Obama and Clinton each have an astonishing $30 million-plus in cash on hand for the primary. That and other political news of the day in today’s Election Central Morning Roundup.

The first thing to say on North Korea is that it’s very good news that the North Koreans have again shut down the Yongbyon nuclear reactor. This is the facility that has been the center of nearly all the trouble over more than a decade now. And the IAEA has now confirmed that the plant has been taken off line, though negotiations will now begin on securing a more permanent shuttering of the facility. The Times calls the deal a “hard-won, yet fragile diplomatic victory for the Bush administration.”

And so it is, sort of.

But here’s the thing no one should forget: it’s taken the Bush administration six-plus years to get things to where the Clinton administration had them when Bush took office.

Let’s review: the Clinton administration had a deal with the North Koreans in which the US — actually a consortium of the US and its allies — gave fuel oil and a promise of diplomatic normalization for the North Koreans to shutter their plutonium-producing nuclear facility. The Bush team called this appeasement and set-up deliberately scuttling that deal, which indeed happened. The North Koreans proceeded to get back into plutonium production big time. And it’s now assumed that they made a few actual weapons with the stuff. Realizing that they’d shot their mouth off with no idea what an alternative policy might be for the Korean Peninsula, they eventually started creeping their way back to the Clinton policy, to which point they have now arrived.

So, back to where we started, only now the North Koreans probably have several nuclear warheads instead of what was probably none in early 2001.

Yes, there are some jots and tittles and an endless amount of trying to find meaningless differences to distinguish their approach from the Clinton approach. But there’s no getting around it: this is the Clinton policy. Indeed, it was also the Powell policy. And it was the policy of most people who had any sense. But it wasn’t the Cheney/Kristol/AEI/PNAC policy. And now the whole exercise of six wasted years has to be chalked up as another of those mind-numbingly stupid Bush policy failures that would be funny if so much hadn’t been (and continues to be) on the line.

Andrew Sullivan isn’t the only one who gets August off. Everything you wanted to know about the Iraqi parliament’s August vacation in today’s Sunday Show Roundup episode of TPMtv …

I must confess that I almost feel sorry for the White House in their desperate attempts to spin the Iraqi parliament’s vacation. Most of the bamboozlement that comes out of the White House these days is meant to cover up for the administration’s failures and deceptions — mainly how well things are going in Iraq, how the whole fight there is against al Qaeda, how jihadists in Pakistan can’t send teams to the US unless we pull out of Iraq, etc.

But in this case, you know the White House really, really doesn’t want these guys to take August off — for pure optics, if for no other reason.

Now, I don’t think these guys are going off to Biarritz — okay, maybe some of them are. But I think it’s a little misleading to imagine — as the US conversation suggests — that these folks are just a bunch of ne’er-do-wells or loafers. I think the whole drama puts the lie to the administration line in a more telling way. And that is that Iraq doesn’t really have a government. It’s a country that remains under military occupation. And the ‘government’ is just a group of factions playing a multi-layer chess game, partly under our watch and partly gaming out position for our departure. The key is that our timelines and deadlines are clearly not theirs. And they seem fairly indifferent to the benchmarks and dramas that the White House is telling the American people are so important.

In other words, the vacation issue appears to be both less and more than it seems — not the caricature it’s portrayed as in the American media perhaps but also a sign that the narrative of events the White House is feeding the US public is a sham.

It’s about time on the Iraq filibuster. But it’s a very good move. There has been little if any press attention to the fact that senate Republicans are filibustering practically every piece of legislation to come before the senate. But Iraq is the sui generis issue. And the Democrats need to make it clear that the Republicans won’t allow anything on Iraq to even come to the floor.

The Republicans have every right to filibuster. But it should be clear that that’s what they’re doing.

McCain campaign hemorrhaging still more staffers in Iowa. That and other political news of the day in today’s Election Central Happy Hour Roundup.

This is pretty funny. This article from Reuters manages to get through an entire article on the filibuster the Democrats are going to force senate Republicans to go through with without ever actually using the word ‘filibuster’. It’s almost a thing of beauty in its negative capacity of bamboozlement.

Some choice quotes …

U.S. Senate Democrats, hoping to raise pressure on President George W. Bush and his fellow Republicans to pull troops from Iraq, have scheduled an around-the-clock war debate starting on Tuesday.

and

Democrats have all but publicly acknowledged that they will be unable to pass their end-the-war amendment because opposition Republicans are insisting on 60 votes for a victory.

Like I said, the ploy that dare not speak its name. Who will come out for filibuster pride?

(ed.note: Thanks to TPM Reader LK whose bamboozle-o-meter was clearly working over time.)

I’ve noticed that we’re again hearing a lot of talk to the effect that the American people just don’t have the gumption to brave out the genius of President Bush’s Iraq policy. Or, relatedly, that if we’d had constant polls back in WWII that they too would have shown public support flagging at every little reverse between December 1941 and August of 1945.

Well, this topic came up in a rather heated exchange with a reader. So I thought the point was worth making again. Despite what a lot of people in Washington and the rest of the media seem to think, there was actually fairly extensive polling of public opinion during the Second World War.

And here’s an example of some of it. (Regular readers may recognize this because I posted the same data in 2006.)

Click here or on the image itself to see a full-size copy of the data in question.

The key point is that many polls were taken during the war. And approval of the president’s conduct of the war, understanding and belief in the goals of the war and other similar measurements all remained constant at very high levels or in some cases actually went up. One key data point you can see on the chart is the number of Americans will to make peace with Hitler — that is, an negotiated end to the war rather than the unconditional surrender which was a key allied war demand. The number was under 10% for most of 1942 and 1943. Then it briefly surged up to just over 20% in early 1944 (roughly the time of the invasion of Italy) before falling back down to about 15% for duration of the war in Europe.

Given the flimsiness of the rationale and the incompetence of the execution of the war in Iraq, a more perplexing question is why support for the war held on as long as it did. But the reason for the drop is not the time the war has dragged on — though it’s now as long or longer than almost any other war in US history — or how many have been killed. The death toll in the Second World War dwarfs the numbers of those killed in Iraq.

The reason the war is unpopular is because people don’t think we are accomplishing anything that promotes our security or national interests — indeed, quite the contrary. Not because we’re not doing it right or not doing it well but because the whole concept is flawed. People can see that we’re digging a hole into the Earth and a lot of them want to stop and climb out even though it will be messy.

Here is a wonderful tour de force of the Fred Hiatt editorial in the Washington Post. The main point of the piece is to show that Hillary Clinton, despite what she wants Democratic voters to think, actually supports the Bush-Washington Post line of muscular foreign policy heroism. But along the way Hiatt manages to set up such a surge of straw men that he ends up arguing that Hillary, senate moderates and even President Bush all share one position, which is the Baker-Hamilton Commission position. And they all stand against ‘Democratic primary voters’.

Here are the two key grafs …

In other words, Clinton ascribed to what might be called the consensus, Baker-Hamilton view: Pull out of the most intense combat but remain militarily engaged by going after terrorists, training and advising Iraqi troops, and safeguarding at least some regions or borders. It’s the position set forth in the proposal of Democratic Sens. Carl Levin and Jack Reed and in the compromise proposal of Republican Sens. John Warner and Richard Lugar. Last week President Bush said it’s “a position I’d like to see us in.”

If everyone agrees, what’s the problem? Bush and the Democrats have very different ideas of the conditions needed to move to Baker-Hamilton. (So, by the way, did Republican Jim Baker and Democrat Lee Hamilton when they co-wrote the report.) Bush thinks U.S. troops can pull back only after they have established, with their new counterinsurgency strategy, sufficient peace to allow Iraqi factions to begin making political compromises.

Did you know that Carl Levin and President Bush were both part of the consensus on Iraq? I’m tempted to say that this is classic high school debating society logic — both clever and ridiculous, simultaneously. But given the author, isn’t the key here a rather disingenuous effort to expand the circle of people who agree with his terribly discredited position?

Over there. More than two-thirds of wasteful Defense Department contracts for Iraq win approval anyway.