It must be terribly frustrating for the Senate Republican leadership, knowing there’s not much they can do to force embattled Sen. Larry Craig (R-Idaho) to go away.

The party can take away his committee assignments, but that’s already happened and it didn’t have much of an effect. Officials can withhold re-election campaign funds next year, but in Craig’s case, that probably won’t matter. Republican leaders can pretend he doesn’t exist, stop returning his calls, and no longer let him sit at the cool kids’ table in the Senate dining room, but Craig seems immune to peer pressure at this point.

GOP leaders do have one tool left — an ethics committee investigation — and the party will apparently use it to make Craig absolutely miserable.

Worried that the disgraced lawmaker intends to remain in the Senate indefinitely, they are threatening to notch up the public humiliation by seeking an open ethics hearing on the restroom scandal that enveloped Craig last month.

The Senate hearing would examine the original charges in Craig’s case, including the allegation of “interference with privacy,” for peeping into the bathroom stall occupied by an undercover police officer. One senior Republican aide imagined “witnesses, documents, all in front of the klieg lights.” The committee also could look for “a pattern of conduct” — which means combing court records in other locales to discover whether Craig had prior arrests that haven’t come to light.

What do you suppose the chances are Craig has faced related, still-unknown charges elsewhere?

Mcjoan has more, including some analysis on what to expect from next year’s Senate race in Idaho, whether Craig is on the ballot or not.

Ezra Klein has a terrific piece in the LA Times today, detailing how presidential candidates from both parties are approaching the national healthcare debate. The Dem candidates’ plans are similar, Ezra explains, as are the Republicans’ approaches, leaving the public with a clear choice of direction.

The Republican plans make you pay more for your healthcare so you’ll buy less. They do this by weakening the protection that insurance offers from health expenses. The Democratic plans bring everyone into the system, then use that leverage to reform the insurers and extract savings through efficiencies of scale.

Thompson, who doesn’t have a plan, says that “the best way to improve the best healthcare in the world, which is what we’ve got right here in the United States, is to expand choice.”

And that indeed is where the plans differ: the type of choice they offer. The Republican plans make it easier to choose to forgo health coverage or to buy less of it. The Democratic plans make it easier to buy comprehensive health insurance. And the voters will have to choose between the two.

The decision this week by the Republicans’ top-tier presidential candidates — Giuliani, Thompson, Romney, and McCain — to skip the debate in Baltimore focused on the concerns of the African-American community, continues to stir debate. No one seriously believes the “scheduling” explanation, and several prominent Republican voices — Gingrich, Kemp, Mehlman, Watts, and Steele — have taken the candidates to task for blowing off minorities.

On “Meet the Press” this morning, Pat Buchanan, whose tolerance for diversity is less than stellar, argued that the GOP candidates made the right call.

“[L]et me explain it, 90 percent of Republican votes are — in the general election are non-Hispanic, white. That is a higher percentage in the primaries, even higher percentage in New Hampshire and Iowa. These are [sic] what is going to decide this nomination, Tim.

“There is a risk going to this gathering here, and there’s very little reward, in my judgment, in those early battles…. Rudy’s got his own problems in New York with the Amadou Diallo thing, and I can understand why they don’t go down there and get asked about affirmative action. They look at the risks, they look at the rewards, they say, ‘Look, this is going to be decided in the month of January. How does this help me in January and what we’re building for, the Republican nomination?’ […]

“Tavis, about, I think, 13 percent of the country is African-American. About 10 percent of the votes are African-American and Republicans get about 10 percent of that. And so taking your time out of the critical areas — Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina — does not make sense to me if I were advising them. I would look at the costs, look at the benefits, make the call there.”

You know, all of this might actually make some sense … if you’re willing to assume that white people are completely indifferent to the concerns of the African-American community. Indeed, if you’re convinced that the typical Republican primary voter doesn’t care about the challenges facing black people in the United States, and might even hold it against a presidential candidate who showed up to talk about those challenges, then sure, blowing off minority communities would certainly be the right call.

But therein lies the point: Buchanan’s rationalizing is offensive precisely because it rests on those assumptions. In his words, there’s a “risk” in talking to African Americans about the criminal justice system and healthcare, so it should be avoided, at least until after all the nice white people in Iowa, New Hampshire, and South Carolina have had a chance to register a Republican preference.

If I’m Giuliani, Thompson, Romney, or McCain, I’d be tempted to say, “Stay off my side, Pat.”

Earlier this week, Columbia University replaced MoveOn.org as Public Enemy #1 for many conservatives, because the school hosted a forum for Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Most notably, Rep. Duncan Hunter (R-Calif.) announced on Fox News that he would “move in Congress to cut off every single type of federal funding to Columbia University.”

Now, Hunter clearly has an incentive to appear unhinged. He’s a faltering presidential candidate, and the GOP base is easily riled up by absurd stunts like these. Indeed, it’s a two-fer — it’s posturing on Iran and it’s blasting an Ivy League university filled with “intellectual elites.”

Part of me assumed the controversy would fade; even conservatives would realize Ahmadinejad’s appearance at Columbia made him, not the university, look ridiculous; and the right would find some new boogeyman for next week.

Alas, no such luck. Hunter meant it — he’s introduced a bill called the “Restore Patriotism to University Campuses Act.”

It’s almost as if Hunter wants to look ridiculous. I’m sure someone will get around to mentioning to Hunter the constitutional problems associated with Congress punishing colleges based on the content of political speech, but I have a hunch it won’t matter.

If you’ve been waiting around for the Sy Hersh article which gives you all the details about the coming strike against Iran brought to you by the lethally slapstick militarism of Dick Cheney … well, here it is.

There are two big articles (AP and NYTimes) on the right-wing pressure Freedom’s Watch and two big facts that stand out from them.

First, both articles note that Freedom’s Watch is made up of Bush-Cheney big-money givers and former staffers at the White House. But the AP makes explicit what the list of personnel makes clear: These aren’t people close to “Bush” or “the White House”. It’s more specific than that: The activists and givers are people close to Dick Cheney.

Second, as the NYT explains, coming off the Petraeus press-rollout, Freedom’s Watch’s next press campaign is for confrontation (i.e., war) with Iran.

Put the two together, and you understand what’s coming.

Robert Kaplan, a close student of the modern military, has a short piece up in The Atlantic about the private military contractor question. But what Andrew Sullivan calls a “qualified defense” of the role of military contractors in Iraq and elsewhere is more, I think, an exercise in knocking down a couple strawmen and evading the key questions.

For instance, Kaplan writes …

Rather than mercenaries who will fight for the highest bidder, private contractors like KBR and Blackwater are composed mainly of retired American noncommissioned officers (NCOs), working alongside the same military to which they used to belong. Just as other professions tap the wisdom and expertise of retirees, so does the American military. Indeed, some contractors, like Triple Canopy, are known to hire veterans of the most elite Special Operations units in the U.S. military.

But these are points that are givens to anyone who knows the first thing about the issue. While I think there are legitimate longer-term questions about the for-hire nature of these private armies (a topic I’ll get to in a subsequent post) everyone realizes that these companies work only for the US defense establishment (and other arms of the US government) and other governments and organizations that the US government authorizes them or allows them to work with. Similarly, it is widely understood that the ‘work force’ of these private military contractors are overwhelmingly veterans of the US military.

The real issues are budgetary and constitutional.

But before we get to those matters, then there’s the issue of whether we have any choice these days but to rely heavily on private contractors. On this front Kaplan writes …

The former Halliburton subsidiary of Kellogg, Brown and Root (KBR) consummated its veritable marriage with the U.S. military during the Clinton administration, when the firm’s logistical capabilities were indispensable to the Balkan interventions that many liberals supported. The KBR-designed military bases in Bosnia and Kosovo became templates for those in Iraq and Afghanistan.

…

The idea of a large American military presence anywhere without contractors is now unthinkable. Without firms like KBR, the support tail in Iraq would be infinitely longer than it is, with tens of thousands of more troops required to achieve the same result. Buildings need to be maintained; chow halls have to be run; showers and restrooms need to be cleaned. Mundane activities like these account for the bulk of what private contractors do.

The obvious rejoinder to this argument is, well, what’d we do in the old days? As in, in Vietnam, Korea, all over Europe during the Cold War, etc. etc. And the obvious answer is nearly all these things used to be done by the military.

So what happened? Policy decisions were made, largely but not entirely during the 1980s, to privatize big chunks of war-fighting and war-support. It’s true that in the short-term these services are indispensable to a mission like Bosnia. But that’s only because we made the decision to phase out those capacities in the military. So their indispensability tells us nothing about whether this heavy reliance on contractors is a good idea; it just tells us we’ve made the decision to rely on them.

The more serious argument for the use of at least some private contractors for military duties are similar to those fueling the growth of outsourcing in the private economy. Say I need to build twenty camps in Bosnia. The skills aren’t war-fighting skills precisely and we won’t need that to be done too often. If I enlist these folks into the military, I don’t just have to pay them today. I need to give them military benefits, long-term VA health care benefits, retirement benefits, etc. The costs of taking those folks on ‘full time’ as it were are steep. And a good bit of the time I may not have much work for them to do. So better I bid it out to a contractor, pay for the work to be done, and then not be encumbered by the longterm responsibility for those people.

In theory there’s much to be said for that argument, at least in purely economic terms (this does after all get us into the broader issue of the privatization of risk). But the key is just what you’re paying the contractors and whether it’s really work that’s core or not core to what you do.

In a lot of cases what you’re doing is building up a constituency of private contractors who cherry-pick the best people and then hire them back to the military at exorbitant prices. So the same folks who would be doing Job X for the US Army are now doing it for Blackwater for the US Army — only now Blackwater CEO Erik Prince gets to pull down a big chunk of taxpayer dollars too.

These are broad schematic outlines of best case and worst case scenarios. You can only get any sense of what’s going on by looking in detail at how these contractors are being used. Kaplan tosses off some arguments about how this sort of thing is inevitable in modern economies and militaries. “The government being the government and the military the military,” says Kaplan, the private sector can do this stuff more cheaply and efficiently. But I’m pretty dubious about that. In the provision of medical services in Medicare for instance or in most social insurance programs, that’s demonstrably not the case.

And when you try to figure out this core issue of ‘do they do it better or cheaper’ remember that a lot of the big contracts don’t go to competitive bidding because there’s only one of two companies even capable of doing the job. Few of the factors that lead to real cost savings are in place.

The other ‘advantage’ of private contractors is that they can, as Kaplan artfully puts it, “perform more exotic missions.” Indeed. As Kaplan explains, PMCs can work for governments we don’t want to be associated with or who don’t want to be associated with us.

There’s even this …

Private military contractors might even provide an alternative to conventional military intervention in humanitarian emergencies. If the so-called world community won’t intervene in a place like Darfur, maybe Blackwater will do so—for a price.

I’m sure that would go swimmingly well.

But before proceeding further I should say that there are cases where such efforts have happened and arguably have worked. Kaplan says how we never could have gotten stuff done in Bosnia without KBR setting up all the barracks and kitchen halls. But I have a somewhat different recollection. Let me stipulate before proceeding that the following is from memory. But back during the Bosnia crisis it is my distinct recollection that while we didn’t want to assist the Croats directly as they prepared to retake and (truth be told) cleanse the Krajina region, we basically looked the other way as US military contractors trained the Croat Army for the task. What happened was brutal. But it created the facts on the ground that made the eventual Dayton settlement possible.

Whatever happened in that case you can see how this form of mission ‘exoticism’ can quickly get into very bad territory — especially when the government is in the hands of incompetents and liars. And this touches on the other problem — accountability. Who do they work for? And who’s accountable for what they do? A lot of the ‘benefits’ turn out to be various forms of subterfuge — aiding various players around the globe without having our fingerprints on the job or keeping the scale of our involvement in a country like Iraq from our own public because we’ve outsourced a big part of the job to ex-military personnel now working in the ‘private sector’.

Former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich announced on Saturday that he would not be running for President of the United States, effectively locking in the shape of the 2008 field. With Gingrich, the last fence-straddler, out, and Fred Thompson finally officially in, the preliminary warmup stage is complete. The real race has begun. Consider this all-politics Sunday Show Roundup episode of TPMtv the starting gun, or perhaps the starting-of-the-sprint-to-the-start gun …

Newt Gingrich was supposed to launch a pledge drive today to gauge the potential for a presidential candidacy, but yesterday he aborted any plans for a run.

In his usual meticulous way, Walter Pincus reviews a Blackwater contract and crunches the numbers:

Amount billed per day for a Blackwater senior manager: $1,075

Amount paid per day to U.S. Gen. David Petraeus: $493

Late Update: Let me head off a couple of potential criticisms of this comparison in advance. First, Blackwater was a third tier subcontractor: a sub of a sub of a sub. So the amount listed above is what Blackwater charged directly–not what the prime contractor, Halliburton subsidiary KBR, ultimately charged to the U.S. government, which would be a higher number. Second, Petraeus’ daily salary does not include all of the costs associated with his compensation, which would also be a higher number. The fact is that a perfect apples to apples comparison is difficult if not impossible, but the gross disparity here is illustrative nonetheless.