I don’t agree with the issue Sen. Sam Brownback (R-KS) is advocating in this campaign web video (he’s pushing his consistent pro-life position in contrast to Mitt Romney’s ‘light on the road to the White House’ conversion to the cause). But this strikes me as one of the better, maybe the best use of distributed or viral video by a campaign yet.

The backstory here is that at the Sunday Republican debate Sam Brownback got asked about robocalls his campaign has been using in Iowa against Romney. The calls attacked Romney as a Johnny-come-lately to the pro-life cause. Romney said the accusations were false. But when debate moderator George Stephanopoulos pressed Romney on just what was false, it became pretty clear that the charges must all be true since Romney just blathered on without specifically challenging any of the claims. Nor should this be surprising since Romney was pro-choice right up until the point where he was pretty sure he wanted to run for president in 2008 and then he became pro-life.

In any case, here’s Brownback following up.

One thing I like about this video is that it’s one of candidates continuing the dialog outside of the often distorting and constraining time limitations of a debate. It also comes across as pretty genuine and unscripted (a subjective appraisal, but take a look). He speaks right to the camera. And it’s a case where a candidate has what I think is demonstratively truth on his side, and he’s using the technology to make his point and point viewers to third party analyses.

There’s always a temptation to imagine that new technologies transform the terms of communication more profoundly than they do. But this is a case where Brownback is doing something that wouldn’t be possible unless the candidate controlled the medium of distribution.

Brownback’s chances of winning the nomination are next to nil I think. Maybe (nil+2) or (nil+3). But if one of the top-tier candidates, on either side, could do this I think it could be a very powerful force for their campaign.

Of course, in most cases, to appear genuine and unscripted requires in some degree actually being genuine and unscripted. And that may greatly reduce the number of candidates for whom this is an option.

Will the Democratic reform bill change Washington? It’s unclear. But it sure is a huge bummer for lobbyists, lawmakers, and staffers.

Iowa Senator Tom Harkin wades into Clinton-Obama no-nukes argument — and agrees with Obama. That and other political news of the day in today’s Election Central Morning Roundup.

Don’t forget, applications for TPM’s Fall Internship are due this Friday!

Also, if you’re a design, code or video expert who thinks a TPM internship isn’t for you, think again. In addition to writing, research and media monitoring, we want a few interns who can help with TPMtv, do design work and generally support all of our various technological efforts.

So email us!

Yesterday we brought you footage of Hillary Clinton’s Q&A “Breakout Session” at Yearly Kos. In today’s episode of TPMtv, we give you highlights of John Edwards’s session …

And stay tuned tomorrow morning for highlights of the Barack Obama session.

I’ve noted several times recently how public support for the “Global War on Terror” appears to be inversely proportional to the outlandishness of its proponents claims on its behalf. A case in point came in Sunday morning’s Republican debate in Iowa. I think it’s actually part of John McCain’s stump speech now. But it was the first time I’d really focused in on the substantive claim amidst the claptrap.

McCain said that the fight against militant Islam is the calling or fight of our generation, or something to that effect — and of course that’s a quite subjective statement so he can say whatever he wants.

Then he says, though, that this is a fight that will be with us for the rest of this century. To quote the man, “I also firmly believe that the challenge of the 21st century is the struggle against radical Islamic extremism. It is a transcendent issue. It is hydra-headed. It will be with us for the rest of the century.”

Now, think about that. That’s ninety-three years. My old graduate school advisor Gordon Wood used to say that humans have a very hard time seeing more than fifty years into the future. Of course, even a year into the future is difficult. But more than a few decades and we haven’t the slightest idea what the world is going to look like — what the technologies will be, the great moral issues, the threats, etc. It’s something we can actually study empirically as we look at what people during, say, the Civil War thought the 1910s would be like or the Revolutionary War era folks thought the 1820s would look like.

Consider too that fascism, which was no walk in the park, was around for roughly a quarter century (I’m a ‘small fascism’ man: the copycats in South America in the latter 20th century don’t count and I don’t think even Franco’s regime in Spain does out past the 1950s). And communism, which also had a pretty good run, was around for about three-quarters of a century.

But John McCain states it as a matter of fact that the war against militant Islam will still be the defining national security threat for this country in 2099 and for years after.

I know we customarily give a rather wide berth to rhetorical excess in the theater of politics. But what on earth is McCain talking about? Not long ago it was enough to sate the historical vanity of the War on Terror mongers to dub it a ‘long war’ or ‘generational struggle’, which it may well be. But apparently even that is now insufficient. Only an entire century will do. It is almost as if as the concept in the real-world present looks more and more ill-judged and foolhardy its credentials must be buffed up by giving it more and more ridiculous lifespans ranging off into the unknowable future.

“You may think it’s stupid,” you might say, “But this baby’s lasting a hundred years at least!”

Perhaps it is the chronological equivalent of the way that President Bush salves the universal verdict of his strategic foolhardiness by imagining a future in which historians are as out of it as he is.

It makes sense that it is their final redoubt as the future is the only territory where empirical evidence or — more plainly put — reality can’t be brought up to contradict you.

Fred Thompson relaunches his Web site, and is even testing the waters for an eventual “issues” section. That and other political news of the day in today’s Election Central Happy Hour Roundup.

I think we all know as a general matter that there are a lot of ‘contractors’ in Iraq and that quite a few of them have gotten killed. But I’m not sure I’ve ever seen actual numbers.

Here are some numbers.

According to this article in the Times, the US military estimates there are 125,000 in country. In other words, there are almost as many there as US military personnel, who I think now number around 160,000, post surge.

And 1001 of them had been killed as of the end of June.

Earlier this month we brought you the on-going story of Scott Thomas Beauchamp, a US Army private who published a series of ‘Baghdad Diaries’ in the New Republic under the name Scott Thomas.

Thomas told a dark story US soldiers in Iraq acting in various dishonorable and sadistic ways.

This brought forth a storm of charges from the right-wing blogs and the Weekly Standard claiming that the diaries were fabrications. Then TNR did its own reinvestigation of the diaries and found that with the exception of one error, the stories checked out.

Post media critic Howard Kurtz has been writing about these criticisms in his column. And tomorrow he reports that now the US Army has determined that Beauchamp’s claims were “found to be false.”

Kurtz got a few more statements from an unnamed “military official” who would not go on the record “because the probe is confidential.” And he was told that the investigation into the truth of Beauchamp’s article will not be released. The unnamed official further explained that the Army will not prosecute Beauchamp but rather deal with the matter administratively “by having his cellphone and laptop confiscated.”

For reasons I’m not entirely clear on, the statement announcing the investigation and its verdict appears not to have been a public release but rather a statement released uniquely to the Weekly Standard. That’s how the Kurtz article reads and some quick reporting on my part suggests this is in fact the case.

And it gets better.

The Weekly Standard, which has been leading the charge against Beauchamp, says another unnamed military official told the magazine that not only had the Army found Beauchamp’s written accounts to be false but that Beauchamp himself has now signed a recantation of all his claims. So case closed; he fessed up. Yet when TNR contacted the Army public affairs a Maj. Steve Lamb told them: “I have no knowledge of that.”

So what’s up here?

Beauchamp makes his charges. The US Army allegedly investigates and finds the highly embarrassing charges to be false. But no information will be released about which of his charges were false, how they were false or how they were determined to be false.

They then punish Beauchamp by preventing him from having any communication with the civilian world. And if that’s not enough, an unnamed military source tells the Standard that Beauchamp has undergone a successful self-criticism session and has recanted everything. But an Army spokesman tells TNR that he’s not aware of any confession or recantation.

We can at least be thankful that the matter is being handled with such transparency.

Maybe Beauchamp was always a teller of tales. He wouldn’t be the first nor even the first to have wormed his way into the pages of The New Republic. But it’s hard not to have some suspicion that the Army has put itself in charge of investigating charges which, if true, would be deeply embarrassing to the Army; that it has provided itself a full exoneration through an investigation, the details of which it will not divulge; and it has chosen to use as its exclusive conduit for disseminating information about the case, The Weekly Standard, a publication which can at best be described as a charged partisan in the public controversy about the case.

This hardly inspires much confidence.