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Ivo Daalder: “In yet another sign that sanity may be returning to US foreign policy, Secretary Rice is set to announce teh administration’s readiness to join in talks with Iran over its nuclear program. This is a good — if long overdue — step in the right direction. But unless a willingness to talk is accompanied by a willingness to engage in real negotiations, it may not be enough to end the crisis.”

Department of Can’t Make It Up, Or …

Iran ‘Yellow Badge’ Bamboozler Taheri invited to the White House to advise President Bush on Iraq.

Another very significant detail missing from yesterday’s AP piece on Harry Reid: it would have been illegal for Reid to have reimbursed the Nevada Athletic Commission for his seats to the boxing matches.

I know this isn’t something we don’t already know. But it occurred to me again or rather the grievous wounding of CBS News reporter Kimberly Dozier a few days ago brought it home to me with new force.

As far as I can remember, I don’t think a prominent US journalist has been killed in Iraq since Michael Kelly and David Bloom died at the very beginning of the conflict. (I know many lesser-known and/or non-US journalists have been killed, not to mention thousands of civilians; my point is not to set deaths of the prominent up as more consequential, only to use it as a point of illustration. So bear with me.)

So if we were to use the metric we usually go by in evaluating the human cost of the war for the US, you would say, no deaths in Iraq for name US journalists.

Yet, in the case of journalists — because we know them and their injuries get a lot of individual play — we can see that this gives a highly distorted impression of the underlying reality. Just off the top of my head I think I can think of something like a half a dozen ‘name’ journalists who’ve received horrible, life-changing injuries — Dozier, ABC News anchor Bob Woodruff, Time’s Michael Weiskopf, who had his hand blown off by a grenade and others I’m probably just not remembering.

Again, I know it’s no revelation that a war’s cost is counted in the crippled and the maimed as well as the dead. But this little window into the war shows how much that number of the dead leaves unsaid, especially in this war in which, thankfully, medical technology is allowing many to survive who would surely have died in earlier conflicts.

I had some tough things to say about Jeffrey Goldberg’s piece on the Dems in last week’s New Yorker. I didn’t link to it because as near as I could tell it wasn’t linked on the site. But now a reader has sent me the link. So here it is. I’d be curious to hear other people’s reactions.

How is net neutrality like a boiled frog?

A TPM Reader responds …

Josh,

While I understand some of your points, I read the Goldberg piece recently and thought it contained a lot of good things.

I live in Minnesota and find some of the sentiments expressed by Midwesterners in the piece reflective of what Goldberg is getting at. There is a feeling of pragmatism that needs to come through on many issues in the middle states if the Dems want to take charge. If the Dems are doing some of the things you indicate, they need to build it into a message for MN and other areas that comes across clearly and not just as Bush-bashing. I am a media savvy person – more so than most around me (after all, I read TPM) – and I think the party can do a better job with moderates and “Regan Democrates” here. It is not so much what they are doing as how they are sounding and what’s getting across to voters.

-RLS

Most of the other responses have been more in line with my thoughts. But I’ll try to run a few other representative responses.

A Bush Pioneer docket?

TPM Reader BK points out that Ohio Coingate heavy Tom Noe’s guilty plea makes him the second Bush Pioneer to plead guilty to a politics related crime. Jack Abramoff being the first.

Brent Wilkes seems pretty certain to the be third, though he may actually take the thing to trial.

(Ken Lay, of course, just got a flat out guilty verdict. But we’ll keep the standards high and limit contestants to crimes narrowly connected to politics.)

Anyone else pleading out who we’re forgetting?

Another TPM Reader with a semi-positive reaction to the Goldberg piece …

Josh,

I, too, found his article less nuanced than his past work covering the Middle East. Perhaps he just needs more time to get up to speed.

However, there is truth to Goldberg’s essential thesis, especially about Hillary. Nobody is enthusiastic about Hillary running for president except the Clintons, her staff and crack-smoking New York Liberals. Everybody Democrat who can fog up a mirror knows that a Hillary candidacy would energize and unite a demoralized GOP and do the exact opposite for the Dems.

As I’m sure you know, it’s not easy to volunteer for a political candidate. You need to really believe in him/her in order to donate your precious time and do grunt work like going door-to-door or cold-calling registered voters. This article and others like it should serve as a warning for Hillary, Al and other hard-core Liberals like Russ Feingold: You’re going to have a very difficult time drumming up enthusiasm in middle America. It wouldn’t surprise me if Hillary’s campaign imploded in the mid-West because true enthusiasm for her is so low that her network of volunteers could break down.

IAA

At least on the point of the Hillary candidacy, no arguments from me. It’s always struck me as a totally crazy idea.