I predicted the Redskins would draft into a position they already had covered, and what do you know but they did. This team will be truly mediocre this fall.

Then I went to the Wizards game tonight. Phew. Haywood has to go; so does Etan. And Hayes. Stevenson wouldn't be missed. This is a terrible bench. Plus, I was told that Gil Arenas isn't enough of a leader to save the team next year.

Oddly, I bet the Nationals shape up fairly quickly.

The Republicans, meanwhile, have a dreadful roster compared to the D's at their debate. With one or maybe two exceptions, the D's presented a flock of people who could be great presidents. The R's need to draft one or two new candidates: I bet they do.

This is the news from the D.C. sports scene. We know nothing about money, by the way, in this town.

The following was sent to George Tenet today in care of his publisher. The letter, written by a group of former intelligence officers, reflects disgust with George Tenet's effort to burnish his image with his new "tell" all book.

28 April 2007
Mr. George Tenet
c/o Harper Collins Publishers
10 East 53rd Street
8^th Floor
New York City, New York 10022
ATTN: Ms. Tina Andredis

Dear Mr. Tenet:

We write to you on the occasion of the release of your book, At the Center of the Storm. You are on the record complaining about the “damage to your reputation”. In our view the damage to your reputation is inconsequential compared to the harm your actions have caused for the U.S. soldiers engaged in combat in Iraq and the national security of the United States. We believe you have a moral obligation to return the Medal of Freedom you received from President George Bush. We also call for you to dedicate a significant percentage of the royalties from your book to the U.S. soldiers and their families who have been killed and wounded in Iraq.

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Conventional wisdom is gearing up to tut-tut again (and again) that the Democrats’ Congressional Iraq resolutions put the party in danger of crossing a “fine line” and hence banishing the party to its post-Vietnam wilderness. Once again, Washington journalism projects its own servility and timidity onto the public. Toward that end, and not for the first time, it misunderstands public opinion on the Vietnam war, and rewrites history. David Broder has been beating this drum since 1969. The Broderbund is protecting its own flanks.

It’s an often-quacking canard that after 1972, the country punished the Democrats for having fought to bring the Vietnam war to an end. When, during the 1980 campaign, Ronald Reagan declared that the Vietnam war had been “a noble cause,” an L. A. Times poll found Americans disagreeing by three-and-a-half to one. (Data courtesy of the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research at the University of Connecticut.) In truth, the country elected Reagan over Carter not because of Reagan’s sentimental tribute to the Vietnam war, but despite it.

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Visiting Israel is always a good antidote to some of the hysterics that surround debate about the country and its future here in the United States. I just returned from Israel and there was not much of the end-of-the-world rhetoric one hears so often at pro-Israel conclaves here.

Contrary to some of the rhetoric emanating from Jewish organizations here, no one I spoke to in Israel likened Israel's situation today to that of European Jews in the 1930's, with Ahmadinejad playing the role of Hitler. Israelis find that kind of rhetoric both laughable and offensive. After all, if Israelis are as powerless as stateless Jews 60 years ago, their state has been a failure. That is not how they view Israel. Not by a long shot.

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It's been an extremely unusual winter and spring for me. Instead of promoting Deep Economy, I've spent most of it out on the road organizing protests over climate change.

Working with six recent college grads, we launched stepitup07.org on January 10, urging people to stage rallies in their communities on April 14 to demand tough action from Congress--80% cuts in carbon reduction by 2050. We didn't have any money or any organization, so our expectations were modest--we hoped we might organize a hundred of these rallies.

Instead, two Saturdays ago, we coordinated 1,400 rallies in all 50 states, with 40 Congresspeople and Senators showing up to talk and one presidential candidate (John Edwards) giving a rousing speech at a Florida rally.

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Paul Starr, writing in the American Prospect, is thinking big. He wants to create a “New Deal for the young.” This is a bold idea – and one that could do a lot for the next generation of Americans.

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Ezra Klein is right that Brooks on Obama was a great read, but I think he gets Brooks (and thus the paradox of Obama) wrong. Klein takes Brooks' point to be that Obama has a tendency to "meta" campaign-- campaign by talking about campaigning-- in a way that obscures his actual policy prescriptions. Klein is "baffled" by the constant invoking of Reinhold Niebuhr and deems Obama's rhetoric "banal":

[Obama's understanding of Niebuhr] consists of banalities like "there’s serious evil in the world, and hardship and pain. And we should be humble and modest in our belief we can eliminate those things. But we shouldn’t use that as an excuse for cynicism and inaction."

Here's where I think Klein misses Brook's point: rather than just being "banal," Brooks argues that Obama is "either profound or vacuous, depending on your point of view." Filling out the paradox by considering why Obama's words can be considered profound might clarify some of Klein's confusion.

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Many of the MSM media outlets emphasize the narrowness of the House vote for the beginning of withdrawal at a date (somewhat) certain. But that's not the main point at all, of course. The main point is that the House vote aligns with the wishes of the majority of the electorate, and that this majority is growing. Public opinion is crystallized in this momentous, and historically very rare vote.

Remember how the MSM decried Speaker Pelosi's alliance with John Murtha? Congressman Murtha's relationship with the Pentagon has been critical to the Speaker's mustering of a majority for this vote.

The Senate will have an increasingly difficult time avoiding an echo of this vote.

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Josh has been flagging this story since yesterday but I have a slightly different take on it.

Yes, it is ridiculous, even obscene, for David Broder to make this comparison. However, I am not sure he could have made it if Chuck Schumer hadn't put out his own complicated quote which made Reid's quote look bad.

Broder:

On "Fox News Sunday," Schumer offered this clarification of Reid's off-the-cuff comment. 'What Harry Reid is saying is that this war is lost -- in other words, a war where we mainly spend our time policing a civil war between Shiites and Sunnis. We are not going to solve that problem. . . . The war is not lost. And Harry Reid believes this -- we Democrats believe it. . . . So the bottom line is if the war continues on this path, if we continue to try to police and settle a civil war that's been going on for hundreds of years in Iraq, we can't win. But on the other hand, if we change the mission and have that mission focus on the more narrow goal of counterterrorism, we sure can win.'

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Greg Anrig's point last week that Conservatism=Bureaucracy and big government, based on Senator Whitehouse's brilliant chart showing the web of connections between the White House and the Justice Department under the Bush administration, is right but I think the use of the word "bureaucracy" is misleading.

"Bureaucracy" implies a complicated, impersonal system of rules and formal structures. We dislike bureaucracy because we find that sometimes the rules and structures become an end in themselves. Bad bureaucracies are those that seem to be driven mainly by their own rules, losing any sense of underlying purpose and unable to respond to actual human needs.

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What with Secretary Gates’ visit to Israel and Iraq, all this talk of the Baghdad wall, and the comparison being drawn to the Israeli physical separation efforts of the Palestinians – and with 4 years of US occupation in Iraq and 40 years of Israeli occupation in the Palestinian areas coming up this June – well, time to draw some lessons as an Israeli for my American friends – so here they are in a piece I posted at the Guardian online:

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Watching Henry Waxman take on the horrific Pat Tillman story reminded me of Stalin's quote, "One death is a tragedy. A million deaths is a statistic."

You listen to the lies the government put out about the death of this American hero and it is nothing less than sickening. Just as bad is how the conservatives who lionized Tillman when they thought he was one of them now dismisses his family as a bunch of cranks for wanting to know what actually happened to their soldier.

For the Right, it is bad enough that Tillman turns out to have been killed in an act of fratricide but, adding insult to injury, he was a Democrat, a non-Christian and antiwar.

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Barack Obama has perhaps unintentionally overstated America's global aid assistance and has inflated what the US is currently doing in his recent foreign policy speech.

He then calls for a doubling of a fictionalized amount of current American aid to an annual outlay of $50 billion/year.

Obama stated in his major foreign policy remarks:

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I find myself enjoying writing by numbers. So I will continue in this Mosaic fashion a little while longer, this time trying to detail the solutions to the pair of problems--ecological collapse and social disconnection--I laid out in my first post.

1) The book argues--and again the research seems to show--that the loss of community Americans are now feeling may not be just coincidental to our increased wealth but instead correlated. Past a certain point, wealth seems to have an odd, isolating effect.

Consider how Americans spent their money in the years after 1950: mostly, building bigger houses farther out in the suburbs. (And acquiring the screens into which we now peer). These tend to reduce the chances that we'll run into each other in the course of a day, and that's just what happened. The average American has many fewer close friends and, of course, eats many fewer meals with family, friends, neighbors.

This hyperindividualism--which should make us so happy since we get to be centered on our own damn selves--seems actually not to work that way, perhaps because we've evolved as social animals.

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In this morning's New York Times, David Leonhardt writes about two widely used measures of middle class squeeze: income inequality and income volatility. He points out that inequality has increased shaprly over the past 20 years, but that a new report from the GAO suggests that volatility may not have increased. He uses this certainty/uncertainty dichotomy to suggest that policies should be aimed toward the thing we're sure has increased (inequality) rather than the thing we're less sure has changed (volatility). According to the GAO, one in five people experiences a drop of 25% or more of their income each year, a proportion that was about the same in 1980, and, by implication, not an issue worth worrying about.

I applaud Leonhardt for asking for more hard data and always cross-examinging the data available, and I suspect Jacob Hacker will have something to say about the GAO report. But for now, it is the policy claim that puzzles me. From my perspective, the harm to middle class families is the combination of stagnant incomes combined with rising costs. That combination means that volatility hurts more today than it did in the 1970s when families could put aside 11% of their pay in savings, when consumer debt was less than 2% of income and when two-parent families had a worker at home who could go into the workforce in a time of crisis. When a family has no savings, no back up worker, and is loaded with debt, every income disruption is more painful--and more dangerous.

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Here's what the extraordinary reporter David Halberstam wrote in Vanity Fair, September 2004 (the italics below are mine):

The patriotism debate now going on has unusual resonance for me, because I was one of the first to have his patriotism challenged for raising questions about Vietnam. Very early on I became a target of the war's supporters in the White House, in the Pentagon (which had lots of powerful publicity machinery to use against wayward reporters), and among hawkish journalists, because of my pessimistic reporting. . . .

Finding out the truth from other Americans engaged in a bitter war was never that hard; hiding the truth is always a great deal harder than telling it. The sources we journalists used were the senior American advisers in the field, and they were far more eager to tell their truths to the M.A.C.V. (Military Assistance Command, Vietnam) and Washington than to a bunch of young reporters. But from the beginning the administration, for domestic political reasons, wanted only to suppress the truth; it wanted to find out who was talking to reporters and then threaten them with court-martial.

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The United States military paid a heavy price Monday in Iraq, a terrible harbinger of what our troops will face in the future. Iraqi insurgents deftly exploited a major vulnerability of U.S. forces and in a single attack killed 9 U.S. soldiers. That is almost one-third of the number killed last week at Virginia Tech by a crazed gunman. This is the largest loss of life in a single ground attack since the war began. According to the AP:

Nine U.S. soldiers were killed and 20 wounded Monday in a suicide car bombing against a patrol base northeast of the capital in Diyala province, a volatile area that has been the site of fierce fighting, the military said.

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As the one-year anniversary of the failed Darfur Peace Agreement approaches, a key question is whether China will continue to offer strong support to the government of Sudan, despite its role in the four-year old conflict. Or, will China increase pressure on Khartoum to accept an international peacekeeping force out of concern about damage to its international reputation.

A partial answer is that China's policy toward Sudan is driven by more than its growing appetite for oil and natural gas. Beijing also has a stake in positioning itself in Africa and globally as an alternative to western "meddling" on issues of human rights and governance.

Beijing is weighing these issues against against concerns about damage to its international position, reputational and otherwise, especially as it prepares to host the Summer Olympics next year, as I outline in the research note, below.

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I'm a writer, so part of me resists trying to digest my book--the pleasure is all in the reporting, the stories, the anecdotes. On the other hand, it's probably a good discipline to see if one can recapitulate the argument in a way that makes somewhat straightforward logical sense. So here goes--bad news first:

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I once heard Lucianne Goldberg say that she would have to shut down her site (Lucianne.com) if Ted Kennedy or one of the Clintons died. To her credit, sort of, she would not want her site to be used for so much joy over anyone's death.

The old girl is no fool. Today the rightwingers of Lucianne.com are just having a party over the death of David Halberstam. Neither a politician or even much of a public figure, he was an important writer who told truths conservatives don't like.

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Here’s how it works.  Nearly a year before the first vote is cast, write a story about how a candidate has a complicated relationship with one of his most obvious bases of support based on soft early polling and anecdotal chatter from self-appointed spokespeople.  Meme propagates.  Then, two months later, still 10 months before the first vote is to be cast, write a story about how – “surprise!” – that invented meme may have actual been premature and idle speculation and, you know, we’ll see.

To make a long story short: it turns out black people probably do like Barack Obama after all.  For now. 

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We've been tracking impressive new progressive legislation, from environmental to voting rights to family leave to budget reform laws in states across the country.

But are these gains just a temporary reaction against the failures of national leadership, or are they based on a solid foundation of changes in public opinion?

In fact, a major multi-decade study of public opinion published just in the last few weeks by the Pew Research Center emphasizes that current political changes are matched by a strengthening of progressive values in the public. The study, Trends in Political Values and Core Attitudes: 1987-2007, shows that not only have there been important shifts in the last couple of years, but more importantly, there are long-term trends over the past few decades that have created opportunities for progressive leaders to deliver bold programs that take on the cynicism that affects too many Americans.

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More on this to follow, but:

Sales of existing homes plunged in March by the largest amount in nearly two decades, reflecting bad weather and increasing problems in the subprime mortgage market, a real estate trade group reported today.

In a campaign season - when the economy is front and center - these releases receive extra scrutiny and play a larger role in news cycles.

The ongoing debate among progressives about where reducing federal deficits should rank on the policy priority list is completely legitimate, but denigrating Clinton’s 1993 budget agreement is wrong-headed and counterproductive. Remember that every last Republican in Congress, along with some blue-dog Democrats, voted against the legislation entirely on the basis that its tax increases would purportedly send the economy into a tailspin, kill jobs, make deficits even worse, destroy investment markets, and a host of other calamities concocted by the fertile minds of Newt Gingrich and Wall Street Journal editorialists.

Any future Democratic president who attempts to raise revenues, whether for deficit reduction or any of the initiatives on the admirable wish list of the Economic Policy Institute, will be subjected to the same fear-mongering litany. And the most effective response will be to describe how after those alarms were raised in 1993, nothing but good economic news followed. It’s a really bad idea for liberals to help the right out by suggesting that the 1993 budget agreement had nothing to do with the prosperity that followed – especially when it also happens not to be true.

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Robert Wright of the New America Foundation has a terrific op-ed in the New York Times today on the warped thinking of the neoconservatives who turned Iraq into the gift (to us all) that will keep on giving.

He takes off from a quote from the shameless Richard Perle which says that the reason the war failed is because we stayed around too long rather than hand the country over to the Iraqi people (i.e Chalabi).

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The new federal budget reflects the same old misallocation of funds between space exploration and oceanic exploration; this misallocation has dominated national efforts for decades.

For fiscal year 2007 NASA is allotted $9.8 billion while the National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration is only given $2.6 billion; the difference for 2008 is even larger, respectively $10.5 billion and $2.7 billion. (Caveat: NASA has a tiny Office of Ocean Exploration)

Despite the fact that the oceans cover more than 70% of the Earth, less than 5% of them have been mapped with the same degree of detail as Mars, and that was before the two most recent Mars rovers, Spirit and Opportunity, landed. We have rarely ventured below 6,500 meters in the oceans, although they reach more than 11,000 meters deep. We know much less about the ocean floor and the deepest layers of the oceans than we know about either side of the moon. And yet, the potential payoffs are huge.

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The two largest economic partners for Cuba today are Venezuela and China. Venezuela provides oil to Cuba in exchange for a finely tuned barter arrangement for tens of thousands of doctors deployed throughout Venezuelan cities and villages. China is pumping "tied aid" and financing into Cuba because it smells mercantilist opportunities there.

On Friday, Wu Guanzheng -- a member of the Standing Committee of China's Communist Party Poliburo -- arrived for four days of meetings. He has since met with both acting President Raul Castro as well as the ailing Fidel Castro.

From my recent trip to Cuba, it became clear that China is moving quickly up in economic significance to the Cuban government. My hunch is that it will not take long for China to overtake Venezuela as the most important economic partner to Cuba.

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San Antonio vs. Denver is best of first round in NBA.

The Democrat who wins on the Truly Super Tuesday, Feb 5/08, will be the one believed to be most capable and willing to withdraw completely from the occupation of Iraq, if elected. This is not ex-President Clinton's current point of view, but he can change.

The White House won't agree to renew the assault weapon ban. Another issue where Nancy Pelosi will reflect the will of the American people. By the beginning of 08 she will be the most popular politician in America. Will she endorse anyone for President?

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Perhaps, given my bias, I should recuse myself from the argument I’m about to make. You see, on our first date, I impressed the woman who is now my wife by convincing her conservative brother-in-law that budget deficits are not always a problem. Such is DC romance.

That was over a decade ago, but the issue remains both contentious and misunderstood. That’s why I was so interested in the recent talk given at the Economic Policy Institute by Joseph Stiglitz, Nobel Laureate economist and all around interesting guy. What’s unique about Stiglitz is not that he always rejects conventional wisdom—he doesn’t. It’s that he looks at in the context of the real world, and often finds it lacking.

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We've been following Matthew, the cute little fellow who has run up a huge medical bill. Matthew's mom Terri stays home to care for him and his dad Mike is a Gulf War vet and a police officer. The family has excellent health insurance, but Matthew's six month stay in intensive care used up $1.9 million toward a $2 million cap on his lifetime insurance benefits. Thanks to the vote of his dad's union, the family's group insurance plan now has higher limits, but Terry and Mike have come too close to the edge to relax.

Matthew's home state is now holding hearings on a bill to create a safety net for middle class families who face catastrophic medical bills. Terri and Mike both testified:

"Just because we are not at or below the poverty level, does not mean we can afford the extensive and exorbitant medical expenses for our child."

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I don't think Barack Obama needs to be defensive about his resume because, in my opinion, you do not need experience to be President. What you need is intelligence, character and humility.

Our greatest President, Abe Lincoln, had a pretty thin resume. Two years in the House and a few more in the Illinois legislature. But, as Doris Kearns Goodwin's book teaches us, he had character, awesome intelligence and humility. That last counts because, as Kearns points out, he reached out to all kinds of people for advice including, most significantly, former (and even current) adversaries.

A great President also needs self-confidence. In recent years our country has suffered under both LBJ and Nixon who, full of class and Ivy resentment/jealousy, were hideously crippled as leaders. We need a President who will not feel that he has to prove anything (like to his father) and who understands that simply by becoming President he/she is, by definition, more accomplished than the rest of us non-Presidents!

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Killers like Seung-Hui Cho are damaged, hugely resentful men who set out to punish the world because they consider it so stupid, or unjust, or negligent, or otherwise damnable as to have failed to recognize their true worth and strength. Thus do diminished men puff themselves up as avenging crusaders.

They don't really know who diminished them, but it doesn't matter. As their idea of the original damage is vague, so will their targets be indiscriminate. The whole world is going to be diminished, and so these endlessly bitter men turn themselves into walking arsenals. They turn themselves into broadcasters as well. These killers are in the communication business.

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