Hmmm. Seems Fred Thompson logged a few law firm hours for the Libyan intel agents who blew up the plane over Lockerbie.

This week at TPMCafe’s Book Club, we have an all-star group to debate Jon Chait’s new book, The Big Con: The True Story of How Washington Got Hoodwinked and Hijacked by Crackpot Economics. Paul Krugman, Stephen Moore, Will Wilkinson, Megan McArdle, Ross Douthat, and Ezra Klein will be joining in.

Blog debate so far has focused on Chait’s history of the rise of suppy-siders, but as he explains in his first post they’re only a piece of the puzzle:

The wealthy interests who favor tax cuts, and other pro-rich items, aren’t motivated by supply-side ideology. While they may believe that tax cuts help the economy, their deeper belief is that every dollar they have, including the dollars they inherited, is a reflection of their success and a measure of their virtue. So, in this sense, supply-side ideology simply plays the same role that Social Darwinism did a century ago and that economic orthodoxy did seventy years ago.

In other words, it acts as an altruistic gloss on a much more crass political project.

Some of the more right-wing participants in this week’s discussion likely won’t agree. In fact, we’ve put together a relatively more conservative group to respond to Chait’s argument, so we’re expecting fireworks. As one reader put it, it’s like “like a celebrity death match within the dismal science.”

Enjoy.

With little debate over the fact that there’s been no progress in Iraq on political reconciliation, debate is centering on whether there’s been improvement in purely military terms — whether the ‘surge’ has resulted in reduced civilian deaths. Yet the debate has been confused — in many cases intentionally so — by a welter of incomplete statistics and apples to oranges comparisons that don’t give us any real ability to understand the trends on the ground in Iraq.

Over the last several days, however, TPMmuckraker.com’s Spencer Ackerman has done some good old-fashioned shoe-leather reporting to come up with what we believe are the only solid numbers available.

Both counts — one from the Associated Press and another from Iraq Body Count — follow very different methodologies. And each of them have particular strengths and shortcomings. What sets this data apart, however, is that each organization has used a consistent methodology going back to the beginning of 2006. That means that when you look at June 2006 vs. June 2007, or Jan 2007 vs. August 2007, you’re actually making an apples to apples comparison. And that’s key to get a real sense of the trends are in the country.

The thumbnail verdict? The death rate among Iraqi civilians is either stable or actually rising. But the details are key. Go take a look.

Today is the day. No longer can a politician or pundit evade a question about the situation in Iraq with, “Let’s wait until September.” General David Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker will testify today on exactly where we stand in Iraq regarding both the military and political components of the troop surge announced by President Bush at the start of the year. In today’s Sunday Show Roundup episode of TPMtv we get a glimpse of what we might expect from the Iraq progress report and the debate to follow …

Spencer Ackerman has ongoing coverage of the Petraeus/Crocker hearings at TPMmuckraker.

Late Update: Petraeus offers his own stats on civilian deaths in Iraq–but has not yet divulged his methodology.

Later Update: So much for the spring of 2008. Looks like the surge will last into the summer of 2008.

Here’s video of Gen. Petraeus making his case on declining civilian death rates in Iraq. He says that two US intelligence agencies have signed off on his methodology. But he doesn’t say which two he’s talking about.

In defending his statistics earlier today, Gen. Petraeus said that two US intelligence agencies had signed off on his methods for collecting and analyzing the data. But he didn’t say which two.

There are 18 US intelligence agencies, though probably a far smaller number have any direct competence for analyzing this kind of question. And Karen DeYoung’s recent piece in the Post reported that the CIA and the DIA was following the same methodology as the GAO, which Petraeus’s shop has said is all wrong. There’s a lot of alphabet soup here, I admit. But the upshot is that the Post seems to be saying that CIA and DIA don’t agree with Petraeus’s methods.

So which two intel agencies is Petraeus talking about?

We have the full text of Gen. Petraeus’ prepared testimony posted.

Late Update: Ambassador Crocker’s full statement is here.

For ease of comparison, here are all three of the charts on Iraqi civilian deaths that we’ve been writing about today. The first chart was presented by Gen. Petraeus in his opening statement this afternoon to the House Armed Services Committee. The other two charts we created at TPMmuckraker, based on numbers compiled by the AP and Iraq Body Count, respectively.

Petraeus’ numbers:

The AP‘s numbers:

The IBC’s numbers:

We are still waiting to hear about the methodology employed by Petraeus in arriving at his numbers on civilian casualties, a methodology that he says was signed off on by two unidentified U.S. intelligence agencies. Earlier today, Spencer Ackerman provided an in-depth explanation of the AP and IBC numbers.

If you’re looking for a Petraeus break, you can’t do much better than checking out Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Charlie Savage sitting down this week at TPMCafe’s Table for One.

Savage joins us to discuss his book Takeover: The Return of the Imperial Presidency and the Subversion of American Democracy. In his first post, he explains how he came to gradually understand the radical project that was underway:

I kept asking the question why. What was driving Dick Cheney and the other “presidentialists” who were so relentlessly and systematically pushing this agenda, about which they had said nothing to voters when campaigning for the office? Where was this coming from? This question took me to Ann Arbor, Michigan, to the Gerald R. Ford Presidential Library, where the National Archives houses a bookcase full of documents in gray boxes titled “RICHARD CHENEY FILES.”

Don’t miss this.