Hillary Clinton and Obama on the Iraq vote.

The Democrats and the war:

Democrats looked to the upcoming votes after losing a bruising battle with Bush on an emergency war spending bill. Lacking the two-thirds majority needed to overcome another presidential veto, Democrats dropped from the legislation a provision ordering troops home from Iraq beginning this fall.

Congress passed the revised $120 billion spending bill on Thursday, providing $95 billion for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan through September. The House voted 280-142 to pass the bill, followed by a 80-14 vote in the Senate.

Democratic leaders said they hoped to ready the bill for Bush's signature by this Memorial Day weekend.

Democratic presidential rivals Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama both voted against the bill.

''I fully support our troops'' but the measure ''fails to compel the president to give our troops a new strategy in Iraq,'' said Clinton, D-N.Y.

''Enough is enough,'' Obama, an Illinois senator, declared, adding that Bush should not get ''a blank check to continue down this same, disastrous path.''

Their votes continued a shift in position for the two presidential hopefuls, both of whom began the year shunning a deadline for a troop withdrawal.

Should I avert my eyes so that I can preserve some chance of voting for Clinton or Obama in 2008? Both candidates have calculated that this is the position they must take to go forward toward the primary. I'd like to think they both know they are wrong but are doing what they need to do as a means to an end. And I believe that at least Clinton does. Obama, I suspect, is simply weak on national security (which is why he was against the war all along).

"You're referring to the Notorious Greenhouse Effect."

David Lat has notes on a law firm lunch talk given by Linda Greenhouse.

She discussed various predictors (attributed to various scholars) regarding ideological movement, including whether the justice is new residents to the DC area (those who have prior DC experience are less likely to change their positions in the context of DC culture), whether the justice has prior executive branch experience (those with prior experience are less likely to change their ideology), and any life-changing events that the justices have experienced (e.g. Justice Thomas's confirmation hearings). She indicated that Justice Thomas is unlikely to become more liberal over time because his defenders on the right during his confirmation hearings so firmly anchored him to that ideology. Her conclusion seemed to be that Justices Roberts and Alito are unlikely to change their ideological stances over time based on the first two tests (both have prior DC experience and both worked in the executive branch)....

On the idea that justices become more liberal as they get older because they're tired of being criticized in the media and they want people to write nice things about them: "You're referring to the Notorious Greenhouse Effect." "This is the idea that justices become more liberal as they get older because they want the east coast liberal media, such as the New York Times, to write nice things about them in their obituaries." She was skeptical of this as an explanation for ideological movement.

Maybe it's for the law professors.

Are real-life lawyers starting to think they can act like those lawyers on TV?

Yesterday we were talking about that lawyer who told a judge she was "a few French Fries short of a Happy Meal." Beldar wonders if television has warped their minds. Beldar says he's been a big fan of the lawyer show "for a long, long time, all the way back to Perry Mason days," but you've got to realize these shows are fiction and that they've got to concoct endless dramatic spectacles. How incompetent to lose your bearings and think that because these TV lawyers mouth off to the judge and suffer no serious sanctions that you can too!

Me, I don't watch the TV lawyer shows. I didn't watch "Perry Mason" back in the 60s, and aside from a couple of episodes of "L.A. Law" -- enough to see I didn't like it -- haven't watched any in the last 30 years. I accept that the shows exaggerate and overdramatize to entertain people, but it just doesn't work on me.

But there was once a TV show about lawyers that I loved: "The Defenders."

The series concerned the cases of a father-and-son team of defense attorneys, Lawrence Preston (E.G. Marshall), the sharp veteran litigator, and his green and idealistic son Kenneth (Robert Reed)....

As Rose pointed out a 1964 article, "the law is the subject of our programs: not crime, not mystery, not the courtroom for its own sake. We were never interested in producing a 'who-done-it' which simply happened to be resolved each week in a flashy courtroom battle of wits." Rose undoubtedly had in mind CBS's other celebrated defense attorney Perry Mason (1957-66) when he wrote these words. Although both were nominally "courtroom dramas" or "lawyer shows," Perry Mason was first and foremost a classical detective story whose climax played out in the courtroom, while The Defenders focused on the machinery of the law, the vagaries of the legal process, and system's capacity for justice. Although the Prestons took on their share of murder cases, their aim in such instances was to mount a sound defense or plead for mercy, not unmask the real killer on the witness stand.

Certainly The Defenders exploited the inherent drama of the courtroom, but it did so by mining the complexity of the law, its moral and ethical implications, and its human dimensions. Rose and his writers found much compelling drama in probing the psychology of juries, the motives of clients, the biases of opposing counsel, the flaws of the system itself, and the fallibility of their own lawyer-heroes. The series frequently took a topical perspective on the American justice system, honing in on timely or controversial legal questions: capital punishment, "no-knock" search laws, custody rights of adoptive parents, the insanity defense, the "poisoned fruit doctrine" (admissibility of illegally obtained evidence), as well as immigration quotas and Cold War visa restrictions. The Defenders avoided simple stances on such cases, instead illuminating ambiguities and opposing perspectives, and stressing the uncertain and fleeting nature of justice before the law.

Can we get a show like that now?

Two new books about Hillary Clinton.

Anything new?

"A Woman in Charge: The Life of Hillary Rodham Clinton," by Carl Bernstein, reports that Clinton as first lady was terrified she would be prosecuted, took over her own legal and political defense, and decided not to be forthcoming with investigators because she was convinced she was unfairly targeted. While in Arkansas, according to Bernstein, she personally interviewed one woman alleged to have had an affair with her husband, contemplated divorce and thought about running for governor out of anger at her husband's indiscretions.

"Her Way: The Hopes and Ambitions of Hillary Rodham Clinton," by Jeff Gerth and Don Van Natta Jr., reports that during her husband's 1992 campaign, a team she oversaw hired a private investigator to undermine Gennifer Flowers "until she is destroyed."...

According to Gerth and Van Natta, even before the Clintons were married they formulated a "secret pact of ambition" aimed at reinventing the Democratic Party and getting to the White House. The authors cite a former Bill Clinton girlfriend, Marla Crider, who said she saw a letter on his desk written by Hillary Clinton, outlining the couple's long-term ambitions, which they called their "twenty-year project."...

The authors report that the Clintons updated their plan after the 1992 election, determining that Hillary would run when Bill left office. They cite two people, Ann Crittenden and John Henry, who said Taylor Branch, the Pulitzer prize-winning historian and close Clinton friend, told them that the Clintons "still planned two terms in the White House for Bill and, later, two for Hillary."

I'm not troubled that a husband and wife would discuss their shared ambitions, but putting a "secret pact of ambition" in writing seems really disturbing. But is it true? Unless I see the document, I'm not going to get any more exercised over it than I already am about the prospect of a President who's already had his two terms getting back into the White House through his wife.

There's some interesting material at the link about Bill Clinton's affairs, which you'd think would be a very tired subject by now. Bernstein writes about Marilyn Jo Jenkins, "a power company executive he fell in love with and almost left his wife over":

Jenkins ... was spirited into the governor's mansion at 5:15 a.m. for a final, furtive meeting with him the day he left for Washington to assume the presidency -- [and] Bernstein's account makes clear her pivotal role.

Bill Clinton wanted to divorce his wife to be with Jenkins in 1989, Bernstein reports, but Hillary Clinton refused. "There are worse things than infidelity," she told Betsey Wright, the governor's chief of staff.

The key question now is what these things about Bill mean about Hillary. It's not a hard question to answer, though, it seems. The narrative is ambition, and Bill Clinton is what he is. On balance, he's quite useful to an ambitious plan. But who knows the real truth? Who knows what the two of them have said to each other? We can't know, and yet we must form opinions about her.

Volatile Republicans.

In the 2008 campaign there's a way in which the Democrats and Republicans are alike (according to William Kristol, writing in Time):

[T]here's a top two—Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama for the Democrats, Rudy Giuliani and John McCain for the Republicans. There's a third-place candidate on the edge of the first tier—John Edwards and Mitt Romney. There's a big jump down to the next tier of declared candidates, none of whom seem to have much of a chance. And there is a possible late entry (Al Gore) or two (Fred Thompson and Newt Gingrich), any of whom would join the first tier.

And a way in which they are different:

The Democratic campaign has been amazingly stable. In late February, if one averaged half a dozen national polls, Clinton was at about 35%, Obama had about 25%, and Edwards and Gore trailed with about 13%...

The Republican race has been more volatile....

[W]hereas three-fifths of the Democratic vote now goes to the two front-runners, fewer than half of Republicans support Giuliani or McCain.... The door is open far wider for Thompson—and perhaps Gingrich—to enter the G.O.P. race than it is for Gore to join the Democratic contest.

And the G.O.P. race features real differences among the candidates on important and salient issues [like abortion and immigration].

Kristol wants to think the more volatile condition is better. But is it?

Blog survey.

If you have a few minutes, please take this survey about blog reading. It's for academic purposes and has no questions about commercial products (like the last one I linked to). It's mostly trying to find out why people read blogs. (Warning: I don't think it works in Safari. I had to use Firefox.)

Dust and death.

Americans are still dying from the 9/11 attacks.