Thanks to Greg Sargent, in his new personal blog The Horse’s Mouth, for a heads-up on Rudy Guiliani’s appearance at a fundraiser for Ralph Reed down in Georgia yesterday. Yes, indeedy, “America’s Mayor” lent his name and mug to the doughty if dingy former Poster Boy of the Christian Right, who is struggling against the backwash from his complicity in the Jack Abramoff scandal and other past sins to get himself nominated for the mighty post of Lieutenant Governor of Georgia. Greg’s post led me to check in with the indispensable Political Insider blog maintained by Atlanta Journal-Constitution reporters Jim Galloway and Tom Baxter. Their take on the Guiliani appearance noted that ol’ Rudy followed up his appearance for Ralph by cheerfully telling reporters he was still in favor of civil domestic partnership rights for gays and lesbians. This is, ironically, a position that’s anathema to Ralph and his supporters, who are currently up in arms about a state court decision striking down Georgia’s constitutional ban on any kind of official acknowledgement of gay and lesbian relationships. Indeed, George W. Bush’s disinclination to talk much these days about a federal constitutional ban on gay marriage or anything like it is one of the major grievances of the Cultural Right, and one of the reasons, along with his opposition to Deporting All Mexicans, that the “conservative base” is threatening to take a dive in November. Naturally Greg’s analysis compares Rudy to John McCain as a former ideological heretic getting a long look from GOP establishment types worried about 2008. But there is a big difference between the two. As Michael Kinsley explains in today’s Washington Post, McCain’s a guy who’s problem is that people who largely agree with him ideologically don’t like him or trust him. Rudy’s a guy that conservatives like and trust, but don’t agree with. His attack-dog appearance at the 2004 Republican Convention showed he was willing to please the conservative base on the national security topics they agree on, and his agreement to eat rubber chicken with Ralph Reed shows he’s willing to overlook differences on domestic and cultural issues. But are his putative partners in the GOP really willing to accept his positions in favor of what they think of as Holocaust-level baby-killing and rampant, triumphal sodomy?Personally, I’ve never taken Rudy’s presidential prospects that seriously. And until he starts spending less time raking in cash on the motivational- speaker circuit, and more time hanging out at pot-luck dinners in Iowa, I won’t be convinced that events like his appearance for Reed represent anything other than fluffing pillows with the Right. But if I’m wrong, and Rudy commits himself to a presidential race, then this man who at some roast once jokingly (in drag, no less) called himself “a Republican pretending to be a Democrat pretending to be a Republican” is going to have to discard the disguises and tell us precisely why he clings to the party of Ralph Reed, and George W. Bush. And a Guiliani candidacy would definitely hurt McCain, and increase the likelihood that someone (Allen? Gingrich?) will emerge as the True Conservative alternative to front-runners who have dissed the almighty Base.

Having been totally heads-down on a day-job project involving endless columns of county election results (more about that next week), I picked up this morning’s Washington Post feeling like an space cadet returning to Planet Earth. But the first thing that caught my attention was one of those classic Robert Novak columns channeling the peculiar world view of House Republicans.Today the Prince of Darkness informed us all that House Speaker Denny Hastert threw not one but two hissy fits–one for Dick Cheney and one for W. himself–over the abrupt firing of his buddy Porter Goss at the CIA. Here are the two nut graphs:

Hastert, who served with Cheney in the House for two years (1987-88), let the vice president have it in their private meeting. He said he trusted his close friend Goss, who had performed well at the nasty job of cleaning out an agency filled with critics of the president and his policies….[T]he treatment of Goss has caused speculation in Congress that Bush is making a peace offering to his critics at Langley. A president waging a global war against terrorism can hardly function with an intelligence agency whose employees make off-the-record speeches against his policies, contribute to his political opponents and leak secrets to the media. Was getting rid of Goss the equivalent of a white flag of surrender?

Lord-a-mighty. If Novak, whose column has long been a bulletin board for the hard Right, is faithfully reporting House GOP sentiments, these boys are clearly eating some crazy pills. Most of us poor ignorant folk were under the impression that Goss got dropped because, well, he basically couldn’t find his butt with both hands at the CIA, and was hiring people with a similar disability for the top jobs at Langley. But in the fever swamps of the House GOP, it’s gospel truth that a godless liberal cabal of spooks is trying to end the war on terrorism and destroy W., and with the assistance of that well known liberal-lover Cheney, Bush is caving in and racing into the arms of his enemies. Who knew? The only thing in this column that’s not kinda crazy is its last sentence: “More than difficulties at the CIA need to be resolved as the GOP lurches toward the dreaded midterm elections.” Not much doubt about that.

From a substantive point of view, Bush’s big nationally televised immigration speech last night wasn’t bad. Sure, he over-hyped the small and overdue step of authorizing governors to use Guard units for border control support, trying to make it sound like he was personally sending in the cavalry. And yeah, his emphasis on making illegal immigrants “guest workers” rather than potential citizens was questionable, implying that his goal is to get most illegals to sign up for guest-worker status so they can be sent home when they’ve finished their service to the U.S. economy. But his definition of “comprehensive immigration reform” was basically sound, and pretty much where the U.S. Senate seems headed this week.Politically, though, Bush’s speech is beginning to look like a real king-hell disaster. If he thought the xenophobes in his party would be pleased with his Guard-deployment gambit, he was dead wrong: the wingers are really going medieval on him today. Check out this assessement from the normally mild-mannered Rich Lowry of National Review:

President Bush has a bold new approach to immigration enforcement: He wants to police the Mexican border with symbolism.That’s the point of his proposal to send the National Guard to our border with Mexico. This represents Bush’s final, desperate descent into Clintonian sleight of hand. He wants to distract enough of his supporters with the razzle-dazzle of “National Guard to the Border!” headlines that they won’t notice he is pushing through Congress a proposal that essentially legalizes all the population influx from Latin America that has occurred in the past 10 years and any that might occur in the future.Like President Clinton’s gesture of sending more U.S. troops to Somalia after the “Black Hawk Down” battle in Mogadishu, when everyone knew we were really on our way out, Bush’s Guard deployment is a prelude to surrender. The immigrants who have come here in defiance of our laws will get to stay, bring their families and be joined by just as many immigrants in the future—at least if Bush gets his way.It is with this position that Bush has wrecked his political standing, kicking out from under himself the support of his conservative base. Bush’s National Guard feint is a sign that the White House thinks conservatives are not just disaffected, but credulous

When conservatives start comparing W. to Bill Clinton, you know the bottom has fallen out. But even before the speech, there was another sign of big-time conservative disaffection over immigration. Over at that Conservative Establishment Bohemoth, the Heritage Foundation, the web site features an “analysis” by Robert Rector suggesting that the pending Senate immigration bill, which Bush has basically endorsed, would attract 103 million new illegal immigrants over the next 20 years, and cost taxpayers a minimum of $46 billion a year in transfer payments (in a rich irony, the transfer payment estimate is based on the same voodoo econometric model that Heritage has long used to prop up administration claims that tax cuts pay for themselves).Now many of you probably have never heard of Robert Rector, but he’s basically a human rottweiler that Heritage unleashes now and then to bare his teeth and growl at any Republican daring to betray Conservative Orthodoxy. He made his bones back during the welfare reform debate of the mid-1990s, in which he manned the Far-Right pole of opinion, demanding a categorical denial of federal assistance to non-citizens and to unwed mothers.The fact that Heritage is hyping Rector’s Brown Peril “study” on immigration right now goes beyond its exceptional usefulness to all those right-wing talk show hosts who are using it to lend a patina of respectability to their fulminations on the subject. The House That Coors Built seems to have fully joined the conservative revolt against W, reinforcing the implicit conservative threat to take a dive in November if the Bushies don’t straighten up and Fly Right.Even as Bush honked off conservatives last night, he couldn’t seem to bring himself to get beyond mealy-mouthed generalizations about the legislation actually before Congress right now. Sure, he offered a veiled endorsement of the Senate compromise, and implicitly repudiated the House’s build-a-wall-and-ship-’em-all-home approach. But when it comes to the House GOP, which is getting even more revved up in its nativism, his “come let us reason together” rhetoric last night was the functional equivalent of offering an olive branch to a wood chipper. He’s falling between two stools, heavily.Employing another metaphor, a colleague of mine yesterday suggested that Bush’s speech represented an effort to “have his cake and eat it, too.” If so, it looks like he’s managing to lose his cake and go hungry.

Yesterday the Senate approved yet another tax cut targeted to the very wealthy; the House having passed it earlier this week, on what Speaker Denny Hastert fatuously called “a day of celebration for the American people.” (For a dyspeptic view of this development and its broader meaning, check out yesterday’s New Dem Dispatch). It was, of course, styled as an effort to avoid a “tax increase,” and its cost, of course, was disguised through the usual accounting tricks (most notably using a new Roth IRA rollover provision to attract taxable deposits, even though the long-term impact on revenues will be negative). And Republican leaders, of course, fully intend to enact another tax cut later this year, in part because they had to break up the package to keep it within budget limits and avoid a filibuster, but mostly because they want to hand out some more cash-candy to Republican constituencies just before the November elections.But there’s a growing sense that the tax-cut parade is coming to an end, even if the GOP manages to hold onto Congress this November. The biggest fans of tax-cuts-world-without-end are conservatives who now understand their solons have no interest in cutting the spending necessary to keep the budget from drowning in red ink. And even in the financial community, some of the beneficiaries of the drive to exempt wealth from federal taxation are getting very nervous about the borrowing involved. As the Washington Post noted this morning:

[W]ith interest rates rising, the dollar falling and the budget deficit stuck at around $300 billion, tax experts warn that the tax code Bush has transformed may not survive to its Dec. 31, 2010, expiration date and that Congress may have to step in again because tax revenue will not meet all of the government’s needs. “We have a train wreck waiting to happen,” said C. Clint Stretch, director of tax policy at the accounting giant Deloitte & Touche.

So like bandits hauling off a final few items before the cops arrive, GOP congressional leaders are conducting what may prove to be their final raids on the Treasury. But the rest of us will be paying for them for a long, long time.

Yesterday, the Progressive Policy Institute (the DLC-affliliated think tank) released With All Our Might, a collection of essays on how Democrats would fight and win the war with jihadism, at a National Press Club event featuring Evan Bayh and Mark Warner. It’s an important book, at a time when Democrats are trying to put together a credible vision for what we can offer if we take back Congress in 2006 and the White House in 2008. Sure, it’s very helpful that House Dems are promising they will implement the 9/11 commission report during the first 100 days of the next congressional session, but that’s hardly a comprehensive natonal security platform. And with Republicans almost certain to try to fan persistent fears that Democrats aren’t tough enough to keep Americans safe, we need something clear, positive, and sharply distinguishable from Bush policies, to say about the battle our country has been in since 9/11. Check out Monday’s New Dem Dispatch for a quick summary of the book. And please don’t be misled by news reports (which I fear may get echoed in the blogosphere) that frame the book, largely based on questions posed to speakers at the event, as part of some intra-party “fight” on national security, or on Iraq. The 19 national security wonks who contributed to With All Our Might are from all parts of the progressive spectrum, several of whom opposed the Iraq war from the beginning. The book does not have a chapter on Iraq, because the whole idea is to explain what Democrats would do on the broader issue of fighting jihadism, which the American people still care about deeply even if many of them have given up on the administration’s Iraq adventure. And nobody who reads the book could think it represents a criticism of Democrats: the central thrust is to analyze the administration’s and the Republican Party’s failures of leadership–not just their incompetence, but their flawed ideology–and lay out an alternative agenda rooted in the progressive internationalist tradition. So check it out with an open mind, and remember the price that Democrats, and Americans, have paid for past Republican advantages on national security.

There’s a big ol’ battle going on in the blogosphere sparked by a Jon Chait column on the war to purge Joe Lieberman, the reaction to Chait from a variety of would-be purgers, and his reaction to the reaction. I’m not going to bother with links here: just go to The New Republic’s blog The Plank, and read Chait’s several posts over the last couple of days, which provides plenty of links to the dialogue, or successive diatribes, if you wish. I’m not going to wade into this battleground at present, but do feel compelled to respond to a direct question from Kevin Drum based on an Atrios post about the consensus policy views of progressive bloggers. After citing Atrios’ list, Kevin says: “I’m not an expert on the DLC’s positions on everything, but it doesn’t look to me like there’s an awful lot there they’d argue with. (Though if anyone from the DLC wants to set me straight on this, I’ll stand corrected.)”As a bit of an expert on the DLC’s “positions on everything” based on 12 years’ experience, let me go through Atrios’ list and respond. 1. Undo the bankruptcy bill enacted by this administration.The DLC took no position on the bankruptcy bill; I opposed it, as did Marshall Wittmann. 2. Repeal the estate tax repeal .Totally, absolutely, adamantly, that has been the DLC’s position.3. Increase the minimum wage and index it to the CPI.Check. A longstanding DLC position.4. Universal health care (obviously the devil is in the details on this one)Check, with devilish details involving the DLC/PPI’s dissent from the single-payer approach.5. Increase CAFE standards. Some other environment-related regulation.Yup. We’ve offered an alternative approach involving a tailpipe emissions cap-and-trade system, but the urgency of better fuel efficiency standards is Holy Writ in these parts.6. Pro-reproductive rights, getting rid of abstinence-only education, improving education about and access to contraception including the morning after pill, and supporting choice. On the last one there’s probably some disagreement around the edges (parental notification, for example), but otherwise.

Yes again, if “getting rid of abstinence-only education” doesn’t mean getting ridding of any abstinence education.

7. Simplify and increase the progressivity of the tax code

Totally, and in excrutiating detail.

8. Kill faith-based funding. Certainly kill federal funding of anything that engages in religious discrimination.

No to the first sentence, yes to the second.

9. Reduce corporate giveaways

Oh yes, for many years. The DLC/PPI helped popularize the very concept of getting rid of “corporate welfare,” dating back to a late-1980s event we did with Ralph Nader. This principle has undergirded everything the DLC has said on the budget, the tax code, and state economic development policies.

10. Have Medicare run the Medicare drug plan

Nope. We opposed the current plan, but think the problem is cost and complexity, not the basic idea of offering choice and competition, a la the federal employees’ plan.

11. Force companies to stop underfunding their pensions. Change corporate bankruptcy law to put workers and retirees at the head of the line with respect to their pensions.

Not a subject the DLC specifically has addressed, but I have no problem with it.

12. Leave the states alone on issues like medical marijuana. Generally move towards “more decriminalization” of drugs, though the details complicated there too.

No specific DLC position, though I can’t imagine anyone here having a problem with state licensing of medical marijuana, and while not embracing “decriminalization” of drugs, we have long opposed the “mandatory minimum” drug sentencing that stuffed the prison system with non-violent offenders in the 1980s and after.

13. Paper ballots

If this means outlawing electronic voting, no, but we’ve supported a requirement of paper receipts for electronic voting machines to ensure against fraud.

14. Improve access to daycare and other pro-family policies. Obiously details matter.

Totally, and again, in ridiculous detail.

15. Raise the cap on wages covered by FICA taxes.

As part of a more comprehensive Social Security/Medicare reform package, definitely.

Then Atrios offers a few toss-offs:

Torture is badImprisoning citizens without charges is badPlaying Calvinball with the Geneva Conventions and treaties generally is badImprisoning anyone indefinitely without charges is badStating that the president can break any law he wants any time “just because” is bad.

Agreed on all points. Maybe nobody in the progressive blogosphere actually reads New Dem Dispatches or other institutional DLC utterings, preferring to rely on stereotypes, myths, or a few notable disagreements, but it’s all there on the web site.

Now, by my rough count this represents something like 80% agreement–totally aside from the much higher percentage of agreement between left-bent bloggers and the DLC about the vast number of bad policies, terrible politics, and sheer incompetence associated with the Bush administration and the Republican Party. I guess this raises Chait’s pointed question about the attitude of progressive bloggers to those Democrats who agree with them most of the time, but not all of the time.

But that, too, is a subject for another post. In the meantime: back to you, Kevin, and thanks for asking.

One of the most predictable habits of today’s Republicans is that when they get caught doing something disreputable, they try very hard to deflect attention by claiming some Democrat has done the same thing.This seems to be what’s underway in Virginia, where there’s a lot of buzz about Ryan Lizza’s recent revelations in The New Republic concerning the boyhood Confeder-o-mania of Sen. George Allen, and its distinct echoes in his record as Governor of the Commonwealth during the 1990s.Before you could say “So’s your old man,” the conservative Richmond Times-Dispatch published a breathless article noting that one of Allen’s Democratic opponents this fall, former Navy Secretary James Webb, spoke at a Confederate Memorial event in Virginia in 1990.I don’t know if Allen’s backers had anything to do with this article, but it hardly required deep oppo research, since the speech in question is displayed on Webb’s own web page.And once you read the speech and think about it for a moment, the differences between Webb’s and Allen’s attachment to the Lost Cause couldn’t be clearer.First and most importantly, Webb is a southerner with actual Confederate Army ancestors. Not so Allen, whose attachment to the Confederacy developed when he was a Golden Boy rich kid with no southern background. (This point about Allen is one I emphasized in a TPMCafe post, as did Jason Zengerle in the New Republic blog).Second of all, there’s the timing of these events. Sure, Allen’s folks will argue that his Confederate infatuation burgeoned into true love back in high school, while Webb’s speech was a mere fifteen-years-and-change ago, when he was a former Cabinet member. But I think that gets it backwards. Webb did his speech long after the civil rights movement had triumphed over Jim Crow and the Confederacy had been consigned its place in the stormy history of the Republic; that, indeed, is a lot of what he talked about. When Allen was speeding around Southern California in his sporty Mustang with the Confederate flag plates, and wearing a Confederate flag pin in his high school yearbook, that symbol, especially outside the South, was synonymous with Jim Crow’s defiant death throes. (And, as a later TNR piece explains, Allen kept this romance up well after he moved to Virginia and entered politics).And finally, there’s the context of Webb’s speech: at a Confederate Memorial event. I personally think this is the most crucial distinction of all. The main southern argument for getting the Battle Flag off state flags and public buildings is not that Confederate symbols should be abolished, but that they should be consigned to history instead of adopted as current ideological totems. This was, indeed, the main argument in the once-progressive Zell Miller’s impassioned if unsuccessful 1993 Georgia State of the State address (disclosure: I was involved pretty heavily in drafting that speech): don’t forget the Confederacy, or the terrible sacrifices of its soldiers and their families, but don’t make the Lost Cause synonymous with the South as a whole, or allow it to be used for invidious racial or ideological purposes. As a Georgian who has long argued with my fellow crackers about the uses and abuses of Confederate symbols, I have read Webb’s speech and personally found it irreproachable.I sort of doubt George Allen was just exhibiting an exotic historical interest in the Confederacy, interchangeable with, say, an enthusiasm for the War of the Roses. No, there’s not much doubt what it meant to be a Yankee Confedero-phile in the late 1960s. The southerner in me always reacts to such phenomena by saying: “You’re touching my stuff, and breaking it.”So I hope nobody really buys the “everybody did it” idea about George Allen’s strange past.

There’s an interesting op-ed in the Washington Post today: none other than Markos Moulitsas of Daily Kos invades the MSM to fire a shot across the bow of the Good Ship Hillary, suggesting that her (a) apparent disdain for the netroots, and (b) her identification with the D.C. Democratic Establishment, could imperil her presumed presidential candidacy in 2008.Now I don’t presume to know a lot about the interactions, positive, negative or neutral, between Team Hillary and netroots worthies; I’ll take Markos’ word for it that Clinton’s advisors haven’t been giving bloggers and other cyber-activists a lot of love. I’ll also play into the thought experiment that Clinton is definitely running for president; I’m not so sure, but obviously it could happen.But I do think Markos misses something important in drawing a direct parallel between Hillary Clinton and those “D.C. Establishment” candidates who got thrown off-balance by Howard Dean in 2004. Best I can tell from staring at polls for quite some time, Hillary Clinton has broad and deep support and approbation among actual, grassroots, rank-and-file Democrats around the country, based on many years in the brightest spotlight. Going into the 2004 race, there was no candidate with this kind of catholic appeal or folk-legend visibility, and that’s one reason why Dean’s incandescent campaign broke through so quickly (and perhaps one reason it collapsed when the contest got into the serious, vote-getting phase). I’m perfectly willing to agree that netroots support specifically, and activist support generally, is important, but in the end, it’s all about votes.Maybe I’m wrong and Markos is right on that score, but the part of his op-ed I have to take greatest issue with is the familiar argument that Hillary is handicapped by her husband’s role in the decline of the Democratic Party and the election of George Bush. We’ve all heard this litany before: Clinton never got more than 50% of the popular vote (nor did the previous three Democratic nominees, or for that matter, two of the three prior to that); Democrats lost Congress during Clinton’s presidency (a process any political scientist will tell you had been building for decades, and that began slowly reversing during the last three cycles of the Clinton years); and of course, the usual stuff about Clinton’s “third way” policies alienating the all-important activist base (which is probably why he was wildly popular with most activists when he left office, and why so many of them still pine for someone like him). And even Markos concedes that Clinton produced “eight years of peace and prosperity,” which ought to make the Clinton name a bit less poisonous than this column suggests.In any event, Markos’ op-ed is a pretty faithful reflection of the attitudes toward HRC you see steadily circulating around the blogosphere like a breeze through a wind farm. So it’s probably very useful for those who read WaPo but don’t know blogs from hogs to catch a whiff of it today.

Via Chris Bowers, I’m happy to report that the latest Gallup Poll shows George W. Bush reaching new lows in popularity, registering a 34/63 approval/disapproval rating, getting him seriously into the bad company of presidents in trouble, from (second-term) Harry Truman, to Richard Nixon, to Jimmy Carter and to his own old man. I’m not so old that I can remember Truman, though I am aware that his deep unpopularity after his upset 1948 election win fed a Republican congressional landslide in 1950, and then the Eisenhower landslide of 1952. But I do remember Nixon’s fall from grace very graphically (feeding the 1974 Democratic landslide and then the election of Jimmy Carter in 1976), and of course the free-fall Bush I went into thanks to his overt confusion and indifference over every aspect of domestic policy. Most of all I remember my fellow Georgian Carter (I was actually a Carter volunteer the first time he ran for governor, in 1966), whose well-earned post-presidential rehabilitation has obscured his own W.-like reputation in the late 1970s for total fecklessness. I will certainly never forget the day after the revelation of the Desert One disaster–the Iranian hostage effort that expired when U.S. helicopters collided en route to an aborted rescue. As it happens, I spoke that morning to my political mentor, a man who had worked for Carter in Atlanta, and who observed: “Well, Jimmy’s just established himself as the first president to screw up a one-car funeral.” George W. Bush has established an equal reputation for incompetence, and unlike Carter, has also richly earned a reputation for lying to the American people on a vast number of issues. He seems to be on a trajectory to combine the worst perceptions of Carter and Nixon: a president over his head, who can’t tell the truth to save his own political life.

The incoherence and attempted demagoguery of the beseiged Republican Party are becoming impossible to overstate. Witness the latest Big Idea on dealing with gas prices, unveiled last week by Senate GOP Leader Bill Frist: mailing $100 checks to 100 million Americans to help them fill up at the pump this summer. Check in with your favorite economist and ask him or her about the genius of this “plan.” It basically involves borrowing 10 billion smackers–yes, 10 billion–and tossing it into the marketplace to subsidize higher gas prices. The Frist “plan,” of course, isn’t intended to do anything serious about rising gas prices. Its rationale is purely political: buying votes just before the midterm elections. There are plenty of bad ideas bouncing around Washington right now about gas prices. As the Progressive Policy Institute’s Jan Mazurek explained last week, all the frantic casting-about for a short term response to higher gas prices ignores, and in some cases cuts directly against, the long-term solutions that the Bush administration and Congress have been rejecting over the last five-and-a-half years, especially a serious effort to build fuel-efficient and cleaner cars. The world’s insatiable lust for oil isn’t going to go away any time soon, and the only sure way to keep petroleum prices from wrecking our economy and wrecking family budgets is to reduce our dependence on this perilous energy source. Throwing money at every gas pump in America is a worse than unserious proposal.