Found at last — the legendary conservative civility. Not at all like those nasty bloggers: “You don’t go see Joseph Goebbels’ films to see the truth about Nazi Germany. You don’t go see Al Gore’s films to see the truth about global warming.”

Did Goebbels even make movies? He must have meant Leni Riefenstahl, right?

All right. Looks like we’re getting to the bottom of this Goebels-the-filmmaker business. Reader EF notes:

He did get involved and resented the fact that the Nazi movies lacked the snap of the Hollywood product. He desperately wanted a Nazi answer to “Gone with the Wind” and pushed for the production of “Kolberg”, a turgid depiction of a heroic siege in the Frederick the Great era (I believe). And getting involved in the UFA productions gave him a chance to hang around with and sleep with actresses. Interestingly, just about all of the major mid-century leaders were big movie fans, and most preferred the Hollywood product – including Hitler and Stalin.

Curiously, there was an “American Experience” documentary last night on PBS in New York on Goebbels, with Kenneth Branagh reading from the Goebbels Diaries. How this constituted part of the “American Experience” is a mystery even stranger than anything on “24,” the competition over on Fox.

IMDB says the heroic seige depicted in Kolberg took place during the Napoleonic Wars. The city of Kolberg is now known as Kołobrzeg after the Potsdam Conference moved Poland’s border west to the Oder.

It seems to me that this has been pretty clear for a while, but now it’s explicit — the Iranian government wants to engage in talks about the various US-Iranian issues, including Teheran’s nuclear program. If you’re concerned with things like America’s interests, not getting lots of people killed, and preventing Iran from going nuclear you’d take them up on the offer. I honestly don’t think this is even remotely a hard question. It might not work, of course, but even that would leave us better off than we are now as the weird kid sulking in the corner refusing to talk to Billy.

Nevertheless, there’s no mistaking the fact that just as Iran has been trying to at least set the stage for possibly ratcheting tensions with the United States down, there’s been a fairly concerted effort in the American press to ratchet things up. The folks doing the ratcheting have, it’s clear, some friends and some influence inside the administration.

People need to understand this and be clear with themselves. This is not a group of people primarily concerned with Iran’s nuclear program — anyone who thought that would be open to some negotiating. This is a group of people primarily concerned — for whatever reason, no doubt the reasons are mixed and vary somewhat — with continuing and intensifying US-Iranian conflict. It’s not clear how influential this faction is or will be in the president’s decision-making, but those of us on the outside are either with them or against them.

As recent posts from Ivo Daalder and Michael Levi indicate, there’s no reason to think Democrats have anything to fear from standing up for engagement rather than war. The real political risk is that staying silent lets the other side shape people’s understand of what’s happening so deeply that it becomes harder to speak up later. The odds that this whole situation somehow won’t come up in the midterms are low. Democrats are going to have to deal with it, and it’s better to start sooner than later.

Under investigation for bribery and corruption, Rep. Bob Ney (R-OH) takes time out of his busy schedule to help raise money for the good-government watchdog group that’s been giving him headaches. That and more in today’s Daily Muck.

Tim Berners-Lee, original author of many of the basic World Wide Web protocols, speaks on network neutrality at a conference in Edinburgh:

It’s better and more efficient for us all if we have a separate market where we get our connectivity, and a separate market where we get our content. Information is what I use to make all my decisions. Not just what to buy, but how to vote. There is an effort by some companies in the U.S. to change this. There’s an attempt to get to a situation where if I want to watch a TV station across the Internet, that TV station must have paid to transmit to me.

One of the moves in this debate is a certain amount of back-and-forth as to what the status quo is. Neutrality partisans portray themselves as trying to block a new initiative from the telecom companies. Neutrality opponents portray themselves as trying to block a new regulatory initiative. In the abstract, there’s a case to be made for both characterizations of the situation, but it’s hard to miss the fact that almost all (or maybe liberaly all — I’m not quite sure how to do a precise head count) of the internet’s technical pioneers see neutrality as preserving the longstanding rules of the road.

Ed Kilgore, writing about the immigration bill wending its way through congress remarks: “While I personally favor most of those Democratic amendments that are being defeated, the compromise is worth supporting, if it could actually become law.”

That seems wrong to me. The odds are overwhelming that six months from now there will be more Democrats in both the House and the Senate than there are today. That means that for the price of a small delay in time of passage, Democrats should be able to get a more progressive bill through in the next congress if nothing passes this year. If something does pass this year, a lot of the pressure for immigration reform will fade away and it’ll be hard to revisit the issue. Maybe the next congress would only let us get a slightly better bill or maybe it will let us get a much better bill. It’s hard — impossible, really — to know for sure. But it’s very unlikely that we’d get a worse bill. Under the circumstances, Democrats seem to have a lot of leverage and every reason to take a hard line in negotiations.

Am I wrong? Perhaps Ed can explain his thinking in greater detail.

Nathan Newman raises what I think is a weirdly neglected issue in the United States — our artificially low supply of skilled professionals, particularly in the health services sector. Lots of qualified applicants can’t get spots at nursing schools, medical schools, etc. simply because the number of places at these schools (or the number of schools) hasn’t increased proportionately to growth in demand and the overall population. Training more doctors and nurses would hardly single-handedly solve the country’s health care problems, but it would be helpful in implementing almost any approach one might care to try.

John McCain’s victory strategy for Iraq: “One of the things I would do if I were President would be to sit the Shiites and the Sunnis down and say, ‘Stop the bullshit.'”

Takes one to know one, I guess.

Spencer Ackerman and Ezra Klein offer further remarks.

The trial of David Safavian began this morning, and TPMmuckraker was there. He’s accused of lying and obstructing investigations related to his relationship with Jack Abramoff. What did we find? Golf, golf and more golf.

Satire is a concept that a lot of people have trouble grasping. Tom DeLay, it seems, is no exception.