This is pretty amusing.

The Israeli Defense Forces will now be pushing the official Israeli line on Facebook and Twitter. I guess it understands that its unofficial defenders (often trolls) on the web run heavily toward bigots and ethnic triumphalists who do Israel's cause infinitely more harm than good.

But Israel needs to understand one thing. Thinking folks -- especially the young and especially on the web -- do not trust official sources and especially official military sources. Perhaps before Vietnam, Americans believed the Pentagon. But who does now?

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When we were just beginning work on our book, Authoritarianism and Polarization in American Politics, we stumbled on a curious but compelling relationship. In a state level analysis, we found a very high correlation between favoring corporal punishment of children and the 2004 Bush vote. To begin our TPM post, we thought it might be interesting to see whether the result replicated in 2008. It does.

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I am always intrigued by the neocon take on the Middle East. There are many elements to it, starting with the belief that the Israeli-Palestinian issue is not central to America's problems with Muslims (Arabs and non-Arabs).

That is critical because, if the Palestinian issue is central to our problems in the region (and contributes to violence directed against Americans), then we would have to do something to end the conflict. And that means ending the occupation, facilitating the creation of a Palestinian state, and helping Israel secure itself within its pre-'67 borders.

There is another key element to the neocon take. It is that settlement expansion (i.e., robbing Palestinians of more land) does not contribute to violence. Denying that nexus is significant because allowing it to stand suggests that violence doesn't just arise out of the blue but is often directly linked to the settlement enterprise.

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I was never much of a source for Mark Pittman. I'm not sure I ever told him anything that he didn't already know.

But some time last year he figured out that I was willing to criticize the financial services industry, or at least more willing than most members of Congress. He called me for comment, for instance, on the stunningly advantageous terms that lenders got in buying back stock warrants when they paid off TARP funds. I hadn't heard the first thing about it before his call, but he told me what he had found out and I said that really stinks. Mark got to include "congressional reaction" in his story, and I got national press for stating the obvious.

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"Your list is a bunch of tiny victories."
"what's lacking is a broad-based benefit for the middle class."

Comments on my last post do seem to show that the old adage that a "billion dollars here and a billion dollars there, and pretty soon you're talking about real money" just doesn't hold for folks these days. But a $787 billion stimulus that funded schools for working and middle class parents, gave tax rebates to working and middle class parents, that is providing unemployment insurance relief for millions of middle class families facing job loss-- all of these are incredible gains.

Put this in perspective, Clinton couldn't get a $16 billion jobs bill passed over a filibuster in 1993. And remember, the stimulus money is not being handed out over decades but isn't being distributed over just a couple of years; literally, I don't think anyone can point to a larger domestic spending increase by the federal government on a per-year basis in American history.

As the President prepares his Tuesday address to the nation and Congress prepares for hearings on the war, I sure hope everyone is reading the cogent analysis of Thomas Johnson (Naval Postgraduate School) and Chris Mason (Center for Advanced Defense Studies) entitled Refighting the Last War; Afghanistan and the Vietnam Template. Analysts have compared Afghanistan to Vietnam but often backed away from a detailed comparison. Johnson and Mason show the parallels to be absolutely spooky.

As Jeffrey Record further notes, "the fundamental political obstacle to an enduring American success in Vietnam [was] a politically illegitimate, militarily feckless, and thoroughly corrupted SouthVietnamese client regime." Substitute the word "Afghanistan" for the words "South Vietnam" in these quotations and the descriptions apply precisely to today's government in Kabul.

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Polls show the Democratic base is unmotivated to turnout in 2010-- and it's no wonder given all the rhetoric that Obama hasn't done much with his 2008 victory.  Those attacks from the rightwing are understandable from a partisan position, but many progressives seem to oddly be aping similar rhetoric-- wallowing in glass half-empty complaints of what Obama and Congress haven't delivered while failing to actually educate the public on the successes they have.  We should be able to demand more while publicly praising what we do achieve -- basic political walking and chewing gum at the same time -- but a lot of progressives seem not to have mastered the skill.

Maybe it helps that I had such low expectations of Obama's administration to begin with-- but then I thought significant federal reforms would fail due to the filibuster. So the progress actually made is a pleasant surprise.  And those successes are large and profound.   This post will summarize those gains, and even in summary form will be quite long, reflecting  the incredible victories involved.    Yes, we all wish for more, but the best way to get there is to educate the public -- and especially the progressive base -- about what we got in the last year and how replacing moderates and conservatives with more real progressives could deliver even more in the future. 

Quick Summary of 2009 Progressive Victories (more explanation below)

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I've been thinking about why the White House Party Crashers have attracted so much media attention and I've concluded it's because they represent everything that is screwed up about America at the end of the first decade of the 21st Century.

To begin with, they have no shame. They lie, they cheat the little people in their lives, they run fake charities, they welsh on their obligations, and they value and pursue everything that is fake and shallow--and then they have the chutzpah to ask a network to pay them to tell their lies on TV.

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Ben Bernanke's column in the Washington Post has to be absolutely infuriating to anyone old enough to remember the events of 2008. In this column, Bernanke lectures the public about the need for the Federal Reserve Board to preserve its independence from Congress, explaining that:

"The government's actions to avoid financial collapse last fall -- as distasteful and unfair as some undoubtedly were -- were unfortunately necessary to prevent a global economic catastrophe that could have rivaled the Great Depression in length and severity, with profound consequences for our economy and society. (I know something about this, having spent my career prior to public service studying these issues.) My colleagues at the Federal Reserve and I were determined not to allow that to happen."

It's nice to talk about the Fed's response to this crisis, but Mr. Bernanke's studies apparently did not tell him the obvious, that allowing an $8 trillion housing bubble to grow unchecked would lead to an economic disaster like what we are now experiencing. He and his colleagues at the Federal Reserve Board either could not see, or did not care about, this huge bubble. As a result, Ben Bernanke has been running around for much of the last year and a half telling us about his knowledge of the Great Depression.

It is worth quickly explaining why a collapsed housing bubble leads to a recession, since the policy people responsible for this disaster have done so much to try to obscure the obvious.

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Barack Obama can do virtually nothing to halt the mounting fear among Israelis that he is hostile to them: no visits, no speeches, no jets. If you need proof, and don't know Hebrew, just look at the body language of Ben Caspit, the populist-journalist host of the very widely watched "Journal" program on Channel One, Friday nights.

Caspit fancies himself the voice of the common people, or at least its conscience, sort of like Chris Matthews. He may, God help us, be right, at least for the moment. This past Friday, he was (let's call it) interviewing two relatively moderate members of Knesset, one from Likud, and one from Kadima, both of whom support the settlement freeze, both of whom insist that this is not just a sham, for all of its qualifications. Kadima's Gideon Ezra, the former deputy director of the Shavak (the state security services), even insisted the freeze was very late in coming, for all the obvious strategic reasons; he implied that Kadima might well be prepared to join the coalition if Netanyahu required their support to pursue a deal with the Palestinians.

Both of these responses might have raised the antennae of an interviewer. Caspit was having none of it. Instead, he wanted to talk about the public statement Friday by Likud's Limor Livnat, a formidable minister in Netanyahu's coaliton, that the freeze only proves Obama is anti-Israel, that "we have fallen into the hands of a terrible administration."

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Right after Thanksgiving dinner, my son, Nick, asked if I had seen Lin-Manuel Miranda (the Latino creator, writer, and star of "In The Heights") perform his rap about Alexander Hamilton at the White House in front of the first family.

I hadn't seen it. And it's amazing.

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It is horrific to contemplate what Gilad Shalit and his family have been subjected to for over three years. Not only has he been imprisoned but the ups and downs of the prisoner exchange negotiations must be torture for his family (and for Gilad himself if he knows what has been going on).

But most maddening is, in my opinion, the racial implications of the Shalit saga. It does not matter that Israelis and Palestinians are racially indistinguishable. The fact is that the Israelis are "white" in terms of their status in Israel-Palestine and the Palestinians are not.

The Shalit story is reminiscent of the way Americans become obsessed with crimes committed against whites while generally indifferent to identical crimes committed against people of color. The media will devote endless hours and days of coverage to the tragedy of a white woman gone missing while ignoring similar disappearances of black women. The same applies to stories of child kidnappings and other crimes of violence.

We tend only to care if the victim is white.

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It seems that the folks in power have a hard time doing anything that doesn't end up making the Wall Street boys even richer. We are constantly told that they simply could not think of any way to rescue the economy that didn't involve making Goldman Sachs, J.P. Morgan and the rest of the crew incredibly rich. Of course the rest of the economy didn't especially get rescued (10.2 percent unemployment and 2 million foreclosures a year is pretty damn bad), but Wall Street is doing just great.

In this context, it is worth thinking about efforts to push mortgage modifications that ostensibly have the purpose of keeping homeowners in their homes. The government is using up to $70 billion of TARP money for this purpose. Effectively, the government is handing money to banks to get them to reduce monthly mortgage payments and/or principle.

This a lot of money to be handing banks. This is an actual gift from the government to the banks.

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Benjamin Netanyahu's announcement "falls short" (in George Mitchell's words) on so many dimensions, reasonable people will conclude that it is simply a piece of theater, meant to appease the Obama administration, and public opinion around the world, particularly in the wake of the Goldstone report:

The freeze allows for the completion of 2,500 partially-built housing units and the construction of 492 new apartments. It does not apply to buildings like schools and synagogues. It does not take into account that the actual drivers of new settlement are not in the government, but fanatic settlement organizations that have been acting more or less independent of government decisions for years, and which the state does not have the manpower (or the army, the stomach) to confront with military force. The freeze does not apply to East Jerusalem, a greatly expanded zone (70 square kilometers) in the heart of the West Bank--historically, Palestine's biggest city, commercial hub, and the site of the mosques. Oh, and it last only ten months.

In effect, Netanyahu has followed the route of Sharon and Olmert before him on "Judea and Samaria," running like Menachem Begin and governing like Golda Meir: at first refusing to budge, then offering to take a five foot leap over the eight foot pit. No wonder the PA's Saeb Erakat announced almost immediately that the Israeli government's step was "unsatisfactory." No wonder, almost immediately, Avigdor Lieberman told Israel's Reshet Bet early this morning, "the response of the Palestinians is the last consideration the Israeli government's order of priorities." The point, he said, was mainly to attend to relations with Israel's friends, the (so he says) "17 countries" around the world that supported Israel about the Goldstone report but have been drifting into hostility. (When you have Lieberman in the government, leaks are superfluous.)

AND YET LIEBERMAN'S admission is precisely what should get our attention.

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Prime Minister Netanyahu today announced a partial 10-month settlement freeze. And, understanding that Netanyahu's freeze is meaningless, the far right is backing him 100%.

According to the New York Times, "A statement from Mr. Netanyahu's office said the moratorium would be in Judea and Samaria, the biblical names of the West Bank, meaning it would not include Jerusalem, and would not apply to new residential building, so existing construction would continue and public structures like schools and community centers would be unaffected." (And, I'd guess, also parks, hospitals, day care centers, bakery cooperatives, Weight Watchers centers, synagogues, more synagogues, Arthur Murray's dance studios, aviaries, fine restaurants, zoos, etc).

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