As noted a bit earlier, a bunch of you would love to send food and drinks to these students filibustering Frist. And I’ve actually got numbers of several places who can deliver to them. But let’s hold on a second so that this can be coordinated. Otherwise, they’re just going to end up with 50 pizzas in front of their stand in the next hour. And despite the great college student capacity to consume pizza, a lot of it will still go bad. I’m trying to figure out a way this can be done to keep these kids swimming in party food as they continue their filibustering. So I’ll be updating you shortly.

Late Update: While you’re waiting, here are pictures of Rep. Rush Holt filibustering Frist (reading from Aesop’s Fables, we’re told) earlier today. By the end of this filibuster Aesop himself may even stop by.

House Republicans say they’re ready to vote on a Social Security phase-out bill. Will Democrats succumb to latent Faintheartedness? Will the Conscience Caucus fall into line?

Everyone on our Conscience Caucus list has either said they’re opposing phasing out Social Security or has expressed reservations about doing so. Now would be the time to check back with these folks and find out whether they’ve changed their minds in favor of phase-out.

As noted earlier, with all our chattering about our TPMCafe Fundraiser we want to bring you some news today about what we’ll be including in the initial launch of TPMCafe.com.

One of the features of the site we’re most excited about is a group blog focusing on foreign affairs and national security.

This is a subject that I haven’t written about recently as much as I have in the past. But, as you know, it’s one that interests me greatly. And this group blog will provide an informed and lively discussion of national security issues both as events develop in the news day to day, but also taking a broader view, thinking about the challenges that face the United States in the years and decades to come, and how to meet them.

The blog will have about half a dozen contributors who mix backgrounds in government work on the National Security Council, international relations and journalism. We’re still finalizing the list. But two of the contributors we’re ready to announce are Ivo Daalder of Brookings and Anne-Marie Slaughter of Princeton University.

Ivo served as director for European Affairs (’95-’96) on President Clinton’s National Security Council staff, where he was responsible for coordinating U.S. policy toward Bosnia. And from 1998-2001, he served as a member of the Study Group of the U.S. Commission on National Security/21st Century (i.e., the Hart-Rudman Commission).

To find out more about Daalder’s work you can read the Foreign Affairs review I wrote last year of the book he recently wrote with James Lindsay, America Unbound: The Bush Revolution in Foreign Policy.

Slaughter is the Dean of the Woodrow Wilson School of International Affairs and an expert in international relations and international law. Her most recent book is A New World Order. And, no, I didn’t review that one. But, hey, I can only write so much.

Needless to say, we couldn’t be happier that such impressive folks have signed on.

We’ll be bringing you more on other contributors to the new site shortly …

Fainthearted no more!

One-time Faction member and would-be Dean, Rep. Moran (D) of Virginia talks to Rawstory.com about President Bush and Social Security phase-out.

As of 5:11 PM this evening we have 1373 contributors to our TPMCafe Fundraiser (here’s a brief description of what TPMCafe will include).

We’ve got a bit more than six hours remaining. And given that it’s Friday evening, the pace of contributions seems certain to slow. But we’re holding out for 1400 contributors before we finish up at midnight.

Headlines that warm TPM’s soul.

Nina Easton in The Boston Globe: “Many of Bush’s allies retreating on private accounts“

Okay, we’re done. Our TPMCafe Fundraiser went from the morning of April 20th through the evening of the 29th. And over those ten days 1522 TPM Readers contributed online. A few dozen more did so by mail. Needless to say, if you didn’t get a chance and would still like to contribute, we will not turn you away. As it always is, the ‘contribute’ link is down there on the left sidebar beneath the ads. But for now no more harping or pitches in the posts. The Fundraiser has been a great success. I cannot thank you enough. More tomorrow on TPMCafe and what’s coming next week.

9/11 really does change everything.

Here’s Sen. Wayne Allard (R) of Colorado justifying Republican use of the nuclear option in a letter now being sent to his constituents …

In light of recent terrorist attacks, it is readily apparent that we face a new age of global unrest, a world in which terror has replaced formal declarations of war as the major threat against freedom and democracy. A necessary component of providing justice to those who would do harm to our nation is to maintain an efficient court system – a court equipped with the personnel and resources that enable it to fulfill its role as a pillar of our constitutional system of governance.

The current filibusters of President Bush’s Circuit Court nominees clearly demonstrates an active effort by a minority of Senators to block the confirmation of well-qualified judicial nominees. I firmly believe that these tactics have damaged the judicial nomination process to an unacceptable degree, and now it must be corrected. It is shameful that the action of a handful of Senators has created a vacancy crisis that threatens the service of the very justice upon which our great nation depends.

Without the nuclear option, the terrorists will <$NoAd$> have won.

Ironic.

John Tierney, the Times new conservative columnist, has another column on Social Security today jumping on to the president’s new bandwagon. His premise is that Democrats are “aghast” at the president’s ‘new’ Social Security proposal because he “has finally called their bluff.” He’s proposing a way to make big cuts in Social Security while still protecting the poor. And as Tierney goes on to explain, this has given the lie to the established arguments for Social Security, which Democrats commonly make.

Tierney’s piece is woven through with various misleading arguments, which you’ll probably be able to catch when you read it. But look more globally at the argument that he, taking the president’s lead, is now embracing.

The privatizers have spent almost six months arguing that Social Security is bad as an investment plan because it doesn’t have a high enough rate of return. Now they have taken to arguing that it is bad as a welfare program because it gives too much to those who aren’t poor.

Social Security is also, I’m willing to concede, an abysmal hair dryer. But the point isn’t relevant.

And here we have the essence of the matter. In their effort to phase out Social Security, privatizers continually try to evaluate it in terms of something that it is not. Tierney reveals his own assumptions and prejudices by claiming that Social Security is simply a poorly designed old age welfare program that unwisely provides benefits for middle class people too.

Social Security is neither a poorly designed welfare program nor an investment plan with a poor rate of return. And the privatizers are losing this national debate because Americans, overwhelmingly, understand that.

Social Security is a defined-benefit Social Insurance program that provides a baseline level of retirement security for everyone. Middle class people pay into the program during their working lives and they get benefits back when they retire.

That is not a flaw in the design. That is the design.

By a decisive margin, Americans understand that system and they approve of it. Yet it is a system that offends the sensibilities of privatizers like Tierney.

So their attempts to bamboozle continue apace.

(ed.note: As noted yesterday, Ivo Daalder will be one of the contributors to the national security and foreign policy blog at TPMCafe.com. As we build toward the launch of the new site, we’ll be bringing you occasional guest posts from Ivo and other contributors.)

Whatever happened to Bush’s “global war on terror”? For three years, the president didn’t let an opportunity go by without repeating that we were in a global war against evil terrorists. But he’s gone strangely silent ever since his reelection last November. My Brookings intern, Jina Chung, examined the text of Bush’s speeches over the 12 months, as posted on the White House website to see how many times Bush referred to the “war on terror” or some variant of the phrase in the six months since November 2 and how many times he did so in the six months prior the elections. Here’s what she came up with: Before the elections, Bush mentioned the war on terror three times as often as after. In fact, he referred to it more often in the thirty days prior to the election (71 times) than in the six months since (66 times).

Why this sudden reluctance to talk about what for years was Bush’s signature foreign policy issue? Part of the reason, surely, is that the war on terror was central to Bush’s reelection effort. “We can go to the country confidently on this issue,” Karl Rove told the GOP months after the September 11 attacks, “because Americans trust the Republican Party to do a better job of keeping our communities and families safe.” And there is no doubt that confidence in Bush’s ability to fight terrorists proved to be decisive in his defeat of John Kerry.

But I think something else, something more significant is going on — which is that Bush increasingly appears to think the war on terror has actually been won. That’s not as surprising as it sounds. For Bush, the invasions of Afghanistan was the first phase in the war on terror; Iraq has turned out to be the last. In Afghanistan, Bush maintains, the terrorist infrastructure was destroyed and Al Qaeda was severely disrupted. The terrorist network “has been severely diminished,” Bushed argued in his prime time press conference Thursday night. “We are slowly but surely dismantling that organization.” As for Iraq, remember that Bush called this the “central front” in the war on terror as far back as September 2003. With January’s elections and the installation of a new Iraqi government just this week, Bush I think now feels that the terrorists are really on the run — and that he is the true victor in his war.

I am not saying that Bush is right in thinking this. He’s, in fact, deeply mistaken. Terrorists have hardly been defeated and, if anything, the botched invasion of Iraq has done wonders for their cause. But what I am saying is that Bush appears to believe that the tide in the war has turned — that victory is not only likely, but is actually at hand.

And this helps explain another strange turn of events — the return, in recent months, of Bush’s pre-9/11 foreign policy. Before the terrorist attacks, Bush’s foreign policy consisted of worrying about great powers and rogue states — and abhorring involvement in nation-building and dealing with the world’s great calamities as misguided forms of foreign policy as social work. The policy priorities emanating from the White House and Foggy Bottom today are little different. A key priority now is containing China through strengthened alliances with Japan and India, and support for Taiwan. That is what Condi Rice’s trip to Asia last month was all about. Another priority is preventing rogues like North Korea and Iran from threatening us and our allies with nuclear weapons. And rather than worrying about the nexus between tyrants, terrorists, and technologies of mass destruction we’re back to worrying about madmen and missiles (which, Bush reassured us on Thursday, missile defenses will take care of).

The only difference between Bush’s pre-9/11 foreign policy and now is his new rhetoric about freedom and liberty. But let’s not kid ourselves — rhetoric is one thing, actually following through is another. After Bush decided to walk hand-in-hand with the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia last Monday, it’s surely no longer possible to take this rhetoric seriously anymore.