We hear again and again that large numbers of Iraqis are going abroad to escape the descent into violence at home, particularly the well-educated and well-off. But is there specific and quantifiable data on this rather than anecdotal evidence? If you know of any concrete data on this, can you send it in to our comments emails?

Senate Majority Leader-elect Harry Reid (D-NV), following Friday’s Oval Office meeting with the President on Iraq: “I just didn’t feel there today, the president in his words or his demeanor, that he is going to do anything right away to change things drastically. He is tepid in what he talks about doing. Someone has to get the message to this man that there have to be significant changes.”

More here, including the President’s now standard fallback position when challenged: “I am the commander in chief.” I doubt that is the sort of management technique he was taught at Harvard Business School. It’s more like something Steve Carell’s character in The Office would come up with.

Okay, these are fairly round numbers. But they give us at least a broad view of the problem. According a recent UN report, approximately 100,000 Iraqis per month are leaving the country. And an average of 2,000 per day are streaming out into Syria (the rest appear to be leaving through Jordan, approximately 1,000 per day according to this Brookings report). Bear in mind that Iraq is a country of just under 27 million people. So in demographic terms, that amounts to something like arterial bleeding.

The respected international aid and advocacy group Refugees International put the numbers together in a single report and put the number of Iraqi refugees at 2.3 million, with 1.8 million in neighboring countries (overwhelmingly in Syria and Jordan) and 500,000 internally displaced refugees persons (i.e., within Iraq).

For further information, here’s a Human Rights Watch report on the treatment of Iraqi refugees in Jordan.

Beneath the aggregate numbers, there’s the next question of who’s leaving. Mass flight like this never cuts evenly across a country’s demography. I know there’s been a lot of anecdotal reports that Iraq’s small but not numerically insignificant Christian community is basically fleeing the country en masse. And in January of 2006, a UN report said that 40% of “professionals” — though that term can mean different things — had left the country since the invasion. Given what’s happened this year it seems inconceivable that the number hasn’t ballooned since.

As we used to say in the Cold War (though it was perhaps Lenin’s coinage?), people vote with their feet.

We should know later tonight whether Rep. “Dollar Bill” Jefferson (D-LA) is able to win re-election while the target of a federal bribery investigation. The polls close in his runoff at 9 p.m. EST.

Update: Jefferson ahead 56%-44%, with less than 25% reporting.

Late update: With 33% of precincts reporting, Jefferson leads Karen Carter 60%-40%.

More on Jack Abramoff’s HUD connection: HUD still maintains that Abramoff had no lobbying contacts with the department, but billing records from Abramoff’s old firm tell a different story. Special cameo appearances by Sen. Mel Martinez (R-FL), a former HUD secretary and the president’s choice to chair the Republican National Committee, and current Secretary Alphonso Jackson. This angle to the Abramoff iinvestigation has been percolating for a while.

Feds unlikely to prosecute former Rep. Mark Foley for his behavior with congressional pages, ABC reports.

A quick book recommendation. I’ve read a number of Caesar biographies. But each that I’ve read, or started reading, was either too ensconced in the professional historical literature or too cartoonish and overdrawn. Here’s an exception: Adrian Goldsworthy’s Caesar: Life of a Colossus.

I’m not sure I would have had high hopes for this book since Goldsworthy is primarily a military historian. I think I must have gotten it as a review copy. But when I picked it up to read just a few days ago he immediately pulled me into the story. I haven’t gotten far enough into the book yet to read Goldsworthy’s treatment of the conquest of Gaul, which I’m sure is excellent, given his area of specialty. But I’m eager to recommend it just on the basis of what I’ve read so far, which covers Caesar’s early life. Goldsworthy not only brings his subject to life but has an engaging way of sifting through and meditating over source material that is often particularly incomplete or ambiguous for this early period in Caesar’s life. Writing ancient history that is both historically grounded and compelling reading is a special challenge because the historical record, compared to anything in the last 1000 years or so, is so thin. But he makes this oldest of stories vital, hop right off the page.

In so many words, I was dubious that Goldsworthy would make a good biographer. But he quickly set me straight. This book is a treat.

If this period of history has a hold on you definitely get a copy.

What will the House Democratic Caucus do about Rep. Bill Jefferson?

The subject of a federal criminal probe and a House Ethics Committee investigation, Jefferson overwhelming won re-relection yesterday, after being forced into a runoff against fellow Democrat Karen Carter.

Saying that Jefferson is the subject of a federal criminal probe hardly seems to do the man justice. By all appearances, the only thing standing between Jefferson and a multi-count federal grand jury indictment for bribery and related unsavory activities was the power-drunk GOP majority in Congress, which, perhaps fearful of investigations into its own corrupt activities, tried to turn the FBI’s raid of Jefferson’s Capitol Hill office into a constitutional crisis.

Had it not been for the howls of protest over the FBI raid and the legal wrangling that followed, it appears very likely that Jefferson would already be under indictment by now. But the GOP majority is gone. The Democrats, having vaulted into control of Congress in significant part due to voters’ disgust with entrenched Republican corruption, have made ethics a top priority. And Speaker-elect Nancy Pelosi has already staked out a strong and laudable position on Jefferson’s conduct in removing him from the powerful Ways and Means Committee even before the mid-term elections.

So Jefferson will return to Washington as a living, breathing embodiment of political corruption at the very moment that Democrats are trying to implement ethics reform. Nice, uh?

So what to do? My own preferred solution would be a two-fer. The House should refuse to seat Jefferson and Rep.-elect Vern Buchanan (R-FL). Buchanan was elected to Katherine Harris’ old seat thanks to 18,000 undervotes in the Sarasota area, without which his Democratic opponent Christine Jennings almost certainly wins.

Republicans are already gearing up for a partisan bloodbath if the Democratic-controlled House refuses to seat Buchanan, the certified winner of a flawed election. What better way to take some of the wind out of those arguments than by simultaneously refusing to seat Jefferson, the flawed winner of a certified election?

Undemocratic, you say? The people have spoken? Perhaps. But the people’s elected representatives in the House can democratically say that a member is unfit to serve. Is anyone other than his most compromised defenders seriously arguing that Jefferson is fit to serve?

Refusing to seat Jefferson right off the bat would be as bold a stroke as the introduction of any reform package within the first 100 days, and it would dramatically distinguish this Congress from its sorry predecessor.

The federal investigation of political corruption in Alaska, centered on state Senate President Ben Stevens, son of U.S. Sen. Ted Stevens (R-AK), appears broader than at first reported, according to today’s Anchorage Daily News:

The director of a Juneau-based salmon fishing group said last week he has been ordered by a federal grand jury investigating Alaska corruption to turn over lobbying and consulting records involving state Senate President Ben Stevens and former congressional aide Trevor McCabe, an Anchorage lawyer.

The grand jury subpoena, issued last month, also seeks records on the Alaska Fisheries Marketing Board, a nonprofit federal-grant distribution corporation set up by Ben Stevens’ father, U.S. Sen. Ted Stevens.

The executive director of the Juneau salmon group responding to the subpoena, Robert Thorstenson Jr., serves on the marketing board. Thorstenson said he and a partner, Juneau and Seattle lawyer Rob Zuanich, rent space to the board for its Juneau office.

In a telephone interview Thursday from Seattle, Thorstenson said the subpoena to Southeast Alaska Seiners Association arrived last month after he was contacted by agents from the FBI and the National Marine Fisheries Service. The subpoena said the grand jury was investigating felony crimes, Thorstenson said.

The subpoena appears to document a widening of the federal corruption investigation in Alaska, which burst into public view in August with dramatic raids of the offices of six legislators, including Ben Stevens. Agents returned to search Stevens’ offices Sept. 18.

The article also suggests, without saying so explicitly, that the indictment this week of state Rep. Tom Anderson, an Anchorage Republican, for alleged extortion, bribery, conspiracy and money laundering, is connected to the Stevens investigation. Anderson has pleaded not guilty.

As long as we’re engaging in useless exercises, is it time for an Afghanistan Study Group?

The AP has obtained a list of 30 rules/directives handed down by the Taliban, the most troubling of which target teachers and those who cooperate with international aid organizations:

The Taliban gunmen who murdered two teachers in eastern Afghanistan early Saturday were only following their rules: Teachers receive a warning, then a beating, and if they continue to teach must be killed.

. . .

Taliban militants early Saturday broke into a house in the eastern province of Kunar, killing a family of five, including two sisters who were teachers.

The women had been warned in a letter to quit teaching, said Gulam Ullah Wekar, the provincial education director. Their mother, grandmother and a male relative were also slain in the attack.

The two sisters brought to 20 the number of teachers killed in Taliban attacks this year, said Education Ministry spokesman Zuhur Afghan. He said 198 schools have been burned down this year, up from about 150 last year.

The 30 Taliban rules also spell out opposition to development projects from aid organizations, including clinics, roads and schools.

Under our watch, the Taliban has burned down more than 300 schools in the past two years. Did anyone ask Robert Gates during his confirmation hearing whether we’re winning the war in Afghanistan?