ABC News reports that while a federal grand jury in Washington, D.C. is investigating the death of an innocent 9-year old Iraqi boy at the hands of American contractors, “Blackwater has been operating behind the scenes in Iraq to settle with the survivors and families of the dead”:

Officials familiar with the case told ABCNews.com that Blackwater had resisted U.S. government demands that the company pay at least $100,000 per death, claiming the U.S. government has not paid that much in similar situations in Iraq. Iraqi prosecutors reportedly are urging Blackwater to pay at least between $20,000 and $80,000.

On Feb. 17, Karl Rove will be paid $40,000 for a speech on “Reflections from the Architect” at the University of Iowa. “Media will be allowed to get video, audio and photographs” during only the first five minutes of Rove’s talk. “After that, no recording devices are allowed.”

I’m pretty well-sick of the primary campaign at this point, having gone through about the nine millionth iteration of “Obama’s shallow” versus “HRC’s unprincipled” this morning. That said, one reason the campaign often feels so tedious is that both campaigns keep talking about the same very narrow set of things over and over again. But they really are a narrow set of things. It’s as if the Western Front featured this brutal trench warfare just because nobody noticed some giant open plain right next to the battlefield. There are a whole bunch of critical substantive issues about which I think it’s genuinely unclear where both major contenders stand. These are points where a person who’s strongly committed to Candidate A could make a strong argument to me that Candidate A secretly agrees with my views on Issue X, but that’s not what I’m interested in. I’m interested in getting serious, public expressions.

I’m gonna do it list-style:

• Budget deficits: Are Clinton or Obama committed to reducing them, or are they open to expanding them in order to establish new programs that they think are especially important? And what programs might qualify?
• Federal Reserve: Are Clinton or Obama happy with the past 25 or so years of conservative Republican leadership at the Fed or would they like to take things in a new direction?
• Judiciary: Assuming a Democratic Senate allows for relatively easy confirmations, do Clinton or Obama intend to continue appointing 1990s-style moderates, or would we see a return to the liberal jurisprudence of a Thurgood Marshall?
• Unilateral preventive war as a non-proliferation policy: Should we disavow this aspect of the Bush National Security Strategy or are we going to stick with it and hope that more conciliatory rhetoric can make it work?
• Israel: Any number of things come to mind, but in the most general sense do Clinton or Obama see this as an important issue it’s worth focusing on in 2009, or is it a headache the intend to ignore until a crisis breaks out or they’re lame ducks?
• Root causes: Does reducing the appeal of al-Qaeda really require the transformation of the Muslim world into a series of democracies, or are there aspects of US foreign policy that drive radicalism?
• War on terror: If, as both candidates affirm, we’re in a “war on terror” when might that war end? What, if any, special war powers do Clinton and Obama think the state of war justifies? Or is this a pure metaphor that, like the “war on poverty,” is simply supposed to signify a high level of commitment?

That’s all for now, I guess. I’ve said before that I’m an Obama guy, but I think a lot of the criticism of him out there have at least some merit. In principle, I’d be perfectly open to revising my prospective vote (I think it would be overly grandiose to call it an “endorsement”) if Hillary Clinton staked out clearly better stances on some of these things (and for the record, I don’t take the left-most side on all of these questions) before Tuesday’s Potomac Primary.

This week, Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) caved to the right wing and skipped a key vote on the economic stimulus plan, despite voicing prior support for the package. CNN’s Jack Cafferty excoriated McCain for placing his personal ambitions over the public’s well-being:

It was one of those moments that said quite a bit about somebody’s character. What did McCain do? Nothing. He ducked. Instead of representing the people in Arizona who elected him, he simply choice not to vote at all. John McCain, pilot of the Straight Talk Express, wimped out. [...]

This makes it looks a lot like John McCain wants to be president but he can’t bring himself to do the job of senator. Just another politician choosing to do what’s best for him.

Watch it:

It was one of those moments that said quite a bit about somebody’s character,” Cafferty said. “John McCain didn’t have the stomach for the tough decision.”

Digg It!

On Iraq, and whatever broader set of issues one believes are implicated in the Iraq debate, I only ever hear one message coming from the Obama campaign, namely:

1. Obama and Clinton disagree, and Obama is right and Clinton is wrong.

Team Hillary, by contrast, is always equivocating between two different ideas:

1. Obama and Clinton disagree, and Clinton is right and Obama is wrong.
2. Obama and Clinton actually agree, but Clinton is more experienced and more capable of implementing a sound agenda.

Clinton Argument Two can be made pretty persuasively. Plenty of anti-war folks are on Clinton’s side, and Obama’s never really spelled out what, exactly, on the level of doctrine he and Clinton disagree about. But the fact that Clinton Argument One does, in fact, get trotted out (especially when the intended audience isn’t yours truly) seems to me to badly undercut Argument Two.

Meanwhile, and somewhat relatedly, I keep encountering people whose view of the race seems to be shaped by the assumption that it’s not possible that good-faith disagreements exist about national security issues among Democrats. That, in essence, all Democrats have very lefty ideas about this stuff and all deviations from an ideal plane of leftiness are explained by political cowardice. I’m not really sure what evidence anyone would find convincing on this score, but perhaps part of the value of having an inside-the-beltway corrupt Villager on your list of blogs-I-read is that I can tell you that in my experience this is false. There are lots of strongly partisan Democrats who very much think Bush has taken the country in the wrong direction but who vigorously disagree among themselves about what national security policy ought to look like.