Oh, man. Bill Richardson just repeated his call for a Balanced Budget Amendment to the constitution. The audience, showing what I think is a pretty impressive level of knowledge of budget policy, erupted in boos. And rightly so. This is a terrible idea. Fortunately, Richardson’s not going to be president, but imagine if we’d had such a thing in place during, say, the second world war. I dunno what Richardson thinks he’s doing.

Ezra Klein just got himself mentioned in a question at the health care forum, namely what is it, exactly, that Hillary Clinton learned from her previous experience with health care. It’s a good question. Clinton, in response, hit the ball out of the park. I don’t even really remember what she said — something about evil corporations being evil — but it was a great answer and right in her sweet spot at the nexus of experience and partisan loyalty.

Last night, over drinks, I wound up in one of those “if liberals like humanitarianism, why don’t you want o indefinitely prolong the hopeless and catastrophic war in Iraq?” arguments and I have, naturally enough, a bunch of Iraq-related answers.

When Gene Sperling got to talking this morning about his work with the Global Campaign for Education, aimed at ensuring every child on the planet a chance to go to primary school, though, I got downright anrgy about this sort of humanitarian rationale for Iraq. The crux of the matter is that Sperling’s big, longshot legislative dream is this bill sponsored by Senators Hillary Clinton and Gordon Smith “to require the United States to do its fair share — up to $3 billion dollars by 2012 — in meeting the Millennium Development Goal promise of universal education by 2015.” He was very excited that Senators Obama and Edwards have also committed to spending $2-$3 billion on this.

Meanwhile, for 2008 the White House says we need to spend $5.3 billion on Mine Resistant Ambush Protected vehicles for use in Iraq and Afghanistan, making me fairly certain the Iraq share alone is worth more than $3 billion. The National Priorities Project sees about $450 billion as having already been spent on Iraq. If you’d taken that as a lump sum and put it in a safe investment vehicle that secured you a very modest 2 percent real rate of return per year, you’d have about triple what Sperling was looking for.

Now, obviously, you wouldn’t actually want to finance global education spending that way, but it’s telling as a thought experiment about the bankruptcy of a lot of the “humanitarian” rationales that have been offered for the war.

Years ago, Matt Miller introduced me to the concept of “Still True Today” — the basic point being that a lot of the most important facts in the world rarely get reported because they don’t constitute “news.” The blogosphere, unfortunately, really hasn’t done much to ameliorate this. I could, for example, write a post every single day about how hundreds of millions of people around the world are living in absolutely deplorable conditions and we ave the power to substantially ameliorate that. But I don’t, because there’s no peg.

This morning, though, I’m attending a ONE Campaign panel on just this, so I do have the opportunity. I don’t have any real expertise or analysis to offer on the subject of aid per se, but from a blogging/activist point of view, I’ll simply say that this is a topic where a quite broad range of elites are eager to see US policies changed — it’s a very bipartisan group. What’s lacking is evidence of a mass constituency that particularly cares, which, I guess, is where the idea of netroots outreach comes in. At any rate, this is probably the most important issue there is.

Looks like this morning’s congressional leadership forum has been canceled since too many of the congressional leaders need to stay in DC for votes and such thanks to some procedural wrangling. That’s too bad, I was really sort of more interested in their thoughts than in hearing from the presidential candidates, since one has many, many, many opportunities to read presidential candidates’ speeches and more than a few chances to see them live. Congressional leaders, by contrast, tend to be shadowy figures granted the occasional sound bite here or there but rarely able to lay out an account of what they think they’re doing.