GETTING THEIR ACT TOGETHER....From Atrios, blogging from the convention:

...the DNC has a serious problem here — the media facilities for most members of the media, and I don't just meen the Sheboygan Weekly Reader, I mean the New York Times, really really really really suck. There are a shortage of power outlets. A shortage of ethernet connections. Print/radio media have to trade off small numbers of floor passes between them. Air America is stuck in the radio ghetto, instead of having one of the few cushy real radio booths.

As a friend in radio just told me, (quoting roughly), "We spent weeks trying to get a table here. Two weeks ago someone from the RNC sent us an email to set everything up, asked us for list of desired guests so they could schedule them for us, etc..."

What is the deal with this? We hear variations on this observation every four years, and it just boggles the mind. Various bloggers, for example, are reporting that the wireless internet access in the convention hall is pretty sucky too.

I know, I know, I don't belong to an organized political party, I'm a Democrat, yada, yada, yada. But seriously, is there really still such a big gap in basic organizational chops between the parties? Why?

NEW DEMOCRATS....A bunch of people have emailed me to recommend yesterday's Matt Bai article in the New York Times magazine about the rise of independent liberal groups that operate outside of the traditional apparatus of the Democratic party. The centerpiece of Bai's narrative is a PowerPoint presentation put together by Rob Stein, a former aide to Commerce Secretary Ron Brown, that's apparently become famous in liberal fundraising circles:

The presentation itself, a collection of about 40 slides titled ''The Conservative Message Machine's Money Matrix,'' essentially makes the case that a handful of families -- Scaife, Bradley, Olin, Coors and others -- laid the foundation for a $300 million network of policy centers, advocacy groups and media outlets that now wield great influence over the national agenda.

The network, as Stein diagrams it, includes scores of powerful organizations -- most of them with bland names like the State Policy Network and the Leadership Institute -- that he says train young leaders and lawmakers and promote policy ideas on the national and local level. These groups are, in turn, linked to a massive message apparatus, into which Stein lumps everything from Fox News and the Wall Street Journal op-ed page to Pat Robertson's ''700 Club.'' And all of this, he contends, is underwritten by some 200 ''anchor donors.'' ''This is perhaps the most potent, independent institutionalized apparatus ever assembled in a democracy to promote one belief system,'' he said.

I guess I'm a little surprised that the story of how movement conservatism and its associated money machine rose from the ashes of Barry Goldwater's 1964 campaign is still news to anyone, but I guess it is. And apparently Stein has put the the story together in a uniquely understandable way that makes light bulbs go off for a lot of potential activists.

But what really surprised me is that in an 8,000-word story about these people, there wasn't so much as a single sentence about what they believe in. It's all about the infrastructure and the fundraising and the message machine — but nothing about the message itself. What are they doing all this work for?

I'm not the only one wondering. Peter Beinart has a short blog post today comparing these New Democrats to the policy wonkish DLC:

NDN is riding high these days, having been featured in a cover story in this week's New York Times Magazine, and it's hosting a blizzard of events all week. Unlike the DLC, there are no policy forums--the briefings are about political strategy. If NDN has an ideology, it seems to be that ideology is secondary; that Democrats need to embrace whatever and whoever can win.

....NDN probably better represents this convention's utilitarian spirit. And there's no question that, at least in the short term, that spirit is paying political dividends. But in the long run, it's the DLC's message that the party needs to remember. Ideas have consequences, and so do their absence.

Well, yeah. But the thing is, the NDN folks say that an obsession with just the next election is precisely what they're opposed to. They think liberals need to spend more time trying to change long-term public opinion, and in this they're absolutely correct. It's the primary area in which conservatives have stomped all over liberals in the past few decades.

But what opinions do they want to change? And what do they want to change them to? Does someone have a PowerPoint presentation for that?

BUSH AND THE ENVIRONMENT....Former Interior Secretary Stewart Udall writes today about the environment and the Bush administration:

From 1961 to 1981, every president — Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Ford and Carter — gave his unwavering support to environmental reforms. Richard Nixon set a high goal by declaring that the 1970s should be the "environmental decade." He created the Environmental Protection Agency and approved laws to protect endangered species.

As the country moved rightward with Reagan, the rhetoric may have been negative, but in the end no effort was made to repeal important environmental laws. George H.W. Bush had a positive record, and although Bill Clinton was stymied by a hostile Congress, he used his executive powers to achieve positive results.

Overall, it's a record that bolsters my thesis that this administration is rowing against the tide of American history....Bush and company have not put forward a single positive new conservation concept. They have systematically lowered pollution regulations to please favored industries. They have allowed park and forest maintenance to be neglected and under-funded. I view these events and developments with dismay. This is a time for straight talk, for those who love the land to make their voices heard before more damage is done to the resources we all own.

Bush has the worst environmental record of any president in history. The only silver lining is that America is a big place and there's only so much damage that can be done in four years.

Assuming, of course, that four years is all he gets....

SHOVE IT....Drudge is hyping a story from Channel 4 in Pittsburgh that says Teresa Heinz Kerry had a brief confrontation with a reporter Sunday evening that ended when she told him to "shove it" and walked off.

The "reporter" in question was Colin McNickle, the editorial page editor of the Scaife-owned Pittsburgh Tribune-Review. If you want to know why Mrs. Kerry might have a beef with Mr. McNickle, you can read part of the answer here: the Tribune-Review editorial page has been on a disgusting and dishonest jihad against the Heinz Endowments for nearly a year. He's lucky that a fleeting tonguelashing is all he got.

DEMOCRATIC CONVENTION COVERAGE....Will the Washington Monthly be covering the Democratic convention? Sure! In fact, new WM editor Amy Sullivan will be in Boston this week along with other WM staffers, and if everything goes according to plan they will be guest posting here throughout the convention. My job is to "anchor" our coverage, which basically means that my butt will be anchored to my chair watching the convention on TV, just the way the blog gods intended it. As with pro football games, I suspect mine is the best seat in the house.

Here are a few miscellaneous links for convention junkies:

• Official convention site.

• Dave Winer's aggregator of all the bloggers covering the convention.

• C-SPAN's schedule for gavel-to-gavel coverage of the convention starting with a pregame show at 3 pm on Monday.

• Map of the convention floor.
  

And here's the prime time speaking schedule, in case you want to make sure to tune in for only your favorite Democrats. Note that "prime time" appears to mean 4 pm - 11 pm Eastern time.

—Kevin Drum 12:07 AM Permalink | TrackBack (0) | Comments (26)

URANIUM FROM AFRICA, PART 2....Yesterday, writing about the period just before and after the war last year, I speculated that Joe Wilson might have decided to write his famous July 6 New York Times op-ed only after seeing (or hearing about) an internal CIA memorandum dated June 17 that conclusively debunked the uranium from Africa story. The full post is here.

Today, Wilson emails to say, "I never knew about the June 17 document you cite in the blog....I did not know about it then and only your blog brought it to my attention."

So that's that.

SOME LINKS....I don't usually do linkfests, but here are a couple of interesting links anyway:

• A long Guardian story about ASBOs — Anti-Social Behaviour Orders — legal injunctions used in Britain against minors accused of anti-social behavior. In January, for example, a 14-year-old boy was banned from saying the word "grass" anywhere in England or Wales until 2010. Read both Part 1 and Part 2.

• Rivka writes about abortion and birth defects.
  

These aren't related in any way, and I don't have any particular comment on them. They're just interesting reading.

WHO'S THE ANIMAL?....A British animal rights activist has called for the assassination of scientists working in biomedical research:

I don't think you'd have to kill too many [researchers]. I think for five lives, 10 lives, 15 human lives, we could save a million, 2 million, 10 million non-human lives.

Charming as always, those animal rights folks....

THE REAL JOHN KERRY....Here's the final paragraph of Tom Oliphant's highly personal profile of John Kerry in the American Prospect:

John Kerry is a good, tough man. He is curious, grounded after a public and personal life that has not always been pleasant, a fan of ideas whose practical side has usually kept him from policy wonkery, a natural progressive with the added fixation on what works that made FDR and JFK so interesting. I know it is chic to be disdainful, but the modern Democratic neurosis gets in the way of a solid case for affection. Without embarrassment, and after a very long journey, I really like this guy. As one of his top campaign officials, himself a convert since the primaries ended, told me recently, this is pure Merle Haggard. It’s not love, but it’s not bad.

This is a genuinely interesting article from a guy who's known Kerry for more than 30 years, but he's right: there's no real love there. In fact, here's another version of his piece:

....slow climb up the public-service ladder....could be a successful, even excellent, president....well-prepared....likely to be a tough grind....contemplative, serious person....iron butt for grunt work....patience and tough negotiating that are Kerry attributes....sober yet imaginative person....quiet leadership....pretty good, ambitious local prosecutor....true expert....passionate and authoritative advocate....leading spokesman....worked like a dog....always listened to criticism....listened and responded....difficult path to success....careful vetting....vintage Kerry: part traditional....part new thinking....worker as well as a thinker....not by instinct a visionary....grubby, central task of coalition building.

Compare that to this take on the Bush administration from John Lewis Gaddis, who's basically sympathetic to their worldview:

They violated a really fundamental principle. It's the dog-and-car syndrome. Dogs spend a lot of time thinking about and chasing cars. But they don't know what to do with a car when they actually catch one. It seems to me this, in a nutshell, is what has happened to the Bush administration in Iraq.

Yep. After four years of almost breathtaking unwillingness to face up to the hard work of how to really deal with 9/11, an "iron butt for grunt work" strikes me as a welcome change. The question is, will the American public agree? Will they interpret this kind of traditional work ethic as more Thomas Edison or more Jimmy Carter?

Stay tuned.

BLOGGING MILESTONE....The LA Times opinion section uses almost all its back page today for a piece about bloggers going to the Democratic convention. It's a fun little quiz of ten blogs to see if you can identify which ones were credentialed vs. those that were credentialed but later had their credentials revoked. (The link is here, although the online version doesn't do justice to the print version, which included nice little graphics for each blog.)

Anyway, the only reason I'm pointing it out is that I think it's a milestone: a story related to blogging that's not about the phenomenon of blogging itself and just assumes you know what a blog is. This might be the first time I've seen anything like that in the mainstream press.

For the record, the featured blogs are:

• Hot Flashes from the Campaign Trail
  

• ANWR
  

• Iddybud
  

• The American Street
  

• OxBlog
  

• Dinner for America
  

• INDC Journal
  

• Centerfield
  

• TalkLeft
  

• Electablog
  

POLITICS AND PSYCHOLOGY....This is what happens when social science meets politics. A team of psychology researchers asked subjects to rate George Bush and John Kerry after being asked questions about death and the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks:

Subjects asked about death had more confidence in Bush and admiration for him, while those questioned about intense pain rated Kerry more highly in those categories

....[Jamie] Arndt concluded that images from Sept. 11 could gin up support, even subconsciously, for Bush and the government's anti-terrorism policies.

"He may benefit from keeping it in people's minds," Arndt said in a statement.

So let me get this straight: Bush would probably do well to keep reminding people of 9/11? Hmmm. That's....very....interesting.

I wonder if anyone's told him?

PERSONAL HYDRATION....Let's turn to medical matters, shall we?

I've long been flabbergasted by the volume of liquid that most people drink. "Drink eight glasses a day!" our doctors recommend, for no apparent reason (I've asked) — and we do. In fact, judging by the size of fast food cups these days, which are rapidly exceeding their already Bunyanesque proportions, most people consider eight glasses to be a lower limit.

And me? I could probably make it from morning through dinnertime on one glass of water and barely notice that I was thirsty. A couple of months ago I tried drinking a glass of water every hour (for reasons I won't go into) and almost exploded. I was peeing every 30 minutes.

So, since the eight-glasses-a-day rule seems to exist for no particular reason (I've checked), I pay no attention to it. I drink when I'm thirsty, and if my urine is a nice healthy color I figure I'm doing fine.

And today I got happy news. My friend Dr. Marc (PhD, that is, not MD) sent me word that the Institute of Medicine has undertaken some vast new research on this issue and confirmed my belief: most people "meet their daily hydration needs by letting thirst be their guide." Hallelujah!

But wait — there's more. It turns out that they also set some "general recommendations" for water consumption, and long story short, the midpoint of those recommendations for men is.....

100 ounces per day. That's over 12 cups per day. 50% more than the old-wives-tale version from our childhood.

What to think? I must be at about the 99th percentile of water requirements. Judging by these recommendations, I'm a human camel or something.

Kind of a drag, though. I finally find something I'm at the 99th percentile of, and it turns out to be personal hydration needs. That's just great. I'm sure there's loads of money in that....

FURTHER FUN FACT: In case you're interested, the Consumer Reports summary of the IOM study that Dr. Marc sent me says this about the old eight-glasses-a-day advice:

The origin of the eight-glasses-a-day rule is most likely government guidelines from the 1940s that recommended "1 milliliter of water for each calorie of food," or roughly 64 to 80 ounces per day. However, "water" referred to the total fluid intake from all beverages and food.

We get about 20% of our fluid from the food we eat, so this means that the actual recommendation was for about 6-8 cups a day.

Isn't that typical? The whole eight-glasses-a-day thing came from some prehistoric government study based on God-knows-what that's been handed down through the generations like the Dead Sea scrolls, and even at that everyone misunderstood it in the first place. It's practically a microcosm of all of human history, isn't it?

IDEOLOGY....David Brooks is getting some attention for his latest column, in which he agrees with the 9/11 commission that we're not engaged in a war on terror. Rather, "we are in the midst of an ideological conflict":

Last week I met with a leading military officer stationed in Afghanistan and Iraq, whose observations dovetailed remarkably with the 9/11 commissioners. He said the experience of the last few years is misleading; only 10 percent of our efforts from now on will be military. The rest will be ideological.

Question 1: is there anyone who disagrees with the idea that this is primarily an ideological conflict? It seems to me that both left and right pretty much already agree on this, although there's hardly 100% agreement on exactly what ideology we're fighting.

Question 2: do the hawks agree with the notion that only a very small part of our future efforts will be military? And if so, what exactly do they think is the primary difference between George Bush and John Kerry on national security?

9/11 RECOMMENDATIONS....You know, it strikes me that the 9/11 report puts John Kerry in a tight spot: should he push to have its recommendation adopted quickly or not?

Let's assume he mostly agrees with them. In that case, pushing to have them adopted is both the right thing to do and the smart thing to do, since it gets Kerry out in front on this issue and puts pressure on Bush to get in line.

On the other hand, if I thought I was going to be elected president in three months, I'd want to be the one who crafted all this legislation. And presidential nominee or not, the junior senator from Massachusetts in the minority party just won't have that much say over how the legislation is put together.

Decisions, decisions. In any case, the more I think about it the more I wonder whether this intelligence czar idea is the right way to go anyway. The problem is that in addition to budget authority, the commission also envisioned him as having hiring and firing authority over the intelligence chiefs at the Pentagon and the FBI, both of whom would presumably also report up through their normal chain of command since the commission doesn't envision their entire agencies being moved (the way various agencies were moved when the Homeland Security department was created, for example). In other words, matrix management.

This isn't automatically a bad idea, mind you, but it is a tricky one. I'd want to be very sure of myself before I decided that a matrix reporting structure was the best possible answer to our intelligence woes.