Miscellaneous

• Via Daily Kos:Snow claims Greenspan backs tax cuts (full story here). As I mentioned before, Snow used to be against deficits.
• Wampum has an interesting suggestion for further de-Frenchification of the House of Representatives.
• TalkLeft found some actual left-right bipartisanship.
• On the subject of my Iraq post, Matt Yglesias points out that my statements that we should “maintain containment in Iraq” and that we should “improve relations with the Muslim world” are somewhat contradictory, as containment is not particularly popular among Middle Eastern Muslims. Agreed (though I did say “ideally” Bush could achieve four simultaneous objectives). Certainly, containment would mandate continued military presence in Saudi Arabia and the Middle East more generally. Could we somehow offset the resentment created thereby? Fullfilling committments in Afghanistan would help. Engaging on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict might help. Ending sanctions against Iraq might help. And for that matter, removing Saddam and financing the building of a free, prosperous, and democratic Iraq might help, but the second part seems particularly unlikley.

AB