(Forgive the meta, it's Friday afternoon.)

Shai Sachs at MyDD has been doing an interesting series on diversity in the blogosphere that's worth checking out.

I'm sure it's no surprise to liberal blog readers to know that bloggers are unfortunately disproportionately all of the things that American elites disproportionately are: straight, white, male, educated, wealthy (there's lots more nuance here, but you get the idea). While it's a serious problem in general (what's a representative government without a representative dialogue, after all?), it's a particular problem for the netroots because, well, progressives are supposed to care about that stuff. (And believe me, TPMCafe has the same problem, so I don't speak from any moral higher ground).

But it's also a problem because it exposes the significant divide that exists between netroots and grassroots. Not a newsflash, I know, but it's worth looking at so that we don't lose sight of the offline world.

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Michael Moore’s latest film on the American Health care system comes out today and tomorrow in select cities. It promises to stir up a lot of controversy although, as the New York Times points out, much of it will likely center around Moore himself and not the problems facing the American health care system.

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Coffee Houser Ed Kilgore is moving from his New Donkey digs over to edit and blog at The Democratic Strategist.  You know him, you love him, get more of him there.

What blogs are  you reading that Cafe denizens would like?  The thread is yours.

People seem to be waking up. Initially following the Hamas takeover of Gaza, conventional wisdom coalesced around the idea of flooding the West Bank with aid to strengthen President Mahmoud Abbas and also teach Hamas a lesson.

This was fine advice which some of us have been offering (without success) since 2005 when Mahmoud Abbas became President following the death of Yasir Arafat. It became even more urgent when it was clear that Hamas was going to mount a serious challenge to Abbas in the parliamentary elections of 2006. Our position was simple: if we wanted Hamas to lose, we needed to make sure Abbas could show the Palestinian people that he could deliver for them.

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Senator Edwards is moving middle class economic issues front and center. It's time.

The numbers are familiar--skyrocketing credit card charges, predatory mortgages, families working hard and sinking deeper in debt each month. What's new is the aggressiveness of the solutions--and the fact that he is willing to make them a centerpiece in his presidential bid.

Will Edwards stand alone on these issues? Or will all the candidates get more aggressive in putting together proposals to rein in the credit industry?

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As Suzanne points out, "universality" has multiple meanings here. She mentions that any international coalition purporting to legitimize universal values needs to be diverse in terms of geography, development, power, religion...

The question of who sits at the legitimizing table raises the issue of what tables are available and why you even need a table. The biggest table of all is the United Nations, one of whose supposed virtues is its universal membership. The UN is often derided as a club of sovereign governments. The debate sparked by Rachel really asks whether sovereignty (membership in the club) has any connection with legitimacy.

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You've read my writing about mothers who work, and about how American social policy fails working families. Now come here me talk about it--along with an all-star panel of respondents.

The event is called Moms Who Work: Myth and Reality, and it's hosted by and held at Demos in New York City, Thursday, June 28, at 12:15. Please do sign up for the event, so we know how many to expect (we want to serve enough milk & cookies, er, refreshments!). Moderating will be former Ambassador Linda Tarr-Whelan, who runs Demos's Women's Leadership Initiative. Panelists include Carol Jenkins, who runs the Women's Media Center; Linda Lisi Juergens, Executive Director of the National Association of Mothers' Centers; and Lois Backon, Vice President of Families and Work Institute. Come join us!

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JOSH MARSHALL: Hi this is Josh Marshall from TPM Media. It’s Thursday June 21st, 2007. Just after the September 11th attacks on the World Trade Center in 2001, the EPA put out a series of press releases reassuring people in lower Manhattan that the air quality was safe and people could go back to living and working in the area. Well it turned out that wasn’t true or at least the EPA had no test to back that up and we know that subsequently many people have gotten sick.

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I'm a Democrat and have voted Democratic in every Presidential election since I was 18. But I have to tell you. It is conceivable that I'd vote for Mike Bloomberg for President.

I have two reasons. The first is not as significant as the second.

I think he is a great Mayor and a great leader. He is good on all the issues and has demonstrated the courage and ability to implement the policies he believes in.

The United States is probably easier to govern than New York City and his success there demonstrates that he would be an effective President. As a multi-billionaire, he will be utterly free from the pressures most Presidents have to respond to.

That would worry me if I did not share most of his views and beliefs. But I do.

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Rachel: I appreciate your questions, which dovetail with some of the arguments being raised by Ivo Daalder, Bob Kagan and others in relation to a proposed Concert of Democracies. One of the ideas behind the Concert, as I understand it, is that because of their representative character democracies have the legitimacy to defend international legal and humanitarian principles, even when other governments don't agree. The contention is that authoritarian regimes lack moral standing to weigh in on issues, for example, of humanitarian intervention or the protection of human rights, and should therefore not be allowed to get in the way.

My view is that while defensible intellectually, this position is neither politically nor practically tenable. Here's why:

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Wow. It’s hard to know where to start, particularly as I realize that I should have done a bit more to situate the book before providing an excerpt from the conclusion. Let me do that briefly now, both with a link to the book’s website, and an explanation of at least where the title comes from. Some of you may remember my link to Captain Ian Fishback’s letter to John McCain back in 2005 explaining his vain efforts to try to get his superiors to articulate clear standards of interrogation and describing the abuses he witnessed committed against detainees as the result of the lack of standards. He ended that letter by asking whether we as a people were going to sacrifice our ideals to our security, arguing that our true strength lies in trying to uphold our ideals. For himself, he said that he “would rather die fighting than give up even the smallest part of the idea that is America.” I chose that title because it came from a soldier (who has served multiple tours in Iraq and Afghanistan) writing to a former soldier in a way that directly refutes the Administration’s claims, as Sy Hersh quotes in the New Yorker this week, that “Abu Ghraib is just the price of defending democracy.”

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One of the signs of a good book is stimulating debate. The Idea That is America is doing that, not only here on TPM but in the International Herald Tribune (I´ve been in Europe the past six months at Oxford and on a Fulbright in Spain), the Stephen Colbert show, and lots elsewhere.

Responding to Rachel´s post and some of the bloggers on mine:

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For about twenty-four hours, political junkies were entertained by the possibility that New York Mayor Mike Bloomberg was indeed getting serious about launching a third-party presidential bid. This bubble was inflated by the news that Mayor Mike had officially abandoned his Republican voting registration, accompanied by a statement that sounded a lot like music to the ears of David Broder and other plague-on-both-your-houses antipartisans.

Then today Bloomberg threw some cold water on the storyline, making a horde of political reporters sit through a boring press conference before saying he wasn't a candidate and intended to serve out his mayoral term. But at least some reporters heard a candidacy aborning anyway.

Whatever he's up to, the initial buzz about the likely impact of a Bloomberg candidacy has been interesting, if sometimes misleading.

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This comment is a better response to Rachel Kleinfeld's question than any I could offer:

You and Dean Slaughter seem determined to convince people like me that every truly progressive idea is already an "American ideal", and that wherever these ideas are not already in practice, that is merely a case in which our practice does not yet live up to our ideals. This, in my opinion, is sentimental bunk. Not only is it sentimental bunk, but it is dangerous and progress-thwarting bunk which prevents people from listening to the voices of their pre-tribal, pre-national, pre-patriotic consciences, and encourages them to wallow in empty national platitudes and credal bombast, and to place loyalty to national tradition and the alleged wisdom of the Glorious Ancestors ahead of reason and direct moral intuition of the causes of human suffering and human happiness. To believe that the keys to human perfectability are already fully embodied in the ideals of one's national community is superstitious idolatry.

I would like to move this conversation from the general to the specific, by seeing what others think of a moral and policy conundrum raised by The Idea That Is America. Throughout the text, Dean Slaughter walks a tense line between the idea is that it is human beings, not states, that hold moral weight--and the notion that America does "not lead the world by right, or even by power, but by the consent, and at the request, of other nations."(See particularly pgs 177, and 190-191)

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JOSH MARSHALL: Hi, it's Josh Marshall from TPM Media. It's Wednesday June 20, 2007. Yesterday on TPM we highlighted an article in Neswday that reported that Rudy Giuliani had originally been a member of the Iraq Study Group – that's the Baker-Hamilton commission – the commission about Iraq that reported its findings late last year and, in addition to a number of other findings, suggested that the US pull back from frontline action in Iraq. Now it turns out Rudy had signed on to the commission back in March of 2006, but a couple of months later he had not shown up for one of the meetings of the commission. So James Baker, the senior Republican on the study group got in touch with Rudy and said “Hey! Either you show up for the meetings of you're off the commission.” Well it turns out Rudy was too busy making so many of these high paid speeches so he didn't have time to be on the group - he didn't have time to do his part figuring out how the US could resolve its problems in Iraq. So he begged off.

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Glen Greenwald (via Atrios) explains why progressive bloggers are not really fringe extremists. Exactly. But if everybody is a 'progressive' now, then we are no longer talking about outside-the-box social and political criticism, and we need a lot of it.

Along the way, Greenwald quotes the saintly Digby:

" . . . And we all agree that Islamic terrorism is a threat, but one that we cannot meet with military power alone. And yes, a vast majority of us were against this mindless invasion of Iraq from the beginning, or at least saw the writing on the wall . . . "

Now this is a perfectly respectable, honorable point of view, one that we should all hope is reflected in the next few electoral cycles. But there is more to be said.

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I came accross an article today which discusses a variety of potential issues facing the U.S. economy in the (near) future and the impact these issues may have on the increasingly struggling middle class.

Looking at the U.S. economy with a "big picture" orientation, the article relates broad economic developments to specific middle class problems.  The author touches on, well, the kitchen sink, including rising debt levels, stagnant wages and jobs, and increasing costs of education and health care. Included are also some reform proposals and in the author's view one of the pressing issues is tax reform.  Note of caution: I have not done too much research to verify how much of this is right, and at least related to the tax reform piece I do think that I do not agree with the increased taxes on earnings from privatized public utilities proposal.  Regardless, it's an interesting article, and it hope it generates discussion given the variety of topics encompassed.  I am very much looking forward to hearing everyone's thoughts!

I think Ezra Klein did a pretty good job getting to the crux of the progressive choice between Edwards and Obama yesterday when, after summing up their speeches at the activist Take Back America conference, he wrote "... where Obama promised to radically change our politics, Edwards promised to radically change our policies."

Obama's emphasis is on changing our conversation and civic culture. He talks about the smallness of modern politics and "hope-mongers" to get people to believe again. Edwards, in contrast, champions liberal causes like health care, poverty and net neutrality. He plays the part of committed activist while Obama plays the part of civic savior.

I think there's more to this than a difference in campaign tactics and rhetoric, though. Each man is laying out a progress narrative that moves along a different axis.

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Several leading scholars have identified nuclear terrorism as the greatest threat the United States and its allies face and have concluded that such an attack is very much within the realm of possibility.

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Thanks to NBC, we now know who would be most endangered by a free and open Internet – our nation’s corn farmers.

To protect them, we need nothing short of a spying program that would make the National Security Agency green with envy because the Peacock Net wants the Federal Communications Commission to carry it out.

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I bought both Hillary Clinton biographies. Yesterday I finished Carl Bernstein's "A Woman In Charge."

It is a great read. Bernstein is as good a writer and reporter today as he was in 1973. I recommend the book.

But, frankly, it made me more and not less sympathetic to Hillary.

Just reading about the early days of the Clinton administration when the Republicans decided to destroy the new administration by hurling every kind of lying charge against the Clintons makes painful though useful reading.

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Anne-Marie’s book is written from the heart as well as the head. That is to be commended in itself. I had a preview of how inspiring her message can be at a panel we did together at Duke in Fall 2005. Her arguments and the conviction with which she makes them resonated quite powerfully with the students and others there. Clearly lots of people do believe that values matter and are looking for a sense of what is, has been and could be again right about America and our role in the world.

Two questions on my mind as I wrestle with these challenges:

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Let's narrow the debate again.  Matthew's case is not about end-of-life decisions, quality-of-life decisions, or experimental treatments and long-shot outcomes.  This is about life or death for a baby with an otherwise bright future.  It is also about a fundamental policy decision about what risks we share collectively and what risks we leave to each little family.  And it is about whether an insurance company, the government, or someone else decides who will get care.  I want to give Matthew's mom a chance to respond:

No doctor ever said that we shouldn't/couldn't save Matthew.  There was never a question.  We were always told that he could be fixed, but he would need multiple heart surgeries.  We certainly could not/would not let him die when everything you are told is that he has a great fighting chance of survival.  Even if we had ever said.."Oh wait, we can't afford that ... just let him die"  ... that would have never ever happened!  
 
This is one of my biggest complaints ...... Stanford was paid $14,500 to $21,262 per day..  that was at a 40% discount,  just for room and board ... this is not including critical care doctors, surgeons, assistant surgeons, labs and X-Rays...  that is just insane.   Who can pay that?? ...  it's no wonder we ran out ... we spent 3 months at Stanford... Stanford was like a giant vacuum and sucked away approx 1.7 million of our 2 million in just 3 months.

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It's interesting that the first instinct of some commentators is to immediately look at "The Idea That Is America" from the point of view of non-Americans. Because we don't have the luxury of making policies for non-Americans until we have won a Presidential election, and we are not going to win such an election until we can embrace the commonsense American ideals--and language--that Anne-Marie Slaughter presents here.

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Hi it’s Josh Marshall from TPM media, it’s Tuesday June 19^th, 2007. You know we’re looking now, we came right off the 2006 election, and the president came out with his idea of a surge, a build-up of troops to finally get control of the sectarian violence in Baghdad. We were told then that it needed until the summer, perhaps till September, to really get a sense of whether the policy was going to work. Now that September is getting close we’re told that September really isn’t enough time to judge the success of the policy and really we’ve got to wait until perhaps the end of the year, even to 2008.

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Richard Cohen, the Washington Post columnist, has been one of the most consistent liberal wusses for decades now. He is the newspaper equivalent of Alan Colmes, mushy through and through.

I stopped reading Cohen years ago but a friend told me that today's column is not to be missed. In it, Cohen calls for clemency for Scooter Libby.

I'm not going to quote from Cohen although you can check the above link.

His main point is that since there was "no underlying crime," lying to the grand jury about it was no crime either.

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Earlier this week, Elizabeth Warren returned to the compelling story of a child named Matthew who was born with a heart defect, is in fragile condition, and will need a series of heart surgeries throughout his life. He has already passed the $2 million lifetime cap on his insurance. His father’s union negotiated with the insurer to raise the cap, but Matthew will need more help. His parents were hoping that Nevada might make funds available, but recently, the state said “no.”

Who should help Matthew? And should there be any limit on how much is spent on a single individual?

My answer is that this is a question of medical ethics that needs to be addressed, case by case, by a panel of physicians. And yes, in a world of finite resources, there will always be limits: we have to ask, “What value are we getting for our health care dollars?”

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I'll be brief. "The idea that is America" is obviously vulnerable to the interpretation of foreigners. In Dissent, Ms. Slaughter suggested the U.S. engage Iran:

"On nuclear weapons, the United States should be willing to offer Iran assurances that assuage its legitimate fears. These assurances might include a negative security assurance—a promise not to attack Iran except in response to Iranian military action or direct Iranian support of a terrorist attack against the United States, Europe, or Israel."

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I'll be brief. "The idea that is America" is obviously vulnerable to the interpretation of foreigners. In Dissent, Ms. Slaughter suggested the U.S. engage Iran:

"On nuclear weapons, the United States should be willing to offer Iran assurances that assuage its legitimate fears. These assurances might include a negative security assurance—a promise not to attack Iran except in response to Iranian military action or direct Iranian support of a terrorist attack against the United States, Europe, or Israel."

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I try to imagine a historically-minded Latin American reading Anne-Marie Slaughter’s claim that the essence of American patriotism is its commitment to “liberty, democracy, equality, justice, tolerance, humility, and faith,” without exploding in bitter laughter and I find that I cannot. Anne-Marie may be right (I am not at all sure) that values play a particularly important role in the American national psyche, but psycho-history is not history, just as self-love is not real love.

But leave what we have wrought in Latin America from James Monroe through Woodrow Wilson (self-determination, indeed!) to Henry Kissinger and Ronald Reagan to one side. There is, more generally, something strangely over-intellectualized as well as over-sentimentalized about Anne-Marie’s account of our own history. Take, for example, her argument that our debates about what our values mean constitute what she calls “the essence of our politics, the secret of our success, and the source of our strength as a vibrant, open society.” Frankly, while I might wish this were so, I don’t think there is really much historical basis for the claim.

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One of the great government success stories at the state level in recent years has been the streamlining of the driver’s license application and renewal process so that the endless DMV lines of the past – which fueled public hostility toward government – became far shorter and less hassle-laden in most places. But the REAL ID Act of 2005, which will begin to take effect next year, will totally trash that progress. Since the Department of Homeland Security issued proposed REAL ID regulations in March, states have been justifiably rebelling at unworkable rules guaranteed to make trips to the DMV more Kafkaesque than ever before. And there’s little reason to believe that all of the mishigas will do anything to make us safer, which was the ostensible rationale for the law.

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If Anne-Marie Slaughter jolts us out of the smugness with which we tout American ideals, she will have done a great public service. The danger is that America trumpets its ideals from within a rhetorical echo chamber. Credibility is one problem; relevance and connection to day-to-day realities is another. The rhetoric of the American mission must be put on a low-sanctimony diet.

Dean Slaughter reminds us that ideals give a broad outline as often as (or more than) they point down the straight and narrow path. In a sense, keeping faith with American values is an existential challenge. Not the kind of dire “existential threat” that the national security apparatus is geared toward thwarting, but the struggle over practicalities and trade-offs required in trying to genuinely live out our ideals, just as Anne-Marie says.

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American patriotism is grounded not only in our love for our country itself, but also in our love for the values our country stands for—of the idea that is America, no matter how far short we may fall in practice. It is the idea that knits us together in our vast diversity. It is the idea that our soldiers fight for. It is the idea that all patriotic citizens stand for, even against our own government. It is an idea that ultimately belongs to all the world’s peoples.

Americans are hardly unique in having forged a national identity based on a set of fundamental principles. The French glory in their country’s heritage as the source of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of “Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity.” The English rightly love their tradition of individual rights and restrained rule begun with the Magna Carta. The Chinese venerate many of the principles of Confucianism as part of the bessence of being Chinese. South Africans celebrate ubuntu, the belief in a universal bond of sharing that connects humanity. Indeed, a journalist’s story about the near destruction of a fabled Baghdad street of booksellers in the late summer of 2006 closed with a heart-wrenching description of the last bookseller to remain open breaking down in tears. “Iraq,” he said, as he wiped his eyes, “it is the first country. It set the laws of Hammurabi.”

But values play a particularly important role in the American national psyche for a unique reason: Although we inhabit a common land that we love, we do not share a common race, creed, or national origin.

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Welcome to the TPMCafe Book Club! This is where we regularly invite authors to come and discuss their most recent works with readers and invited commentators. Past Book Club authors include Thomas Frank, Anthony Shadid, Larry Diamond, George Packer, Ivo Daalder/James Lindsay, Robert Dreyfuss, Chris Mooney, Gene Sperling, Gershom Gorenberg, Peter Beinart, Kevin Phillips, Sidney Blumenthal, Reed Hundt, Anne-Marie Slaughter/John Ikenberry, Jonathan Cohn, Daniel Gross, Steven Cook, and Chris Hayes.

This week we'll be discussing Anne-Marie Slaughter's The Idea that Is America.

In the book, Professor Slaughter outlines what she believes are the core values that have guided America thus far and must inspire American foreign policy in the future: liberty, democracy, equality, tolerance, faith, justice, and humility. This week, we will discuss Slaughter's argument that because these values are universal, acting in the world with them in mind is not tantamount, as some of the left would argue, American exceptionalism.

Joining the conversation will be Rachel Kleinfeld, Bruce Jentleson, David Shorr, Suzanne Nossel, Lee Feinstein, Michael Levi and David Rieff.

-ahg

Just to remind Democratic candidates: like Wayne Gretzky said, you have to skate to where the puck will be. The situation in Iraq in the late fall, when the voters will be wooed and won by the one will then be the victor in the first quarter of 08, will not be what it is today. It will be, probably and dreadfully, much more problematic than today. So what will you say? The key tests are: do you favor residual force deployment; do you see any way to revive a multi-state or two-state approach for Palestine; do you favor attacks on Iran; will you support the Turks or the Kurds, if it came to that choice; will you partition Iraq. There may be some more, but this suffices: I don't believe anyone will be able to avoid answering these questions in the fall; this summer, yes, but not in the fall, when the voters have to be closed.

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When Christopher Hitchens is not defending George W. Bush, Paul Wolfowitz, Scooter Libby, or their jihad against Islamists and the evils of certain axes, he can be interesting, even informative. So it was that I turned to his piece on Tunisia in the July Vanity Fair (not yet online), for it happens that I spent three weeks in Tunisia in January 2006, and therefore have an independent reportorial base from which to assess his assessments. (I wrote about my stay in the Chronicle of Higher Education.)

Hitchens makes a case for the Tunisian dictatorship. The country is, after all, a relatively healthy place for women and an inhospitable place for Islamists. On a weak base, it features a relatively thriving economy. It has the great merit, Hitchens points out, of not being Algeria, let alone Libya. Points taken, if not being the rest of Africa is a compliment.

I'm not competent to know all of what Hitchens fails to observe, but the following lines of his caught me up short: "you can say for Tunisia that people do not lower their voices or look over their shoulders (another thing that has made me nervous in my timne) before discussing" the dictator, Zine El Abidine Ben Ali.

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How screwed up does the world have to be that even our games are the site of global labor exploitation? As the New York Times highlighted yesterday, first world game players are actually paying to have third world workers "mine" for virtual gold in computer games, so that the first world workers can cheat.

We're not talking chump change here-- with tens of millions of real dollars exchanged for virtual gaming goodies. And sadly, Chinese workers mining for that virtual gold see the usual global capitalist exploitation. A Chinese worker takes about four hours to get 100 virtual gold coins and gets paid $1.25 for that effort-- or 30 cents per hour -- yet an end-user gamer will pay $20 for those coins, meaning middle-men take 96% of the value of the Chinese workers labor.

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"Rupert Murdoch has grown so desperate in his attempt to buy Dow Jones and its Wall Street Journal that he'll tell any lie he thinks will help," wrote Slate's Jack Shafer on May 24.

In half a dozen columns, Shafer himself has sounded a bit desperate to expose Murdoch's lies in order to discredit his bid. He's right to note that "Murdoch doesn't exasperate because he's a conservative; he exasperates because he has no principles." But the ownership and investment system which Murdoch is gaming doesn't have any principles, either. It will take more than investigative journalism, satire, or commentary like Shafer's or mine to pose the challenge that needs to be posed.

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Since last summer, we've been following a handsome little fellow named Matthew. When he was born with a heart problem, his parents quickly learned about caps on insurance. Before he was two years old, Matthew was about to exceed his lifetime coverage limits. His parents were told to consider divorce and welfare, giving Matthew for adoption, moving to another state, and other strategies to work the system to find a way to pay for his health care.

Eventually his dad's union negotiated their group insurance contract to raise the cap above two million dollars (Matthew was at $1.9M in medical expenses). Matthew's parents were elated, but they had started on a mission for other families that weren't so lucky. They pushed their homestate of Nevada to help with back-up protection. The latest news from Matthew's mom is in: The State of Nevada decided that there would be no help for medically-fragile children like Matthew.

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