On television, of course, it’s difficult to make a nuanced point but it occurred to me when discussing the whole “should Hillary drop out” issue that a decision to end her campaign needn’t deprive the Ellen Malcolms of the world their chance to register a vote for the first viable woman presidential candidate. If she announced that she was done campaigning on Monday, she’d still be on the ballot in West Virginia on Tuesday — and in Kentucky a week later — and she’d still probably win both states.

Folks are still out there voting for Mike Huckabee, after all. The difference is just that Huckabee isn’t actively campaigning for their votes. He’s endorsed John McCain and receded a lot from public view. And conversely, receding a bit and starting to transition to playing a constructive non-presidential role in Democratic politics is available to Clinton even if she doesn’t drop out. What the party needs from her, fundamentally, is for her to avoid spending the time between this weekend and Puerto Rico launching a constant barrage of attacks on Obama. That’s consistent with dropping out or with staying in the race, and dropping out is consistent with her most loyal voters still voting for her anyway. The specific modalities aren’t very important, it’s about shifting the national discussion to the problems with McCain.

The AP reports that despite a decline in total veterans “as soldiers from World War II and Korea die,” the government “expects to be spending $59 billion a year to compensate injured warriors in 25 years, up from today’s $29 billion,” according to internal documents. The VA “concedes the bill could be much higher” as the Iraq and Afghanistan wars go on:

Inflation accounts for a big chunk of the increase. But even when the VA factors out inflation, the compensation for disabled veterans would still grow from $29 billion to $33 billion in today’s dollars — a more than 10 percent increase. And the department acknowledges the estimate could rise by 30 percent.

Earlier this year, Nobel prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz predicted that a “lifetime health-care and counseling for veterans” from Iraq and Afghanistan could in part push the total cost of the wars to $5 trillion to $7 trillion, far higher than current expectations.

John McCain fires two aides (theoretically they quit) over their background as lobbyists for the military junta that rules Burma.

William Galston and Pietro Nivola have an interesting piece on the rise of geographic segregation in political presences, where more-and-more people now live in whole counties full of co-partisans. It ends, however, with a pretty lame entry into the literature of bellyaching about polarization:

Because politics is a contact sport, hard-hitting partisan competition is unavoidably part of the game. A party system that differentiates sharply between alternatives has virtues, not the least being that it engages more voters, offers clearer choices and enhances accountability. But hyperpartisan politics also do damage, not least to public trust and confidence in government — and many Americans understandably yearn for less polarization. Because the underlying structure of our politics remains so deeply divided, the 2008 election may not requite their wish.

These upsides are what I wrote about in my “case for partisanship” article and stacking the upsides against the Galston/Nivola downsides, I think polarization looks pretty good. On the one hand, we have more engaged voters, clearer choices, and more accountability. All of those are good things. The downside is allegedly “public trust and confidence in government.” But it’s not even clear that that’s a bad thing. I don’t trust the government as much as I did before I learned that it was running a network of secret prisons in Eastern Europe and organizing an illegal surveillance program, but I’d say that’s a merited decline in trust.

Why would we pine away for a shift that would make government less accountable but more trusted?

On CNN’s Late Edition today, former Gov. Mitt Romney (R-MA) claimed that the argument that John McCain would, in effect, be a third Bush term “isn’t going to stick”:

BLITZER: [Obama] says he welcomes a debate with John McCain on the issue of the economy, taxes, spending policy because John McCain would simply be more George W. Bush. … Does John McCain want to continue what Obama called the failed policies of the Bush administration?

ROMNEY: Well I think you’re going to hear that time and again, Wolf, throughout the campaign season. And I just don’t think it’s going to stick.

But earlier on the same program, a leading McCain surrogate — Rep. Roy Blunt (R-MO) — conceded that McCain is indeed promising a third Bush term on the economy:

BLITZER: So it would be in effect a third Bush term when it came to pro-growth tax policies?

BLUNT: It would be. I think it would be. And I think that’s a good thing.

Watch a compilation:

Romney may not have gotten the memo, but it’s nice to see Blunt conceding the point. McCain is promising more of Bush’s economic agenda — unaffordable massive tax cuts for the rich that offer no help for the average family.

The McCain economic agenda includes: $1.7 trillion tax cut for corporations, $300 billion a year in tax cuts that aren’t paid for, and a plan that delivers 58 percent of the benefits to the top 1 percent of taxpayers and only 9 percent to the bottom 80 percent.

All this coming from a man who once said he “cannot in good conscience support a tax cut in which so many of the benefits go to the most fortunate among us.”

In his new book, Torture Team, renowned international lawyer Philippe Sands documents the fact that Bush’s torture program was approved at the highest levels of the administration.

Speaking with PBS’s Bill Moyers on Friday, Sands noted that these architects of torture refuse to acknowledge they were “complicit in the commission of a crime.” “There was not a hint of recognition that anything had gone wrong, nor a hint of recognition of individual responsibility,” he said of his interviews with key torture advocates.

Sands cited former Pentagon official Doug Feith, who was instrumental in shredding the Geneva Conventions, as an example:

When you read my account with Doug Feith and with others, you will see the sort of weaseling out of individual responsibility, the total and abject failure to accept involvement. Read Mr. Feith’s book. on how to fight the so-called war on terror. And it’s as though the man had no involvement in the decisions relating to interrogation of detainees. And yet, as I describe in the book, the man was deeply involved in the decision making from step one. So it’s about individual responsibility. And there’s been an abject failure on that account.

Watch it:

Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia recently argued that torture is not unconstitutional. Speaking with Moyers, Sands slammed Scalia for being “foolish” and not considering the implications of his words:

I’ve listened, for example, to Justice Antonin Scalia saying, if the president wants to authorize torture, there’s nothing in our constitution which stops it. Now, pause for a moment. That is such a foolish thing to say. If the United States president can do that, then why can’t the Iranian president do that, or the British prime minister do that, or the Egyptian president do that?

“You open the door in that way, to all sorts of abuses, and you expose the American military to real dangers,” Sands concluded.