TINA BROWN NAILS RATHERGATE....I hate to say this, but Tina Brown (yeah, yeah) gets it exactly right in her dissection of Rathergate today in the Washington Post. She gets the motivation right, she gets the blogosphere's role mostly right, and she gets the bigger picture right. It's the best thousand words I've read yet on the whole affair.

DEMOCRACY IN IRAQ....I'm glad to learn that I'm not the only one who was confused by today's New York Times article about election problems in Iraq. It seems that Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani — a person we should be listening to, if recent history is any guide — is unhappy at the prospect of January's elections being postponed due to violence, but also unhappy at the prospect of Shiites not getting the representation they deserve. The first concern is self-explanatory, but not so much the second. So Matt Yglesias explains:

The election is supposed to be held under a party list system, where voters pick not candidates but political parties. Then each party will get a number of seats in the National Assembly proportional to its share of the vote. Rather than compete in an election, however, the leaders (mostly exiles) of the major parties -- INA, SCIRI, PUK, KDP, INC, and al-Dawa -- seem inclined to negotiate the outcome in advance and then run a consolidated list which is all-but-guaranteed to sweep the board, denying the Iraqi people an effective choice and freezing independent voices out of the government.

Sistani doesn't like this plan, at least in part because he thinks it will wind up under-representing Shiites relative to what they could secure in open elections. If what he's after is a simple renegotiation of the current formula under which exiles agree that Shiite Arabs are 55 percent of the population, then he stands a reasonable chance of getting his way. But if he wants to see a genuine election where the parties run against each other instead of colluding to lock out independents, then we're likely to see a serious conflict.

That's encouraging, isn't it? If Sistani is OK with the smoke-filled room approach but just wants a better deal, then hey, we can talk. But if it turns out he wants real elections, the kind in which actual people from actual parties run against other actual people from actual parties, then he's probably out of luck.

That's not much more than a mockery of democracy, but unfortunately I can't really complain too loudly. Roughly speaking, it would be as if Democrats and Republicans agreed to team up and decide in advance who was going to win each district in elections for the House, thus preventing any real choice. Which, of course, is pretty much exactly how it works these days, with both sides collaborating in gerrymandering schemes designed primarily to protect each other's incumbents.

In other words, Sistani is getting a democracy considered state-of-the-art by his occupiers. What more does he want?

COLE ON CAT....Feeling sorry for Cat Stevens? Juan Cole suggests you not bother:

To steal from Bill Maher:

NEW RULES: If you advocate the execution of novelists for writing novels, you and John Ashcroft deserve one another.

It hardly needs saying that DHS's statement that they are "extremely confident" about the information that prompted them to reroute the flight doesn't butter much toast these days. Still, Prof. Cole is probably right: perhaps there are bigger and better things to worry about at the moment.

COMPASSIONATE CONSERVATISM....How do you screw the poor without looking like you're screwing the poor? Easy: insist that income requirements for child tax credits increase with inflation even though the incomes of the poor have stagnated or even dropped in the past few years. Jack O'Toole has the dismal details.

Needless to say, fine distinctions like this didn't get in the way of extending $13 billion in "last minute" corporate tax breaks. After all, corporations are reliable contributors to Republican campaigns.

INTERNET FAME: A MODEST PROPOSAL....Edward_ at Obsidian Wings laments that a Google search for "Obsidian Wings" nets only 33,000 hits compared to 127,000 for David Brooks. Actually, though, that strikes me as pretty decent, considering how long Brooks has been around and how many high-profile outlets he has for his writing.

But that made me curious, so I entered "Kevin Drum." Result: 143,000 hits. Not bad!

And that in turn gave me an idea: I propose that we formalize this as a measure of Internet Fame (IF): 127,000 Google hits is equal to one "brooksie." By that measure, here's how various people rate:

• Obsidian Wings: .26 brooksies
  

• Daniel Drezner: .69 brooksies
  

• Kevin Drum: 1.13 brooksies
  

• Paul Krugman: 1.15 brooksies
  

• Atrios: 2.06 brooksies
  

• Instapundit: 4.35 brooksies
  

• George Bush: 25.51 brooksies
  

• Britney Spears: 34.25 brooksies
  

People with very low internet presences would have to measure their IF in millibrooksies. My mother, for example, has an IF of 2.7 mb.

So: what ISO committee do I need to talk to in order to get this officially adopted? After all, there are bound to be a few minor technical details to be worked out....

ENRON ON THE POTOMAC?....There are problems at Fannie Mae. But who gets the blame?

Chief executive Franklin D. Raines and the board of directors were not singled out for blame, but the report criticized "a culture and environment that made these problems possible." It did name W. Timothy Howard, the company's vice chairman and chief financial officer, saying he "failed to provide adequate oversight" of key control and reporting functions and had jobs in which he both set earnings targets and then the accounting polices that could be used to meet them.

I'm really tired of this charade. With only the very rarest of exceptions (which usually involve obvious embezzlement of some kind), CEOs always know what the CFO is doing when it comes to broad accounting models. That goes for Ken Lay, Dick Cheney, Franklin Raines, and every other CEO. They know. One of these days, CFOs are going to have to form a union or something to keep them from being the sole fall guy in these cases.

On another note, if you're interested in the problems at both Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, you might want to check out Ben Wallace-Wells' cover story in the April issue of the Washington Monthly. Anyone who read that article five months ago won't be even slightly surprised by today's news.

CALIFORNIA TO BUSH: DROP DEAD....Polling models may be in trouble, but ARG and the LA Times agree on one thing: Kerry is going to kick George Bush's butt in California.

On a personal level, that means local TV will stay blessedly free of campaign ads, which is a good thing since there's probably no room left in between the wall-to-wall commercials for the 16 separate initiatives on the ballot this year. We even have Propositions 60 and 60A, a numbering snafu that I've never seen before.

Needless to say, I will be voting no on all of them.

PROBLEMS WITH POLLING....ARG has finished their massive nationwide poll of 600 people in each state (plus DC), a total of 30,600 respondents. Here are the basic results:

• Nationwide, Bush leads Kerry 47% to 46%.
  

• Kerry has the lead in 20 states with 270 electoral votes.
  

• Bush has the lead in 29 states with 253 electoral votes.
  

• Two states are tied (Wisconsin and West Virginia).
  

In a poll this large, there's essentially no margin of error in the national number, which leads Robert Waldman to wonder why other pollsters don't also use larger samples to eliminate (almost all) sampling error:

I think pollsters use small samples only partly to save money, and also to give themselves an excuse if their numbers are off. With a huge sample, a difference between the poll and the election would imply a more worrisome problem, either a biased sample, a faulty likely voter filter or a psychological difference between talking to a pollster and actually voting. It is clear that some or all sampling techniques give biased samples, because the spread of polls is too large to explain with sampling error alone. Polling agencies certainly don't want to spend money to prove that they are one of the agencies with a defective sampling technique.

He may be right. Sampling error is real, but it's not what's at fault for the huge disparities we're seeing lately, with polls taken on the same day sometimes varying by as much as 10 points or more. The real problem is the weighting formulas used by the different polling firms.

And as near as I can tell, it's only going to get worse. I've been reading for years that truly random telephone polling is getting harder and harder for a variety of reasons: cell phone proliferation, caller ID, fewer people willing to talk to pollsters, etc. This makes raw calling samples more and more distorted and puts an increasing burden on weighting models that correct the sample to more accurately reflect the actual electorate.

And that's not all. Add to this various formulas for deciding who's a likely voter and who's not, and what gets reported in the daily paper is becoming more algorithm than it is real data. What's more, calling more people won't help. If there's a systematic bias in the sample, it's going to be there regardless of the sample size.

What we're seeing this year may be the Cheynes-Stokes breathing of traditional polling models, and by 2008 the whole enterprise may either be dead or changed beyond recognition. In the meantime, though, we have the worst of all worlds: we're still relying on traditional polls even though the sample distortion is too large to be massaged away with fancy software, but we don't have new polling models to replace them yet.

In other words, we don't really know who's winning. Election day may turn out to be a real surprise.

PARTISANSHIP AND WAR....It's kind of fun watching Andrew Sullivan and the NRO gang take potshots at each other — they're almost acting like Democrats! — and while I don't want to take sides in this grudge match, I have to say that I found Jonah Goldberg's latest rhetorical volley intriguing. Responding to Sully's complaint that George Bush didn't try to unite the country in the aftermath of 9/11, he says:

First, the Democrats made the deliberate and cynical decision to make dividing the country a priority. Perhaps not that much — or not uniformly — before the 2002 elections. But afterwards, and most especially once the WMDs didn't materialize....

To use the historical analogy in contention here, isn't this a bit like blaming Churchill for World War II because Britain started fighting back in 1940 — most especially after all that Blitz unpleasantness?

Remember, 2002 was quite a year. After a calculated display of bipartisan mourning for public consumption, the Bush administration thereafter refused to consult with or even take notice of the existence of an opposition party. Republican consultants advised their clients to use the war as a wedge issue in reelection campaigns and the Republican leadership declared rhetorical war on mild-mannered Tom Daschle. Andy Card talked about marketing plans for the Iraq invasion. The White House cynically proposed a union-busting plan for the Department of Homeland Security designed solely to arouse Democratic opposition. The President told cheering audiences that Senate Democrats didn't care about the security of the country and campaigned tirelessly even against congressmen who had supported him. In Georgia, Max Cleland was likened to Osama bin Laden.

And it worked: Republicans won the election. And Democrats finally woke up and realized that George Bush was more interested in using the war as a partisan club than he was in actually fighting terrorists. So they started fighting back. If the Republicans were intent on making it a partisan issue, after all, what choice was there?

So yeah: "not that much" before the 2002 elections. Conversely, from the very beginning, it's been clear that Bush wasn't trying to build bipartisan support, the normal course for a president embarking on a foreign war, but was instead using the war as a partisan club and a campaign issue, a way of dividing the Democrats and making them look weak on national security.

Despite the fact that this is a global war that requires broad support over long timescales, George Bush has not tried to gain Democratic support; he has not engaged seriously with the international community; he has not asked the American public for any kind of sacrifice; he has continued to push a divisive domestic agenda; he has shown little interest in funding anti-proliferation efforts; he has declined to put adequate resources into Afghanistan; he has done nothing to fix an intelligence operation that's quite obvously broken; and he has stonewalled every investigation into the failures that allowed 9/11 to happen.

So if you're going to talk about a "deliberate and cynical decision to make dividing the country a priority," let's be honest about who made that decision. I'll give you a hint: he's not a Democrat.

DEAL HUDSON UPDATE....You may recall that I wrote last month about Deal Hudson, editor of the όber-moralist Catholic publication Crisis who, it turned out, had led a somewhat less than moral life before taking the reins of the magazine.

Well, it turns out that Hudson has apparently led a somewhat less than moral life after taking the reins of the magazine too:

In addition, specific accusations of more recent sexual misconduct had come to the board's attention, one scholar said.

"This was not about one incident 10 years ago," he said. "It's surprising it was held down as long as it was. I haven't gone out of my way to track Deal Hudson's improprieties — I could be doing nothing else. But you began to wonder after a while if they are true."

"I could be doing nothing else." That's a lot of improprieties!

Anyway, long story short, it looks like Hudson will be, um, spending more time with his family in the future. Which, when you think about it, is sort of an appropriate punishment, isn't it?

But while he may be gone, he won't be forgotten: although he's no longer publisher of Crisis, he'll still be working on book deals and fundraising for the magazine's parent. After all, we can't let fussy moralism get in the way of fundraising, can we? I guess there's such a thing as going overboard on moral values after all.

WORKPLACE STRESS....Over at Crooked Timber, John Quiggin is complaining about this Daniel Akst column in the New York Times today that suggests workers are better off today than they were during the Great Depression. That seems fairly uncontroversial, and on the substance of the CT post I'll confine myself to saying that while John may have a point, I think I basically agree with commenter Steve Carr. You'll have to click the link to find out what I'm talking about.

What really caught my eye is this one sentence from Akst's piece:

Excluding homicide, workplace fatalities have fallen from 37 per 100,000 in 1933 to 18 in 1970 to roughly 4 today.

Um, is there some reason he had to exclude homicides for this comparison? Or am I out of touch with the real issues of the modern workplace?

Just wondering.

THANKS!....I just heard from our associate publisher that our subscription drive last week has brought in over 400 new subscriptions so far and more are coming in every day. That's great news, and I know that all you new subscribers are going to enjoy the magazine. Many thanks from me and from everyone else at the Monthly.

And remember, if you haven't subscribed already, it's not too late! To subscribe or donate, just click one of the links on the top right under the magazine cover.

TIME FOR A NEW AG?....Attorney General John Ashcroft is 0 for 5,000: that is, 0 anti-terror convictions for 5,000 anti-terror detentions. TalkLeft has the details.

On the other hand, we prevented Cat Stevens from entering the country. Onward!

UPDATE: OK, let's clear up what's really going on here. This is what David Cole says in The Nation about Ashcroft's conviction record now that a federal judge has tossed out his terrorism case in Detroit:

Until that reversal, the Detroit case had marked the only terrorist conviction obtained from the Justice Department's detention of more than 5,000 foreign nationals in anti-terrorism sweeps since 9/11. So Ashcroft's record is 0 for 5,000. When the Attorney General was locking these men up in the immediate wake of the attacks, he held almost daily press conferences to announce how many "suspected terrorists" had been detained. No press conference has been forthcoming to announce that exactly none of them have turned out to be actual terrorists.

Defining whether a "terror" conviction is really a terror conviction is surprisingly hard, and Ashcroft, of course, takes an expansive view of this, routinely counting even minor visa violations as "terror" convictions. But that's not what Cole is talking about. What he's talking about is the number of convictions resulting from anti-terrorism sweeps and preventive detentions following 9/11. Among the 5,000 who were detained, so far none have been convicted of terror-related offenses.

TORT REFORM....Do you live in Texas? You might want to think twice before buying a house. For all practical purposes, the Republican party there has eliminated the right to get home defects repaired unless the building industry itself agrees to do it. If they don't feel like it, you have no recourse.

There's no question that the civil justice system can be abused, and curbing those abuses is a legitimate topic for legislatures to address. But exempting entire industries from being sued is a plain and simple fraud on consumers. And remember: what George Bush did in Texas is the same thing he'd like to do for the entire country. If he gets his way, you may soon find that you have no recourse against corporate negligence either.

MORE IRAQS....Noam Scheiber gets it exactly right today over at &c.;:

Robin Wright's analysis of Kerry's Iraq plan in today's Washington Post has a weirdly disembodied feel to it. She writes as though Kerry and Bush were participating in an essay contest about the future of some hypothetical war zone called "Iraq," proclaiming Kerry's proposals marginally better but really no different than Bush's. (Kerry gets a B+, Bush a B-.)

But the point isn't that Kerry's proposals only have a slightly better chance of success. It's that Bush's poor judgment and total incompetence have arranged it so that no proposal has a very good chance of success. Assessing the two candidate's positions outside that context is a totally useless exercise.

Pundits have been kvetching for months now that Kerry hasn't produced a gift-wrapped miracle that definitively solves all our problems in Iraq. But that's just not in the cards anymore. Iraq is such a mess that there's nothing left except choosing the least worst of a bunch of bad choices.

In any case, Kerry has now said what he'd do in Iraq, and while it might not be a slam dunk, it's surely better than George Bush's apparent plan to keep doing what he's been doing all along ("stay the course"). What Bush has been doing all along is exactly what got us where we are today, and practically anything would be better than that.

And that's really what this is all about. Iraq is going to be a big problem no matter who's president next year, but the real question is: what happens next? There are certainly going to be serious, unforeseen foreign policy problems during the next four years, and who do you trust to handle them best? The team that brought you Iraq and continues to believe that they've handled it just fine, or someone else?

I'd prefer not to see any more foreign policy crises handled the way Iraq was handled. Unfortunately, common sense tells us that's exactly what we'll get if George Bush is reelected: more Iraqs.