So how about that political progress in Iraq? Well, Time says it’s actually a fraud. See more from Kevin Drum, Marc Lynch, and Ilan Goldenberg. Basically, the Iraqi cabinet seems to have cobbled something meaningless together so that Ryan Crocker can go before congress and say that just when it looked like the administration was going to need to report (fake) security progress but no political progress — bam! — in the nick of time along comes some (fake) political progress.

The difference, one assumes, is that Crocker and Petraeus won’t be mentioning the part about how it’s all fake. Then whatever they say, Bush will further exaggerate three or four notches, while Dick Cheney goes for five or six and Condoleezza Rice keeps her reasonable rep by leaving it at one or two notches of additional misleadingness. I’m excited. Have I mentioned that Bush wants $50 billio more dollars and that maybe all this cash we’ve been throwing away on Iraq had instead funding productive investments (be they public or private sector) wages might be going up instead of down?

As both a map enthusiast and a non-fan of agricultural subsidies, I really liked this graphic. Each red dot represents the address of a recipient of federal farm subsidies. The big red dots represent people getting over $250,000 a year. Given that this is clearly a map of Manhattan, one can safely assume that that these people are not struggling family farmers. It’s a neat illustration of an out-of-whack system. It comes to me via Yuval Levin who has the right position on the issue, but naturally glosses it with a misleading partisan spin:

The farm bill passed by House Democrats in July would continue giving millionaires farm subsidies (setting the income threshold for payments at $1 million a year, and keeping loopholes in place that allow some making much more to qualify). The Bush administration has proposed sharply reducing the income threshold to $200,000 a year and ending many of those loopholes.

The real story with farm legislation, of course, is that bad policy comes from a bipartisan group of farm-state legislators. Back when the Republicans were in the majority and the congress passed a bad farm bill, he was all for it. Now that it’s a Democratic congress, he’s posturing as in favor of sounder policy. But the real dynamics aren’t partisan or even ideological — it’s bipartisan sausage-making at its finest.

Justin Logan makes a good, if provocative, point about the president’s overblown rhetoric on Iraq has the effect of amplifying Osama bin Laden’s propaganda. We shouldn’t be sending people the message that al-Qaeda really is on the verge of seizing control over Iraq’s oil resources and building a universal Caliphate. The people who blow themselves up for al-Qaeda’s sake are murdering people, but they’re not accomplishing anything and they’re certainly not right around the corner from world domination and people need to know that.