George Soros's words often kick up storms. And another storm has hit.

This time it's about comparing America today and Nazi Germany -- and how states deal with their not-so-pleasant pasts. Just for the record, Soros also included Turkey and Japan in his mix of history-denying countries that faced obstacles in approaching their futures in a healthy way.

Soros is sort of like a less careful Alan Greenspan whose wrinkled brow, or the length of pause before he spoke, or a small wink could generate political and economic tsunamis.

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At a conference on the shores of the Bay of Bengal I happened to have a long talk with a former general who while on active service ran an army engaged in conflict with a major Muslim nation. His comment about the "surge" was this: "You never reinforce a losing situation."

But reinforcing the American military commitment to the Middle East is the maxim of the Administration. It is the Vice President's essential thesis: the American military must be firmly installed in the Middle East until the end of oil, and until anti-American Islamic fervor fades away, no matter how long that may take. He sees American dependence on Middle Eastern oil lasting at least 60 to 80 years, notwithstanding the impact on the environment, not to mention the current account deficit. He sees armed opposition to Islamic fundamentalism as lasting at least as long as the Cold War, and of course he thinks of the conflict as the successor to the Soviet threat against capitalism and democracy. The Vice President has explained all this many times, in various ways, and in his heyday he persuaded virtually all of the mainstream media to agree with him.

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Ann E. Kornblut, just moved to the WP, in this morning's paper, describing Hillary Clinton: "In perhaps her most aggressive speech since announcing she is running for president...."

Number of times the word "aggressive" has been applied to a speech by George W. Bush in the WP over the past year: 0.

Number of times the word "aggressive" has been applied to a speech by Dick Cheney in the WP over the past year: 1. (By Michael Powell, Josh White and Theresa Vargas)

Number of times the word "aggressive" has been applied to a speech by John McCain in the WP over the past year: 0.

Number of times the questioning of Bush administration officials by reporters has been called aggressive in the WP over the past year: 3. (All by Howard Kurtz.)

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If the current lineup holds, the Democrats will be represented by a communitarian if Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama becomes the presidential candidate. Hillary’s communitarian leanings have been long known. They are especially well spelled out in her book It Takes A Village. She also delivered the keynote address at the 1996 meeting of the Communitarian Network, and met frequently with communitarian thinkers, especially William Galston.

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Despite concerted pressure on the Intelligence Community to adopt the sunny optimism about Iraq's future touted by that visionary, Dick Cheney, the analysts held their ground and provided the nation this grim assessment in the latest National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq:

. . . even if violence is diminished, given the current winner-take-all attitude and sectarian animosities infecting the political scene, Iraqi leaders will be hard pressed to achieve sustained political reconciliation in the time frame of this Estimate.

Folks, that is the center of the earth, bottomline. Iraq is toxic or radioactive--pick your metaphor--and is not likely to improve, with or without a troop surge.

Why?

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You know you are in trouble when it takes former Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu to dispel some of the gloom about the Iranian nuclear threat to Israel. But that is what happened at last month's Herzliya Conference on National Security. The annual conference has become the most prestigious venue in Israel for discussions of Israeli and global security by high-ranking political leaders, military figures and academics.

Netanyahu said: "I am optimistic, and my optimism is not baseless, because I understand our capabilities….”

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The Ways and Means Committee just completed the fourth hearing by Chairman Charlie Rangel dealing with income insecurity in America. It started with the problems of 37 million poor Americans, and expanded to deal with issues of healthcare and middle-class stress. For perhaps the first time in history we have the appropriate person at the appropriate time and place to deal with this economic phenomenon that is an intersection of tough demographics, economics, and unfortunate politics. Since Lyndon Johnson's Great Society, the political equation for poverty and income inequality in America has been dominated by a tendency to “round down” to the detriment of lower income and politically disadvantaged Americans. They've lost, both politically and economically. Now there is a moment in history for that to change: enter Charlie Rangel.

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Secretary Rice will host the principals of the Quartet tomorrow in Washington. It will be the first Quartet meeting during the German presidency of the EU and with the new UN Secretary General Ban-Ki Moon (the Russians make up the foursome). Question is, almost four years after launching a Road Map that has gone nowhere and six years since the last Israeli-Palestinian official political negotiations at Taba, whether anything will actually move this time or will it be more declarations and platitudes? Somewhat surprisingly the prospects are not all bleak.

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My thanks to the correspondents of the TPM Cafe for their reactions to and comments on my short essay. First things first. My given name is 'Chalmers,' my family name 'Johnson.' Chalmers is unquestionably a Scottish name, but I am not a Scot. My father was named Frederick Johnson, Jr. My mother declared that the world did not need another Fred Johnson, least of all a Fred Johnson III. I was therefore named after a mutual friend of theirs, Chalmers Wood of Tennessee. I am grateful for her decision.

Tom Wright raises the question of whether the political system can save us and seems to answer in the affirmative. I disagree. The problems I am addressing in my book Nemesis both precede and transcend the current Bush administration, as is obvious when one reflects that the great warning about vested interests in the munitions industry came in Eisenhower's farewell address in 1961 and that the roots of "military Keynesianism" were planted during World War II.

Dan K raises an important distinction with which I agree: At the end of World War II, Britain did not so much give up its empire as transfer its imperial pretensions to the United States and segue into the role of camp-follower.

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The modern American welfare state is premised on a number of economic assumptions, among them that Americans would build personal savings over the course of their careers. In the Forties and Fifties, in the wake of the Great Depression, reality accorded with that assumption. Pensions were widely available and American families saved for higher education and for retirement. In 2007, the reality is starkly different.

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Can you think of anyone who deserves the Nobel Peace Prize more than Al Gore? He's certainly someone who didn't ask what the country could do for him, but rather what he could do for his country, and the world. His personal courage, in the face of not only defeat but mindless negative commentary from the mainstream media, has enabled him to wake up the sleeping world on climate change and sound the clarion call of honesty about Iraq, civil liberties, and the real risks to the American Dream.

Chalmers Johnson's warning about the choice between democracy and empire is compelling. But so powerful is his message that it washes away any sense of resistance. Where is progressive politics? And where is the press?

Prof. Johnson does a superb job identifying the conditions and consequences of imperial overreach, but he pays little attention here to Americans who oppose overreach. Maybe it’s in the book, which I will dash out and buy this weekend. (Full disclosure – I took Professor Johnson’s seminar on ‘Revolution’ back in grad school at Berkeley. No surprise to his readers, it was a great course).

But there are domestic forces of resistance trying to keep America democratic.

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After being prominently mentioned in the Democratic State of the Union response - President Bush seems to have started to adopt at least some of the rhetoric of those who want to reduce lavish executive pay.

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Just when we most needed her ferocious research, sharp moral sense, ruthless wit, and fabulous sense of humor about politicians, Molly Ivins has exited the planet, taken away by breast cancer at 62. The obit I've tucked below the fold is circulating on a journalists' listserv, and is probably posted publicly by now.

What a time to lose the author who first warned us about Shrub. Let me propose that we all raise our voices, in her honor, in dissent--wherever needed.

NOTE, added 2/1: Here's John Nichols' wonderful piece in memoriam, over at The Nation.

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The brilliant libertarian economist William Niskanen once described the U.S. Department of Defense as the second largest planned economy in the world. He had reason to know, since he used to work there. In Chalmers Johnson's analysis, the DoD is not merely an economy all its own, it is an imperialist power that covers the world, wreaking havoc abroad and defying democratic mores at home.

I can't disagree.

I'm a fan. I have Johnson's three most recent books. I've even read one of them. The latest one does not disappoint, if you want more industrial-strength criticism of the U.S. national security state. Even for a 60s retread, I was knocked back on my heels more than once. ("We did THAT?")

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Chalmers Johnson’s book Blowback, published in 2000, captured in the title’s single word a great deal about why the 9/11 attacks would occur and, even more importantly, why U.S. policies since then have been mostly counterproductive in preventing future terrorism. So when Johnson issues another warning, as he does in his latest book, Nemesis, we damn well better listen closely.

The argument that Johnson is making now is similar to the one that Yale historian Paul Kennedy made in 1987, when he published a best seller called The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers. Kennedy, writing before the Soviet Union’s collapse and when Japan’s economy was booming, warned that the United States was on a path to fall victim to the same “military overstretch” that induced the decline of previous imperialist powers. Bogged down with too many military commitments and conflicts, Kennedy showed, the earlier hegemons’ economies became drained of the resources and investments needed to sustain growth. Eventually other countries snuck up and surpassed their economic and technological leadership. Kennedy said the U.S. was well on its way to the same fate, though he was kind of coy about how deterministic his historical analysis was supposed to be.

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Chalmers Johnson is joining the Coffee House for the next few days to discuss his new book, Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic.

History tells us that one of the most unstable political combinations is a country -- like the United States today -- that tries to be a domestic democracy and a foreign imperialist. Why this is so can be a very abstract subject. Perhaps the best way to offer my thoughts on this is to say a few words about my new book, Nemesis, and explain why I gave it the subtitle, "The Last Days of the American Republic." Nemesis is the third book to have grown out of my research over the past eight years. I never set out to write a trilogy on our increasingly endangered democracy, but as I kept stumbling on ever more evidence of the legacy of the imperialist pressures we put on many other countries as well as the nature and size of our military empire, one book led to another.

Professionally, I am a specialist in the history and politics of East Asia. In 2000, I published Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire, because my research on China, Japan, and the two Koreas persuaded me that our policies there would have serious future consequences. The book was noticed at the time, but only after 9/11 did the CIA term I adapted for the title -- "blowback" -- become a household word.

I had set out to explain how exactly our government came to be so hated around the world.

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This week, the AP reports on efforts by eight state legislatures to stop a new wave of fraudsters who are targeting desperate homeowners facing foreclosure. These scam artists knock on doors, cold-call and post flyers in the neighborhood offering to "rescue" the homeowner from their lenders.

In reality, their "solutions" are worse than the homeowner’s problems. In the worst cases, the homeowner ends up not only losing their house but still owing their entire mortgage to the bank. In the best case, they give the "rescuer" a few hundred dollars, and then never hear from him again. Of course, these aren't petty theives stealing in the dark of night. These fraudsters work in plain sight and the courts even assist them by enforcing arcane contracts that the homeowners did not understand.

The opportunity for foreclosure fraudsters is now huge, given that the number of foreclosures nationwide has jumped 46% this year. (I, along with two co-authors, are now investigating the causes of this spike, using a survey of 2000 homeowners in four states.)

Our friends at the National Consumer Law Center have been leading on this foreclosure fraud issue for several years (see their report (pdf)). We at the Harvard Legal Services office have also developed a concise single-sheet guide for the homeowner facing foreclosure. I'd be happy to provide a copy upon request.

Below the fold: legislative solutions to the scammer problem.

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Today's New York Times carries a news item about a report issued by the American Jewish Committee which attacks progressive Jewish critics of Israeli policies as anti-semitic.

"The American Jewish Committee, an ardent defender of Israel, is known for speaking out against anti-Semitism, but this conservative advocacy group has recently stirred up a bitter and emotional debate with a new target: liberal Jews....

"An essay the committee features on its Web site, ajc.org, titled “ ‘Progressive’ Jewish Thought and the New Anti-Semitism,” says a number of Jews, through their speaking and writing, are feeding a rise in virulent anti-Semitism by questioning whether Israel should even exist.

"In an introduction to the essay, David A. Harris, the executive director of the committee, writes, “Perhaps the most surprising — and distressing — feature of this new trend is the very public participation of some Jews in the verbal onslaught against Zionism and the Jewish State.” Those who oppose Israel’s basic right to exist, he continues, “whether Jew or gentile, must be confronted.”

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Below is the text of a live discussion that went from 3:20 to 4:00 pm with Senator Chuck Schumer.

Before we get started I just wanted to take a minute and say thanks to the TPM Café for hosting this discussion and thanks to all of you for the thoughts, comments, and questions that have been submitted. The passion of the netroots community helped propel Democrats to victory in 2006 and I hope that through discussions like this one we can continue to build on that success.

I thought I would start by talking about Neroden’s comment that the 50% Solution is made up of small ideas, not big ones.

First off, 50% represents a real benchmark against which the “Baileys” can measure our progress towards our goals, it does not represent compromise. In fact, once we get to 50%, we should do it again. And again.

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Commenting on Senator Schumer's proposals here is as difficult as, let's say, writing an honest review of a terrible novel by a writer whose work you like. What is that saying: “Homer also nods”? That is, even the best have their lapses.

And this is quite a lapse, almost a parody of the Democratic Party's fetish for list-making. One of the low points in the recent history of the Democratic Party was the House Democrats' agenda for the 2004 election, which purported to be a simple message but had no coherent statement of principles behind it and sixty-three individual policy proposals. When the Democrats came out with the “Six for '06” plan last year – nuanced, but at least six clear points of principle -- I thought they had finally learned some discipline. But apparently not everyone got the memo.

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As I noted yesterday, Senator Schumer will be joining us for a live chat this afternoon. At 3 (note your calendars, it was originally scheduled for 2:30), the Senator will jump into the fray and answer your questions for an hour.

We've got a good list of 26 questions to choose from already, but the more the merrier. What are you going to ask?

Do you have thoughts on his book?

update (3:10 pm): The Senator is running a little bit behind but the thread will be up soon.

Give Scooter Libby credit for something, the man is at heart an artist with a firm grip on irony and probably has inked a deal with Danny DeVito to play him when this tawdry event becomes a movie. How else to account for his July 7, 2003 chat with White House spokesman Ari Fleischer. Fleischer testified in court today that during a lunch with Libby, Scooter told Ari that Valerie Plame worked at the CIA in CPD (a division in the Directorate of Operations) and that this info was, "hush, hush and on the QT".

Paging Danny DeVito. Mr. DeVito please. Yep cineophiles, Scooter was quoting Danny Devito from L.A. Confidential. As described by Clark Kimball of the St. Louis Post Dispatch, Danny DeVito:

was the slimeball publisher of a tabloid tattler that outed celebs and civic insiders, helped in no small part by "moles" inside the Police Department, in particular Kevin Spacey as the "technical adviser", a detective who found a synergistic partner in DeVito. Their careers were mutually boosted by high-profile arrests and tawdry exposes. Of course, both characters paid a huge price for their methods.

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Legal Adviser John Bellinger is taking on his critics over at Opinio Juris, in a very interesting discussion about interrogation standards and detainee policy. Check it out.

My new book Positively American: Winning Back the Middle Class Majority One Family at a Time is meant to help answer the question that Democrats are always asked: What do Democrats stand for?

The first part of the book includes war stories and colorful anecdotes – from my Senate election in 1998 to the take-over of the Senate this past fall – and describes the eight words that carried Bush to reelection in 2004: war in Iraq, cut taxes, no gay marriage. In the book I ask, what are our eight words?

In the second part of Positively American - "The 50% Solution" - I present eleven ambitious but concrete goals, to be achieved within ten years, and delineate specific policies to achieve them. Each chapter offers context and anecdotes to explain why I believe the middle class will respond to the goals described and why the goals are so important to our country’s future.

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New York Senator Charles Schumer will be joining us this week at TPMCafe to discuss his new book and the future of the Democratic Party. He'll be posting on his book today, and then joining us tomorrow from 2:30 to 3:30 pm for a live discussion.

He's the Senior Senator from New York, the Chairman of the DSCC, and the Vice-Chairman of the Senate Democratic Caucus. And, for an hour tomorrow he's all yours.

What would you like to ask him?

Allison Stevens, a contributor to Women’s enews, a news service which too few good men bother to read, has just reported that the hugely expanded bipartisan Congressional Caucus for Women's Issues now has the power to put women’s issues on the national agenda. The caucus, which Stevens says may end up outnumbering the so-called “Blue Dog Coalition, a caucus of 44 fiscally conservative Democrats, and the New Democrat Coalition, a group of 63 pro-business Democrats,” also has the support of Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who was a member of the caucus, which was founded in 1977.

Among the issues on their “wish list” according to Women’s Enews, are women’s health, educational equity and sex trafficking, women in prison, and international domestic violence.

All are important but will go nowhere if they don’t challenge Market Fundamentalism, the exaggerated belief and faith in the ability of markets to solve problems that have dominated our national political debate for a generation. Without directly challenging Market Fundamentalism, they will ultimately fail to improve the lives of ordinary American women and their families.

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"There is no debate among Israelis, however, about the wisdom of negotiations between the West and Iran. That, defense officials agree, would be the worst of all options. Negotiations that took place now would be happening at a time when Iran feels ascendant: The time to have negotiated with Iran, some say, was immediately after the initial U.S. triumph in Iraq, not now, when the United States is losing the war. Under these circumstances, negotiations would only buy the regime time to continue its nuclear program. Talks would create baseless hope, undermining the urgency of sanctions. And resuming negotiations with the Iranian regime--despite its repeated bad faith in previous talks over its nuclear program--would send the wrong message to the Iranian people: that the regime has international legitimacy and that resisting it is futile."

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Reader mrs panstreppon found it! According to the New York Times on September 12, 1972, a Harris poll found that 74% of Americans supported President Nixon's contention that "it is important the South Vietnam not fall into the control of the Communists." 11% opposed it.

"Important." OK. This is the sort of thing that gives polling a bad name. I might well declare it important that the Vietnamese be permitted to vote for their leaders without implying that the U. S. Army, in pursuit of that goal, fight a war that kills two to three million of them and 58,000 Americans besides.

In the meantime, cherry-picking polls is a bad idea, no better than cherry-picking anything else besides cherries.

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I admire James Webb (D, VA), and thought he did marvelously, in plain English, responding to Bush's bland, ignorant blather the other night.

After hearing him on "Face the Nation" this morning, I went looking online for a 1972 poll that he claimed showed a huge majority of Americans who still thought it right to prevent Vietnam from going Communist. I couldn't find this poll. (Anyone recognize it?) But Google did direct me to a 2003 article Webb published in American Legion containing the following:

Vietnam became an undeclared war fought against the background of a highly organized dissent movement at home. Few Americans who grew up after the war know that a large part of this dissent movement was already in place before the Vietnam War began. Many who wished for revolutionary changes in America had pushed for them through the vehicles of groups such as the ban-the-bomb movement in the 1950s and the civil-rights movement of the early and mid-1960s. In this regard, it is interesting to note that the infamous antiwar group Students for a Democratic Society was created at the University of Michigan through the Port Huron Statement in 1962 – three full years before American ground troops landed at Da Nang. The SDS hoped to bring revolution to America through the issue of race. They and other extremist groups soon found more fertile soil on the issue of the war.

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David Broder in this morning's WP ("Clinton's Presidential Posturing") refers to Hillary Clinton's "partisan" talk at a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing.

Number of times in the past two years Broder has spoken of "partisanship" in connection with Republican candidates for president in 2008: 0.