Reading the Clinton/Tomasky interview, Greg Sargent rather enthusiastically notes that in it “she vows as President to conduct a systematic review of the ways in which the Bush administration has hoarded executive power — a review, she claims, that could actually cause her to relinquis some of those powers.” David Kurtz follows through on the TPM homepage: “Hillary Clinton promises a systematic review of the Bush administration’s executive power grab if elected–with an eye toward relinquishing some of those powers.”

I think this isn’t the best reading of what happened. Mike shrewdly asked her “what specific powers might you relinquish as president, or renegotiate with Congress – for example the power to declare a US citizen an enemy combatant?” and Clinton . . . didn’t come up with anything. Instead, she vaguely replied:

Well, I think it is clear that the power grab undertaken by the Bush-Cheney administration has gone much further than any other president and has been sustained for longer. Other presidents, like Lincoln, have had to take on extraordinary powers but would later go to the Congress for either ratification or rejection. But when you take the view that they’re not extraordinary powers, but they’re inherent powers that reside in the office and therefore you have neither obligation to request permission nor to ask for ratification, we’re in a new territory here. And I think that I’m gonna have to review everything they’ve done because I’ve been on the receiving end of that. There were a lot of actions which they took that were clearly beyond any power the Congress would have granted or that in my view that was inherent in the constitution. There were other actions they’ve taken which could have obtained congressional authorization but they deliberately chose not to pursue it as a matter of principle.

Basically, she’s telling liberals she’ll roll back executive power but she’s not committing herself to doing anything in particular. Basically, as Charlie Savage wrote for our October issue, I wouldn’t count on any future administration voluntarily relinquishing the powers Bush has seized. Maybe some future congress will take power back, but people don’t do that kind of thing voluntarily. That’s what Clinton’s telling us.

Ross’s explanation of why the GOP is addicted to war:

As in the Cold War, foreign-policy hawkishness has become the glue holding the fragile GOP coalition together, even as Iraq has made foreign policy a general-election liability for the Right, instead of the asset it was in the Reagan years. Which is one way to explain the weird aftermath of the ’06 debacle, in which social conservatives and fiscal conservatives each blamed one another for the defeat, when it was perfectly clear that the Iraq War had more to do the party’s degringolade than the corruption of the small-government movement or the excesses of the religious right.

Maybe. But I’ll say this. I get the sense that Republicans think that while Iraq may now be a bad issue for their party, that things like unconstitutional surveillance, arbitrary and indefinite detention, and routine torture are big-time winning issues for the GOP. So they like the hawkish posture, even if Iraq’s been a problem. That’s how it seems to me.

Beyond that, I can also say for a fact that that’s how it seems to an awful lot of Democrats. Talk to people on the Hill or people involved in messaging, and there’s just no confidence that they could win a big high-profile standoff with Bush on pretty much any issue related to terrorism. There’s a critical margin of members who just won’t back any position that can’t also attract substantial Republican backing to provide “cover.”

Jon Chait has a brilliant piece on “entitlement hysteria”, noting that despite the pundits’ obsession with Social Security, the entitlement problem is really a Medicare problem which, in turn, is really a health care problem:

Since you can’t solve the entitlement problem without solving the health care problem, one might think that the entitlement hysterics would have gradually moved on to becoming health care hysterics. (There’s also the fact that Social Security is solvent until 2041, but over 40 million Americans lack health insurance right now.) Yet this is another puzzling thing about entitlement hysteria: the sheer persistence of the obsession. It’s true we have some large federal programs that are going to have to be shored up. But why do they consider this to be a matter of such unique urgency? Put aside the war in Iraq, for which plenty of people (including me) lack any confident solution. In addition to the health care crisis, there’s global warming. There are numerous loosely secured nuclear sites throughout the world, any one of which could some day provide the raw material for a terrorist attack of unprecedented scale. There are numerous diseases threatening the lives of millions of Africans whose deaths could be prevented at relatively modest expense.

These other calamities have one thing in common: The consequences of inaction are permanent. Carbon released into the atmosphere can never be recovered. Africans who die from aids can’t be brought back to life. And fissile material captured by terrorists can’t very easily be taken back.

Meanwhile, of course, health care is precisely the issue that the candidates are offering plans on. But acknowledging that the current debate is, in fact, presenting important choices on issues of vital importance would put political journalists in an awkward position. Rather than posturing, you’d need to respond to that reality by trying to inform yourself about the issues at hand and the meanings of the rival camps’ proposals to deal with them. Instead, it’s more comforting to complain that nobody has the courage necessary to talk about cutting Social Security benefits.

The good news out of Iraq is that “Iraqi officials said today that they would move to halt the activity of Kurdish rebels who have been striking across the border from northern Iraq, a promise delivered amid a flurry of international diplomatic efforts to prevent a widening conflict between the two countries.” The bad news, of course, is that Iraqi officials don’t have any practical authority over events in Kurdistan so this is all meaningless.

All throughout the article we’re hearing about commitments made by Maliki, calls to Maliki, meetings with Maliki, etc., etc., etc. But Maliki’s irrelevant!