Has Salon uncovered details of AT&T’s arrangements with the NSA?

Do the Democrats need ‘new ideas’? Or are the old ones — or to put it more evenhandedly, the existing ones — just fine?

This debate is actually several debates in one. And we’re going to try to hash them out this week at TPMCafe. Today, tomorrow and Friday, Ken Baer (go new ideas!) of the new quarterly Democracy is going to debate Jon Chait (existing ideas are cool!) of The New Republic.

Kenny has just posted his first post and Chait will follow this afternoon.

I’m going to have a bit more about this later today. But you’ll remember that Monday we were taking apart White House Press Secretary Tony Snow’s witless comments about the Battle of the Bulge. “If somebody had taken a poll in the Battle of the Bulge, I dare say people would have said, ‘Wow, my goodness, what are we doing here?’ But you cannot conduct a war based on polls,” said Snow.

Well, as I hypothesized, there were polls taken — right at the time. And they show Snow’s all wet.

The American public really can tell the difference between a able president with a plan and one who’s just floundering from one failure to the next.

More on this shortly.

Is Kentucky’s thrice-indicted GOP governor blocking his state’s employees from reading a local blog that’s been digging into his misdeeds?

A New Hampshire congressional candidate turned up in the woods last month, claiming to have been in a serious car crash but exhibiting no bumps or bruises. Perhaps he should use Shirlington Limo? This and more of the day’s news in today’s Daily Muck.

Okay, the scandal-hobbled Gov. Ernie Fletcher started this morning banning the site of one of his biggest critics (who’s successfully moved the scandal now engulfing his administration). That was the bluegrassreport.org. Then they blocked TPMmuckraker.com and now TPM too. Paul Kiel called the state tech folks and at first they denied it. But now they’re not taking any questions.

Okay, back on Monday we discussed Tony Snow’s comments about how if polls had been taken during World War II’s Battle of the Bulge people would probably have been pushing for a change in the course of the war as they are now in Iraq.

That’s actually an insult to the American people generally, as well as the men who fought World War II and those who supported them on the homefront.

In any case, Snow clearly believes he can get away with this malarkey because he thinks polls weren’t taken at the time.

But he’s wrong. They were taking them. And they pretty clearly belie Snow’s whole point.

My great friend and former graduate student colleague James Sparrow dropped me a line last night to tell me that “Hadley Cantril, at Princeton, did secret polling for FDR throughout the war on public support for the war, and specifically focused on trendlines, noting shifts from event to event.”

This morning we managed to dig up a helpful chart that shows the polling Cantril did (click the image below for a full sized picture).

As you can see, there was no downtick in public support for the war around the time of the Battle of the Bulge. Approval for President Roosevelt’s conduct of the war continued at around 70% where it had been for years. The number of people who said they had a clear idea of what the war was about was at about the same level and appears to have been rising. Support for a negotiated peace with Hitler remained around the anemic levels it had been for years — at around 15%.

The only slight movement in the polls was a brief uptick in the number of people who would be willing to negotiate a peace with the German Army if they got rid of Hitler. That went up to the mid-30s before falling down again into the 20s. Keep in mind too that this was a much more primitive period for the collection of public opinion data. So a lot of the small wobbles in the trendlines are probably within the polls’ then-larger margins of error. But the basic picture is clear: the American people then, as they will now, will stick through a lot of adversity if they think the war they’re fighting matters and that their president knows what he’s doing.

Then they did. Now they don’t.

Also, this isn’t just a gotcha on Tony Snow, showing the existence of polls he wasn’t aware of, and so forth. There’s a serious underlying point here about the administration’s basic frivolousness in its conduct of the war.

No one thinks you can fight a war or conduct any project of great consequence by following minor oscillations in polls. But long term and imbedded trends in public opinion mean something. In this case, the public can see President Bush doesn’t know what he’s doing.

Having his flacks go out and compare him to great wartime leaders of the past and insult the American people in the process doesn’t change that.

After winning a guilty verdict, the Justice Department looks ready to kick the Abramoff investigation up a notch.

Rep. Ben Chandler (D-KY) comes out against Gov. Fletcher’s blog ban.

Update: Finally, an official from Kentucky’s Office of Technology called to give their side of the story — and to spare us any hurt feelings.

We get emails …

Nope, the dead enders appear to be those on the left who despite continuing electoral nightmares continue to cling to the idea that if only they upped the vitriol a couple of quanta they would surely either convince or cow the public into voting for the party of the Murthabots.

You see the problem with that hypothesis is that you really can’t heat things up much past where they are now unless that thin line between unreasoning rage and violence is crossed, in which case it’s important to remember which philosophical camp owns and knows how to use the guns.

It seems to me that the dead enders are the folks at KOS [5 NYT reporters at the Vegas gig?? absolutelyunbelievable] and Dem Underground, who have no understanding of Islamism and probably wouldn’t care if they did, because to them the U.S. is the real enemy and heaven forbid the idea that the United States has the right and obligation to proactively de-Islamize the area of the world from whence the threat has arisen.

Re Fr. Coughlan, not me – its the left who are the anti-Semites.