This week’s Tuesday map comes to us from a billboard controversy south of the border.

Created by advertising agency Teran/TBWA and launched a few weeks ago in Mexico, the Absolut billboard ad depicted pre-1848 North America -– before the treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo turned Mexican territories into what is now the American South West.

The campaign was obviously intended for a Mexican audience, as Favio Ucedo, creative director of a top Latino advertising firm, explained:

Many (Americans) aren’t going to understand it. Americans in the East and the North or in the center of the county -- I don’t know if they know much about the history… Probably Americans in Texas and California understand perfectly, and I don’t know how they’d take it.”

But Absolut quickly learned just how some Americans would take it: not well.  Although the ad never appeared in the U.S., it was picked up by American media outlets, causing a flurry of complaint from U.S. citizens (some more creative than others).

As of Friday, Absolut’s maker Vin & Spirits had decided to withdraw the apparently offensive advertisement even though it "was based upon historical perspectives and was created with a Mexican sensibility... [and was] in no way was meant to offend or disparage, nor...advocate an altering of borders..."

The Department of Homeland Security has quietly eased restrictions on U.S. companies looking to hire looking to hire non-immigrant science and technology students. It's probably a step in the right direction for immigration policy, since there's always more demand for these visas than supply. But it's unfortunate that that DHS had to use administrative procedures that are normally reserved for emergencies in order to get around Congress.

For this week's Seven Questions, "Waiting for a Cyber Pearl Harbor," FP asked Richard A. Clarke, former U.S. counterterrorism chief and former special advisor to the president on cybersecurity, about what offensive capabilities the new U.S. Air Force Cyber Command (AFCYBER) should have. He succinctly replied: "Highly classified ones."

Though Clarke isn't interested in mentioning specifics, someone else is. Lt. Gen. Robert J. Elder of the U.S. 8th Air Force, under which AFCYBER will be housed once it's officially launched this fall, has revealed how the United States plans to "hit back" in cyberspace.

In an interview with ZDNet.co.uk, he said offensive capabilities that AFCYBER is working on include denial of service, confidential data loss, data manipulation, and system integrity loss. These "cyberpunches" will be paired with kinetic (physical) attacks. Elder said:

Offensive cyberattacks in network warfare make kinetic attacks more effective, [for example] if we take out an adversary's integrated defence systems or weapons systems. This is exploiting cyber to achieve our objectives.

Now that the U.S. military has put on its cyber boxing gloves, it looks like it'll be no holds barred in the online world.

A couple weeks back, we pointed out that John McCain likes to refer to America as "She," a habit that I assume builds some linguistic distance between himself and Hillary Clinton. Hillary could never refer to America as "She," so McCain subtly infers that a president Clinton could never protect the country in the same way that a masculine figure could.

David Corn over at Mother Jones took the analysis a step further:

Could the implication be that Barack Obama is not quite American and that he is not interested in protecting our country, which the ad describes with the feminine pronoun. In other words, the half-black dude with a funny name--who might be a secret Muslim--can't protect her. Has Lee Atwater been resurrected? This smacks of the George H.W. Bush smear-tossing campaign against Michael Dukakis in 1988--but also of Hillary Clinton's claims that Obama is not yet ready to be commander in chief.

Here's McCain's latest ad with the gender-specific language. Is this subtle racism, sexism, or just traditional political language? You be the judge.

On Sunday, what has been described as a "game-changing" evolution in trans-Atlantic travel regulations will take place, when the open-skies agreement takes effect. Current regulations force carriers to base flights out of their own countries only, and place restrictions on which airlines can use which airports. The new agreement means that any airline can fly from any city to any airport. The move will undoubtedly increase competition between airlines, resulting in shorter flying times and greatly reduced fares. (A new European airline is already in the works that promises to send passengers from Liverpool to Baltimore for a mere 16 bucks.)

This is great news... if you live in Europe. New fares may apply to folks on both sides of the drink, but Europeans are finding great opportunities to spend their euros in the United States, while American tourists find that a dwindling few countries even accept dollars at tourist attractions anymore.

The effect of the dollar's fall on American tourists has been much discussed, and this European travel season for American tourists is shaping up to be the most painful in a five-year-slump. Stories about $40 ice cream or $10 bottles of water are scaring American tourists away from European summer jaunts, and make lower airline prices sort of look like the free food and drinks at Caesar's Palace.

Non-stop flights from European cities will no doubt open up new American markets to European travelers. And therein lies perhaps the one consolation for the dejected American Europhile: "I may have lost Paris, but they're only gaining Detroit." I mean, where would you rather vacation?

Photos: Bill Pugliano/Getty Images News; JOEL SAGET/AFP/Getty Images

It reminds me of a joke well-known by Manhattanites: Q: "Why are New Yorkers so depressed?" A: "Because New Jersey's the light at the end of the tunnel."

Europe, welcome to New Jersey.

When you don't have a plan, call for an expert panel:

Democrat Hillary Rodham Clinton called on President Bush on Monday to appoint ''an emergency working group on foreclosures'' to recommend new ways to confront the nation's housing finance troubles.

The New York senator said the panel should be led by financial experts such as Robert Rubin, who was treasury secretary in her husband's administration, and former Federal Reserve chairmen Alan Greenspan and Paul Volcker.

Volcker is a good choice, and he has had some smart things to say of late. Alan Greenspan and Robert Rubin are undoubtedly brilliant, accomplished men who know a great deal about the financial markets and are generally well-respected in Washington. But with all due respect to Senator Clinton, they're not the right people to lead such a mission. Greenspan, after all, was the one whose slashing of interest rates helped spark the housing bubble. And Robert Rubin has been on the board of Citigroup, making him neither the most disinterested observer nor a particularly prescient one. Citigroup was up to its ears in subprime mortgages.

Greenspan and Rubin still might have some good ideas for getting us out of the current mess, even if they helped to cause it. But think of it like this: If your doctor missed tell-tale signs that you had cancer until it was nearly too late, wouldn't you start looking for advice elsewhere?

TIM SLOAN/AFP/Getty Images

Over at the American Prospect, Paul Waldman suggests that the anti-war movement has failed itself. Here's Waldman on groups such as Code Pink:

They want to end the Iraq War, and make the American government more reluctant to use military force in the future. But ... the idea that yelling at a couple of Marine recruiters week after week might have some actual impact on the speed with which we leave Iraq is so absurd one wonders whether even the participants believe it.... But that's not why they're there. They're there because it makes them feel good. There's nothing wrong with that, of course. That's why all of us do most of what we do.... But it becomes a problem when you hurt the cause you're trying to help, particularly when there are actual opportunities for effective action."

One of these days, a smart sociologist is going to sit down and write a book that explains just how, despite overwhelmingly anti-war public opinion, Americans allowed Iraq and Afghanistan to become the longest wars the country has fought in the last 100 years (with the exception of Vietnam). In other words, why did a viable anti-war movement fail to materialize despite the fact that two thirds of Americans believe the war is not worth fighting?

The answer might have something to do with the fact that most of the public debate about the Iraq war has been about the way it was sold and waged, not about ideology. "More competence" doesn't exactly make for the best rallying cry. What's more, many Americans don't see the fight against militant Islam as a transcendent struggle akin to the Cold War. A majority now do not fear becoming a victim of the terrorists' rage. And most aren't particularly motivated to tangle with those who do. Some time back, Bob Kerrey, a former U.S. senator, 9/11 commissioner, and Medal of Honor recipient for his service in Vietnam quite rightly put it to me this way, harkening back to Vietnam:

[I]n the Vietnam War, you had a number of other fault line debates going on, civil rights being the largest, that tended to divide very much like the Vietnam War did—pro civil rights people tending to be anti-Vietnam War and so forth. They were exceptions to that. But it tended to break out that way. It was a great left-right debate going on. And by left-right, I mean communism versus liberal democracies, and it wasn't an artificial debate. It was a real debate.... I have a much different sense of this debate than the Vietnam debate. This one is: We shouldn't have gone there because there wasn't weapons of mass destruction, that the administration lied to us—those are the sorts of things that you hear in the debate. And it's just not as likely to galvanize a large audience the way the Vietnam War did."

Commenters: Why not?

EMMANUEL DUNAND/AFP/Getty Images

There have been many good one-liners and a few memorable speeches during this campaign, but Barack Obama's speech this morning in Philadelphia is in a class of its own. Whatever you think of his candidacy, it is one of the most frank, nuanced speeches on race we've heard in a long time:

Trinity [Obama's church] embodies the black community in its entirety – the doctor and the welfare mom, the model student and the former gang-banger.... The church contains in full the kindness and cruelty, the fierce intelligence and the shocking ignorance, the struggles and successes, the love and yes, the bitterness and bias that make up the black experience in America.... The fact is that the comments that have been made and the issues that have surfaced over the last few weeks reflect the complexities of race in this country that we've never really worked through – a part of our union that we have yet to perfect.

And it's remarkable to hear a black politician speak so frankly and with such understanding about white anger, acknowledging that blacks and whites may harbor "resentments [that] aren't always expressed in polite company":

Most working- and middle-class white Americans don't feel that they have been particularly privileged by their race. Their experience is the immigrant experience -- as far as they’re concerned, no one's handed them anything, they've built it from scratch. They've worked hard all their lives, many times only to see their jobs shipped overseas or their pension dumped after a lifetime of labor. They are anxious about their futures, and feel their dreams slipping away; in an era of stagnant wages and global competition, opportunity comes to be seen as a zero sum game, in which your dreams come at my expense. So when they are told to bus their children to a school across town; when they hear that an African American is getting an advantage in landing a good job or a spot in a good college because of an injustice that they themselves never committed; when they're told that their fears about crime in urban neighborhoods are somehow prejudiced, resentment builds over time.

As they say, read the whole thing or watch it here.

Brendan Smialowski/Getty Image

Pennsylvania's back-slapping, gaffe-prone governor, Ed Rendell, was the guest of honor on Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me this past Saturday. The first episode of NPR's always-funny quiz show since the Eliot Spitzer story broke, it was as entertaining as you might expect.

Host Peter Sagal glossed an earlier Rendell comment on Spitzer's fall from grace as, "Out of the 50 governors [likely to be caught frequenting prostitutes], he'd be fiftieth" -- referring to Spitzer's well-known penchant for sanctimony. Rendell noted that there are actually 10 women governors, so Spitzer would actually have to be fortieth. Sagal then asked Rendell, "Where would you put yourself on the list?"

"In terms of the style of the person, I'd put myself in the middle of the pack," the Pennsylvania governor responded. Good to know.

The rest of the segment, in which Rendell weighs the merits of such Madonna film classics as Shanghai Surprise, is pretty funny too.

David Paterson is a funny guy. Check out this hilarious exchange between one smark-aleck reporter and New York's governor-to-be today:

Just so we don't have to go through this whole resignation thing again," one ballsy reporter asked, "Have you ever patronized a prostitute?"

Paterson thought for a minute. "Only the lobbyists," he said.

The Obama campaign came out swinging Tuesday with a memo by former State Department Policy Planning chief Greg Craig -- who is most noted for defending Bill Clinton in his impeachment trial -- detailing the holes in Hillary Clinton's claims that she has amassed vast amounts of foreign-policy experience over the last 15 years. Since Clinton is making these claims, I guess they deserve a closer look. But in general, all this talk of a foreign-policy threshold for presidents is profoundly overdone.

Pop quiz: Name the presidents since World War II who might have passed this so-called threshold? Certainly not Clinton's own husband, who arguably came to office with the least-developed foreign policy mind of any 20th-century president. Ike, LBJ, Richard Nixon, and George H.W. Bush are four who might pass "the threshold." Maybe Gerald Ford, who served more than two decades in the House, then was Nixon's veep. But the truth is, most presidents would not qualify, including JFK, Jimmy Carter, George W. Bush, and, yes, Ronald Reagan, whom many credit with winning the Cold War.

I care deeply about foreign policy, so I'd like to think my choice in candidates is based in part upon their understanding and experience in the conduct of international affairs. But let's be honest: Experience is hardly a guarantee that a president's policies will be sound. Consider Nixon, who served two terms as vice president under General Eisenhower, then went on to no great glory in Vietnam. George H.W. Bush's victory in the first Gulf War looks good in hindsight, but many trash-talked him at the time for not taking out Saddam. Need I mention Dick Cheney? The idea that foreign-policy experience is a silly litmus test for presidents was pointed out with some eloquence by the New York Times' Helene Cooper in a piece which, unfortunately, ran last August while everyone was at the beach. It's worth going back to:

But does time spent as United Nations ambassador, director of the Central Intelligence Agency, or first lady really cut much ice when you become commander in chief? A surprising number of experts on American presidencies said 'no.'"

It shouldn't be that surprising. There's just very little evidence that foreign-policy experience leads to good foreign policies in office.

AFP/Getty Images

So, by now you've probably heard that New York Governor Eliot Spitzer has appeared to acknowledge his alleged involvement in an international prostitution ring. As he put it in today's press conference, "I have acted in a way that violates the obligations of my family," but did not directly say he would step down, only that he would use this opportunity to rebuild trust with his family and the public. "I do not believe that politics in the long run is about individuals," he said, "It is about ideas," suggesting that he may not be ready to call it quits just yet. "I will report back to you in short order," he said as he left the podium without taking questions. In the post-Clinton era, pehaps he thinks he can fight this one out.

I'm sure we're going to learn much, much more about this in the hours ahead, but if it's true -- as the Times alleges -- that Spitzer is "Client 9" of the Emperors Club, a prostitution ring with branches in Washington, London, and Paris in addition to New York, I have to wonder: Who are clients 1 through 8? Is the ordering by importance, chronological, or random? How international was the clientele?

Bill Pugliano/Getty Images

DEARBORN, MI - MARCH 5: Foods stock the Middle Eastern foods aisle at a new multilingual Wal-Mart that will stock the largest selection of Middle Eastern food of any Wal-Mart in the nation. The store has signage in English, Arabic, and Spanish, and employees who are multilingual are identified by special name tags that they wear.

Here's another sign that Nouriel Roubini is right about the shape of things to come:

The sprawling media-information company that Mayor Mike Bloomberg left behind is bracing for the worst in terms of a fiscal downturn.

"The new top brass here are betting on a recession," said one insider...

Bloomberg LP recently imposed a salary freeze for anyone making a base salary of over $200,000 a year, said the insider.

"Freezes on headcount are soon to come," added the source.

But who needs these under-the-radar indicators? The U.S. economy lost 63,000 jobs in February and 22,000 in January. It's pretty clear, as Warren Buffett said earlier this week, that "by any common-sense definition, we [the United States] are in a recession." Buffett is the world's richest man, and he'll weather the storm just fine. I just worry about the rest of us.