCain said, "but that's not too important."

100 years redux? Actually, yes, because McCain said exactly the same thing he said the last time he got in hot water over this: he's OK with keeping troops in Iraq forever as long as it becomes as peaceful as garrison duty in Okinawa or Germany. Unfortunately, in typical McCain style, that's where he stops. He never explains how Iraq is going to be fully pacified when a large and growing majority of its residents are outraged at the idea of a long-term U.S. presence. He just doesn't get the Catch-22: he wants Iraq to become Okinawa Jr., but as long as we're there the violence is never going to stop and Iraq will stay Iraq. Casualties will never be reduced to zero.

And there's a broader question anyway: even if casualties did drop to zero, would we really want a long-term neocolonial presence in Iraq anyway? Why? To protect the oil? That was pumping just fine before we were there. To fight al-Qaeda? They're in Pakistan. To ensure a presence in the area? We already have bases in Afghanistan, Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar, Oman, Turkey, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, and elsewhere. How the hell many do we need?

QUOTE OF THE DAY....From Owen Cargol, then president of Northern Arizona University, explaining his locker room conduct to a fellow employee:

In a subsequent e-mail to the employee, Cargol described himself as "a rub-your-belly, grab-your-balls, give-you-a-hug, slap-your-back, pull-your-dick, squeeze-your-hand, cheek-your-face, and pat-your-thigh kind of guy."

Uh huh. You'll be unsurprised to know that Cargol was considered an ideal choice by the Coalition Provisional Authority to become the first chancellor of the American University of Iraq last year. Via Henry Farrell.

LONG-TERM BASES....The Washington Post reports that the Iraqi government — not the faction that hates us, but the faction that supposedly likes us — is pretty unhappy about the status-of-forces treaty the Bush administration is trying to negotiate with them:

"The Americans are making demands that would lead to the colonization of Iraq," said Sami al-Askari, a senior Shiite politician on parliament's foreign relations committee who is close to Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki. "If we can't reach a fair agreement, many people think we should say, 'Goodbye, U.S. troops. We don't need you here anymore.' "

....In Iraq, the willingness to consider calling for the departure of American troops represents a major shift for members of the U.S.-backed government. Maliki this week visited Iran, where Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the supreme leader, urged him to reject any long-term security arrangements with the United States.

I guess my honest opinion is that this is probably negotiating bluster more than anything else. Maliki, in fact, does need us in Iraq, and he knows that we know it. Still, as recently as last year Maliki wouldn't even have offered up bluster, so things really have changed since then. And the biggest change is this: public opinion in Iraq, stoked largely by the Sadrists, is now so opposed to a long-term American presence that Maliki feels like he has to win some significant concessions on this score merely to keep from being tossed out of power. Needless to say, this bodes poorly for our long-term chances in Iraq.

CULTURE OF DEBT....This isn't exactly what I've come to expect from David Brooks, but today he decries the fact that "the social norms and institutions that encouraged frugality and spending what you earn have been undermined" and then goes on to name names:

The agents of destruction are many. State governments have played a role. They aggressively hawk their lottery products, which some people call a tax on stupidity.

....Payday lenders have also played a role. They seductively offer fast cash — at absurd interest rates — to 15 million people every month.

Credit card companies have played a role. Instead of targeting the financially astute, who pay off their debts, they've found that they can make money off the young and vulnerable. Fifty-six percent of students in their final year of college carry four or more credit cards.

Congress and the White House have played a role. The nation's leaders have always had an incentive to shove costs for current promises onto the backs of future generations. It's only now become respectable to do so.

Wall Street has played a role. Bill Gates built a socially useful product to make his fortune. But what message do the compensation packages that hedge fund managers get send across the country?

I doubt that I'd end up agreeing with Brooks 100% about how to address this problem, but this isn't a bad start. It's a worthwhile column to read.

McCAIN ON ABORTION....One of the inexplicable side effects of John McCain's maverick reputation is the number of people who believe — or, perhaps, desperately want to believe — that he's basically pretty moderate on abortion rights. Columnist Froma Harrop is one of them, but Steve Benen sets the record straight:

First, Harrop is willing to gamble, but pro-choice Democrats have to know better....[Harrop] concludes that McCain's voting record of complete and total opposition to reproductive rights for nearly a quarter century is insincere, and once in the White House, he'll suddenly transform into a moderate. This is sheer fantasy.

Second, McCain is going to great lengths to prove how completely wrong Harrop really is. Indeed, McCain is telling anyone who will listen that he'd be even further to the right than Bush on this issue, subtly criticizing Griswold, and by extension, the very notion of a right to privacy.

....And third, it's utterly foolish to narrowly focus the inquiry to the Supreme Court. McCain is practically desperate to stack the court with more far-right justices — his active support for Bork wasn't an accident — but if we take a more general look at McCain and women's issues, we see that McCain will maintain the global gag order, supports the court's ruling on Ledbetter, has expressed no interest in civil rights protections for women, and has voted against everything from requiring health care plans to cover birth control to international family planning funding to public education for emergency contraception.

McCain tends to use soothing, nonconfrontational language when he talks about social issues, but his actual record on abortion is about as hardline conservative as you can get. A lot of moderates who like McCain seem to be averting their gaze from this and trying to persuade themselves that it's all just politics and the real McCain is a lot like them: not a big fan of abortion, maybe, but not really extreme about it either. Unfortunately, it ain't so. If McCain gets into office, his record is pretty clear: he'll do everything he can to reduce or eliminate access to abortion, starting with poor women and working his way up. Read Steve's whole post for more.

PERMANENT PRESENCE....Juan Cole on Saturday:

Al-Hayat reports in Arabic that the Da'wa (Islamic Mission) Party has decisively split. It is the party of the Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki. The new branch, Da'wa- National Reform, has been formed by former PM Ibrahim Jaafari.... Al-Hayat estimated that at least 10 members of parliament have also defected to the new party led by Jaafari.

Those 10 members of Da'wa- National Reform in parliament have joined a new political bloc consisting of the Sadrists (30 MPs), the Iraqi List (24), National Dialogue (11), Islamic Virtue Party (Fadhila) (15). These 90 MPs oppose the soft partition of Iraq and generally have a strong Iraqi nationalist orientation. Several have expressed opposition to the US-Iraqi security agreement now being negotiated.

In Iran on Monday:

Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri Maliki concluded a three-day visit to Iran after meeting Monday with Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who warned that the continued presence of U.S. troops was "the main obstacle on the way to progress and prosperity in Iraq."

....Khamenei and other Iranian politicians have repeatedly urged Maliki's government not to sign a status of forces agreement being negotiated with the United States. The agreement would provide a legal framework for the continued presence of U.S. troops in Iraq after the United Nations mandate expires at the end of this year.

Later the same day in Washington:

The Bush administration is conceding for the first time that the United States may not finish a complex security agreement with Iraq before President Bush leaves office.

Faced with stiff Iraqi opposition, it is "very possible" the U.S. may have to extend an existing U.N. mandate, said a senior administration official close to the talks....Iraqi officials have raised a number of objections to the draft documents, both publicly and privately. And they are now suggesting that the latest proposal isn't even worth submitting to their parliament for approval.

On Monday two Iraqi lawmakers who saw the proposed draft said the document, put forward Sunday, said it seeks to address some of Iraq's concerns. It adds an explicit promise that U.S. forces in Iraq will not attack neighboring countries and that Iraqi authorities will be notified in advance of any action by U.S. ground forces, the lawmakers said.

....Hadi al-Amri, head of the Badr Organization, a pro-government Shiite party with close ties to Iran, said the latest draft was still unacceptable, and warned that the positions and interests of the two sides are so far apart that any kind of agreement is "impossible."

There's literally no one outside the Bush administration itself that supports any kind of permanent U.S. presence in Iraq. No one, that is, except for John McCain. But don't call him McBush just because he supports Bush's Iraq policy, Bush's tax policies, Bush's foreign policy, and Bush's social policies. That would be unfair.

SEBELIUS....Yesterday I mentioned Kansas governor Kathleen Sebelius as a short-list contender to be Barack Obama's running mate. If you're curious to learn more about her, head over to the Huffington Post where Sam Stein runs down her pluses and minuses.

CHARTERS IN LA....The California Charter Schools Association has released a study showing that charter schools in Los Angeles outperform city-run schools:

"It's pretty significant that seven out of 10 charters actually outperform their most similarly matched district public school," said Caprice Young, chief executive of the charter schools association, citing one finding in the report. She said the study was intended to answer the question parents are most likely to ask: How does their local charter school stack up against the nearest comparable regular schools?

....The study found that charters, on average, were improving their test scores at a faster clip than traditional schools. However, it also found a big difference in achievement between "mature" charters — at least 6 years old — and those more recently established. The older charters scored significantly higher, leading the association to call for patience in judging young charter schools.

There are at least a couple of huge caveats here. First, the study was done by a charter advocacy group. Second, trying to match up "comparable" schools is really, really hard. In fact, it's close to impossible, especially with small sample sizes, so even if CCSA's study is legit, its results still might be an artifact of differences in where the schools are located or in the specific ethnic makeups of their neighborhoods, rather than differences in teaching methods.

Still, it's encouraging news if the results can be confirmed. Done properly, charter schools have the potential to be a good deal. If they can figure out a way to outperform LAUSD schools, more power to them.

CRIME AND POVERTY....In the Atlantic this month, Hannah Rosin writes about a mysterious increase in crime taking place not in the inner cities of New York or LA, but in the suburbs of medium sized cities across the country. Cities like Memphis:

Memphis has always been associated with some amount of violence. But why has Elvis's hometown turned into America's new South Bronx? [Lieutenant Doug] Barnes thinks he knows one big part of the answer, as does the city's chief of police. A handful of local criminologists and social scientists think they can explain it, too. But it's a dismal answer, one that city leaders have made clear they don't want to hear. It's an answer that offers up racial stereotypes to fearful whites in a city trying to move beyond racial tensions. Ultimately, it reaches beyond crime and implicates one of the most ambitious antipoverty programs of recent decades.

Uh oh. I have a sinking feeling I can guess what's coming. And sure enough:

Early every Thursday, Richard Janikowski drives to Memphis's Airways Station for the morning meeting of police precinct commanders....A criminologist with the University of Memphis, Janikowski has established an unusually close relationship with the city police department. From the police chief to the beat cop, everyone knows him as "Dr. J," or "GQ" if he's wearing his nice suit. When his researchers are looking for him, they can often find him outside the building, having a smoke with someone in uniform.

....About five years ago, Janikowski embarked on a more ambitious project. He'd built up enough trust with the police to get them to send him daily crime and arrest reports, including addresses and types of crime. He began mapping all violent and property crimes, block by block, across the city. "These cops on the streets were saying that crime patterns are changing," he said, so he wanted to look into it.

....When his map was complete, a clear if strangely shaped pattern emerged....Janikowski might not have managed to pinpoint the cause of this pattern if he hadn't been married to Phyllis Betts, a housing expert at the University of Memphis.

....About six months ago, they decided to put a hunch to the test. Janikowski merged his computer map of crime patterns with Betts's map of Section 8 rentals. Where Janikowski saw a bunny rabbit, Betts saw a sideways horseshoe ("He has a better imagination," she said). Otherwise, the match was near-perfect. On the merged map, dense violent-crime areas are shaded dark blue, and Section 8 addresses are represented by little red dots. All of the dark-blue areas are covered in little red dots, like bursts of gunfire. The rest of the city has almost no dots.

Their basic conclusion is simple: the goal of Section 8 is to get rid of inner city high-rises and disperse poor residents into other parts of the city. Eliminate areas of concentrated poverty, goes the thinking (those where more than 40% of residents are poor), and you'll eliminate many of the pathologies associated with poverty too. But that turned out to be only half true. Crime did go down in the city cores where this happened, but the number of areas of moderate poverty (20-40% poor) went up, and the crime in these areas went up too. Inner city gangs simply reformed elsewhere.

This is a depressing story, and not one that has a conclusion yet. It's certainly not a blanket condemnation of Section 8, which may simply need more time to affect a problem that's been generations in the making. In fact, if you read the whole story one of the things that comes through is the need to expand programs like Section 8 so that people aren't simply being dumped into new neighborhoods, and to improve the use of "cops on the dots" policing programs that have been successful in larger cities. Still, sobering stuff, and worth a read.

ENDING THE ADDICTION....Amory Lovins on reducing our oil use:

MJ: So how could Washington best cut fuel consumption?

AL: ....For cars, the most effective thing would be a "feebate": In the showroom, less-efficient models would have a corresponding fee, while the more-efficient ones would get a rebate paid for by the fees. That way when choosing what model you want you would pay attention to fuel savings over its whole life, not just the first year or two. It turns out that the automakers can actually make more money this way because they will want to get their cars from the fee zone into the rebate zone by putting in more technology. The technology has a higher profit margin than the rest of the vehicle.

This is one of my favorite ideas, but I almost never it see it get any love. It's revenue neutral, it's progressive, it's simple to implement, it incentivizes good behavior without any draconian regulation, and it's highly effective. So why the low profile? Is it considered a political nonstarter? Or what?

Here's a further suggestion: require stickers to list the estimated cost of fuel consumption over a five year period. The estimate doesn't have to be perfect, just close enough to make it clear to consumers how much more one car costs than another over its life. Upside: it's free. Downsides: none that I can think of.