The good news is that in an almost shocking outbreak of common sense, “A House appropriations subcommittee yesterday approved a foreign aid budget for next year that would reverse the deep cuts President Bush proposed for international family planning programs he himself once described as among the best ways to prevent abortion.” The bad news is that the same committee will be scaling back the already scaled-back Millenium Challenge Corporation, one of just a tiny handful of worthwhile ideas to have come out of this administration so far.

Michael Hayden is not only keeping tabs on all your phone calls, but stands in defense of cruel, degrading, and inhumane interrogation techniques. It’s a seamless culture of lawlessness.

As a post-9/11 security measure, the Coast Guard has stepped up its inspections of ships trying to land and deliver cargo at our ports. Naturally, even if your ship isn’t smuggling any terrorists or illegal contraband or what have you, this causes some somewhat pricey inconveniences. Consequently, the Coast Guard has started forewarning ships that they’re going to be inspected in order to reduce the delay. Which is fine. Unless, of course, the ship you’re inspecting actually does have some mischief taking place on board in which case the warning stands a good chance of tipping off the malefactors. After all, advance notice sort of undermines the point of random inspections.

Cargo and port security is all messed up. I like the GreenLane Maritime Cargo Security Act and even Heritage has some nice things to say about it.

I was, obviously, distressed by reports that the Iranian government was going to force that country’s non-Muslim citizens into wearing Nazi-style yellow stars and so forth. Those reports, however, appear to have been simply made up.

Late Update: Which is not to deny that the Islamic Republic is a bad place with a bad government.

Yet another tragic mine accident. The Senate looks poised to pass some mine safety improvements, but I believe prospects for getting through the House GOP are less clear.

The six months itch. You may recall having seen something about the FAIR report into how whatever day it is, Tom Friedman always thinks the next sixth months will be the decisive ones in Iraq. Atrios reminds us that he’s hardly the only one who’s been pulling this kind of thing. Will Marshall said, 28 months ago, that “America has about six months to break the resistance and give the new Iraqi government a fighting chance to survive. It would help if our leaders stopped casting anxious glances toward the exits.” When that didn’t happen, though, he didn’t change his tune.

Beyond poking fun at people, there’s a serious issue here. Voters are upset about how things are going in Iraq. So Democrats want to criticize the Bush Iraq policy. This means they must agree that things are going very badly in Iraq. But the consultant class along with various others has determined that calling for withdrawal is a losing strategy. Consequently, Democrats find themselves arguing that Iraq is perpetually on the brink of total disaster as a result of Bush’s policies, but never, ever, ever actually goes over the tipping point of becoming the sort of lost cause where the main American goal has to be cutting our losses.

The resulting rhetoric is deeply, deeply foolish.

I don’t know if the contradictions it leads to are a political problem, per se. What it reflects, however, is precisely the reflex that’s been crippling Democrats ever since 9/11 — a refusal to step back and figure out what they really think before calling in the pollsters and so forth to figure out what to say about it. This is a policy that’s driven by a weird combination of timidity and partisanship and that’s precisely the thing voters doubt about Democrats’ ability to run the country. But the big, bad scary Bush of 2002 is gone. The new unpopular Bush won’t even be on the ballot again. Everyone needs to take a deep breath and start saying what they mean, and offering some arguments in good faith.

I don’t really believe that “incompetence” — as opposed to the invasion being a fundamentally unsound idea — has been the source of our problems in Iraq, but if it’s evidence of incompetence and bungled you want, this New York Times article about Iraq’s police has it in spades. Bernard Kerik tells us he was given ten days notice and no guidance before being sent to Iraq to head up the creation of a police force. “Looking back, I really don’t know what their plan was,” Kerik says, and he apparently ‘prepared’ for the job by watching shows about Saddam on A&E.

And of course why was Kerik given the job in the first place? Even if you want to be give maximum credit to the Giuliani administration for reducing New York City’s crime level, Kerik obviously wasn’t the key figure there. And even if you do somehow want to give Kerik credit for the whole thing, this experience had literally nothing to do with the job at hand. Most people, of course, have no experience whatsoever with training and building foreign police forces. But some people do! This wasn’t a task that had never been attempted before, the administration just decided to go with a crowd-pleasing, headline-making pick rather than doing something boring like finding someone who might have some idea of how to do the job.

I’m certainly not prepared to make an endorsement at this point, but let’s just say that I like Al Gore a great deal and especially the things he’s been doing over the past several years. Various people are talking him up as a potential 2008 presidential candidate (see my colleague Ezra Klein’s American Prospect article in this regard) which seems sensible to me.

Now, along comes Mark Leibovich in The New York Times with a piece on Gore arguing that if he runs, he’ll be “deeply stigmatized” in the eyes of many Democrats because of his loss in 2000. The curious thing is that he can’t seem to find anyone who actually feels that way. Elaine Kamarck says she’s “always been puzzled by all the hostility to Gore, especially after he was essentially robbed of the election” but nobody quoted in the article expresses any hostility to Gore, only puzzlement at the hostility that allegedly exists and belief that said possibility might be defused.

Now, to be clear, I don’t want to be doing one of these blogger slams on someone in the MSM. For all I know, there’s a deep wellspring of anti-Gore sentiment lurking out there someplace. But I haven’t stumbled on it, and I don’t see it in the Times piece. Are there Gore-haters out there? Are you one? Inquiring minds want to know.

Things just got unbelievably worse for Rep. William Jefferson (D-LA), whose Washington office was raided last night.

Hint: the FBI has disclosed portions of “coded” conversations that Jefferson had with their informant.

Update: More details from John Bresnahan at Roll Call.

More Gore. The email is pouring in! I have, in fact, been able to locate some Gore haters. A larger number of emails, however, are strongly pro-Gore. An even larger, however, tell a narrative of intense disappointment at Gore’s performance during the 2000 election campaign and, especially, bitterness about his failure to more vigorously contest the results in Florida followed by a period of re-enamorment over the past several years. I think I would put myself into this latter camp, so combining personal sentiments with anecdotal evidence, I conclude that Gore would have no serious bitterness-and-anger problem would he choose to run. Rather, the challenges a Gore campaign would face are about what one would expect — he’s not a great public speaker, the press seems to hate him, and it’s not clear how much money he could raise.

I’ve been a bit surprised, however, to see how prominent a role complaints about the Parents Music Resource Center have played in statements by anti-Gore people. I’ve expended many pixels over the past couple of years defending indecency and so forth, so that business definitely annoys me. I can’t say, however, that I find it especially significant. The censorious impulse lamentable but not, fundamentally, of the same order of importance as questions like war, health care, global warming, etc. I also don’t think we’re going to see a non-busybody candidate in this regard emerge, since one of the things Hillary Clinton’s been up to recently is pushing for regulation of video games and so forth.

Late Update: See further remarks from Reed Hundt and Todd Gitlin.