The eulogies for President Gerald R. Ford provided a timely reminder about the necessity, in extreme situations, of "thinking large."

Ford, of course, came to office as a result of Watergate. From the first minutes of his Presidency he was dogged by questions about the future of his disgraced predecessor, Richard M. Nixon.

Would he be indicted? What were the implications of putting a President on trial? Would he be convicted and then jailed?

According to Ford, 90% of his time in the first days of his administration dealt with Nixon, making it difficult for Ford to achieve his goal of ending our "long national nightmare."

But then Ford pardoned Nixon, ending the nightmare with a single decisive act.

Historians believe that it was that act that caused his defeat by Jimmy Carter two years later. But, by and large, they also believe Ford did the right thing. Decades later, Senator Edward Kennedy presented Ford with the JFK "Profile in Courage Award," stating, "that time has a way of clarifying past events, and now we see that President Ford was right in 1974." And that he had been “thinking large.”

Israelis have a unique way of expressing the concept of "thinking large" or, more precisely, of "thinking small." They call those who can't see the big picture a "rosh katan" or "small head."

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House Democrats announced their plan today to cut student loan interest rates in half. 

To hold down costs, the lower rates would be phased in.  The rate would fall from 6.8 percent today to 3.4 percent by 2011.  The lower rates are limited to subsidized loans for low- and middle-income undergraduates.

The lower rates will save an average student at a four-year college $4400, according to an analysis released today by PIRG.

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Kevin Martin, the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, was sold out in the merger of AT&T and BellSouth. He wasn't undercut by the other commissioners who disagreed with him, even though Martin took out his anger at them. He was sold out by the company for which he had extended his prestige -- AT&T. On top of that, Martin has made life for himself just that much more difficult dealing with Democrats in Congress, even as he accepted the foundation for a more open Internet.

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This week on TPMCafe's America Abroad, the bloggers are talking about... Iraq, Wilson’s Fourteen Points and Kofi Annan. My full summary is after the break.

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When I saw the headlines about Wal*Mart moving to flexible scheduling, I was see that the company has decided to become a leader in the work/life arena. Here's a bit from The Wall Street Journal:

[U]sing a new computerized scheduling system, [WalMart] will start moving many of its 1.3 million workers from predictable shifts to a system based on the number of customers in stores at any given time. The move promises greater productivity and customer satisfaction for the huge retailer but could be a major headache for employees...

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Iraq is on everyone's mind today at TPMCafe. At America Abroad, Bruce Jentleson questions the "moral responsibility" case for surge and Ivo Daalder has two thoughts about Bush's soon-to-come "old-wine-in-new-bottles Iraq strategy." In the Coffee House Jo-Ann Mort is agreeing with Todd Gitlin and Josh Marshall that it's the Administration's lack of sanity, not management skills, that have brought us to where we are in Iraq and Steve Clemons is calling for people to attend a protest against McCain and Lieberman's announcement of their surge policy. Finally, at Election Central Eric Kleefeld has a quote opposing the surge policy from none other than Oliver North and at the Democrats Discussion Table readers are discussion Murtha's efforts to defund the war.

Let me know if I missed anything good and share some wisdom with us.

Warren Reports is happy to read comments of Representative Rahm Emanuel of Illinois, chairman of the Democratic Caucus,

“The agenda we have is about restoring economic security to a very vulnerable middle class. The real activity will be in those areas."

Sounds like something right off these pages, eh?

Still, it is worth a moment to consider the implications of this sort of rhetoric, now that it is ascendant. The emphasis is not on lifting up those at the bottom. No, this strategy is about ensuring that those in the middle don't backslide into the bottom. Uncharitably, this could be called The Stasis Agenda.

Contrast that with the change-oriented rhetoric of John Edwards' "two Americas" refrain. He sees a bi-polar America and calls for expanding opportunity for those at the bottom.

"It's wrong we have 37 million Americans living in poverty. Poverty is the great moral issue of our time, and we all have an obligation to do something about it.''

At least in tenor, this is a more progressive (and divisive) sort of rhetoric. Which is right? ...

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Joe Biden is spot on:

"I have reached the tentative conclusion that a significant portion of this administration, maybe even including the vice president, believes Iraq is lost," Biden said. "They have no answer to deal with how badly they have screwed it up. I am not being facetious now. Therefore, the best thing to do is keep it from totally collapsing on your watch and hand it off to the next guy -- literally, not figuratively."

The challenge will be to make sure the administration doesn't get away with it.

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Another argument likely to be made in favor of the step-up-the-course surge strategy is the moral responsibility one. Having wreaked havoc on the country, we owe it to the Iraqi people not to leave until we get them to a better place.

That there is a moral component to what we should do next and our broad sense of responsibility to the Iraqi people is a valid point. And one critics need to address as well, as Rachel and Ivo and others are pushing us to. But two crucial questions to bear as the Bush administration likely invokes the moral responsibility argument:

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Bush said he'll announce his "new" Iraq policy next week, which likely will just be the old policy with a new fancy title and more troops in harm's way. But to make the case that he's really changing policy when he's not, Bush will replace all of the top military and civilian Americans in Iraq. “This helps the president to make the case that this is a fresh start,” one official tells the Times this morning.

So rather than keeping the people who actually know something about Iraq and have established relations with the Iraqis who will have to make any new policy work, we're sending in a whole bunch of new faces to try to convince the American people we're changing course. Don't think the public will buy it, do you?

There is a peaceful picket protest tomorrow -- Friday -- at 1150 17th Street NW, Washington DC that you should know about -- and perhaps make some time to visit at noon.

It has become a sad cliche that Americans deserve better from their leadership than they are getting.

The President and some Members of Congress are calling for an increase in troop levels in Iraq to attempt to keep implementing the same domestic security and training plan for Iraqi police and militia units that America has had in place all along.

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Todd and Josh have said it well--this war in Iraq is not simply about management. It's about a misbegotten war. This war was a mistake from the beginning. There was no way that there could be a good outcome, considering the forces that were on the ground just waiting to be released. As it happens, as this coffee house debate is happening, I'm reading a terrific, readable and insightful book by Brandeis University prof Yitzhak Nakash which I heartily recommend to tpmcafe readers: Reaching for Power: The Shi'a in the Modern Arab World, published recently by Princeton University Press.

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A repost from Progressive States that illustrates why I think progressives pay way too little attention to state policy. While there's been a lot of national attention on the whole "tort reform" debate, this week's cover story at Business Week, , How Business Trounced The Trial Lawyers, declares nearly complete victory for the business lobby in shutting the courtroom door to victims of corporate negligence. Big money was used to hijack state policy, making changes at the federal level nearly irrelevant.

What happened? Read beneath the fold:

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Thanks to two federal laws, the Fair Credit Reporting Act (FCRA) and the Fair and Accurate Credit Transactions (FACT) Act, consumers are entitled to receive a free copy of their credit report each year, from each of the three reporting agencies. There is even a handy website portal for all three: annualcreditreport.com.

Considering the power of the financial industry in Congress, this legislation counts as a pretty big win for consumers, since it allows them to confirm the accuracy of their own information. So what's missing? (Below the fold...)

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Lately, I have seen several solicitations from friendly mortgage lenders offering homeowners the chance to pay off their mortgages early. Note that these are not new lenders offering a refinance -- rather these are the homeowners' own lenders offering an accelerated repayment schedule, with the promise of saving you tens of thousands of dollars in interest over time.

Now, I’m always a little wary when a mortgage lender proposes to reduce the amount of interest I will pay them. Isn't that how they make their money?

Is this a smart deal for consumers? Probably not. ....

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As someone on the left, I think that preventing human suffering and augmenting human freedom should be the moral grounding of any left-of-center foreign policy.

Given that an India like partition-massacre is likely to occur when we leave, I am frustrated by how little conversation I hear on any side of the political spectrum about whether we have a responsibility to the citizens of Iraq. We may well be serving that responsibility (and the same responsibility to our own troops) by pulling out--but I want to hear us talking about it in a serious way.

One thought I have been having (and I speak only for myself, not for the Truman Project here, who might lynch me for it) is whether we should offer a surge in troops for a very short, set, sudden period specifically to allow Iraqi citizens who wish, to resettle in a safer, more defensible, more ethnically homogeneous area of the country. We would protect these refugee movements, and then undertake a major troop pull out.

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I wanted to second Todd's point about Iraq and liberal hawks who are still trying to wrestle through what went wrong and how it might not have. It's not about management or luck. The dudes who brought us this war are just nuts.

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"Our Iraqi Mistake. What Was It, Exactly?" asks Jacob Weisberg in Slate, rightly noting that the question has legs because it goes to the unresolved quandary of where American foreign policy goes from here. Weisberg concludes that "even in this mistakenly chosen war, our failure wasn't inevitable. It is the product of blunders made along the way by President Bush and his people—and the blunders they are making still."

It is a helluva puzzle for liberal hawks, whom or what to blame for the ongoing catastrophe, and it is not a question for them alone. But with the word "blunders" Weisberg tries to solve the puzzle without the keystone piece--the formative, fundamental nature of the Bush government and the movement conservatives who brought it to power.

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The 110th Congress will be sworn in today. We at Warren Reports - not to mention bloggers elsewhere, the mainstream press, and the American people at large - have high expectations of the new Democratic majority. Our political system (and the House in particular) is premised on change; when something isn't working, we can send in new people to try to do better. In November we did just that, and now we have a new set of elected leaders to hold accountable.

For what it's worth, the task at hand will not be easy. For more than a decade, Congress has neglected central needs of the American middle class. Iraq has not only created deep political rifts; it has left us in a fiscally precarious situation. American confidence in its political leaders is shaky at best.

Against that backdrop, I want to wish everyone on Capitol Hill the best of luck - the leaders, the members, the staffers, and everyone in between. We're counting on you.

Kurt Anderson's recent piece in New York magazine brings together some items we've discussed recently in this space: Lou Dobbs, Jacob Hacker and risk shifting, airline bankruptcy, etc. It's worth a read.

The money quote:

"We can afford to make life a little more fair and a lot less scary for most people."

Woodrow Wilson was born 150 years ago, on December 28, 1856. 88 years ago -- on January 8, 1918 -- Wilson gave his famous Fourteen Points address to Congress, using the occasion of the Great War to propose ideas to remake the world. Several historical eras later, we still are in the grip of Wilson’s ideas.

Indeed, most American presidents since Wilson have had to confront his vision – adapting his ideas, borrowing his rhetoric, learning from his mistakes, pushing off against his fanciful schemes, and tapping into the American idealism to which Wilson gave voice. George Bush is only the most recent president to simultaneously draw upon and push off against the Wilsonian vision. Depending on who you listen to, Bush is either a direct heir of Woodrow Wilson or the ultimate anti-Wilson. Bush’s neo-con advisors have been described as “Wilsonians in boots.” But the Bush administration has had no use for international law and collective security which is the heart of Wilsonianism.

In the quest to untangle Wilson’s legacy today, here are my Fourteen Points on Woodrow Wilson.

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In keeping with Reed’s topic, below, here’s a seven-item new year’s wish list for the new Congress. Remember, this is a truncated wish list, just for the next two years. If I thought there were an entrenched majority and a probable Democratic president, I’d be more ambitious. Some of these are underway, and I endorse them enthusiastically:

1. Restore habeas corpus, emphatically endorse the Geneva Conventions, ban secret detention and extraordinary rendition, and shut down Guantanamo and all secret torture sites.

2. Launch immediate hearings on every aspect of the Iraq war, and come up with an intelligent withdrawal plan.

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Former Senator John Edwards explained this week that, if elected President, he will prioritize investing in universal heatlh care and lifting people out of poverty over deficit reductions.  This sounds familiar:  as a 1992 presidential candidate, Bill Clinton promised to prioritize investing in infrastructure and middle class tax cuts over reducing the deficit. 

According to Bob Woodward in The Agenda, Clinton told a crowd at the Kennedy School of Government on May 13, 1991 that "America spent too much time and money in the 1980s on the present and the past, and too little attention and money on the future...  I define the future as investments in education, infrastructure, research and development, and the environment...  We have to break out of the old categories and think about whether we are going to invest in the future...  If you let 10 to 20 more years go on where the middle class keeps losing ground, this won't be the America any of us grew up in."  On November 20, 1991, Clinton promised at Georgetown that "In a Clinton Administration, we'll cut income taxes on the middle class: an average family's tax bill will go down 10 percent."

So what did Bill Clinton do as President?  Following the counsel of his economic advisors, Clinton focused on out-of-control deficits and prioritized deficit reductions in his 1993 economic plan.  That plan was later credited with the booming economy of the 1990's.  At some point, Senator Edwards might need to decide:  Should we read his lips?

Today at TPMCafe, Nathan Newman has "an honest bravo" for a newly green Wal-Mart, Ivo Daalder has thoughts on the ongoing Bush buck-passing, Reed Hundt offers Coach Gibbs as a political metaphor, Bruce Jentleson is unconvinced by the case for surge, M.J. Rosenberg is asking Why Not Gore?, and Greg Sargent has the latest on Edwards's anti-McCain rhetoric and Rudy's misplaced memo.

As always, let me know if I've missed anything good, stay caffeinated, and share some wisdom.

Seriously. This initiative by Wal-Mart to promote energy-saving light bulbs is a major environmental initiative.

"Compact fluorescent" bulbs fit in normal sockets but use 75% less electricity than regular bulbs, last ten times longer and produces 450 pounds fewer greenhouse gases over the course of their life than those regular bulbs. And consumers save $30 over the life of these bulbs- a big personal savings for consumers.

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First it was the Iraqis and Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki who the administration blamed for the chaos in Iraq. Now, the New York Times tells us in a long exposé, the administration is blaming General George W. Casey, the top U.S. commander on the ground in Baghdad. If only Casey hadn’t insisted that he could do the job with the troops at hand and instead had asked for more American soldiers and Marines earlier, things would be going swimmingly now in Iraq — or so Bush appears to believe. But the problem isn’t Maliki or Casey or even Rumsfeld — the problem is Bush’s failure understand what Iraq is all about.

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Football is the sport that lends its metaphors to politics. It's no accident that Nixon suggested plays to the Redskins coach of his era, and no surprise that they were bad ideas too. By contrast, golf (Updike) and baseball (Roth) -- as noted by my son Nathaniel in his excellent senior thesis -- inform literature, sociology and history. And so not surprisingly the travails of the failed Washington team, the Deadskins of a 5-11 season, are a lesson in a particularly Washingtonian form of failure: the inability of the public (or, in a big sense, political) leader to assess his own failings in an objective manner and take decisive action.

Coach Joe Gibbs is, in Washington at least, more than a person.

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The op-ed by retired General Jack Keane, a leading advocate of the Iraq surge strategy, and Frederick Kagan ostensibly making the case for the surge strategy is telling for what it says, what it doesn’t say, and its underlying logic.

We’re told what the problem is: insecurity, instability, terrible violence and the prospect of things getting worse. I agree with that. So does the Iraq Study Group. And almost everyone else. No dispute there.

But then we’re told that the reason we have this problem is “a history of half-measures”. The strategy is sound, we’ve just been doing it poorly. Do it right, and it’ll work. Doing it right means “maintain our presence long enough either to root out the hiding enemy or to defeat him when he becomes impatient. A surge that lasted at least 18 months would achieve that aim.”

Would it?

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I woke up New Years Day to this story front and center in my hometown newspaper.

And I almost immediately began thinking of Al Gore.

My immediate thought was, "this girl would not be spending her days in a cemetery if the votes had been fairly counted in 2000 or if Sandra O'Connor had done, what she had to know, was the right thing.

Of course, I am very prone to thinking of the 2000 might-have-beens.

For me, the 2000 election is right up there with Nov. 22, 1963 as a terrible watershed moment that changed everything -- although I think the 2000 election altered our futures more than JFK's death did (as earthshaking as the assassination was).

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Over on The Atlantic's website, Robert D. Kaplan commends Gerald Ford for what the exalted pundit class evidently considers the proper role for a former president, namely, keeping his mouth shut:

The fact that Ford embargoed, until after his death, an interview he gave Washington Post writer Bob Woodward in 2004 is further proof of his estimable reticence. While his displeasure at President George W. Bush's Iraqi policy was real, he seems to have had mixed feelings about publicly airing them. He had to have known that once deceased, he would not be able to go on television or issue statements, clarifying or embellishing, according to the news cycle, what he had told Woodward. He knew that he would be stuck with what he said. That's character.

It's getting the last word, all right, but why is it a sign of character to swallow your right to public judgment when you are one of the few standing Republicans who can lay claim to being a textbook conservative, and who therefore might get a hearing in the ruling party at a time when its titular leader has led it, not to mention two countries, over a cliff?

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Today is Kofi Annan’s last day on the job. The legacy stories about his ten years as UN Secretary General have focused on the parting shots he delivered to the Bush administration earlier this month. But a more accurate description is that Annan has consistently been a pro-American Secretary General. On issues ranging from promoting democracy to human rights, Annan has put himself at odds with the UN’s non-democracies, and in alignment with principles that this administration has propounded, if not practiced.

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