In the new economy of the 21st century, it’s become commonplace to note that workers will switch jobs multiple times in their careers and that globalization is changing the nature of work. The most extreme example might be freelancers -- skilled workers who are unattached to any particular company and work on projects as they come. They're as mobile as a mobile workforce gets. But today's social contract can't meet their needs. Our system of "benefits for workers, provided by business" was a bargain struck in Franklin Roosevelt’s time. It makes no sense in a dynamic world of globalization, as any freelancer will tell you. So what can a freelancer do? Enter Sara Horowitz, the founder of the Freelancers Union.

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1. Castro's death will lead to a grassroots movement that opens the door to a new form of governance in Cuba.
2. The White House's purposeful provocation of Iran triggers a military engagement between American and Iranian ground forces.
3. Maliki's government falls, and the Administration tries to put Chalabi in his place.
4. The dollar drops steeply, causing the Fed to raise interest rates, which in turn kicks off a recessionary economy. Congress proposes a stimulus package that the President vetoes. Legislative gridlock ensues.

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I haven't posted a follow up piece on the broader parts of the President's State of the Union Address -- beyond this foreign policy essay -- and I haven't posted on Senator Chuck Hagel's impressive and courageous leadership on the Iraq War Resolution this week, as well as Senator Biden's leadership -- because I have just been seriously depressed and distracted by an encounter I had the night of the State of the Union speech.

We all have personal stories. We know people who are sick, who die, who need a helping hand. But in Washington, we deal with the macro-dimensions of policy and we rarely think about the individuals involved. That's why I don't think Barbara Boxer was out of line in any way at all by admitting that both she and Condi Rice were a step removed from the real costs and consequences of our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

But the President does get to "point up at the gallery" in the Chamber of the House of Representatives on the night of the State of the Union address and point to heroes who did something significant and who can possibly inspire others. Hillary Clinton can pick names and questions from tens of thousands she received in her "Conversations with Americans" and "humanize" an interaction that is nonetheless symbolic and can't really be more than a macro-level encounter with the millions of people who have to consider voting for her or someone else.

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Today brought sad news that someone with the U.S. military Multi National Force--Iraq (MNF-I) lied about an attack on U.S. soldiers in the Shia-controlled city of Karabala on Saturday, 20 January 2007. The initial story released to the press stated:

KARBALA, Iraq (CNN) -- Attackers who killed five U.S. troops at a government building in Karbala posed as U.S. military officials to get past Iraqi guards, a Karbala police spokesman said.

The attack happened Saturday as the U.S. military convened a meeting to discuss security for Ashura, the upcoming Shiite pilgrimage to Karbala.

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2008’s first presidential primary is over, and the initial results are in.

No, not Iowa, New Hampshire, or Nevada, or even the so-called “money primary”. I’m referring to a new rite of presidential initiation:

The Web video Primary.

Candidates (or candidates-to-be) Clinton, Brownback, Obama, McCain, Edwards, Richardson, Romney, Vilsack and others all either announced their candidacies via Web video, or have already made extensive use of the medium. While not the first Web video breakout moments – the 2004 innovations by Bush-Cheney, MoveOn.org, and DNC and the “Macaca” video in 2006 were the true breakthroughs – they nevertheless signal that Web video has gone mainstream. They also offer an interesting insight on the candidates’ Internet strategies, and campaign strategies in general, as an analysis shows:

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Will former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee announce that he's running for President when he appears on Meet the Press this Sunday? According to the Arkansas Times, three sources confirm that he will do just that. The paper adds that Huckabee has appearances scheduled in Iowa next week. Though the Huckabee camp has yet to confirm the paper's report, it did send out a release today saying that Huckabee would be on Tim Russert's show on Sunday morning, where he would be discussing "his future plans."

Getting together with friends who travel in different circles is a good way to get beyond the usual bubble in which most of us live and hear views different from those of our regular crowd.

A few weeks ago about a dozen of us got together to discuss our kids, politics and anything else that came to mind. The people in the room were mostly non-Jews. They are well-educated, upper ncome and split along political lines.

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Mickey Kaus writes: “…the invasion of Iraq and ‘comprehensive immigration reform’ actually have more in common than you might think. Far from being a sensible centrist departure from the sort of grandiose, wishful thinking that led Bush into Iraq, ‘comprehensive immigration reform’ is of a piece with that thinking.” Kaus goes on to list what he considers to be 10 similarities between the Iraq invasion and immigration reform. His list is useful in pointing the way to 10 differences that actually demonstrate why the two subjects have no business being lumped together:

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The phrase of the day at today's Senate Banking Committee hearing was "tricks and traps." In one form or another, that's what every prepared statement and every question centered on: the tricks and traps used by the credit card companies. The senators--Republican and Democrat--used the term. The consumer representatives used the term. Even the industry people used it as they tried to make clear that their companies weren't different from others in the industry.

The hearing had a nicely bipartisan mad-as-hell quality.

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I had the lucky chance to attend the Senate hearing on credit cards this morning, and to hear Professor Warren take on the credit card giants, just a few seats over. As the first witness, she detailed the tricks and traps of credit cards, a theme that I was excited to see picked up by a number of Senators in the question/answer period. Said Professor Warren, “No one needs to be an engineer to buy a toaster. No one needs to be a crash test scientist to buy a car. And no one should need to be a lawyer to take on a credit card.”

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After loosening their standards for loans over the last several years, banks are seeing deliquency rates rise as adjustable rate mortgages (ARMs) snap like bear traps on unwary borrowers. Today, the Wall Street Journal reports (subscription required) on the response of mortgage lenders to the 5-year high in late mortgage payments. The merits of these responses differ greatly.

A Good Response:

* Allowing borrowers with ARMs to refinance into different loans at no charge

A Problematic Response:

*Short sales, which occur when a borrower owes more on the home than it is worth. The house is sold, the bank gets the proceeds and discharges the remainder of the debt. While this can be a better alternative for borrowers than a foreclosure, it can create a potential tax nightmare. The portion of the loan that is forgiven may be treated by the IRS as income to the borrower, creating a potentially huge tax liability for an already cash-strapped individual.

Short sales help banks by allowing them to avoid the time and expense of foreclosure. Let's hope the banks are making borrowers aware of the tax implications of these transaction.

I'm sorry, I'm just tired of the older boomers' nostalgia for 1960s-style street protests. They certainly aren't the best or only way to make social change. I don't think they're called for just now, for a variety of reasons.

But if you want some street protests, here's a suggestion: institute a draft.

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The words and images coming out of the entertainment industry the past couple of weeks seem on the surface encouraging to everyone who listens or buys digital music and who wants more freedom to play to watch TV or post video content online. They promise more freedom and more flexibility.

If you believe it, I’ve got some trombones, 76 to be exact, I’d like to sell you.

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At 9:30 this morning, Senator (and Presidential Candidate) Chris Dodd will open his first hearing for the Banking Committee, and I will be his first witness.

There will be a webcast, so you might get to see the human representative of your own card company. There will be representatives from CapitalOne, Barclaycard, and JP Morgan Chase. The list of players also includes Professor Robert Manning, author of Credit Card Nation; Travis Plunkett of Consumer Federation of America, Tamera Draut of Demos; and consumer lawyer Michael Donovan.

I promise to report more today--including the webcast link if I can find it. But the fact of this hearing, just days into the new Congress, says something about changing priorities in Washington. It's only a hearing, but change in DC often starts with hearings. It gives me hope that the winds in Washington may be shifting ever so slightly.

I'm going to side with Andrew (and even go beyond his point) and challenge Josh's simple assertion that "anti-war sentiment has been pretty effectively expressed through the conventional political process" presumably compared to the 60s when it wasn't effectively so channelled.

Except on one hand politics in the 60s and early 70s era reflected rising anti-Vietnam sentiment, while for all the supposed "effective" politics of today, the troops are still in Iraq with NO legislation even seriously proposed by the Congressional leadership yet to pull them all out.

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My student reporter at Brandeis yesterday tells me that President Carter got a good reception at Brandeis. Despite attempts by rightwingers (including the university President's wife) to label Carter a Jew-hater, some 1700 students showed up to hear the former President and gave him a positive and friendly (even enthusiastic at times) reception. When confronted by a student with a complaint about a particularly ugly passage in the book that seems to endorse terrorism under certain conditions, Carter apologized and said that passage will not appear in future editions.

Despite all the predictions of mass student protests against Carter, virtually no demonstrators showed up. And, best of all, most of the audience left the auditorium before Dershowitz showed up.

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From Jim Webb's response to the State of the Union:

In short, the middle class of this country, our historic backbone and our best hope for a strong society in the future, is losing its place at the table.

George W. Bush still does not get it. He insists that the terrorists hate us because of our freedom. NO THEY DON'T!!!!!! What sheer, utter nonsense. If you don't understand the task or problem at hand how can you come up with an appropriate fix? This is part of the reason that the Bush Presidency is in shambles. Call it the hubris of stupidity.

Let's start with the basics. There is no such thing as a terrorist. There are individuals who engage in terrorist acts and many of those persons are affiliated in one fashion or another with a group of some sort. But "terrorist"? Doesn't exist as an entity in and of itself.

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The State of the Union address promises a new George W. Bush -- talking about health care, energy independence, and other topics that his administration has ignored for too long.

But already, we know that the new Bush is the same as the old Bush. Sitting in the First Lady's box will be Julie Aigner-Clark, the founder of the Baby Einstein juggernaut. Aigner-Clark's great innovation was to take random "baby-friendly" images pair them with classical music and convince a generation of parents that this was good for your child.

Oh, if it were only so!

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I'm not going make a habit of jumping into Cafe debate very often-- my primary role here is that of facilitator, not contributer-- but Josh called me out so I'm obligated by the Code of Blogging to defend my good name.

His basic point is well-taken: anti-war sentiment has largely been successfully channeled into mainstream electoral politics in a way it simply wasn't in the late 60s and early 70s. Because of that, it hasn't been necessary to try to levitate the pentagon or confront the Democratic Party simply to be heard (and thank God for both). But, while every young lefty probably has pangs of "I was born a generation too late" once in a while, I think Josh's accusation of protest-fetishism misses the basis of my complaint. It's not about the protests, it's about the movement.

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Let me describe for you Hillary Clinton’s foreign policy. And Barack’s, and Richardson’s and Edwards’. Let me tell you their views on national security and diplomacy, the foreign policy priorities they would aggressively pursue, and the sort of foreign policy president each would become,if elected.

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Andrew Golis is our newest staff member at TPM. And his primary responsibility is running TPMCafe. Over the weekend we were discussing the recent ‘netroots’ debate at TPMCafe and Todd Gitlin’s post about the new movie Chicago 10. And the discussion turned to why there’s no anti-war movement today with all that’s going on in Iraq. Either why there isn’t one or why it’s so anemic. I’ve heard this point made many times. But I think the premise is entirely wrong.

Let me throw out some basic points to illustrate where I’m coming from.

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Documentary Feature: "Deliver Us From Evil," "An Inconvenient Truth," "Iraq in Fragments," "Jesus Camp," "My Country, My Country."

Yes it would be better to be President but winning the Oscar would be kinda cool. What do you think of Al's chances?

The State of the Union is actually better than in six years: the country is united, focussed, interested, and informed. That's all bad news for the White House.

The President has lost the "ear" of the American people, according to the polls. That's because he has lost their trust. Mendacity did the deed; it's poetic coincidence that the Libby trial commences today, although as an aside one wonders if a juror who worked for Bob Woodward can be counted on to punish a lie even if proved.

Iraq -- mayhem, horror, venality, despair, waste and ignorance -- opened the doors of perception, and now everything the White House says is no longer taken at face value. What then follows?

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As we leap off the cliff into the yawning maw of violence that awaits us in Iraq we might want to figure out which side we are on. At least Congress appears to be thinking about it. Until now, US forces have spent most of their time targeting and killing Sunni insurgents with two major exceptions--April 2004 and November 2004. On those occasions we fought Moqtada al-Sadr's forces and those two months marked some of the highest U.S. casualties since the war started in 2003. December 2006 was another highwater mark for U.S. fatalities in Iraq only this one at the hand of the Sunnis. At the dawn of 2007 we are going to fight the Shia again.

We have four basic choices confronting us in Iraq:

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Jim Hoagland's piece on Iran this weekend made the excellent point that we don't need to follow Bush's "hurry" to make his mark on that volatile piece of real estate.

But it failed to suggest a way to curb Iran's nuclear ambitions--which really should worry Democrats as much as Republicans if not more--since we actually CARE about the women, homosexuals, and minorities whose repression will continue under a strengthened Iranian religious dictatorship. (Not to mention the end of the nonproliferation regime we fought so hard to create).

America and Ahmadinajad have already become great pen-pals... what if the liberals of America sent Europe a letter on Iran that went something like this:

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Amitai asks whether it’s a good idea to restore pay-as-you-go rules to Congressional appropriations: “Does it make sense for the Democrats to ‘act responsibly’ only to provide funds to be expended by the next Republican administrations on its constituencies?” My answer is absolutely, yes, because bringing back paygo is one of the best ways to reinforce the narrative that we can be trusted to govern effectively and they can’t – thereby helping to put off into the distant future when Republicans will regain the White House and Congressional majorities.

The blindness of movement conservativism to historical experience and its indifference to the real-world consequences of its ideologically driven policies is one of the main messages to carry forward not just in the coming campaign but from here on out. And the decision of the Republican Congress early on to grease the skids for tax cuts by dropping paygo, which had demonstrably proven to be critical in transforming big deficits into surpluses in the 1990s, is one of the many examples of the right’s premeditated acts of destruction – in this case to the budget.

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Once upon a time the adage that they "never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity" seemed to apply to only one side of the Arab-Israeli divide: the Arab side.

After all, Israeli officials – at least in the first 20 years of Israel's existence – were emphatic that Israeli representatives would go anywhere in the world, at a moment's notice, to negotiate without preconditions with any Arab government willing to talk with Israel.

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Chalmers Johnson, the acclaimed author of Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire, will be joining us next week to discuss his new book. In Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic, he argues that "America is saddled with an empire that is fatally undermining its republican government." We're excited to have him to joining us and hope you'll do the same.

His visit to the Coffee House is especially interesting in light of where last week's conversation ended about the New Left and the Netroots.

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The Democrats announced that they are committing themselves to work to balance the budget. They will re introduce PAGO (Pay As You Go) which entails cutting expenditures some other place before spending more on an old or introducing a new program. They did this twice before. In each case it enabled to GOP to spend the funds saved—by recreating a deficit. There follows a personal observation on the subject, from the period that followed my service in the White House as a senior advisor.

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Annals of White House Journalism:

USA Today's White House reporter David Jackson interviews George W. Bush and asks this nondescript, imprecise question: "Have you read about Lyndon Johnson in Vietnam?" (Have you read news clips? Comic books? David Horowitz? What?) "Yes," says the Reader-in-Chief.

When Jackson then asks, "Do you draw any lessons from that?" Bush replies: "Yes, win. Win, when you're in a battle for the security … if it has to do with the security of your country, you win."

First question unasked: What did Vietnam have to do with the security of the United States? Second: If Iraq endangers the security of the United States, just how, Mr. Mission Accomplished, did that happen? Third, what does "win" mean?

Over the years I've met most of the currently announced Democratic candidates, and I just pinch myself when I see the line-up. Senators Clinton, Edwards, Obama, and Dodd, Governors Richardson and Vilsack are just terrific people. They are each bright and capable. Person by person, they are committed to bringing out the best in America. In ethnic and gender terms, they represent a marvelous picture of the real America, and not a one of them appeals to hate or divisiveness.

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This is worth noting.

From Ha'aretz tonight.

"President George Bush will order an attack on Iran if it becomes clear to him that Iran is set to acquire nuclear weapons capabilities while he is still in office, Richard Perle told the Herzliya Conference on Sunday. Perle is close to the Bush administration, particularly to Vice President Richard Cheney.

The leading neoconservative and fellow at the American Enterprise Institute addressed the session on Iran's nuclear program. He said that the present policy of attempting to impose sanctions on Iran will not cause it to abandon its nuclear aspirations, and unless stopped the country will become a nuclear power."

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Nicholas Kristof of the New York Times asked a question last week worthy of further consideration: “Why are we so lousy at foreign policy?” He points to two basic reasons – one is America’s failure to understand nationalism abroad.

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