ZELL-ING OUT. Not that it's a surprise or anything, considering the way he's been attacking the Democratic Party for months now, but Georgia Sen. Zell Miller has still reached a new low for someone calling himself a Democrat in agreeing to speak at the Republican National Convention in New York. Quoth the AP:

Georgia Sen. Zell Miller, the highest profile Democrat to endorse President Bush for re-election, will speak at the Republican National Convention later this summer, a congressional aide said Friday.

According to the aide, who spoke on condition of anonymity, Miller will give his address on Wednesday night of the convention in New York. The Bush-Cheney campaign was expected to make an official announcement later in the day. The convention will be held Aug. 30-Sept. 2.

The speech by Miller, a former two-term governor, comes 12 years after he delivered the keynote address for Bill Clinton at the 1992 Democratic National Convention, also held in New York.

Miller, who is retiring in January, has voted with Republicans more often than his own party and has been a key sponsor of many of Bush's top legislative priorities, including the Republican's tax cuts and education plan.

In May, Miller spoke at the Georgia Republican convention and criticized Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry as an "out-of-touch, ultraliberal from Taxachusetts" whose foreign and domestic policies would seriously weaken the country.

"I'm afraid that my old Democratic 'ties that bind' have become unraveled," Miller said.

While it's not entirely clear what the Democrats can do about Miller, given that he's already set to retire, Miller's continuing courtship of the GOP higher-ups and the president ought to start counting for something, and counting soon.

Just two years ago Miller told supporters of Max Cleland, "No outsider, no matter how well-intentioned, no matter how well-respected, can come into Georgia and holler 'liberal' and expect Georgians to jump," according to the Atlanta Journal Consitution.

His new speaking engagement proves he still believes that if you're going attack someone as a liberal, it helps to do it as an inside job.

--Garance Franke-Ruta

JUST POSTED ON TAP ONLINE. Breaking news from Arizona, where Ralph Nader's effort to get himself on November's ballot is proving more than unsavory. As the Arizona Democratic Party seeks to disqualify many of the signatures supporting Ralph's candidacy, Max Blumenthal burrows into the seedy world of professional petitioning to show us Nader's newest grassroots allies.

Also on The Daily Prospect:

• Fahrenhaughty 9/11: Michael Moore’s new film is powerful, sure -- but it’s also sanctimonious, callous, and cheap. By Noy Thrupkaew.
• Thucydiots: Two weeks ago, conservatives cast themselves as Reagan's children. But their Iraq adventure makes them look more Nixonian than Reaganesque. By Jim Sleeper.
• Good Bill Hunting: The Hunting of the President's director/screenwriter talks about Clinton's gift, Larry Case's fantasy car, and what his movie has in common with The Stepford Wives. An interview with Harry Thomason. By Tara McKelvey.
• Kerry's Catch-22: President Bush has set a fiscal trap. If elected, President Kerry would have to work hard to spring free of it. By Robert Kuttner.
• A Global Vision for Labor: Andy Stern sees a new mission for the biggest unions -- and it’ll require some major changes. By Harold Meyerson.

RYAN'S TOAST. Illinois GOP senate candidate Jack Ryan, perhaps the first politician in history to be brought down by a sex scandal involving wanting to have sex with his wife, is planning to withdraw from the Illinois senate race, the A.P. is reporting:

Illinois Republican candidate Jack Ryan intends to abandon his Senate bid after four days spent trying to weather a political storm stirred by sex club allegations, GOP officials said Friday.  

A formal announcement was expected within hours, said these officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity.

Ryan conducted an overnight poll to gauge his support in the wake of the allegations made by his ex-wife in divorce records unsealed earlier this week. Aides said in advance his only options were to withdraw or to redouble his campaign efforts with a massive infusion of money from his personal wealth.

Illinois GOP leaders would select another candidate in the event of a withdrawal. Ryan's replacement would become an instant underdog in a campaign against Democratic State Sen. Barack Obama.

Some have worried that a Ryan withdrawal may allow the state GOP to field a stronger candidate against state Senator and rising Democratic Party star Barack Obama, such as former Illinois GOP Gov. Jim Edgar. That prospect seems extremely unlikely; Edgar had already refused to run for the senate seat last year, despite a personal appeal from President Bush, and many considered Ryan to be the strongest statewide candidate the troubled Republican Party could field. Smart money in the state says that the Republicans will have to run a damage-control race from here on out and simply resign themselves to a relatively weak candidate who is at least taint-free and perceived as generally decent, such as state Sen. Steve Rauschenberger, who lost to Ryan in the primary.

--Garance Franke-Ruta

THE REAL REAGAN? I recall that when Edmund Morris's long-awaited biography of Ronald Reagan, Dutch, finally came out some years ago, it was widely criticized (for Morris's use of, among other things, consciously made-up scenes attempting to get the reader inside Reagan's otherwise mysterious persona). But I got around to reading Morris's remembrance of Reagan in the current New Yorker, and it was very, very good. It's the only thing I've read about the late former president, in fact, that left me feeling I knew more than I did when I started. I won't say Morris's piece is balanced -- more important than that, it is nuanced and complex and contradictory. I felt like I was getting a fuller picture than in other articles and coverage.

Check it out here if you are not already totally saturated with Reaganania.

--Nick Confessore

WHO IS IGNORING WHAT? I don't recall conservatives having been too upset "that more wasn't done to stop the killing" in Rwanda back in 1994, but I was only thirteen, so perhaps I'm mistaken. Still, I can't help but think there's a whiff of disingenuousness about Rich Lowry's column lambasting global indifference to the unfolding tragedy in Sudan. The point, it seems, is simply to excoriate the president's critics:

Unfortunately, Sudan doesn't fit comfortably into the Bush-bashers' international-relations categories, or we might hear more about the issue. For the president's critics the word "diplomacy" means one thing: strong-arm Israel. And "multilateralism" tends to mean only appeasing France. So the administration's diplomatic achievement in Sudan might as well not exist, and its effort to muster other international actors -- from the U.N. to Europe -- behind a multilateral diplomatic and humanitarian-aid initiative in Darfur is ignored. And even though China is obstructing diplomatic pressure on Sudan because of its oil business there, there are, unsurprisingly, no cries of "blood for oil."

Fair points, perhaps, but if I were writing about the ineffectual response to a global crisis, I might spare some time to criticize not the president's political opponents, but the president himself. After all, unlike his opponents, the president is actually in a position to do something about all this. And he isn't. Lowry's fundamental unseriousness about this is typified by his laudatory reference to "the administration's history of involvement in Sudan," which he glosses thusly:

Negotiations between the North and South had been bumping along ineffectually for years, until Bush appointed former senator John Danforth -- now the U.S. representative to the U.N. -- as his special envoy to the country. High-level Bush officials were engaged in the peace talks on a daily basis, and finally a ceasefire was forged this May.

That's perfectly correct, but the ceasefire negotiations the administration oversaw have nothing to do with the Darfur crisis. Or, rather, it does have something to do with the Darfur crisis -- it's counterproductive. As this week's New Republic editorial points out, "The Bush administration fears that, if it alienates the Khartoum government over Darfur, it will undermine one of its signature African achievements -- the potential end to the 21-year civil war in southern Sudan."

Now as I pointed out the other day the stark reality is that there isn't a huge amount we can do about Sudan at this point, since such a large portion of our military is otherwise engaged in Iraq. Phil Carter has some worthwhile thoughts on that point, and on what it would take to build a military force-structure that's well adapted to the 21st century security environment. Thinking seriously about military reform, however, isn't nearly as fun as using mass murder abroad as an opportunity to level some political cheap shots.

--Matthew Yglesias

MOORE IN THE MIDDLE. I've been out in the heartland all week and wanted to add a note on how Michael Moore's movie looks from here. The thing to remember is that most of the presidential campaigns' television advertisements are being shown out here and in the Southwest, and the ads for Moore's movie can be especially devastating when viewed in that context. I was down in Springfield, Il., earlier in the week and saw a John Kerry health-care spot -- "Country," which is in rotation in 14 battleground states, including Illinois media market neighbor Missouri -- followed immediately by what appeared, at first, to be a Bush campaign advertisement. Except that it quickly became clear that it wasn't. It was the ad for "Farenheit 9/11," which makes the golfing president look callow and out-of-touch. The two spots together provided quite a striking one-two punch -- and the Moore ad made the fairly traditional Kerry spot suddenly that much more memorable.

--Garance Franke-Ruta

"CHANGING THE TONE." Another of President Bush's campaign promises goes up in smoke, courtesy of Vice President Cheney.

Remind me again of who's to blame for bringing bitter partisanship and polarization to Washington?

--Nick Confessore

GOOD FOR THE GOOSE. I can't fault Michael Moore for assembling a rapid-response team to defend Fahrenheit 9/11; he's just stockpiling the same sort of firepower that'll be used in attempts to discredit the film. (And quite an arsenal he has, according to The New York Times -- although I have to wonder at the choice of perennial albatross Chris Lehane.)

But if, as Moore says, "The most important thing we have is truth on our side," why aren't they willing to release transcripts of the film to potential critics? Atrios linked to today's Scarborough Country, which featured Lehane and Michael Isikoff; Isikoff has become the first journalist to feel the full wrath of the Moorish army, for his depiction of Moore's presentation of the post–September 11 Saudi flights. Isikoff's report is the sort of close-but-not-quite journalism that merits a correction, sure, but Lehane et al. seem to be more interested in their own outraged reaction than in making sure the problem doesn't happen again:

SCARBOROUGH: Will you provide Michael Isikoff and will you provide us a full transcript of this movie?

LEHANE: You can come to us whenever you want about any single fact that you want.

(CROSSTALK)

SCARBOROUGH: No, no. Answer the question.

...

LEHANE: You come to me with any issue that you have and I‘ll go over it with you.

(CROSSTALK)

SCARBOROUGH: Chris Lehane, will you provide us a full transcript, yes or no?

LEHANE: As I provided Michael Isikoff when he asked, I provided the transcript of the issue that he was looking at.

SCARBOROUGH: OK.

(CROSSTALK)

LEHANE: And Michael still hasn‘t answered my question.

As a PR strategy, this makes sense; the filmmakers hold all the cards and will continually have inaccurate stories to decry as malicious. (It works pretty well, too; for example, Atrios was referencing the conversation to criticize Isikoff, and didn't touch the transcript issue.) Don't get me wrong here -- it's refreshing to see a smart PR strategy on the anti-Bush side. But especially when one of your causes involves disclosure of documents, shouldn't you be willing to disclose the transcript of the film you want people to accurately quote?

--Jeffrey Dubner

JUST POSTED ON TAP ONLINE. What does the upcoming handover of sovereignty in Iraq mean for the U.S. economy? Donald Rumsfeld and Alan Greenspan may seem to operate in distinct worlds, but, as Robert Reich explains, their missions are inseparably linked.

Also on The Daily Prospect:

• Dodge the Draft: There are rumblings in Washington to bring back the draft -- but when it comes to the military, "bigger" and "better" don't go hand in hand. By Michael O'Hanlon.
• Gun Nut: Uh, Mr. President, your Freudian slip is showing. By Charles P. Pierce.
• Bell's Curveball: Publicly, House Democrats distanced themselves from Chris Bell after he filed an ethics complaint against Tom DeLay. But privately, they exult. By Terence Samuel.
• Purple People Watch: Senate races are shaping up, with appearances from Heritage Foundation and the Coors Light Twins. A weekly roundup from the swing states by The American Prospect staff.

ARE PRO-CHOICE CATHOLIC POLITICIANS? From this Associated Press report, it looks like the bishops' task force assigned to think through the issue of political leaders who disagree with the church's teachings on abortion and euthanasia is adopting something of sensible middle ground. They're obviously aware of the risks of instituting a flat denial of Communion to such individuals:

"Disciplinary actions are permitted," McCarrick said. "But they should be applied when efforts at dialogue, persuasion and conversion have been fully exhausted."

McCarrick said keeping the sacrament from defiant Catholic lawmakers could turn Communion into a "partisan political battleground," create a backlash in support of abortion rights and raise concerns about the loyalties of Catholic politicians.

"It could be more difficult for faithful Catholics to serve in public life because they might be seen not as standing up for principle, but as under pressure from the hierarchy," McCarrick said. "We could turn weak leaders who bend to the political winds into people who are perceived as courageous resistors of episcopal authority."

He recommended instead that bishops do more to educate Catholics that opposition to abortion and euthanasia is based on the earliest church teachings and is unequivocal.

Church leaders at the Colorado meeting voted 183-6 to adopt a statement warning lawmakers at odds with church teaching that they were "cooperating in evil," but made no definitive statement on whether they should be denied Communion. Under church law, each bishop decides how to apply Catholic teachings in his own diocese.

More on this as it develops.

--Nick Confessore

STABBING BACK. The stab-in-the-back defense has hit the big-time, graduating from conservative media outlets like National Review to Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz -- you know, actual administration officials who might be considered to bear some responsibility if that Iraq War thing doesn’t work out so well in the end. Wolfowitz’s cut at the press took the meme to a new low, spurring a little rightful outrage from Howard Kurtz:

[T]he suggestion that they are too cowed to leave Baghdad ignores the great courage that many of these journalists have shown.

In the past couple of months:

New York Times reporter John Burns and several colleagues were blindfolded and driven to a makeshift prison before being released after eight hours.

Times reporter Jeffrey Gettleman and his driver were abducted by gun-toting men with scarves over their faces before being released.

Washington Post reporter Dan Williams barely escaped death when his car came under hostile fire after he traveled to Fallujah.

CNN correspondent Michael Holmes also escaped injury when his car was blasted by AK-47s, but two of CNN's Iraqi employees were killed.

In another attack, hostile fire shattered the window in a car carrying Fox's Geraldo Rivera.

Wouldn't any prudent person be careful about traveling on these dangerous roads? Are journalists supposed to be cowboys who chase stories with no regard to their personal safety? And aren't the reporters operating in an environment that administration officials predicted long ago would be a safe and democratic environment once Saddam was toppled?

The administration will run into more of this if it plans to really push the argument that, if things end poorly in Iraq, it’ll be because the media compromised the effort. If there’s one he-said, she-said that the media won’t take part in, this is probably it.

--Jeffrey Dubner

CLINTON REDUX. I've not read My Life, but I did notice that Michiko Kakutani's New York Times review of the book was incredibly harsh, as well as predictably shallow and lazy. One might chalk this up to bias, but Kakutani is rather well known for nasty reviews; I doubt it was payback for Bill Clinton's slams of the Times. I do, however, think the paper made a mistake in assigning such a book to a reviewer who evidently has little patience for questions of policy. (See Prospect editor Michael Tomasky's take here.)

Someone at the Times evidently agrees, since they've rushed Larry McMurtry's review of the same book onto the Web a couple of weeks early. McMurtry's is a more positive, though not at all fawning, treatment. It's worth reading. And, of course, so is Slate's eternally-helpful "Juicy Bits" column, which features the book in this installment..

--Nick Confessore

TRENT LOTT PART II? Here's the Los Angeles Times on last March's bizzare coronation ceremony for the Rev. Sun Myung Moon, which was attended by a panoply of leading Republicans (and a few Democrats):

It's not every day that a onetime federal tax cheat gets an ornate crown placed on his head in the Dirksen Senate Office Building in Washington before an audience of more than 300 while he explains that Hitler and Stalin, whose souls he claims to have posthumously redeemed, view him as the new Messiah. But then the Rev. Sun Myung Moon, who has presided over mass weddings in Central Park, has always had a flair for the unusual.

The "international crown of peace awards" ceremony staged by Moon and his wife on March 23 -- first disclosed by Salon.com writer John Gorenfeld and now being more widely reported -- is not only a tribute to his entrepreneurial skills but it also offers a valuable lesson in how Washington works.

Weird stuff. As the Times relates, "The name of the senator who gave permission for Moon to use the Dirksen Building remains a mystery." Wouldn't it be nice to know which senator exercised such poor judgment?

--Nick Confessore

NO RECOURSE FOR THE LITTLE GUY. Pandering to the insurance industry, gas and oil producers and tobacco companies, the Senate has added the so-called Class Action Fairness Act of 2004 (S. 2062) to its summer legislative agenda. Anything but fair, this legislation would make it far more difficult for consumers to fight corporate abuse. Just how badly does big business want this legislation passed? Enough to hire nearly over 475 lobbyists to advocate for this anti-consumer legislation.

Visit Moving Ideas to learn more about this anti-consumer bill and what you can do to help defeat it!
--Editors of MovingIdeas.Org

JUST POSTED ON TAP ONLINE. "We realized that we were all badly disillusioned with the government and felt we just had to stand up and be heard, even though that was a little against our usual behavior." So says William C. Harrop, ambassador to Israel under George H. W. Bush and the organizer of Diplomats and Military Commanders for Change. See what else Harrop had to say in his interview with the Prospect's Laura Secor.

Also on The Daily Prospect:

• Backstage Pass: How David Bossie and Citizens United snuck their anti-Clinton ad onto 60 Minutes (in seven markets, anyway). By Rob Garver.
• The Last Hurdle: John Kerry's biggest problem -- still -- is the national security gap. Here's how he can close it. By Kenneth S. Baer.

THE MORAL CASE. Looking back on the Iraq War, the editors of The New Republic concluded this week:

But, if our strategic rationale for war has collapsed, our moral one has not. In the '90s, this magazine supported military intervention to prevent slaughter in Bosnia, Kosovo, and (unsuccessfully) Rwanda. And, in the process, we learned that stopping genocide brings unexpected rewards. Because the United States went to war twice in the Balkans, southeastern Europe is now largely at peace, increasingly democratic, and slowly integrating into Europe. By contrast, in Rwanda, where the United States stood by, genocide's aftershocks have helped plunge much of Central Africa into war, killing millions and destabilizing an entire region.

I'm not so sure about this rationale. Ironically, arch-interventionist John McCain's op-ed in today's Washington Post shows us the best reason for skepticism. Writing about the unfolding catastrophe in Sudan, he writes:

The U.N. Security Council should demand that the Sudanese government immediately stop all violence against civilians, disarm and disband its militias, allow full humanitarian access, and let displaced persons return home. Should the government refuse to reverse course, its leadership should face targeted multilateral sanctions and visa bans. Peacekeeping troops should be deployed to Darfur to protect civilians and expedite the delivery of humanitarian aid, and we should encourage African, European and Arab countries to contribute to these forces.

The United States must stand ready to do what it can to stop the massacres. In addition to pushing the U.N. Security Council to act, we should provide financial and logistical support to countries willing to provide peacekeeping forces. The United States should initiate its own targeted sanctions against the Janjaweed and government leaders, and consider other ways we can increase pressure on the government. We must also continue to tell the world about the murderous activities in which these leaders are engaged, and make clear to all that this behavior is totally unacceptable.

This is pretty weak brew, seeing as how the genocide in Sudan is actually unfolding before our eyes, rather than, as in Iraq, being something that took place years ago. A prominent US official is calling for other countries to intervene militarily while we "provide financial and logistical support." Why shouldn't we do more? The answer, of course, is that our ground forces are stuck in Iraq participating in a mission that's under-manned as it is. Indeed, since the Iraq War started, we've seen situations where there's been a compelling case for American humanitarian intervention in Liberia, Congo, and Haiti as well as Sudan, but in all cases there simply wasn't very much we could do consistent with the continuing mission in Iraq. Meanwhile, even if other countries were inclined to send their forces abroad, the fact is that we're also trying to gain more foreign support for the Iraq mission.

The point is simply that there's no shortage of problems in the world that could be ameliorated by the use of American military power. On the contrary, the problem is that there's a shortage of American military power to ameliorate serious humanitarian problems. That means that unless we're going to create a much larger military, we need to be careful about how we expend those forces. That applies not only to "realist" skeptics of humanitarian mentions but also -- in some ways especially -- to those of us who believe in using American power to advance American interests. Like anything else, the use of force entails opportunity costs in addition to direct ones, and jumping at anything with any kind of humanitarian component winds up creating a need to ignore more acute crises later.

--Matthew Yglesias

COUGH UP. Here's an interesting scoop about how the Republican K Street machine works. Not only is the GOP leadership pressuring trade groups to hire Republicans, but they are pressuring Democratic business lobbyists to spy on Democratic legislators. Reports The Hill:

Democratic lobbyists are giving House Republican aides and lawmakers closely held information about the voting intentions of congressional Democrats in exchange for access to private meetings with GOP officials on Capitol Hill.

For House Republican whips, the inside information on Democratic voting strategies can yield a crucial awareness of what the ultimate vote count on the floor might be.

...

House Republican sources provided The Hill with e-mails showing lobbyists providing information about Democratic whip efforts to defeat the foreign sales corporation (FSC) tax measure. The $143 billion in tax breaks for corporations passed 251-178; 48 Democrats broke ranks and voted for the bill, and 23 Republicans opposed it.

The e-mails reveal that some Democratic lobbyists are willing to sell out their former bosses and that House Democratic leaders are having difficulty keeping their members in line.

In an e-mail, a Democratic lobbyist asks permission to attend a meeting about FSC: “I heard there is a … meeting tomorrow at 3pm. Is it OK for me to attend on behalf of my clients?”

The GOP aide replied: “Sure, but what intel are you gonna get us? You worked for [Rep. Robert] Matsui [D-Calif.] right? Where are the California Dems? Is [Minority Leader Nancy] Pelosi [D-Calif.] really holding Dems feet to the fire?”

The lobbyist replied: “Yeah, I worked for Matsui (back when he was [for] free trade). I think Pelosi will be working this hard — you probably already know this, but I just heard that the Dems will be putting in repatriation in their substitute (which will mollify the [California] and West Coast Dems).”

Interesting stuff, and completely unprecedented, as far as I know.

By the way, in case you're wondering -- yes, Roll Call and The Hill regularly scoop The Washington Post and The New York Times on lobbying stories.

--Nick Confessore

RISING WAGES? USA Today's editorialists take a whack at John Kerry's criticism of the president:

Most measures of economic health, while below levels of the booming 1990s, have been heading upward. The economy has added an impressive 1.2 million jobs since January, inflation rose a modest 2% over the past year, and wages are picking up.

This is reminiscent of The Washington Post's June 19 editorial which made the same point:

Now comes the next round of political gloom-mongering. Sen. John F. Kerry, the victor in the Democratic primaries, has been telling voters this week that although job creation may have recovered, wages are the real problem. "In the last year, wages have gone down, and prices have gone up," the candidate told an audience on Tuesday. Actually, hourly wages for non-supervisory workers have risen this year by 2.2 percent as of May, so they kept pace with consumer price inflation.

Damn those lying, pessimistic Democrats. Except that as the Post had to concede yesterday, Kerry's actually right:

On June 19 we wrote that wage increases had kept pace with inflation in the year to May, and criticized Sen. John F. Kerry for suggesting that wages had fallen behind. We were wrong and Mr. Kerry was right: Hourly wages for non-supervisory workers rose 2.2 percent, while the consumer price index rose 3.1 percent.

So back to USA Today: While "wages are picking up" nominally, real wages -- called "real" because they're the ones that matter -- are actually going down, not "heading upward." Now as to whether there's anything in particular Kerry could do in the short term to fix this, I'm not so sure. Things like indexing the minimum wage to inflation and making it easier to organize unions should boost the labor share of economic growth down the road, but that's a different story.

--Matthew Yglesias

WE TAKE IT BACK. After having the Office of Legal Counsel write a memo explaining that torture isn't really torture, and that even if it is, the laws don't apply to the president, but in case they do, here's a whole bunch of ways to break the law and get away with it, too, and then refusing the release the memo to Congress without any legal authority, the White House has decided to release it after all and note that maybe this whole thing wasn't such a good idea in the first place. The Post's coverage fails to note that the author of the "disavowed," "derided," "overbroad," and "irrelevant" legal opinion has since been appointed to a spot as a federal appellate judge by the Bush administration.

The administration's line on this is still filled with impenetrable ambiguities. "Bush has not authorized any interrogations that would employ methods outside the law, [an official said] said." The whole point of the memo, however, was to define as legal certain things that are not, in fact, legal. It didn't say, "go break the law," it said, "if you do this you won't be breaking the law." So when they say they're not employing methods outside the law, we need to know which law they're talking about -- the real ones, or the ones their lawyers have made up.

Stepping back, though, the really important thing is this: The administration wrote this opinion, and then sought -- quite stridently -- to keep it secret. Only when faced with a public outcry are they willing to back away from the doctrine it entailed. If the White House had had its way, the public would never have heard a word of any of this, and the memo would never have been disavowed. And, of course, we don't know what other secret memos may be lurking around somewhere. What's more, as Michael Froomkin points out it's not clear from this that the administration has disavowed the expansive view of presidential power that underlay the original torture memos -- the new position seems to be that Bush could order torture if he wanted to, but he just isn't doing it.

--Matthew Yglesias

MIX UPS. Knight-Ridder's Jonathan Landay reports that one plank of the Iraq-Qaeda connection theory seems to be based on a simple case of mistaken identity:

Some civilian Pentagon officials and other experts have cited Ahmad Hikmat Shakir as potential evidence of an Iraqi role in the Sept. 11 conspiracy, a possibility that grew with the discovery of the lieutenant colonel's name on the Fedayeen Saddam rosters.

But the U.S. officials who spoke to Knight Ridder on Monday said there were a number of reasons that intelligence analysts doubted that the officer was the same Iraqi who met the two Sept. 11 hijackers in Kuala Lumpur.

First, they said, the order in which the names were entered on the rosters was different from the name of the Iraqi who worked in Malaysia, indicating that the names didn't belong to the same person.

"It's very confusing, but it's not the same guy," one U.S. official said.

More importantly, the U.S. officials said, U.S. intelligence analysts have determined that on the dates marked on the rosters, the man who met the hijackers in Malaysia wasn't in Iraq. The officials declined to reveal the dates.

This reminds me of another insufficiently noted element in this saga, namely the tendency of certain folks out there on the right to spin grandiose tales of collaboration on the rather slender thread that Abu Zarqawi once got his leg amputated in Iraq. This was always a bit dubious -- Zarqawi typically operated in the part of Iraq that was outside of Saddam's control, he traveled under aliases as though he didn't want the Baath regime to know what he was doing, and his organization wasn't really a part of al-Qaeda anyway -- but more importantly, some of the videotapes we've seen over the past month have made it pretty clear that Zarqawi has two legs.

The moral in both of these stories is that an awful lot of information pours into the U.S. intelligence community about the murky world of terrorism and rogue states, not all of it accurate. That's why there's an intelligence analysis process where people can look at the totality of available -- and sometimes conflicting -- reports, assess the reliability of various sources, and try to make an informed judgment about what's happening. When little bits of data are ripped out of that and leaked to journalists or otherwise paraded in front of the public, you wind up with a lot of noise. If the parading is being done by people motivated with a specific agenda, you can put together some superficially compelling theories that have no real support within the professional community -- and as we see with the names, you wind up making sloppy mistakes.

--Matthew Yglesias

JUST POSTED ON TAP ONLINE. Why'd you do it, Bill? Of all the campaign seasons in all the countries in the world, you publish into Kerry's? The Prospect staff asks: Will My Life hurt the Kerry campaign? Is it, as Sarah Blustain says, "the last thing we need" -- or is Mike Tomasky right that "John Kerry will have suffered nothing" because of the book?

Elsewhere on The Daily Prospect:

• It Ain't Lyin' If...: Bush’s words may be semantically secure, but his intent has always been to mislead. By Matthew Yglesias.
• Never Mind Bob Bullock: Bush is talking again about bipartisanship. It's gonna take a lot more to fool voters this time. By Mary Lynn F. Jones.
• Get Over Yourselves: Our columnist slaps around Margaret Cho and Tom Hanks and tells them to stop being so incredibly smug. By Noy Thrupkaew.

And don't miss these articles from our upcoming July issue:

• It Was a Very Bad Year: There's little to celebrate about Bill Keller's first anniversary at the helm of The New York Times. And the Judith Miller fiasco is only part of the problem. By Todd Gitlin.
• Ballot Insecurity: In theory, the June 30 handover in Iraq is supposed to clear the path to free and fair elections. In practice, it’s a little more complicated than that. By Laura Secor.
• The Unique Brutality of Texas: Why the Lone Star State leads the nation in executions. By Joseph Rosenbloom.

LOOK AT THOSE NUMBERS AGAIN. Newsweek columnist Robert Samuelson has a tut-tutting and rather meandering column about that Pew poll on media and politics. The thing is, it's almost as if Samuelson is blind to his own evidence:

Still, the latest Pew survey confirms—with lots of numbers—something disturbing that we all sense: people are increasingly picking their media on the basis of partisanship. If you're Republican and conservative, you listen to talk radio and watch the Fox News Channel. If you're liberal and Democratic, you listen to National Public Radio and watch "NewsHour With Jim Lehrer." It's like picking restaurants: Chinese for some, Italian for others. And everyone can punch up partisan blogs—the fast food of the news business. What's disturbing is that, like restaurants, the news media may increasingly cater to their customers' (partisan) tastes. News slowly becomes more selective and slanted.

Rush Limbaugh has 14.5 million weekly listeners. By Pew, 77 percent are conservative, 16 percent moderate and 7 percent liberal. Or take Fox's 1.3 million prime-time viewers: 52 percent are conservative, 30 percent moderate and 13 percent liberal. By contrast, 36 percent of Americans are conservative, 38 percent moderate and 18 percent liberal. The liberals' media favorites are slightly less lopsided. "NewsHour's" audience is 22 percent conservative, 44 percent moderate and 27 percent liberal. NPR's audience is 31 percent conservative, 33 percent moderate and 30 percent liberal. Of course, many news outlets still have broad audiences. Daily newspapers are collectively close to national averages; so is CNN.

Let me get this straight. Conservatives set up media that deliberately plays to conservative listeners, demonstrably slants the news in ways that flatter the ideologies and wishes of the Republican Party, and, predictably, garner an audience that slants heavily to the right. Yet such putative "liberal media" as NPR and CNN have roughly equal numbers of liberal, moderate, and conservative viewers. Doesn't that suggest they do a much better job of reporting the news straight? And doesn't that suggest that the problem here is not symmetrical, as Samuelson -- and many other news reporters and pundits -- like to believe?

Samuelson worries, facetiously, that "the partisan drift may grow because distrust is spreading." Baloney. Here's your problem, dude: Conservative media institutions, such as Fox and the Washington Times, ostentatiously disdain the conventions of objective journalism, while the entire conservative political and media class expend enormous amounts of energy mau-mauing mainstream media outlets that do try to report the news straight. It's part of the broader conservative political strategy of labeling anything not explicitly conservative as "liberal," and then applying pressure on the institution at hand -- a newspaper, a think tank, or what have you -- to "balance" by becoming more conservative. And the strategy also helps convince grassroots conservatives that the Establishment is out to get them, building the audience for ideological media outlets while working the mainstream media to get more favorable coverage from them.

Personally, I'm not against the existence of opinionated, ideological media oulets -- I write for several of them -- and I also like that we have nonideological newspapers and magazines that at least try to play it straight. But if you're the kind of person who worries about the "sorting" of audiences, as Samuelson, than you should direct your ire to where it is due.

--Nick Confessore

OOF! Now that the divorce papers of Jack Ryan -- the GOP's Senate candidate in Illinois -- have been unsealed, we can see what it is he didn't want out there:

Jeri Ryan said her then-husband took her on three "surprise trips" in the spring of 1998 to New Orleans, New York and Paris, during which he took her to sex clubs. She said she refused to go in the first and went into the second at his insistence.

"It was a bizarre club with cages, whips and other apparatus hanging from the ceiling," she said in the court document, adding that her husband "wanted me to have sex with him there, with another couple watching. I refused."

She said on arriving at the third club, in Paris, "people were having sex everywhere. I cried. I was physically ill. [He] became very upset with me and said it was not a 'turn on' for me to cry."

In his legal response to her allegations, Jack Ryan said while he did arrange "romantic getaways" for the couple, they "did not include the type of activities she describes."

"We did go to one avant garde nightclub in Paris, which was more than either one of us felt comfortable with. We left and vowed never to return," he said.

The conventional wisdom on this is undoubtedly that Barack Obama, the talented and buzzy Democratic contender, is now a lock. But I could see how this may actually hurt Obama, because the release of these documents gives the Illinois GOP a chance to get Ryan to drop out and put somebody else on the ticket. On the other hand, the state party is bereft of real talent -- that's how retiring incumbent Peter Fitzgerald got elected -- and it's hard to imagine who they would get to replace Ryan.

--Nick Confessore

TERROR TROUBLES. The big headline result -- and rightly so -- from the latest Washington Post poll is that John Kerry has emerged with a slight lead on the issue of terrorism, which now joins virtually every other issue as a source of Democratic strength. Take a look:

• Health care (+21)
• Taxes (+13)
• Prescription drugs (+12)
• International affairs (+8)
• The economy (+5)
• The budget deficit (+4)
• Terrorism (+1)
• Iraq (-5)

When the unfolding Iraq debacle becomes Bush's strong suit, he's got a big problem. Especially because his Iraq ratings are so bad. Ruy Teixeira elaborates:

I say "interestingly enough" because other data in the poll show that people are not at all happy with how Bush is currently handling the situation in Iraq. His approval rating on Iraq, while improved over last month in the same poll, is still solidly negative at 44 percent approval/55 percent disapproval. Moreover, the poll has the most negative reading yet on whether "the war with Iraq was worth fighting": 47 percent say yes, compared to 52 percent who say no. And a remarkable 71 percent now say that there has been an "unacceptable number of US military casualties in Iraq"--also the most negative reading yet.

A host of other indicators also show the most negative results so far, including whether the war with Iraq has "contributed to the long-term security of the United States" (down to 51 percent), damaged US relations with other countries with other countries who opposed the war (up to 63 percent), contributed to long-term peace and stability in the Mideast (down to 42 percent) and damaged the United States' image in the rest of the world (up to 76 percent). And a high point has been reached (42 percent) in the number of Americans who say we should withdraw our military forces from Iraq "even if that means that civil order is not restored there".

This is dominance across such a broad range of issues, that the interesting question is why Kerry is only leading 48-44. The answer turns out to be everyone's favorite spoiler, Ralph Nader. Factor him out and Kerry's up by eight. The dark cloud, such as it is, on Kerry's horizon is that Bush still has substantial leads on who can be better trusted in a crisis, and on a generic question about making "the country safer and more secure." In light of Bush's poor terrorism ratings, the public is probably open to pursuasion on those counts, but Kerry hasn't yet made his case.

The big X-factor in the campaign, I continue to think, is not the economy (not bad enough to sink Bush, not good enough to save him, especially in light of his very bad ratings on other domestic issues) but the possibility of a new terrorist attack. Will the public see that as evidence that their misgivings about counterterrorism à la Bush were well-founded, or will they rally around the erstwhile "strong leader" in a moment of crisis?

--Matthew Yglesias

THE MYTH OF THE RESURGENT CHRISTIAN COALITION. Speaking of the religious right, check out this story by Wall Street Journal reporter Avery Johnson. Johnson evidently expected to find evidence that gay marriage had re-energized the Christian Coalition, which had fallen on hard times since the heady days of the 1990s. But Johnson's article provides zero evidence that such a resurgence has occurred. There are a bunch of religious right activists saying they hope they'll get some energy going. You have the coalition itself projecting it will bring in $8 million this year, versus the dismal $5.3 million that came from donors last year, and the information that "Some 30 new directors have been appointed to coalition chapters." But there is no evidence presented to back Johnson's claim that "conservative ire over gay marriage is lending fresh energy."

Why? I suspect because the opposite is true. The Washington Post reported last week that religous leaders across the country have been complaining that there isn't much energy among their congregations and activists. The author, Alan Cooperman, interviews a wide range of people, and even those who want the energy to be there are admitting it isn't (and, in some cases, proferring very wishful explanations for the dearth). Cooperman writes:

He has preached for months that gay marriage could be the downfall of Western civilization, but the Rev. Gary F. Smith is worried that the message is not getting across to his flock at the Church of the Nazarene in Leesburg.

"There's quite a bit of lethargy in the pews," he said. "By and large, it's a lay-down-and-roll-over-and-play-dead attitude."

Across the country, evangelical Christians are voicing frustration and puzzlement that there has not been more of a political outcry since May 17, when Massachusetts became the first state to issue same-sex marriage licenses.

Evangelical leaders had predicted that a chorus of righteous anger would rise up out of churches from coast to coast and overwhelm Congress with letters, e-mails and phone calls in support of a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage.

But that has not happened.

"Standing on Capitol Hill listening, you don't hear anything," said Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council, one of the country's most vigorous Christian advocacy groups.

Perkins and other evangelical leaders contend that the outrage is out there. They say it has not been felt in Washington because defenders of traditional marriage are still in shock, or are focused on winning state constitutional amendments against same-sex marriage, or are distracted by the war in Iraq and other issues.

But a few skeptics on the Christian right, as well as many on the Christian left, are beginning to conclude that there is more fervor for a constitutional amendment in America's pulpits than in its pews. And politicians of both parties say the issue has had less grass-roots sizzle than they had expected.

"So far, it's really been a top-down issue," said Sen. John Cornyn (R-Tex.), a strong opponent of gay marriage who has used his chairmanship of a Judiciary subcommittee on the Constitution to hold three hearings on the proposed Federal Marriage Amendment.

Though he is convinced that gay marriage is going to be a "huge" issue, Cornyn said, "what it's going to take is some more bottom-up concern about whether people are losing control of their lives."

Senate Republican leaders said last week that they plan to bring the amendment to a vote in mid-July, a move that evangelicals hope will energize supporters around the country even though the amendment appears headed for defeat. Despite President Bush's endorsement, it is at least 15 votes short of the 67 needed for passage in the Senate, congressional staffers said.

As I've said before, I really think the GOP is making a big strategic error on this issue, their hand forced by a part of their base they can't afford to alienate. But time will tell.

On a different note, I can't help but notice that the Journal's piece is datelined "Looneyville, W. Va." No comment.

--Nick Confessore

EVERY MAN A KING. Here's a nice one from longtime favorite Nedra Pickler:

After a week of campaigning for the less fortunate, John Kerry went on vacation with the fabulously wealthy.

Kerry is a rich man who promotes the Democratic ideal that government should do more to help the poor. He moves between both worlds, spending the past week traveling to downtrodden places like South-side Columbus, Ohio, and the affluent island playground of Nantucket.

That hypocrite! His opponent, by contrast:

Like Kerry, President Bush is a Yale graduate who has benefited from his wealth and family connections. But Bush spends his down time trying to be more of an everyman, preferring to spend vacations at his Texas ranch clearing brush.

"Most Americans don't sit in Martha's Vineyard, swilling white wine," he said at the ranch two years ago.

Now I actually have been known to enjoy some white wine on Martha's Vineyard, so maybe I'm just out of touch. Nevertheless, as far as I can tell "everyman" doesn't own a 1,500 acre ranch worth $1.5 million dollars. One hardly needs to add that the ranch in question was purchased in 1999 as a campaign prop, the small matter of his family's gigantic vacation complex in Kennebunkport, or the fact that our everyman president earns over $400,000 a year in interest alone.

--Matthew Yglesias

WHAT ABOUT THE KURDS? So far in Iraq, America's policy dilemmas have focused around problems within the Shi'ite and Sunni Arab communities. Kurdistan, whose population is broadly pro-American and enthusiastically supportive of the war effort, has been extremely quiet. Recently, however, trouble seems to be brewing. The new interim government dropped hints that it might not abide by the extremely pro-Kurdish interim constitution, prompting the two main Kurdish political parties to drop out of the militia demobilization process and threaten to secede from the Iraqi state unless things go their way.

Yesterday's New York Times contained an enlightening report from Dexter Filkins on Kurdish efforts to re-secure control over formerly Kurdish areas that were subject to ethnic cleansing during the Ba'ath area, indicating that if Kurdish-Arab relations at the political level deteriorate further, those Kurdish militias might get involved in something more than domestic security.

In a seemingly unrelated development, Ilan Berman writes in NRO about deteriorating Israeli-Turkish relations, a fact he attributes to the rise of a semi-Islamist party in Turkey. Seymore Hersh, however, has a rather different theory -- the Turkish government is upset about massive Israeli aid to Kurdish commando groups, a step Hersh reports Israel feels the need to take in light of the ascendance of pro-Iranian Shi'ite parties in southern Iraq. Certainly Israel and Kurdish groups have longstanding ties of various sorts, and I know that Kurdish officials here in Washington have been playing up analogies between the plight of the Kurds and the plight of the Jews before pro-Israeli audiences, seeking to build bridges of some sort.

Needless to say, international man of mystery Ahmed Chalabi has a role to play in this as well. Juan Cole reports that he's Iyad Allawi's chosen go-between in mediation between the Interim Government and the Kurdish leadership. Once upon a time Chalabi was well regarded in Israeli circles, but his recent efforts to cozy up to Shi'a Islamists and the government of Iran have changed all that. What does this all mean? I couldn't say, beyond noting that there are lots of serious underlying problems that go beyond the insurgency and the impending semi-handover of power.

--Matthew Yglesias

A SIMPLER TIME. John Rowland's impending resignation as governor of Connecticut has me feeling nostalgic:

When he first took office, Rowland made $78,000 a year, was paying alimony and supporting a large family when his much wealthier friends and state contractors began to give him a taste of the finer things in life.

They fixed up his cottage in bucolic Litchfield, where Connecticut's movers and shakers summer, complete with a hot tub given to him by a state employee. The governor got thousands of dollars in Cuban cigars and French champagne, a vintage Ford Mustang convertible and free or discounted vacations at the estates of friends -- contractors who won substantial business from the state.

But the high life started to crumble in March 2003 when Rowland's former deputy chief of staff, Lawrence Alibozek, pleaded guilty to federal charges he steered state business to certain contractors in exchange for gold and cash.

Now, obviously, I don't condone this sort of behavior. Nevertheless, there's something to be said for a man who harkens back to the good old days when public officials set themselves up as above the law for the purposes of personal enrichment rather than, say, in order to have people tortured.

--Matthew Yglesias

HEEEEEE'S BACK. There's something inherently enjoyable about watching Bill Clinton emerge on the scene again. I think it will be good for Clinton and probably good for the Democrats. As I see it, the book tour, the attendant publicity, and all the follow-up coverage will have three effects. It will remind the thirty percent of the country that loves Clinton unconditionally of why they loved him. It will drive the anti-Clinton partisans in Washington, and the thirty percent or so of the country that shares their views, into an over-the-top tizzy. (Where the right is concerned, putting Clinton back into public view is like feeding crack to mice. They just can't help themselves. It's almost a Pavlovian response.) And it will remind the remaining part of the country -- the middle-of-the-roaders who didn't care for Clinton's extracurricular behavior but appreciated his work in office -- of how, well, nuts the anti-Clintonites can get, and why they eventually sided with Clinton against his haters. (I'm not using that word in a clinical sense, obviously.)

Conservatives are always at their worst when Clinton comes into play. So, for that matter, are a lot of journalists, who are abetting the conservative project of reducing Clinton's two-term presidency to a string of failures capped by impeachment and the pardon scandal, while downplaying his successes or writing them off as happenstance or coincidence. Matt Yglesias had some thoughts on Sunday's Meet the Press roundtable, which I agree was a little absurd. Even last night's 60 Minutes broadcast, which I thought was in general quite fair, focused very heavily on the impeachment saga -- which is to say, it focused predominantly on his failures as a president, with little discussion of his successes. An alien viewing the program might well have wondered why it was that voters had elected Clinton to a second term. Certainly the guy was no less popular than Ronald Reagan. As this ABC News article points out, Clinton and Reagan had the same average approval ratings for their two terms. The remembrance of Reagan made every effort to account for what popularity he enjoyed. So far, the rehash of Clinton's presidency makes little such effort. There's a clear bias against the guy.

We'll see how the rest of the media bigwigs cover Clinton. I was surprised to see that Maureen Dowd, a charter member of the Catholic Moralizer Squad back during Clinton's day, strikes a vaguely remorseful note in her column, noting that while both Clinton and President Bush have had their 'Who's gonna stop me?' moments, Clinton's "produced a much lower body count."

More reactions as I come across them.

--Nick Confessore

AN EVANGELICAL DEMOBILIZATION. Via Daniel Drezner, the Los Angeles Times reports on a potentially crucial new white paper from the National Association of Evangelicals:

It affirms a religiously based commitment to government protections for the poor, the sick and disabled, including fair wages, healthcare, nutrition and education. It declares that Christians have a "sacred responsibility" to protect the environment.

But it also hews closely to a traditional evangelical emphasis on the importance of families, opposition to homosexual marriage and "social evils" such as alcohol, drugs, abortion and the use of human embryos for stem-cell research. It reaffirms a commitment to religious freedom at home and abroad.

Perhaps most important, the paper goes on to explicitly disavow the theory that all good Christians have a duty to vote Republican:

In the midst of a presidential election year, war and terrorism, the framework says Christians in their devotion to country "must be careful to avoid the excesses of nationalism." In domestic politics, evangelicals "must guard against over-identifying Christian social goals with a single political party, lest nonbelievers think that Christian faith is essentially political in nature."

Now does this mean that Democrats are about to win over the evangelical vote? Not very likely. But just as Democrats depend on not only winning, but utterly dominating, the black vote, the Republican party relies on securing overwhelming support at the polls from white evangelicals. Even a fairly small minority going Democratic could easily tip the balance. The Prospect's Ayelish McGarvey was onto this possibility quite some time ago, and offers thoughts on how Democrats can capitalize on evangelical disillusionment with Bush.

--Matthew Yglesias

WEEKEND UPDATE. Too busy trying to wriggle out of those Lakers season tickets to follow the news? Here's what you missed:

The Columnists

• David Brooks. Why does John Kerry hate freedom?
• Nicholas Kristof. Why doesn't America care about Sudan?
• Fred Hiatt. Iraq sure does produce a lot of wacky anecdotes.
• Jim Hoagland. Is anyone really going to believe this is all the UN's fault?
• David Broder. Chinese dissident, Republican pollster, no difference.
• Thomas Friedman. They love us in China, except they kind of don't.
• Maureen Dowd. Clinton-bashing returns at last.

The Op-Ed You Actually Need To Read

• Robert Kagan and Ivo Daalder on Europe's turn to step up.

--Matthew Yglesias