INTERESTING. . . . No time to opine, but here's the link: Bush speech nets career-low TV audience.

HASTA LA VISTA, BABY? "A majority of California voters do not want to see Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger re-elected, according to the latest poll showing the Republican's political appeal sliding. . . ."

MORAL VALUES, INDEED: The Great Communicator beats out The Great Emancipator as "the greatest American of all time."

QUIZ: 'Baghdad Bob' or 'D.C. Dick' Cheney?

UPDATE: And while we're on the subject of vice presidential humor, let me add something that I somehow forgot to mention last week: Mad Kane is now podcasting.

ONE OF THE MORE AMUSING BLOGOSPHERIC PASTIMES at one point (a year or two ago, I guess) was watching moderate Democrats' heads explode. One by one, we all seemed to finally get it: This administration was not a continuation of modern conservative presidencies like Ronald Reagan's. It was, in fact, a radical experiment in a new kind of national American politics -- strategically divisive, tactically dishonest, and always, always, always brutally demagogic.

The problem wasn't that they broke the rules sometimes. It was that they didn't believe there are any rules.

The bad news, of course, is that the administration hasn't changed its ways; if anything, they've gotten worse, as Karl Rove's recent outburst demonstrates. The good news, though, is that we centrist Democrats aren't alone anymore: heads are now exploding among moderates of all parties and persuasions.

DAN FROOMKIN:

There are at least two reasons why no one should expect any apologies from Karl Rove or the White House for Rove's controversial comments Tuesday night, in which he described the liberal approach to national security as being weak and possibly even treasonous.

1) This White House doesn't apologize.

2) Why apologize when you said exactly what you meant to say?

Yep.

BLOG TRIUMPHALISM: Is it just my imagination, or has the AP taken up Friday Cat Blogging?

A WORTHY CAUSE: I just got the snail mail version of this Paul Glastris appeal . . . and responded!

And if you care about good journalism -- not just good lefty journalism, but good journalism, period -- you should, too.

TEN EUROS FOR WHAT? Vodkapundit's Will Collier is right: This is "interesting" -- and disturbing.

THERAPY? THERAPY??? The next time somebody asks you why the American people remained so divided after 9-11, just tell them the simple, unvarnished truth: Karl Rove likes us that way.

UPDATE: "This is the true face of the Bush crowd: extremism in pursuit of vice. It has to be said again and again. It should certainly be a 2006 theme. Opposing thuggery is a policy--it's called decency. And I suspect some elemental sense of fair play is not dead in the land."

MORE: “Can there be any doubt that this White House and administration have no desire to work for national unity, even on issue of terrorism? It’s MO seems to be division and polarization — whipping up rage against defined enemies…which now apparently include those who compete with it at the ballot box.”

HAPPY BIRTHDAY! Balloon Juice's John Cole reaches the ripe old age of 35 today. "Place your erectile dysfunction jokes, discussions of male pattern baldness, and walker jokes in the comments," he says.

VIA TVNEWSER, here's NBC's David Shuster: "I don't know if things are getting better or worse in Iraq. But I do know the Bush administration is now in total panic mode over the erosion of public support for the occupation. How else could one explain the President's bizarre radio address this past Saturday or the even more surreal comments recently from other administration officials?"

Good question.

TOTAL RECALL -- AGAIN? Digby notes that California has "a special election coming up --- one that will cost more than 70 million dollars and that Schwarzenegger insists we hold even though a regularly scheduled election is next June. Maybe we should make it worth our while."

Hmmm. . . .

THE SCOOP ON JOSH MARSHALL'S CHARACTER PROBLEM: I realize that this is pretty small beer in a world beset by real problems, like poverty, disease, terror, hunger, missing white women, and the films of Michael Bay, but, when I finally got around to registering over at Josh Marshall's TPMCafe this morning, I was a little disappointed to find that Scoop (the well-regarded open source software that powers the Cafe) still spits out an illegal character warning if you try to include an apostrophe in a username. C'mon, Scoopsters -- if Josh can post as Josh Marshall (as opposed to, say, Joh Marhall, or Josh Mrshll), I should be able to post as Jack O'Toole. Simple as that. Right?

PS: Yes, I know. I've seen how TPMCafe passes its "diary" URLs, and it will almost certainly take more than a simple update to the allowed characters list to make apostrophes legal. Still, most content management systems eventually solve this problem. So, uh, why not now, Scoop? You'll have the undying gratitude of O'Briens, O'Learys, O'Sullivans, and, yes, O'Tooles, the world over.

ACCORDING TO SCHWARZENEGGER ADVISER DON SIPPLE, the Governator hopes to overcome widespread public skepticism about his agenda by fomenting a "phenomenon of anger" among California voters, and then carefully aiming that rage at his political opponents.

Classy. And if it were anybody else, I'd probably make some sly allusion to combustibles and the Reichstag. But since Gov. Schwarzenegger is (understandably) a bit touchy on that whole subject, and I'm nothing if not sensitive to the tender feelings of formerly steroidal movie actors with a penchant for cheap demagoguery (and gang bangs!), I'll just have to close this post by echoing the words of one Francis Urquhart, the kind of pol that Arnold would no doubt admire: "You might say that. I couldn't possibly comment."

JUST WONDERING. . . . Is this in any way a representative Democratic response to the words, "the United States is, on balance, a force for good in the world?" And, if it is, do we Dems really have any right to complain about poll results like these?

PERSUASION: I'm a bit hesitant to post this excerpt from AP writer Frazier Moore's recent column on the dying art of political persuasion, because, inevitably, the readers that I enjoy hearing from most will mistakenly believe it's aimed at them. Still, as a blogger who's been fortunate enough to generate a controversial post or two over the years, I can assure you that the phenomenon that Moore is describing here is both real and (kinda sorta) amusing, so I'm going to pass it along:

I am someone who aspires to change a few readers' minds with what I write. And I . . . sometimes have to wonder if I'm breaking through.

In particular, I am perplexed by how much of the e-mail I get seems uninformed by the piece I wrote that spurred it. I am struck by how, instead, what I wrote often serves only as a trigger for readers to sound off on what they already believed, with no reference to my article apart from referendumlike praise or condemnation directed toward me ("you're great" or "you're an idiot"), based on whether or not we seem to agree. [Emph added]

PS: The Matt Miller column that inspired Moore's musings is here.

PPS: Just so you'll know that I'm not simply picking on those who have the temerity to disagree with your not always humble correspondent, here's an example of the kind of comment I genuinely enjoy -- and sometimes even find myself, well, persuaded by.

LESSONS LEARNED: Slate's Fred Kaplan examines the now-(in?)famous Downing Street memos, and reaches three major conclusions.

• President Bush was clearly dissembling throughout the summer of 2002. War wasn't a "last resort" for this administration; it was a conflagration devoutly to be wished.

• The Bushies weren't lying about WMD. They were wrong, but they weren't lying.

• Iraq probably wouldn't be the disaster area it is today if President Bush had acted upon the concerns raised by our British allies during the planning phase.

In short, the memos are a bit of a mixed bag, according to Kaplan -- considerably more damning than most on the right are willing to acknowledge, but somewhat less so than many on the left would like to believe. Which is probably just about right.

AS I'VE MADE CLEAR IN THE PAST, I'm one of those who believes that the Fourth Estate gets more grief than it deserves from both sides of the aisle. But that doesn't mean that a professional media analyst like the WaPo's Howard Kurtz -- a man who gets paid to think deeply and well about these sorts of issues -- has any business cavalierly dismissing any and all Democratic press criticism as so much political hot air.

The bottom line is this: There's still a huge amount of post-Iraq anger out there toward Bush, and liberals are frustrated that the red part of the country doesn't share their view. So the press must be doing a lousy job, right?

The press performance in covering this tightly disciplined administration has been far from perfect, especially on Iraq. But it's worth remembering that during the Clinton years, it was conservatives who saw the media as being embarrassingly soft on the White House.

Jeebus, Kurtz. Brent Bozell is usually more thoughtful (and convincing) than that. . . .

--------

ANOTHER MYSTERIOUS DISAPPEARANCE: When The Moderate Voice's Joe Gandelman wrote his blog post about this morning's NYT story on former oil industry lobbyist Philip A. Cooney's remarkably smooth transition from Bush environmental staffer to Exxon Mobil executive, the article in question ended with what Gandelman called "the environmental quote of the year."

Some climate scientists and environmental campaigners said Mr. Cooney's quick shift from the White House to Exxon was evidence of a near-seamless relationship between the Bush administration and the oil industry.

"Perhaps he won't even notice he has changed jobs," said David G. Hawkins, who directs the climate center at the Natural Resources Defense Council, a private environmental group.

Joe's right. That's a pretty good line. So why is it missing from the latest version of the article? As they used to say on those cheesy old National Enquirer commercials, enquiring minds want to know. . . .

SHUFFLING THE DECK CHAIRS: Dan Froomkin's 2005 West Wing floor plan is up. Uber-wonks, notes Froomkin in a related column, "will enjoy comparing it with the old, circa Jan. 2004 version" here.

BARRY GOLDWATER WOULD BE PROUD: The conscience of a modern conservative. [Via Glenn Reynolds.]

--------

LISTENING TO EXISTENTIAL ANGST: Listening to Prozac author Peter Kramer has always been mystified, and more than a little irritated, by a question that routinely comes up in his public appearances: What if antidepressants had been around in Edgar Alan Poe's (or Nietzsche's, or Kierkegaard's, or [insert tortured artist here]'s) day? Which, he says, is every bit as silly as asking, what if penicillin had been around when Isak Dinesen contracted syphilis?

But is it? Are his questioners really just romanticizing depression, as he suggests? Or are they understandably concerned about a widely-prescribed class of psychoactive pharmaceuticals whose effectiveness is still judged almost entirely on the basis of (largely self-reported) symptomology, rather than a full understanding of the organic mechanisms at work? If I had to bet, I'd say that there's at least a little of the latter at the root of the question. And until Dr. Kramer and his colleagues can tell us precisely how these drugs cure the disease of depression (in the same way that they can explain, say, the interaction of penicillin and syphilis), the query that the good doctor finds so, well, depressing, isn�t going to go away. Nor should it. [Via Arts and Letters Daily.]

A TALE OF TWO WIKIS: I'm far from sold on Michael Kinsley's idea of using wiki technology to spice up the LA Times' op-ed section. (In fact, I'm as baffled by the whole concept as Kevin Drum appears to be.) But the Canary Islands MD who's trying to turn the Wikipedia entry on Avian influenza into a "central clearinghouse for breaking information on the virus" may well be on to something. . . .

--------

MINOR HOUSEKEEPING NOTE: When I upgraded this site's blog engine, WordPress, last month, the template that I was using at the time broke like a cheap toaster oven. Recognizing the desperate nature of my plight, as well as my complete inability to deal with it, the good folks at a local nonprofit were kind enough to lend me the WP template that had recently been developed for their site, with the understanding that I'd replace it before their new blog section went live. So, with that blessed day fast approaching, I stopped by Alex King's WordPress template repository yesterday, and picked up the shiny new design you're looking at now.

Many thanks to Alex for maintaining the repository, and to Kimmo for creating the template itself, which won a much-deserved award in a recent WP design contest. And thanks, too, to the nonprofit for the loaner. As we say down home, I'm forever in all y'all's debt.

And now, on with the show. . . .

UPDATE: Yep, the Puppy Blogging images are breaking the design at smaller screen resolutions. Sorry about that. I'll use thumbnails in the future.

HOW LOW CAN YOU GO? President Bush's job approval falls to 43 percent.

JONATHAN ALTER describes "how the bullies at Fox News play the game."

--------

I'VE BEEN A GREAT FAN OF LIBERAL OASIS FOR YEARS NOW, but this is just completely bassackwards:

If the Democrats in Washington aren�t going to stand up for their party chairman, then it�s up to us.

After Howard Dean noted that the Republican is �pretty much a white, Christian party,� Democrats seemingly couldn�t wait to rush to cameras and criticize the comment, leaving Dean on out a limb to defend himself.

This disloyalty builds on the bad precedent set over the weekend by Sen. Joe Biden and fmr. Sen. John Edwards, both who knocked Dean for saying a lot of Republican leaders have never made an �honest living.�

Oh, Edwards was sure to blog a day later to insist it was the awful media that unfairly blew up his comments.

Biden was sure to go on Imus to insist that he thinks it�s OK if Dean is a lightning rod.

Similarly yesterday, Dems like House Min. Leader Nancy Pelosi and Sen. Chris Dodd were sure to claim that they were just criticizing the comment, but they still support Dean.

Please.

C'mon, folks. Elected officials don't "stand up for their party chairman" -- their party chairman stands up for them. Because, believe it or not (and this concept really does seem to be a brainteaser for some Democrats), the primary purpose of a political party is pretty much to, you know, produce elected officials. And putting them at risk for the benefit of their chief cheerleader would be a little insane, no?

All this cult of personality stuff with Howard Dean is fine up to a point. Many of our strongest grassroots supporters genuinely love the guy, and that's great. But if it continues to lead to this kind of disparagement of our elected officials, Dr. Dean is once again going to find himself trying to function with little or no support outside of his personal base. And we all remember how well that worked out last time, right?

I HAVE A PRETTY FIRM RULE ABOUT NOT USING ADULT LANGUAGE HERE ON THE BLOG, but in this case I'm going to make an exception. Regardless of what you think of President Bush -- and as regular readers know, I'm not what you'd call a fan -- this kind of shit is just completely unacceptable. [Via The Corner.]

QUACK, QUACK: With his second term agenda all but dead in the water, some of President Bush's political allies are starting to wonder whether stubbornness is really a virtue in a lame-duck president.

JOHN COLE: "I don't want junk science or unfounded claims going forward, either, but it is becoming pretty clear to me that faith-based governance simply means that anything you don't like or anything that might require a change in your policy position should be ignored or labeled 'junk science.'"

Quite right.

MIDWEEK PUPPY BLOGGING: Molly gets acquainted with our star boarder, Dylan Thomas O'Toole.

POSTSCRIPT: Yeah, I know. The pictures are far from perfect. But give me a little time. I'm just getting started with this whole pet blogging thing. . . .

HERE'S ED KILGORE, making an important point about politics as it's played in the real world.

Some Arabs came over here and killed a lot of Americans. Bush went over there and killed a lot more Arabs. Since then, no Arabs have come over here and killed Americans. Thus, Bush's invasion of Iraq is responsible for our safety since 9/11.

I don't know about you, but in conversations with non-political people during the 2004 campaign, I heard some version of this "Bush must be doing something right" argument repeated over and over again. And in my experience, telling people they are falling prey to the post hoc ergo propter hoc (after this, therefore because of this) logical fallacy is not a terribly effective rebuttal.

Republicans understood this dynamic, which is why the Bush-Cheney campaign did not dwell on back-and-forth arguments about the original rationales for the war, or respond to John Kerry's pointed criticisms of the administration's success in fighting terrorism. Their whole message was that George W. Bush's characteristic resolve and decisiveness had intimidated terrorists into inaction, making him the Indispensible Man in the war on terror.

Yep. As the only two-term Democratic president since FDR could tell you, winning campaigns don't try to change the underlying assumptions of the electorate in a matter of a few short months; they use those assumptions to frame the debate in a way that ultimately persuades a plurality of the voters to pull the lever by their guy's name.

Sooner or later, we Democrats are going to remember that. And when we do, I suspect that we're going to find that the GOP is in the same kind of trouble at the presidential level that we were in for so many years. It's hard for a majority party to consistently win the White House -- especially once the minority party grows up, and quits making their job easier than it should be.

MORE CLINTONIAN EXCEPTIONALISM: The Corner's Tim Graham is outraged to discover that Bill Clinton gets the same kind of deferential treatment from TV interviewers that every other former president enjoys . . . even on FOX!

Geez. Aren't these guys ever going to grow up?

LEE SIEGEL MAKES THE SHOCKING DISCOVERY that popular entertainments seek to restore order to a disordered universe, and to make the the human heart seem more knowable than it really is. Horrors.

UPDATE: I'm probably being a little unfair to Seigel up there; it's TNR more broadly that tends to irk me on the whole question of pop culture. I mean, really, now: if you're afraid to discuss, say, bestselling books without first making a special point of insulting their writers and readers with a gratuitously condescending disclaimer, why bother?

MORE: Here's Stephen King, kinda sorta making the same point as he (again, kinda sorta) thanks the National Book Foundation for honoring him with their Distinguished Contribution to American Letters Award:

Tokenism is not allowed. You can't sit back, give a self satisfied sigh and say, "Ah, that takes care of the troublesome pop lit question. In another twenty years or perhaps thirty, we'll give this award to another writer who sells enough books to make the best seller lists." It's not good enough. Nor do I have any patience with or use for those who make a point of pride in saying they've never read anything by John Grisham, Tom Clancy, Mary Higgins Clark or any other popular writer.

What do you think? You get social or academic brownie points for deliberately staying out of touch with your own culture? Never in life, as Capt. Lucky Jack Aubrey would say. And if your only point of reference for Jack Aubrey is the Australian actor, Russell Crowe, shame on you.

There's a writer here tonight, my old friend and some time collaborator, Peter Straub. He's just published what may be the best book of his career. Lost Boy Lost Girl surely deserves your consideration for the NBA short list next year, if not the award itself. Have you read it? Have any of the judges read it?

There's another writer here tonight who writes under the name of Jack Ketchum and he has also written what may be the best book of his career, a long novella called The Crossings. Have you read it? Have any of the judges read it? And yet Jack Ketchum's first novel, Off Season published in 1980, set off a furor in my supposed field, that of horror, that was unequaled until the advent of Clive Barker. It is not too much to say that these two gentlemen remade the face of American popular fiction and yet very few people here will have an idea of who I'm talking about or have read the work.

This is not criticism, it's just me pointing out a blind spot in the winnowing process and in the very act of reading the fiction of one's own culture. Honoring me is a step in a different direction, a fruitful one, I think. I'm asking you, almost begging you, not to go back to the old way of doing things. There's a great deal of good stuff out there and not all of it is being done by writers whose work is regularly reviewed in the Sunday New York Times Book Review. I believe the time comes when you must be inclusive rather than exclusive. That said, I accept this award on behalf of such disparate writers as Elmore Leonard, Peter Straub, Nora Lofts, Jack Ketchum, whose real name is Dallas Mayr, Jodi Picoult, Greg Iles, John Grisham, Dennis Lehane, Michael Connolly, Pete Hamill and a dozen more. I hope that the National Book Award judges, past, present and future, will read these writers and that the books will open their eyes to a whole new realm of American literature. You don't have to vote for them, just read them.

Just so.

RAISING KANE: A pox on Cox, says Madeleine.

PRETTY TO THINK SO: Glenn Reynolds implies that the WaPo's Ceci Connolly is just talking out of her, uh, hat when she says that "close to 100" prisoners have been killed while in US custody in Iraq and Afghanistan. I hope he's right.

PRESIDENT BUSH AND THE MORAL CLARITY CROWD HAVE A POINT. Sometimes, right and wrong really is as simple as black and white.

Golf has made Moore County rich. There are spas, country clubs and new $2 million homes. The United States Open, to be held later this month on the most famous of the county's 43 golf courses, is expected to bring $124 million to the state.

While predominately white areas of the county, like Pinehurst, are thriving, some black areas lack even basic services like sewers and garbage collection.

But as developers rush to provide "resort quality" amenities in the newest subdivisions, some neighborhoods have been left behind - without sewers, police service, garbage pickup or even, in some cases, piped water.

These enclaves, Jackson Hamlet, Midway and Waynor Road, are virtually all black. They butt up against, or are even completely surrounded by, affluent towns that are mostly white: Pinehurst, Aberdeen and Southern Pines.

The 500 residents of these unincorporated enclaves are close enough to point out sewer lines that run past their properties en route to new developments, or to watch garbage trucks trundle past without stopping. . . .

Excluding heavily minority areas from town boundaries is a common but little examined practice, particularly in small towns in the South, civil rights advocates and geographers say. With the U.S. Open beginning on June 16 on the Pinehurst No. 2 golf course, residents of the three black neighborhoods and their advocates are making a concerted effort for the first time to win more services, holding news conferences and giving tours.

Dog bites man, I know. Nonetheless, attention must be paid. . . .

MORE: "[I]f you could pass any single piece of federal legislation related to civil rights, what would it be?"

WHAT MAKES SAMMY RUN . . . so damned many ads? An outdated economic model, apparently.

WHAT CAN BROWN DO FOR YOU? I mean, aside from losing your Social Security number?

PROGRESS: According to The Telegraph, "A crowd of 600 Afghan clerics gathered in front of an historic mosque yesterday to strip the fugitive Taliban leader Mullah Mohammed Omar of his claim to religious authority, in a ceremony that provided a significant boost to the presidency of Hamid Karzai. The declaration, signed by 1,000 clerics from across the country, is an endorsement of the US-backed programme of reconciliation with more moderate elements of the Taliban movement that Karzai has been pursuing ahead of the country's first parliamentary elections, due in September."

That's good news. And James Joyner is right: The second, somewhat less sexy part of the clerics' declaration is probably even more important.

"IT'S LIKE CHASING A SPEEDBOAT WITH A ROWBOAT." The current GOP leadership's undeclared but very real class war against middle America continues.

BUT IRAQ ISN'T THE GRAND NARRATIVE: If we were playing checkers instead of chess with our friends in the GOP, I'd probably agree with Atrios when he says that we Dems can only win the argument over Iraq by clarifying it (i.e., by retrospectively opposing President Bush's decision to invade). But here's the thing: We don't need to win the argument over Iraq. We need to win the national security debate (or at least fight it to more of a draw), and that's not going to happen if virtually the entire Democratic foreign policy establishment falls on its sword to appease the anti-war wing of the party.

Frankly, we Democrats have enough problems in this general area already. (Not to mention this one.) It would be a bad idea indeed to add an all-too-easily caricatured position on Iraq to the issues mix.

PS: To get a sense of just how hard it is for a party to get any real traction on a big issue on which it has limited credibility, see Social Security.

RES IPSA LOQUITUR: Regardless of what you think of Howard Dean (and I've spoken well of him on occasion), it's simply not, uh, reality-based to keep angrily insisting that he represents the rank and file of the Democratic party. He doesn't. And how do we know that? Because the rank and file overwhelmingly rejected the good doctor in one primary after another just last year. Q.E.D., right? Right???. . . [Via Glenn Reynolds.]

JOE KLEIN ISN'T WRONG to say that the major political divide in this country at the moment is between centrists and ideologues (the "sane" and the "passionate," he calls them, letting his implication do the insulting). But isn't it a little, well, fainthearted to write an entire column on that subject without even once noting that the GOP has given their passionistas real policy-making power, while the Dems have essentially just thrown theirs the bone of a largely ceremonial national chairmanship? (Can't say I'm fainthearted, can you?)

Oh, well. Not for nuthin' is the guy known as "Anonymous," I guess.

ACCORDING TO CHARLES BABINGTON, Nebraska Sen. Ben Nelson's strong reelection effort "suggests that centrist Democrats with discipline, campaign skills and luck can still generate considerable support in states their party long ago surrendered at the presidential level."

It does, doesn't it?

BY AND LARGE, I tend to agree with Kevin Drum's argument that we Dems shouldn't try to emulate the mindless press-bashing of the right. But on the narrow question that Armando raises here -- namely, the press corps' brain-dead insistence that lying about personal matters is lying, while lying about policy is . . . politics! -- we do, in fact, need to be firm with our friends in the Fourth Estate. The mainstream media's claim to respectability rests almost entirely upon its supposedly solemn commitment to eschew tabloid values and report the news in a way that actually helps the citizenry perform its civic duties. And if we Democrats need to start actively shaming them into taking that commitment seriously, then, by all means, let the shaming begin!

SUPERMUMBOJUMBO? In the abstract, Rick Perlstein's argument that Democrats (Clinton Democrats, that is) have loved swing voters not wisely but too well in recent years is interesting -- compelling even. But with Dems facing real-world numbers like these, isn't Perlstein's "superjumbo" strategy a bit risky? Especially given the fact that we're only one good Republican landslide away from finding the entire New Deal on the table?

PS: Of course, I'm withholding final judgment on Perlstein's thesis until I've read his piece in its entirety. It's possible that he addresses these sorts of concerns head on, and dispenses with them convincingly. Still, it's important to remember that we're not in George McGovern's America anymore, with Democrats solidly in control of the courts and both houses of Congress. Under the present circumstances, a devastating loss would be devastating indeed.

HOUSEKEEPING NOTE: A few years ago, I briefly produced this site with a content management system that required each post to have a formal title, a practice I've never been particularly fond of. (Actually, I've always disliked it rather intensely, which is why the early, hand-crafted versions of The O'Toole File and its predecessor, Political Professional News, were blissfully title-free.) Ever since, I've felt obligated to use them in order to maintain design consistency.

Upon further reflection, though, I've decided that that's just silly. (After all, a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little blogging minds, right?) So, as of today, the titles are outta here.

This change will have the inevitable consequence of making some of the old stuff a little, well, cryptic, I suppose -- which is why I'm bringing all this to your attention; it gives me an opportunity to apologize in advance for any confusing posts that you may now find in the archives. (Over time, I'll make whatever changes are necessary to clarify their meaning.) So, uh, sorry for any inconvenience. And thanks, as always, for stopping by.

You know, this standard-issue conservative horse manure from David Brooks wouldn't irritate me nearly so much if he hadn't rather gratuitously tossed Sweden into the mix:

Over the last few decades, American liberals have lauded the German model or the Swedish model or the European model. But these models are not flexible enough for the modern world. They encourage people to cling fiercely to entitlements their nation cannot afford. And far from breeding a confident, progressive outlook, they breed a reactionary fear of the future that comes in left- and right-wing varieties - a defensiveness, a tendency to lash out ferociously at anybody who proposes fundamental reform or at any group, like immigrants, that alters the fabric of life.

As anyone who's the least bit familiar with recent Swedish history could tell you, Brooks isn't just exaggerating up there -- he's lying, at least by implication. Jesus. Can't the NYT get their crack web team to teach that guy how to Google before he picks up his pen?

MORE: Here's the Heritage Foundation -- yes, the Heritage Foundation -- lauding Sweden's radical reform of its pension system. Not flexible enough? C'mon Mr. Brooks.

(NOTE: As you would expect, the Heritage piece is misleading in some ways; you simply can't compare Sweden and the US without looking at a lot more than their respective retirement systems. Still, the Heritage analysis, which is accurate if not true, pretty clearly puts the lie to Mr. Brooks' nonsense.)

UPDATE: Oops, I almost forgot -- full disclosure here.

Bob Woodward's Deep Throat piece in today's WaPo is pretty fascinating, but this bit is a little off:

Huston warned in a top-secret memo that the plan was "clearly illegal." Nixon initially approved the plan anyway. Hoover strenuously objected, because eavesdropping, opening mail and breaking into homes and offices of domestic security threats were basically the FBI bailiwick and the bureau didn't want competition. Four days later, Nixon rescinded the Huston plan.

Felt, a much more learned man than most realized, later wrote that he considered Huston "a kind of White House gauleiter over the intelligence community." The word "gauleiter" is not in most dictionaries, but in the four-inch-thick Webster's Encyclopedic Unabridged Dictionary of the English Language it is defined as "the leader or chief official of a political district under Nazi control." [Emph added]

Though I have no reason to question Woodward's larger judgment about Felt -- he may well have been "a much more learned man than most realized" -- his use of the word "gauleiter" isn't an example of it. That word was very much a part of the American vulgate in Felt's era, as were several other terms of international origin that sound somewhat exotic today (think "quisling").

Anyway, as the title of this post suggests [Note: Deep Nitpicking, before titles