While in Baghdad over the weekend, House Speaker Dennis Hastert (R-IL) asserted that Iraq is making progress on electricity generation:

On a surprise visit at President Bush’s request, House Speaker Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.) flew into Baghdad at 4 a.m. Friday and immediately remarked on how many lights he saw burning in the Iraqi capital.

The speaker and his party saw it as a sign of progress, of how much power had been restored in a city known for frequent blackouts, according to Hastert’s spokesman, Ron Bonjean, who accompanied the speaker.

“It was one of our first impressions, so many lights shining brightly,” Bonjean said.

Hastert must have toured Baghdad at just the right time because Baghdad residents still have an average of just four hours of electricity per day. The pre-war level for Baghdad? 16-24 hours per day.

More at Political Animal.

– Geoff Miller

While the Senate prepares to debate the Paris Hilton Tax this week, supporters of its abolishment admit they are “well short of the 60 votes required to take up a full repeal measure.” If full repeal fails, Senators may vote on “compromises which are nearly as costly and unfair as full repeal.”

Today, six former White House advisers are urging Senators to oppose these costly proposals that “benefit only the wealthiest three of every 1,000 estates.”

CongressDaily reported last week that Sen. Max Baucus (D-MT) may put forward a “counter offer” containing “a graduated rate structure setting rates of 15, 25, and 35 percent depending on the size of the estate.” Today’s letter points out how this also would be very costly:

- This “alternative compromise” would cost nearly 75% as much as full repeal over the long run, according to estimates by the Tax Policy Center.

- Compared to freezing current law at the 2009 levels, this would cost about $200 billion in the decade from 2012-2021.

- When compared to 2009 law, the graduated rate structure cuts taxes by 66% for couples with estates between $7-10 million, by almost half for couples with estates between $10-20 million, and by 20% or more for multi-billion dollar estates.

As Sebastian Mallaby writes in today’s Washington Post, these so-called compromises “would achieve nearly everything that abolitionists dream of.”

At this afternoon’s press conference, White House Press Secretary Tony Snow compared the constitutional amendment banning gay marriage supported by President Bush to historic “civil rights” legislation. Later Snow was asked if he really meant to equate banning gay marriage with “civil rights.” Snow responded, “How do you define civil rights?” Watch it:

Raw Story has the transcript.

Yesterday, President Bush argued that the Federal Marriage Amendment, under consideration by the Senate this week, would take the issue of marriage away from the courts and to the people:

A constitutional amendment will put a decision that is critical to American families and American society in the hands of the American people, which is exactly where it belongs. Democracy, not court orders, should decide the future of marriage in America.

Actually, the opposite is true. Georgetown Law Professor Michael Siedman explained today at an event at the Center for American Progress:

If enacted, their handiwork [the FMA] is bound to produce outcomes that no one could have wanted or intended and an unprecedented transfer of power over domestic relations to federal judges…Clearly, the framers of the amendment meant to distinguish between “marriage” itself and its “legal incidents.” This much is obvious because the first sentence…defines only “marriage,” while the second sentence refers to both “marriage” and its “legal incidents.”…

Apparently, the framers have in mind a distinction between core legal attributes, which make up “marriage,” and an unspecified list of peripheral attributes which make up its “legal incidents.” Because the amendment is entirely silent about what is core and what is periphery, it gives federal judges unchecked power to place various aspects of marriage in one category or another.

Let’s consider a hypothetical. Suppose that a state passes a law creating “civil unions” with almost all the benefits of marriage. Does this count as a “marriage” or is it only the “legal incidents of marriage?” Which category it falls into determines whether civil unions will be constitutional. That decision will now be turned over to federal judges for the entire country. Short of another constitutional amendment, there is nothing the state or federal government will be able to do about it.

Full Text of the Federal Marriage Amendment: Read more

President Bush and congressional conservatives “are aiming the political spotlight this week on efforts to ban gay marriage,” a move that’s sure to renew debate over so-called “values voters.” But as a poll released today by the Center for American Progress shows, the moral concerns of the American people are nothing like what the right wing claims.

Below, some highlights:

– Asked to name the most serious moral crisis in America today, 28% of Americans cite “kids not raised with the right values”; followed by 22% saying “corruption in government/business”; 17% saying “greed and materialism” or “people too focused on themselves”; and only 3% citing “abortion and homosexuality.”

– On addressing poverty: 68% of voters strongly agree that “government should uphold the basic decency and dignity of all and take greater steps to help the poor and disadvantaged in America” (89% total agree).

– On religious freedom: 67% of voters believe that religious freedom is a “critical” part of their image of America compared to less than three in 10 who believe Judeo-Christian faith specifically is critical to this image.

(Click HERE for more details on the poll, and HERE for a slideshow presentation on the findings. For what it’s worth, among voters who participated in the survey, 46% voted in 2004 for President Bush, while 36% voted for John Kerry.)

As Ron Brownstein of the Los Angeles Times wrote this weekend, “the survey demonstrated again that the moral issues people worried about most in their daily lives were very different from the ones dominating political debate.”

UPDATE: Via First Draft, Gallup has released a similar poll: Read more

Jason Steorts, author of the National Review cover story on global warming, dismisses multiple factual errors exposed by ThinkProgress as “irrelevancies.” Apparently, even though Steorts concedes he made numerous mistakes, we need to correct ourselves for pointing them out. Steorts says ThinkProgress has “failed to correct the errors and omissions I have pointed out in its replies to me.”

Steorts identifies four. At ThinkProgress, we take accuracy seriously. Let’s take Steorts claims in order:

1. The “assertion that I wrote that when you factor coastal ice loss into Davis’s study, it still shows that the Antarctic ice sheet is growing.”

Steorts did assert that when you factor in coastal loss Antarctica is still growing. Here’s the quote “Since this unstudied area lies in the ice sheet’s interior, it almost certainly gained ice over the course of the study, and would accordingly have offset the (also unmeasured) coastal loss.”

2. The “claim that my discussion of Ola Johannessen’s study of ice buildup in interior Greenland failed to acknowledge coastal loss.”

We never claimed Steorts failed to acknowledge costal losses in Greenland. In fact we quoted Steorts saying “Various studies show that warmer temperatures are causing the ice sheet [in Greenland] to lose mass at the margins.”

3. The “claim that my discussion of Greenland’s temperature history is contradicted by average global temperature records.”

Greenland’s temperature history is contradicted by average global temperature records. Steorts claims a forthcoming study in Geophysical Research Letters found it was warm in Greenland in the early 20th century. If true, that’s more relevant than the global average.

4. The “implication that I’d denied that human activity causes warming, when what I’d said was that there is disagreement about how much warming it causes.”

We never claimed Steorts denied human activity causes global warming. We illustrated that Steorts overstated the disagreement about how much human activity is responsible for global warming.

The real test for the National Review is if they buy Steorts argument factual errors are “irrelevant.” The magazine should take accuracy seriously and print a correction in their print edition.

“In a pair of cases that could re-ignite decades-old disputes over race and public education, the Supreme Court Monday agreed to decide what role affirmative action should play in the assignment of students to competitive spots in elementary and secondary schools.”