• Great. The U.S. Senate fails to help the poor, elderly, and unemployed with 58 aye votes but votes unanimously to impose sanctions on Iran. Decisive! The toughest member of the esteemed body, Joseph Lieberman, added that he hopes "our combined sanctions will change the calculus of the Iranian regime" (they won't) and that military force might be necessary to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons.
• Rand Paul wants to deny citizenship to the children of illegal immigrants born in the United States. What's puzzling is that he thinks the courts should review whether the 14th amendment applies to the undocumented, and if they uphold it, then he thinks  a constitutional amendment should be proposed to specifically ban it. Why even bother with the review? Why not just go straight to the amendment?
• Admittedly, I have not read the book-length defense of the electoral college, but the idea that the National Popular Vote movement is a threat to the republic is just bizarre. Ignore the mumbo-jumbo about our "unique blend of federalism and democracy" and it's clear that the electoral college vote, with very few exceptions, simply ratifies the popular vote in almost every presidential election.
• Remainders: Radical economic policy is the first obstacle to reforming the Republican Party; the Texas state GOP is insane; the American right's credibility is a perpetual problem; if I were in D.C., I would totally attend a CRS seminar on Senate procedure; and one man's handouts are another's subsidies.

--Mori Dinauer

With the increasing likelihood of an incredibly depressing defeat for the jobs bill in the Senate -- which would reinforce the social safety net; cut taxes; and provide funding for small business, infrastructure investment, and research and development -- it's worth thinking about how it failed.

Matt Yglesias does just that, noting that even the Imperial Presidency can't force 40 + 1 senators to do something they don't want to do all the time, and that a full-court press simply can't be deployed for every vote -- and even then, the political calculus still doesn't offer any guarantee that a president can get a senator to vote his way. Yglesias observes,

[O]ne problem with this system is that it allows the White House to be deliberately ambiguous about what positions it supports, secure in the knowledge that “the votes aren’t there” for certain things and therefore saying you support them is a freebie. That’s a bad thing, but it doesn’t change the fact that this option is usually available precisely when it’s true that the votes aren’t there.

Much of the analysis -- and indeed division -- on the left comes from profound disagreements about the potential vote count on a given piece of legislation -- whether it is the public option, breaking up the banks, or cramdown. Whether you assign more importance to structural factors or presidential will is the key dividing line between the people who are satisfied with President Obama and those who are disappointed in him.

-- Tim Fernholz

Julianne Ong Hing is providing some fantastic reporting of the trial of Johannes Mehserle, the BART police officer who shot Oscar Grant dead on a transit platform in San Francisco even though he was handcuffed and lying face down on the ground with a knee to his back. Here she is recounting the cross examination of Grant's friend Jackie Bryson, who watched his friend die before his eyes:

Bryson proved a formidable witness against the defense, however. His recounting of Grant's shooting, which came after three hours of combative back and forth with Rains, gripped the courtroom. “Smoke was coming out of his back, and they turned him over and there was a puddle of blood,” Bryson recalled. “I said, ‘Oscar, Oscar, stay awake.’ Everybody started screaming his name,” Bryson recalled. Bryson remembered someone begging for the BART police to call for help, but being told: “When you shut the fuck up, then we’ll call the ambulance.”

“His eyes is there, but blood starts coming out of his mouth,” Bryson remembered, the emotion bubbling up in his voice. “’Let me talk to him,’ I said, ‘I can keep him here. I know you don’t want him to die.’” Bryson told cops on the platform.

Behind me, court observers sobbed and winced in anguish. The grief and anger was still very fresh for people.

Hing says the prosecution hasn't been very convincing.

All throughout the prosecution, people in the audience kept waiting for the prosecution to produce a star witness or an explosive piece of evidence that just never surfaced...In the court of public opinion though, Mehserle is already guilty. He was guilty the minute those videos were uploaded onto YouTube, but not in the eyes of the court yet, and not by the legal definition of murder.

It is, frankly, very difficult to convict a police officer of murder for killing an unarmed black man even in a case as seemingly cut-and-dry as this one. The race of the officer is less of an issue than the race of the victim. The fear of young black men is widely shared across society, and because of that, people tend to excuse excessive force by authorities precisely because they share the fear that motivated them to pull the trigger. They empathize with the officer, while the terror that potential Oscar Grants feel is alien to them. What that ultimately means is that despite the circumstances, getting justice for Oscar Grant will be very hard.

It's worth remembering the people who can't retreat to their air-conditioned havens on a day like today. In that spirit comes an invitation from United Farm Workers for legal residents and citizens looking for work to apply for agricultural jobs. As Wonk Room points out, there will likely be few takers.

In pointing out how tough a job it is, they point out that agriculture is one of the three most hazardous occupations, and that's in part because of toxic materials and hazardous tools and work under the hot sun for long days. They often live in crowded conditions and earn only about $28,040 a year.

That's also an argument for pulling agricultural workers, many of whom are immigrants or seasonal workers, into an official guest-worker system. Workplace hazards don't clear themselves up, and neither do employee abuses. Construction and agricultural firms benefit from a labor base that's less likely to complain when they're taken advantage of, and that's unfair to every American worker.

-- Monica Potts

Disgraced Enron executive Jeffrey Skilling and the reactionary Canadian media magnate Conrad Black are, to put it mildly, unsympathetic defendants. But whether or not a defendant is sympathetic should not determine the validity of a legal claim (after all, Ernesto Miranda of "Miranda rights" fame was almost certainly guilty). I said at the time of the oral argument in Skilling's trial that his legal case was actually very persuasive. So it's not surprising that I think it's a good thing that the Supreme Court today unanimously threw out Skilling's conviction, which was based on a federal statute that makes it a crime to deprive someone -- in this case, shareholders -- of "the intangible right of honest services." (The Court also remanded Black's case back to the lower courts in light of the ruling.)  

The fundamental constitutional issue at stake was whether the statute was too vague to make it clear which actions were criminal and which were not -- a problem that strikes at the core of the due-process guarantees in the Fifth Amendment.

A majority of the Court, through Ginsburg, argued that the provision in question should be construed to apply only to "schemes to defraud involving bribes and kickbacks." Since Skilling had not even been accused of such activities, his actions were beyond the reach of the "honest services" statute. But I'm actually very sympathetic to the broader argument advanced by Scalia (joined entirely by Thomas and in important parts by Kennedy) that "in transforming the prohibition of 'honest-services fraud' into a prohibition of 'bribery and kick-backs,' [the Court] wield[ed] a power we long ago abjured: the power to define new federal crimes." In particular, like Scalia, I'm also puzzled by assertions that effectively rewriting -- rather than nullifying -- overly broad federal statutes reflects "judicial modesty." As Scalia says, it is exceptionally implausible that Congress intended only to criminalize bribery and kickbacks, and I think a good case can be made that the statue as a whole should be thrown out for vagueness. But at least the decision should compel Congress to more carefully define what additional activities it believes should be banned. This is as it should be: Giving the kind of open-ended discretion to prosecutors that the current provision afforded was a bad idea.

A final point of interest in this case is the partial dissent of Sotomayor; it provides another data point suggesting that she may be an emerging leader of the Court's liberal wing on civil liberties. While agreeing that the "honest services" provision was unconstitutionally vague at least as applied to Skilling, Sotomayor (joined by Stevens and Breyer) found that Skilling did not receive a fair trail. Sotomayor argues that the jury selection process was inadequately thorough given that Skilling's trial was held in a location in which he had become enormously unpopular.

-- Scott Lemieux

A while ago I wrote that Andy McCarthy's theory of a grand conspiracy between terrorists and civil-liberties lawyers to destroy the United States was complicated by the fact that many of those lawyers were observant, even Zionist Jews. This is by no means the only hole in McCarthy's reasoning -- which is, roughly, premised on the assumption that anyone who disagrees with him on national-security matters works for al-Qaeda -- but it's a significant one, and one he simply hasn't addressed.

Yesterday, in an op-ed accompanied by a rather racist doctored picture of Elena Kagan in a turban, Frank Gaffney accused Obama's Supreme Court nominee of being part of a secret ploy to institute Sharia law in the United States:

Worse yet, Dean Kagan had an even more direct connection to the Saudis' Shariah-recruitment efforts at Harvard. She personally officiated in 2003 over the establishment of an Islamic Finance Project at the law school. The project's purpose is to promote what is better known as Shariah-compliant finance (SCF) by enlisting in its service some of the nation's most promising law students.

Islamic Finance is basically a set of financial practices that are deemed compliant with Islamic religious requirements. It is a growing segment of the global financial system -- it exists because some elements of finance we now take for granted, such as charging interest for lending money, are prohibited under Islamic Law. If you want to get a job dealing with finance law for a company located in say, Malaysia, you're going to have to know your way around it.

In Gaffney's view, establishing a part of the law school that would teach students about an emerging sector of the global financial system means that Kagan is part of the effort to put the U.S. on the road to Taliban-style justice. To Gaffney, there is no difference between learning about Islam and Islamic practices and being a de-facto member of the Muslim Brotherhood. Yet this would seem like an odd role for a Jewish woman from the Upper Wast Side -- one who pushed her Orthodox Synagogue to hold her Bat-Mitzvah, the first one it had ever performed.

As with the Jewish lawyers who defended suspected terror detainees because of their commitment to the rule of law, the obvious answer -- that Kagan was likely concerned with making sure her students at Harvard Law got the best education possible -- is inadequate. That's because Gaffney, like many of his fellows in this section of the right, is a birther who believes Obama is a Muslim, a raving conspiracy theorist who's most recent efforts to stop the spread of Sharia include decoding the secret Islamic messages in the logos of government agencies.  The fact is that if a liberal so much as farted loudly in his presence, Gaffney would sniff and say it smells like Sharia.

At base, what the Islamic Conspiracy Theory wing of the Republican Party is concerned about is the role of Islam in politics and public life, particularly in the United States. Marc Lynch has a great post excerpting his recent Foreign Affairs piece on the subject that does a good job of cutting through the hysteria and dealing with the actual implications of political Islamism for the West.

One of the reasons I'm highlighting situations in which conservatives accuse observant Jews of being part of grand Islamist conspiracies is that they so resemble the anti-Semitic conspiracies of old, with their fantasies of secret plots for global domination and government subterfuge from within. As Hussein Ibish wrote recently, "Islamophobia is a barely warmed over, 20 seconds in the microwave, version of traditional anti-Semitism." In this case, it's so similar that a Jew is the actual target.

-- A. Serwer

If you've been following the twisted path of financial reform, you may have heard that one controversial provision, exempting car dealers from oversight by the new Consumer Financial Protection Agency, looks like it's going to be included in the final bill, despite the objections of both Rep. Barney Frank and Sen. Chris Dodd, the two chairmen responsible for negotiating the final bill. President Obama too says he opposes the carve-out, but it won't stop him from signing the bill.

It happened primarily because of an extraordinary lobbying effort put on by the nation's car dealers, who benefit from the fact that they have businesses in every congressional district in the country. But just what are they protecting by being exempted from oversight? One of the things they're protecting is the ability of some of them to essentially pull con jobs on our brave fighting men and women. You might be saying, "Huh?" But take a look at this extraordinary article from Mother Jones last year:

One day in April, a 19-year-old sailor named William Kirkgaard was walking to the store at the Norfolk naval station when a man in a black Ford Mustang pulled up and asked for directions to the main gate. Kirkgaard indicated the way, whereupon the man, who said he was a former Marine, began asking questions: Why don't you have a car? Are you a member of the Navy Federal Credit Union? ...

Kirkgaard had maybe $20 to his name—not enough to get a taxi back to the base, much less buy a car. He'd only been in the Navy 10 months and had never bought a car without his parents. He didn't even have a driver's license on him, which meant he couldn't legally drive off the lot. Still, Mustang Man, whose real name is Jesse Neely, eventually persuaded him to test-drive a 2005 Dodge Stratus with 78,000 miles and a $10,000 sticker price. It shook violently and the "check engine" light flashed. Kirkgaard told Neely he didn't want the car, he says, but he naively agreed to give the dealership his personal information. Afterward, employees asked him to sign some paperwork; the sailor obliged without much thought. "Congratulations," they told him. "You just bought a car."

Read the whole thing -- that's just the beginning. Military bases around the country are ringed by businesses that prey on young and often naive military personnel -- car dealers, payday loan operators, and the like. This bill would have afforded a means to crack down on at least one group of scammers. But I guess not.

-- Paul Waldman

It's still too early to judge the ongoing financial-reform conference, but as I warned last week, the process is not necessarily producing a stronger bill. Respected former SEC Chairman Arthuer Levitt has an op-ed today tracing a number of investor-protection rules that have been weakened or gutted altogether by legislators.

My top worries are the new exemptions from Sarbanes-Oxley accounting rules for small companies -- how can that possibly be relevant to a bill intended to tighten rules? -- and a weak new provision on proxy access. The proxy-access provision is supposedly designed to allow investors more say over corporate management, but in fact, it functionally prohibits that from happening. Levitt also mentions the committee's failure to overturn a Supreme Court decision that makes it easier for accountants, auditors and other third parties to avoid consequences for abetting fraud, an issue I touched on yesterday.

These are wise warnings from Levitt. He also notes that little has been done on Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, but as we've discussed, such criticism isn't warranted given that there is little consensus on how to go about fixing the government-owned mortgage giants compared to the broadly debated issues that take up the rest of the bill. Typically, The Wall Street Journal headline focuses on Fannie and Freddie (the sixth point in the column) rather than the bulk of the concerns about investor protection -- a lovely window into the paper's editorial judgment.

-- Tim Fernholz

The decision to replace Gen. Stanley McChrystal with Gen. David Petraeus is getting support from a source that is not as unlikely as it might seem -- Elisa Massimino of Human Rights First.

Our national security and the successful completion of the U.S. mission there depend on depriving the enemy of legitimacy and building trust between Americans and Afghans. If he is confirmed by the Senate to serve in this post, General Petraeus has the opportunity to ensure that the United States treats detainees there in accordance with our values.

Human-rights groups were always suspicious of McChrystal because of the torture allegations swirling around Camp Nama in Iraq during his time running JSOC, while Petraeus has always been on record as opposing torture. Perhaps ironically, while Petraeus is a self-identified moderate Republican, McChrystal was apparently a flaming liberal who wouldn't abide FOX News in his presence. The current scenario would seem to spike Republican hopes for either candidate to run in opposition to Barack Obama in 2012.

-- A. Serwer

Following a rising tide of controversies that ended in a surprisingly swift political revolt on Wednesday, Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd has stepped aside. He will be replaced by his deputy, Julia Gillard, making her the first woman to hold the office. Gillard has promised to pursue a carbon-pricing system and to settle an ongoing dispute over a proposed mining tax.

(Flickr/maxmilne)

Dale Peterson, who wanted to tough-talk and scold Alabamans into voting for him as the state's agriculture commissioner, is back with another of his cowboy-hat-wearing, gun-wielding ads, this time to endorse his former opponent, John McMillan. Apropos Peterson's cowboy persona, Racialicious has a great piece up about the American cowboy myth. It points out what any real student of the American frontier already knows: that many cowboys were African American, Mexican, and Mexican American and were largely itinerant workers who didn't own the horses they rode on or the cows they drove.

The piece also lists the white male politicians who have successfully drawn on the myth of the white American cowboy hero to get their way into office, from Teddy Roosevelt to George W. Bush. The only thing I would add, though, is that it doesn't always work. Peterson didn't win. Voters can be harsh when they feel someone has adopted a fake, drugstore-cowboy persona just to appeal to them, and the personal charisma of Reagan and Bush went a long way to helping them successfully employ a frontiersman-like attitude.

-- Monica Potts

Molly Ball describes how Sen. Harry Reid spent years engineering the Republican field against him, and got the race he wanted:

The dean of the Nevada political press corps, television host and columnist Jon Ralston, frequently refers to Reid as the state's "Meddler-in-Chief," because nearly everything that happens in the Silver State bears his fingerprints. Nowhere has that been more evident than in the race to run against him. It belies the common perception of him as a bumbling, mush-mouthed, accidental leader. By reputation, he is no Lyndon B. Johnson or even Rahm Emanuel: The Washington Post's David Broder called him "a continuing embarrassment thanks to his amateurish performance" as majority leader. But the way he's engineered his current electoral situation shows that Harry Reid is no less a master of the inside game.

KEEP READING ...

Despite the recent announcement that the Justice Department is filing suit against Arizona's SB 1070, it appears Obama's promise to Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer to beef up border security wasn't just a brush-off. Yesterday, the administration asked Congress for $500 million in "emergency" funding for border enforcement, which includes two aerial drones -- the kind at work in Iraq and Afghanistan -- and 1,000 more Border Patrol agents. That's on top of the 1,200 National Guardsmen Obama sent to the area earlier last month. And on top of the 10,000 new Border Patrol agents that have been hired since 2004.

In all, that's about 10 Border Patrol agents for every mile of the U.S.-Mexico border.

The thing is, as Adam Serwer and I have noted repeatedly, there's no border-security emergency. The hysteria about border violence -- fueled in particular by the murder of a single Arizona rancher by what police suspected was an undocumented immigrant (it turns out, after all, the prime suspect is a citizen) -- persists despite the fact that crime along the border is low and going down, immigrants commit fewer crimes than the native-born citizens, and illegal immigration is down because of the economic downturn. 

What's especially upsetting is that so many on the left have climbed on the enforcement wagon in the hope of swaying Republicans to support comprehensive immigration reform, which includes a path to citizenship for the undocumented. In March, the Center for American Progress called for just the type of military drones Obama has now dispatched to the border. But progressives should realize: If having ten border patrol agents per mile doesn't count as "securing the border" to Republicans, who maintain that we still haven't done so, nothing probably will. Progressives should push to bring the 12 million undocumented immigrants living in the country out of the shadows -- and perhaps give up on trying to appease Republicans by militarizing the border.

-- Gabriel Arana

Matthew Yglesias explains how China's tighter monetary policy could be good news for China and the U.S. both -- depending on how the world responds:

China’s central bank announced that it would allow its currency, the renminbi, to trade up or down according to market demand for Chinese money -- just in time for Rolling Stone's blockbuster article on Gen. Stanley McChrystal to obliterate all other issues from the news cycle. It's worth recalling, however, what a big deal this was just a few weeks ago when Paul Krugman called on the Obama administration to "get tough" with China over trade. In March, Krugman had deplored the U.S. failure to threaten tariffs as a leading reason to despair over our economic prospects. Meanwhile, on June 13, China's state-controlled press slammed members of Congress who wanted China to let its currency trade as a "bunch of baby-kissing politicians" who didn’t know what they were talking about. But now the storm has passed, we're all friends again, and the problems are solved, right?

KEEP READING ...

Earlier this week, Arizona Sen. Jon Kyl accused the Obama administration of "holding the border hostage," saying that the White House wasn't going to "secure the border" without Republican commitments to comprehensive immigration reform. At the time I pointed out that this was doubtful, both because of the already considerable federal resources devoted to the matter and because an impenetrable border isn't an outcome within our physical or technological capabilities.

Nevertheless, the administration is going further:

On Tuesday, President Obama asked Congress for $500 million in emergency border security, including two more aerial drones and 1,000 more Border Patrol officers to join 1,200 National Guard troops heading to the region.

This is a funny way of "holding the border hostage" by committing fewer resources to monitoring it. Again, the point remains that Republicans who won't negotiate "until the border is secure" are operating from an initial negotiating position that is impossible to achieve, so they can refuse to commit to comprehensive immigration reform by accusing the administration of refusing to live up to their basic obligations.

-- A. Serwer

If Louie Gohmert were a former beauty queen, chances are he'd get a lot more face time on TV, and you'd have heard of him by now. But since he's looks like an accountant, the Republican from Texas who may be Congress' single dumbest member will have to keep plying his trade on the floor of the House. Via Dave Weigel, we see Gohmert endorsing syndicated columnist Thomas Sowell's latest missive, which begins this way: "When Adolf Hitler was building up the Nazi movement in the 1920s..." You know what's coming - in this case it's Obama convincing BP to set aside a $20 billion escrow fund that proves that genocide is right around the corner. I know - the idea that Obama=Hitler is a profound thought that you haven't contemplated before, and its unusual insight shows why Sowell is one of America's most widely syndicated columnists.

But what I actually want to point to is the way Gohmert begins his tribute to Sowell:

"I didn't vote for Barack Obama in 2008, but I sure would have voted for Thomas Sowell." That's kind of an odd thing to say. Sowell isn't a politician. He's not running for anything. I doubt that when your typical Republican quotes, say, George Will, he says, "I didn't vote for Barack Obama in 2008, but I sure would have voted for George Will." So what could it possibly be about Thomas Sowell that would make Gohmert say that? Let's look at the columnist's picture and see if it provides us any insight:

Hmm. I can't quite put my finger on it...

-- Paul Waldman

This weekend, President Obama will be in Canada for G-20 summit meetings of the largest world economies. There, the U.S. agenda will focus on a number of international issues, but among the most important will be encouraging other countries not to precipitously adopt austerity policies. "We must demonstrate a commitment to reducing long-term deficits, but not at the price of short-term growth," Obama's top economic advisers wrote yesterday. "Without growth now, deficits will rise further and undermine future growth."

The problem, though, is that many major countries are beginning to consolidate their economies. The divide isn't, as this The Hill writer inaccurately suggests, because Europeans worry about debt crises while the president worries about politics. There is a serious debate here over global economic policy, and cutting aggregate demand at this moment could be a very serious mistake. It's a question of interests, especially when it comes to export-oriented nations like Germany and China that rely on the rest of the world to purchase their goods and don't want to change that equation (ironically, though China hasn't exactly been cooperative, they've been less open in rejecting this idea than the Germans).

If Germany and other export-oriented countries refuse to engage in a macro-economic policy shift, we're likely to see more international bailouts as importing countries -- like the PIGS (Portugal, Italy, Greece, Spain) -- need to borrow more and more foreign currency to sustain their purchases from places like Germany. And they're borrowing from Germany and other European countries, further complicating the situation. Ironically, the country best positioned to take advantage of Keynesian stimulus is Germany, whose responsible budgeting makes it an ideal candidate for effective short-term stimulus and whose robust social-safety net makes targeting that stimulus relatively easy. Premier Angela Merkel's refusal to engage these ideas will likely backfire in some way thanks to the inextricable ties of the global economy.

Obama is shouldering the burden of arguing in favor of global stimulus at the international summit, in the hopes of avoiding a double-dip recession. Hopefully he'll be able to find some consensus to continue stimulus in the short-term until global capacity starts to rebuild.

-- Tim Fernholz

• To build on a point I made yesterday, the right's unflinching devotion to the greatness of America's top military brass makes them deeply unserious about the ultimate point of our overseas adventures. For instance, defense "analyst" Michael O'Hanlon's concern yesterday that removing McChystal during "perhaps the most crucial six months of the entire war" would be a grave error because of the indispensable "leadership of such an amazing American."
• If you're looking for a big-picture story on the fringe candidates who have won Republican primaries this year, I recommend you avoid this Politico piece on the "GOP rebels" who could join the Senate next year. The story notes the limited-government bona fides of candidates like Rand Paul and how they want to "shake up" the Senate, but it fails to explain exactly how they would actually do this.
• Sometimes it's worth taking a step back to appreciate how unfit to govern Republicans have become. Here's a member of Congress praising a Thomas Sowell column comparing the BP "shakedown" to the rise of the Nazi Party. And here's RNC Chairman Michael Steele urging Americans to "trust Wall Street" to create jobs. It's a good thing Democrats are allowing these clowns another shot at governance.
• Remainders: The Washington Times is a serious purveyor of sober conservative opinion; Zbigniew Brzezinski talks totalitarianism; it would be easier to take libertarians seriously if they didn't constantly make mountains out of molehills; and the public is a thermostat.

Mori Dinauer

Most of the people who might have been outraged by this are now devoting their full efforts to battling the "creeping influence of Sharia Law" in the United States, but there was a time when this would have been genuinely controversial.

 Shakur's birthday was last week. Had he not been murdered he would have been 39 years old.

-- A. Serwer

TPM's Christina Bellantoni has made a list of public figures who are taking a breather from public scrutiny during Gen. Stanley McChrystal's 15 minutes of gaffe. The one group that she forgot to add, though, is telling: The banks and their lobbyists currently fighting strong financial reform during conference committee negotiations between the House and the Senate.

While the conference committee meetings, which promised unusual transparency, were much anticipated, the increasing focus on the BP disaster left both members of Congress and the media with limited bandwidth for the issue. It was most notable in the scrum that resulted when a BP hearing and the financial-reform conference were held across the hall from each other; in the chaos, it was clear the bulk of attention was on the chagrined oil company executives, while lobbyists scuttled around the doors of the negotiating room.

Democratic political operatives hoping to highlight Republican opposition to the bill have worried that the lack of attention is a wasted opportunity, and reformers are concerned that loopholes could be widened in the committee if activists are unable to breathe down the neck of centrist Democrats who make up the bulk of the negotiating team.

Why not slow down the legislation? Speed is of the essence, passing this bill before campaign season gets into full swing will make finding the votes easier, and the ability of various interests to pressure members is weaker now than immediately before the election. There are a lot of other items on the legislative calendar this summer, too -- critical budget bills, jobs programs, and perhaps some kind of effort on the energy bill.

I'd note that Daniel Indiviglio's criticisms of the rush here are disingenuous -- almost every issue in this bill has been extensively debated for well over a year now. Indivigilio focuses on reforming Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and it's true that Democrats don't want to deal with that issue in this bill due to the fraught politics and because the housing market is still so destabilized.

However, that shouldn't delay the passage of the rest of this package, especially because the amendments offered by Republicans on Fannie and Freddie are transparent poison pills, like a proposal last week that would have immediately dissolved the two mortgage giants -- a move that, without a careful transition plan, would result in economic disaster. There's no reason Congress shouldn't pass the strongest reforms it can now and take the time to come up with a real solution to the GSE problem.

-- Tim Fernholz

I was all ready to write a post noting the hypocrisy of conservatives who pilloried Barack Obama for sacking Stanley McChrystal for his insubordination, when those very same conservatives were fond of arguing that it was unconscionably anti-American for anyone, let alone a general, to criticize the commander in chief during a time of war, so long as that commander in chief was a Republican. But guess what happened? In looking around the right side of the web, I've seen some recycled criticism of Obama in general, but almost no one railing against the decision to give McChrystal the boot. There's even some actual praise. Take this post from National Review editor Rich Lowry, titled "Obama's Home Run":

I'm not sure how Obama could have handled this any better. He was genuinely graceful about McChrystal and his explanation of why he had to go made perfect sense. He called for unity within his adminstration in pursuing the war and sounded quite stalwart about both the war and about the strategy. More importantly, his choice of Petraeus as a replacement for McChrystal is a brilliant move: He gets a heavy-weight, an unassailable expert in this kind of warfare, and someone who presumably can step in pretty seamlessly.

That can't have been easy to say. So let's give our conservative friends their due -- for whatever combination of reasons, some of them are showing themselves to be able, at least for a moment, to step outside the blind partisanship that says you have to criticize each and every thing the other side ever does. I hereby pledge that when Mitt Romney ascends to the White House in 2017 after his third run, I'll try to be open-minded about him.

-- Paul Waldman

You shouldn't be surprised to see that the Affordable Care Act's popularity is trending upward, as this USA Today/Gallup poll demonstrates:

The age demographics are particularly interesting: The younger cohort approves the bill most strongly -- in part because many of its reforms are aimed at them and they stand to benefit most from long-term cost-cutting. Seniors are the most likely to dislike the legislation. While this may represent a problem for the Democrats given seniors are generally reliable voters, the numbers likely reflect generally uneasy support for Democrats from seniors. This simply reinforces the need for the Democrats to turn out their 2008 voting coalition, especially young voters.

As I said, though, health care never looked like a bad election issue for the Democrats, despite constant Republican concern-trolling that the landmark legislation would ruin the majority's chances in 2010. It's a fact worth remembering as Republicans promise that other major agenda items -- notably energy legislation -- will be political poison for their colleagues across the aisle.

The real problem for the majority, however, continues to be dismal news about employment, where some 16 percent of workers are un- or under-employed. So long as the incumbents' management of the economy leaves this many Americans deservedly unsatisfied, other Democratic successes and Republican criticisms will matter very little.

-- Tim Fernholz

Calling it "the right thing for our mission in Afghanistan, for our military, and for our country," President Barack Obama opted to replace Gen. Stanley McChrystal following the publication of a Rolling Stone article in which McChrystal and his inner circle made disparaging remarks about administration officials. The decision was necessary, as Noah Schactman writes, because "[k]eeping General Stanley McChrystal in place would have shattered the chain of command, obliterated the authority Obama had with the military, and undermined any hope of waging a successful counterinsurgency in Afghanistan."

The question now becomes whether McChrystal's departure means a shift in our Afghanistan strategy. As Spencer Ackerman reported earlier, the answer is no.

Conservatives recognized that McChrystal needed to be disciplined but wanted him to stay, largely because they were concerned his departure would mean a shift in strategy. Despite the tendency of the political press to describe military commanders in near-mythological terms, McChrystal is not irreplaceable, not even for those who want to see the current counterinsurgency strategy continue. With Gen. David Petraeus stepping in as his replacement, those on the right concerned with strategic continuity can breathe easy. Obama stressed that "we have a clear goal, we are going to break the Taliban's momentum, we are going to build Afghan capacity, we are going to relentlessly apply pressure on al-Qaeda and its leadership, strengthening the ability of both Afghanistan and Pakistan to do the same," essentially reaffirming his commitment to the strategy decided on last fall. Petraeus' Senate confirmation is likely to go through without incident.

Liberals were hoping that McChrystal's departure would offer an opportunity for the administration to rethink a strategy that some suspect was adopted largely due to political pressure to continue the mission.They point to the recent difficulties in Marjah as evidence the strategy isn't working to dislodge or weaken the Taliban, and maintain that the structure and corruption of the Afghan government is an intractable problem. At the very least, they would have liked a serious re-evaluation of the viability of the current counterinsurgency strategy.

The appointment of Gen. Petraeus is likely to squelch any such discussion before it gets started. The near superhero status Petraeus enjoys isn't simply due to his intelligence or capability as a leader -- it's also the result of media mythmaking about the Iraq War. Despite the ease with which the country has come to adopt the narrative that the 2007 troop escalation and the shift to a counterinsurgency strategy singlehandedly turned the Iraq War around, it remains untrue. As Michael Cohen helpfully continues to remind us, there were a number of factors involved, including ethnic cleansing in Baghdad, the Sunni tribes turning on al-Qaeda's affiliate in Iraq and the Sadr ceasefire.

These things are complicated though, and it's easier both for the press and for the general audience to shoehorn the complicated story of the turnaround in Iraq into a single epic narrative starring an indomitable warrior-hero, and the media won't be able to resist the temptation to call this a sequel. The problem with flattening these things into facile narratives is that it dissuades Americans from thinking critically about the implications -- both moral and practical -- of important policy decisions. Which -- aside from his admirable record -- is surely part of why Petraeus was chosen.

(Flickr/WhiteHouse)

-- A. Serwer

Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee is under fire for comments he made to The New Yorker magazine about same-sex marriage:

Male and female are biologically compatible to have a relationship. We can get into the “ick factor,” but the fact is two men in a relationship, two women in a relationship, biologically, that doesn’t work the same.

Faced with criticism from gay-rights groups, Huckabee clarified.

My use of the phrase “ick factor” was as the established notion from within the Gay, Lesbian, Bi-sexual, Transgender (GLBT) community. It was not an indication of personal aversion, but rather a reference to an established phrase used mostly from same-sex marriage advocates and militants -- not one I created.

I don’t see how Huckabee could be doing anything other than referencing an aversion to gay sex. It is in fact common for conservatives -- in the absence of rational argument -- to focus on the intricate mechanics of gay sex in explaining and justifying their opposition to gay rights. 

The phrase "ick factor" was certainly not invented by gay people. But it has been used among some movement thinkers precisely to refer to the disgust some people feel toward gay sex. The "advocate and militant" Huckabee mentions in defending himself, University of Chicago philosopher Martha Nussbaum, has written a whole book on why disgust toward unpopular minorities -- gay men and gay sex in particular -- is not a suitable basis for law (you can read the Prospect's review of Nussbaum's From Disgust to Humanity here). 

It's pretty clear what Huckabee meant, and his juvenile preoccupation with how gay people have sex would be funny if it weren't so pernicious.

-- Gabriel Arana

Predictably, Washington Post columnist Kathleen Parker went after Jessica Valenti for explaining why Sarah Palin and conservative women like her can't call themselves feminists -- even if they employ some feminist language to promote their conservative values. 

Parker says Valenti's argument shows that today's feminists enforce a sort of orthodoxy that doesn't let women reach their own conclusions on feminist topics even while, practically, the successes of the feminist movement mean many women with divergent views are able to rise to prominence. (She also, in a strange aside, argues that being pro-choice is no longer a feminist requirement because a transgendered man gave birth and there might be fake wombs someday, making pregnancy less a woman's concern.)

Of course women can have divergent views. But it's not true that this makes every woman in power a feminist. Palin's argument is that abortion hurts women, and Parker thinks there's room for a pro-woman argument against abortion. And surely, plenty of women are anti-abortion and would approve of an anti-abortion message from a woman in power.

But Palin would, given the opportunity, institute actual policies that prohibit other women from exercising their own choice. Those who would curb abortion rights praise those who make a choice to carry a troubled or unexpected pregnancy to term, but in their world this is the only "choice" that exists. Palin would make her argument against abortion in a world that disallowed it. This isn't a choice, and it doesn't trust women to make their own. Palin isn't a feminist because feminist orthodoxy is so strong, but because hers is.

-- Monica Potts

If you track tech politics closely, there’s a good chance you can spot a Declan McCullagh column before you glance at the byline. McCullagh, a reporter and commentator for CNET, has a tendency to hang any tech news of the day on an anti-government framework, rarely stopping at healthy skepticism when there's a chance to spark full-blown hysteria. By his own admission, McCullagh started the ridiculous and harmful “Al Gore invented the Internet” meme in the late '90s. McCullagh’s latest hit tearing up the Web is that the Senate is considering a Sen. Joe Lieberman bill to equip the president with a “kill switch” over the Internet.

The problem with a McCullagh framing is that it's intensely polarizing. The natural responses to it are either to become completely terrified or to write pieces completely discounting his concerns. TPMDC’s Megan Carpentier does a nice job fact checking the “kill switch," proving how overblown the McCullagh interpretation of it is. But she does, I think, fall into the trap of underplaying legitimate concerns about how Lieberman and his co-sponsors are proposing securing the Internet and affiliated digital networks.
 
A healthy skepticism is probably the appropriate response to Lieberman’s Protecting Cyberspace as a National Asset Act, as it does seem to suggest a shift in the Internet's public-private dynamic. People in the cybersecurity and intelligence worlds have been debating for decades now over whether the insecurity of the Internet cries out for greater government ability to intervene in Internet traffic (or maybe even the creation of separate networks for banking, energy, and other core parts of the life of the country). The Lieberman plan would, indeed, rely upon private owners and operators of critical digital infrastructure – “systems and assets…so vital to the United States that the incapacity or destruction of such systems and assets would have a debilitating impact” to pull the relevant definition from the PATRIOT Act – to develop emergency security plans that can be triggered by presidential order. In normal times, the Internet stays the Internet. But in recognition of its centrality to the American way of life, the president has the power to, say, order that traffic coming from China be blocked in a crisis. That’s not nothing.

And that's also the debate, I'd suggest, we should be having. How will the “cyberspace” we increasingly depend on be protected while at the same time maintaining its metamorphic nature as a free and open medium? Not fighting over how big a power-grabbing jerk Joe Lieberman is this week.

--Nancy Scola

Tim Fernholz on William Lerach, who went to jail for a crime that, at its heart, is no different than the white-collar crime he speaks out against:

William Lerach, a legend of the plaintiff's bar, finished up a two-year sentence in March for his part in an illegal kickback scheme. By June, he was in Washington, D.C., at the America's Future Now conference, lecturing progressives on the dangers white-collar crime on Wall Street poses to our pension system. The irony should have been apparent, to say the least.

KEEP READING ...

The only reaction over at NRO to Faisal Shahzad's guilty plea is this brief post. And to think I was looking forward to an explanation for why Shahzad likely spending the rest of his life in jail was part of the grand plot against America formulated by terrorists and liberals.

-- A. Serwer

A few months ago, I wrote a somewhat tongue-in-cheek column about how the zombie genre of movies, books, and video games is thriving, and how the genre reflects progressive values (that was the tongue-in-cheek part). It got more links than almost any column I've written. The lesson? People love zombies.

If you're one of those people, you might want to check out this article from Foreign Policy magazine, in which Dan Drezner offers a primer on how advocates of different foreign-policy theories -- real politik, neo-conservatism, etc. -- would respond to a zombie apocalypse. "The specter of an uprising of reanimated corpses also poses a significant challenge to interpreters of international relations and the theories they use to understand the world," Drezner writes. "If the dead begin to rise from the grave and attack the living, what thinking would -- or should -- guide the human response? How would all those theories hold up under the pressure of a zombie assault?"

What apparently began as a clever way to hold his students' attention and get them to understand these theories has blossomed into something more substantial, including an upcoming book titled "Theories of International Politics and Zombies." Which just goes to show: People love zombies.

-- Paul Waldman

For some reason, when I was writing about the Supreme Court ruling outlawing juvenile life without parole for non-homicide offenses, I neglected to mention Andy McCarthy's reaction. What was it? Well naturally, McCarthy asked, did Justice Anthony Kennedy "consult the Sharia?":

The penalty for theft under Islamic law is the amputation of the right hand. That's for a first offense. For a second offense, the left foot is cut off. For additional thefts after that, there are no further amputations — the person is simply imprisoned until he has repented in a manner satisfactory to the Muslim state (meaning for life if he fails to repent). For these penalties to be imposed, the offender must be (a) sane and (b) have reached puberty, meaning these penalties will often be applied to Muslim minors who are considerably younger than 16.

The U.S. is the only country that maintains the practice, so Kennedy didn't have to consult any particular foreign legal system in order to point out that JWOP might fit the description of "unusual" punishment prohibited by the Eighth Amendment. But anything McCarthy dislikes is necessarily connected to a larger secret Islamic conspiracy. This is a man who probably goes to Burger King and demands the non-Sharia ketchup.

Still, I'm sure publications like The New York Times will continue to solicit his opinions on legal matters. There's no such thing as too far right, especially in the "liberal" media.

-- A. Serwer

A few days ago, we checked in on negotiations over the Volcker rule, which would force federally insured banks to stop speculating with their own money and running hedge and private-equity funds. Democrats have been negotiating with Massachusetts Republican Sen. Scott Brown over weakening the rule so he would vote for the final financial-reform bill, but a better course would be strengthening the bill to lure over Sen. Russ Feingold or Sen. Maria Cantwell, two Democrats who voted against the Senate version of the legislation because it wasn't strong enough.

Now it seems that there is some sneakiness afoot, with Democrats hinting they are negotiating with Feingold and Cantwell in order to force Brown to make a deal quickly. But Senate sources say negotiations with the two Democrats have been tepid at best, suggesting that more outreach is needed for these votes. For Cantwell's part, it's unclear changes would need to be made to get her on the bill; while her goal of restoring the complete separation between commercial and investment banks seems out of reach, it's possible that adopting her ideas to close loopholes in derivatives regulation and strengthening the Volcker rule could be enough. "It would go without saying that she wouldn't vote for a bill that was weaker than the one she voted against," notes one Senate aide familiar with the discussions.

Feingold, on the other hand, is a little more transparent, with his staff releasing a statement yesterday that included a list of provisions the Wisconsin senator would like to see in the bill. "I have spoken to Senate leaders, the Obama administration, and members of the conference committee and made my concerns well known," Feingold said in the statement. "I opposed deregulating Wall Street and eliminating the protections of the Glass-Steagall Act, a position which put me at odds with many in Washington who supported the very policies that contributed to the financial crisis, and who now support these bills that simply don’t get the job done." Here's his wish list:

• Cantwell-McCain-Feingold amendment to restore the Glass-Steagall firewall between Wall Street and Main Street
• Sen. Dorgan’s “too big to fail” amendment, which requires that no financial entity be permitted to become so large that its failure threatens the financial stability of the U.S.
• Brown-Kaufman amendment proposing strict limits on the size of financial institutions
• Dorgan amendment to ban so-called naked credit-default swaps, speculative bets that played a role in the economic crisis
• Merkley-Levin amendment to prohibit any bank with government insured deposits from engaging in high-risk finance, like investing in hedge funds or private-equity funds

Unfortunately, it doesn't look like the first four items will make it into the bill, but the Merkley-Levin amendment will likely be the basis for the Volcker rule during conference negotiations. The question now for these legislators is how long to stick to their guns and fight for provisions that lack a major consensus in order to shepherd some of the more feasible reforms into the bill -- unless they decide, as Feingold certainly could, to simply hold his ground and vote no in protest.

Still, there is some hope. "There were folks on the conference committee who feel as we do and are working hard to strengthen it; we feel that the signs are that things are kind of moving in the right direction," the Senate aide said.

-- Tim Fernholz

Today, Troy Davis gets his day in court.

Davis was convicted of the 1989 killing of a police officer, Mark MacPhail. Since his trial, seven of the nine witnesses have come forward and recanted, with several saying they were pressured by police into fingering Davis -- one now points to the ninth witness as the real murderer. The incident brought some much needed scrutiny to the general (and generally unknown) unreliability of eyewitnesses. Just to put this in perspective, three-quarters of those exonerated by DNA testing by the Innocence Project were wrongly identified by eyewitnesses. There is no physical evidence linking Davis to the crime.

Davis has come close to being executed (once his execution was put off two hours before his lethal injection was scheduled to go through), but last August the Supreme Court voted to force a Georgia District Court to reconsider the facts of the case and to make a finding as to Davis' innocence. Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas were the sole dissenters in the 6-2 decision (Sonia Sotomayor did not vote) in which Scalia argued that “this court has never held that the Constitution forbids the execution of a convicted defendant who had a full and fair trial but is later able to convince a habeas court that he is ‘actually’ innocent.” Most people would not describe a trial in which most of the witnesses said they lied or were coerced by police as "free" or "fair," but then again most people don't have the Founding Fathers as imaginary friends. MacPhail's family has also maintained they want Davis executed, but most people understand that the state doesn't have a compelling interest in the ritual execution of a potentially innocent man on the basis that it might grant the surviving victims of the crime some emotional closure.

I'd revisit the argument over Scalia's remarks, but I think they speak for themselves. The judge isn't expected to rule anytime soon.

-- A. Serwer

The Huffington Post has a good story today on just how difficult it will be to determine who has a legitimate claim against BP. The story discusses one woman who works with local hospitals to recruit new doctors and places about 12 doctors a year. One has backed out since the oil spill. Though it's clear her living isn't directly tied to the water, it's also true that the oil spill is going to affect the entire region in ways we can't quite imagine.

But there's also, of course, those businesses that people get uptight about because of the kinds of businesses they are.

There has been so much confusion over who is eligible that Feinberg has had to respond to rumors about a New Orleans strip club putting in for a payout. 

"I'm dubious about that claim. I'm very dubious about that claim," [Kenneth] Feinberg told ABC's George Stephanopoulos. "But I don't want to prejudge any individual claim."

A woman who answered the phone at the club denied that it was a strip club, but so what if it was? It's not as though oil rig workers don't spend their money throughout the local economies, and the lack of it doesn't affect the people who work there. If a hotel can have a legitimate claim, why not a club? This is the media finding -- literally, a sexy story within all the tragedy -- and I hope that no one with a legitimate claim suffers.

-- Monica Potts

• It didn't take long for conservatives to identify the source of Gen. Stanley McChrystal's reckless comments: his frustration with Obama, who's really at fault in all this. Now, I haven't heard anyone outright defending McChrystal's remarks, but it is reflexive of the American right to empathize with military figures regardless of the circumstances.
• Glenn Greenwald has been an indefatigable defender of civil liberties since he began writing about their erosion under the Bush administration, but it appears his focus on the abuse of executive power has led him to believe presidents have powers they don't. Not only does Greenwald believe that the president can bend Congress to his will but also that he has unlimited sway over the national-security bureaucracy.
• I don't get the skepticism here of nonprofit investigative journalism. They have an agenda? They're not adhering to some unachievable standard of objectivity? My position has long been that good journalism can comfortably accommodate a political orientation as long as the reporting stands on it's own.
• It would be comforting to believe that the prime motivation for lunatics like Andy McCarthy is greed at the expense of gullible, ignorant, and paranoid conservatives. But I'm not so sure. The belief that the left is complicit with radical Islam is a view not just widely shared among conservatives -- it is believed fervently. But I don't detect anything less than deep sincerity that he is fighting for a just cause.
• Remainders: Hey, some presidential nominees were actually confirmed by the Senate; Tea Partiers aren't that complicated; I love the irony of criticizing a "strong, charismatic leader who knows what’s best for you" in the midst of a reflection on Ronald Reagan's genius; and can we stop pretending these "originalists" give a damn about the Constitution?

--Mori Dinauer