Novak: Plame wasn’t covert and I’d out her again if I had the chance.

Here’s one thing I’m curious about. Steven Hayes’ new Cheney book seems to be getting a decent amount of criticism. But why is it exactly that anyone thinks it’s an example of some sort of warrior’s ethic or hardcore-osity that the vice president appears to suffer from a fairly extreme if not precisely clinical sort of paranoia? Or frightened of various wildly improbable fantasies.

One of the things a leader must have is the power of discrimination and judgment. There are literally limitless numbers of conceivable threats to consider. Some are very real and dangerous while others are merely notional. And a person in a position of authority really needs to be able to discriminate between the two. But if we accept what’s written about Cheney in these insider-access accounts, he seems to lack any such capability.

Meanwhile, what his supporters want us to see as a kind of inspired vigilance looks a lot more like at least the threshold of clinical paranoia.

His supporters want us to believe that only Cheney has the guts and gumption perseverate on these fears while the rest of us are lulled into a calm of our own inner frivolity. But setting aside the misdirection, straw men and general bamboozlement, even the praise of Cheney’s acolytes and footmen strikes me as quite damning.

Watching the debate? Us too. If you’re watching at home, tell us what you think the highlight moments are. We’ll be putting together a highlight reel to run Tuesday morning. Send us an email to “highlight reel” with the time, your time zone and brief description of the clip you’re describing. We’ll put it in the mix.

A new NYT poll finds that less than one in five think surge is working. That and other political news of the day in today’s Election Central Happy Hour Roundup.

Most campaign videos are pretty lame. But this one from Edwards on the Youtube debate tonight was pretty good.

Here are the video questions for tonight’s debate, in case you missed one or wanted to see one again.

I missed the first half hour of the debate (the crack TPM team was on duty). And I prepared to find this debate was pretty lame — not because I don’t appreciate the concept, but because I had my doubts that they could effectively combine distributed questions with fixed time and place answers.

That said, I think it’s actually been a lot more revealing so far than a lot of conventional debates. A lot of the questions are more outside the box and less canned than most moderator questions and I think the candidates are a bit less willing to stiff the questioner with a non-answer. So I’d give it a thumbs up so far.

Wasn’t crazy about the head-banging education question that just ran at 8:18 PM. But beside that, I think it’s working out fairly well.

Late Update: Maybe it’s just me, but a bit too many cutesy videos.

Gravel just endorsed the ‘Fair Tax’, saying that it’s great because it taxes what people spend rather than what they earn. I guess that’s the kind of thing that sounds great if you a) don’t know anything about tax policy or b) don’t care about progressive taxation. Really rich people spend a low proportion of their money; poor and middle income people spend a lot. It’s a really stupid idea.

Late Update: TPM Reader TD says …

Consumption taxes are not stupid.

If we all started from no wealth, it consumption and earnings taxes would be equivalent. Gravel drew the wrong distinction. Consumption taxes are efficient
because they do not distort savings/consumption choice, which is a big problem with our income tax.

The benefit of our income tax is that it allows wealth taxation, since we are not starting from equal endowments. But I think most liberal economists would say cut taxes on savings, raise taxes on estates/inheritances, since some bequests are accidental.
Most important, it is not at all true that consumption taxes can’t be progressive. Just pay a progressive tax on income – qualified savings and you’re all set. Not so easy — how to treat housing, e.g. but probably a big improvement over what we have. If sufficiently simple, possibly more progressive than what we have.

I didn’t say that consumption taxes were stupid. I’m saying having a consumption tax be the primary mode of raising revenue is a really bad idea. And that’s what Gravel’s saying he’s for.

As I said below, I think this debate turned out pretty well — but perhaps a little less well than I thought an hour ago. At some level I think CNN/Youtube still treated this as a novelty. I’d say 2/3 of the questions were pretty good — in as much as ‘good’ means questions that are off the beaten path and yield productive answers. I agree with a lot of viewers who have said that having actual voters posing the questions made it harder for the candidates to duck the questions. Perhaps a third or maybe a quarter, though, were just silly. I don’t know how else to put it — songs, corny jokes, etc. That can be fun for viral video. But I thought it cheapened the exercise a bit.

The real problem is that there was no follow-up from the questioners, though Cooper did a decent job playing that role. But conventional debates almost never allow for real follow-up, even though the questioner is live and in person.

Ideally, you’d have two candidates actually debate, as in really have a structured argument for an hour. But you’re never going to have that. So I thought this was fairly good.

Late Update: I always try to get my thoughts down in a post before seeing what other commenters and bloggers said. Having done so now, it seems others were even more positive than I was about how this went. As I look back on some of the Youtube questions, I guess it’s perhaps growing on me too. But I still think it would have been better still without a few of the more antic and over-the-top vids. Call me old-fashioned.

The great Karl Rove “informational briefing” scheme spreads to our foreign policy apparatus. And why shouldn’t the Peace Corps know which Republicans are in danger of losing reelection?