An economist lands on a distant planet. He is greeted by alien emissaries. Anxious to learn about the planet, the economist questions the aliens. But instead of the classic “take me to your leader,” he inquires, “what is your trend productivity growth?” (This scares the aliens and they zap him into dust.)

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There is a strong wind that all of a sudden seems to be moving US-Cuba relations in new directions.

Presidential candidates like Hillary Clinton are going to have to decide whether they are going to spend political capital to keep US-Cuba relations in grooves carved out over five decades and defended by Bush -- or whether they are going to be part of charting a new, more constructive course.

The Los Angeles Times today ran an editorial that pulls no punches in highlighting the failures of a five-decade old American strategy that has yielded nothing for American interests. The editorial juxtaposes Clinton and Obama -- who are on conflicting pages when it comes to loosening the tight noose that Bush has strangled Cuban-American families with when it comes to family travel.

But impressively, the Times calls for full, unrestricted travel, which is my own position as well as that of Senator Chris Dodd, whose statement on US-Cuba relations still sets the gold standard.

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The amazing and irreplaceable Grace Paley died this week. Grace would certainly scoff at being called irreplaceable, but so be it; she was and is.

I never studied with Grace, though I attended Sarah Lawrence College (where they are hosting a memorial page for Grace) as an undergrad where I got to know her and she became my teacher in so many ways. We struck up a friendship back then more over debating politics and Jewish identity and Israel than over writing, though in those days I was writing poetry and Grace was an amazing reader of the stuff. Each short story was a prose poem and her own poems always cut immediately to the essence.

We didn't really agree politically--she called herself a "combative pacifist" and I never understood how pacifism could hold up as an overarching ideology, but we shared a belief in fighting for a better world and in using the power of words to make that happen.

Plus, she showed me, especially when I was just out of college, in my first year of work when I was employed at her publishing house, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, the power of politics and art when they intersect. And the need for communications to make a political dent.

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For six years, many have told us that global economic inequality and poverty was irrelevant to the rise of terrorism, so that military means, not social change, was the key to taking on extremist Islam.

But now military leaders in Iraq are admitting that economic desperation is the key factor driving terrorist recruitment there:

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There are aspects of both Barack Obama's and Hillary Clinton's national security and foreign policy strategies that seriously concern me. I feel much more pull towards the kind of national security contours of a Chuck Hagel -- but he has not announced and does not yet appear to be running.

That said, unless something earth-shattering happens, it is likely that either Obama or Clinton will be the next Democratic candidate for President, and very possibly the next President of the United States.

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The Iowa straw poll and a good half dozen Democratic debates are behind us but the campaigns have yet to fully engage in the predictable, and by now ritualistic, arguments about who is “better” on Israel. That is probably because none of the major candidates has said or posted very much about Israel that is not routine fare, designed not to offend anyone.

Campaign staffers tell their bosses to tread very carefully (if at all) on this issue, recalling the trouble Howard Dean got into in 2004 when he suggested that America’s Middle East policy should be “even-handed.” Having never served in Congress, Dean did not know that the inside-the-beltway guardians of the Israel issue had decided that the phrase “even-handed” was code for anti-Israel and was therefore verboten. I doubt any candidate will make that mistake again.

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Reader cal1942, in a response to my post on Bush's spurious literary flourish concerning the Iraq, sorry, Vietnam Syndrome, picks up an item earlier posted by Anthony Banks of Toronto in response to a Greg Mitchell piece in Editor and Publisher. The matter at issue is Bush's quote from antiwar Senator J. William Fulbright's 1972 book, Crippled Giant.

According to Banks, the setting for the sentence quoted by Bush, who no doubt unearthed it after spending much of his August vacation in an earnest, industrious hunt through the literature of the early Seventies, when he was too busy serving in the Air National Guard to read, is as follows. Fulbright has been arguing that the geopolitical security of the United States does not depend on the future of Vietnam. He goes on:

Nor does it matter all that terribly to the inhabitants [what kind of government they have]. At the risk of being accused of every sin from racism to communism, I stress the irrelevance of ideology to poor, peasant populations. Someday, perhaps, it will matter, in what one hopes will be a constructive and utilitarian way. But in the meantime, what earthly difference does it make to nomadic tribes or uneducated subsistence farmers, in Vietnam or Cambodia or Laos, whether they have a military dictator, a royal prince or a socialist commissar in some distant capital that they have never seen and may never even have heard of?

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I can't say that I'm an expert in credit markets, the Fed, or subprime lending, but I've been frustrated by what's happened recently in the credit-subprime-mortgage world and have been trying to figure out what's really going on. Here's my breezy, oversimplified brief history of the credit debacle.

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Earlier this month, the Illinois legislature passed a law (W$J - subscription required) requiring individuals seeking home loans to spend time with a mortgage counselor if the loan is non-traditional (e.g., pre-payment penalties or interest-only payment options). The goal of the legislation is alert borrowers to the tricks and traps that can be thrown into mortgage documents at the last minute by unscrupulous brokers.

A previous program was discontinued earlier this year after problems surfaced and allegations of racism arose. The success of this program will depend on whether its backers can win the public relations battle against actors in the mortgage industry who claim the law will dry up credit for affected borrowers. (This objection raises serious questions as to why such loans are suddenly unavailable when light scrutiny is applied.)

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Where to start? In his speech to the VFW, Bush rolls out a whole flock of canards concerning that noble war he cherished but never got around to fighting in. As is his custom, he cherry-picks evidence, invoking two cavalier statements anti-war statements that minimized the horrors that could be expected in Southeast Asia after the US left.

One is:

What earthly difference does it make to nomadic tribes or uneducated subsistence farmers in Vietnam or Cambodia or Laos, whether they have a military dictator, a royal prince or a socialist commissar in some distant capital that they've never seen and may never heard of?

In his blog today, Paul Soglin, the onetime activist-mayor of Madison, WI, says (from memory) that the quote comes from J. William Fulbright's book, Crippled Giant, and that Bush mangles it beyond recognition.

Perhaps some reader near a good library (I'm not) can look up the text. I'd be grateful.

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Even President Bush is likening Iraq to images of Vietnam -- but in an opposite way from the Iraq War's critics.

Bush has suggested at the National Convention for the Veterans of Foreign Wars that withdrawal from Iraq would lead to the same kind of upheaval in the Middle East as occurred in Southeast Asia after U.S. withdrawal from Saigon.

Both Nir Rosen and Joe Biden have offered images of an Iraq where there is no more center.

Senator Joe Biden responds to the President thus:

President Bush continues to cling to a fundamentally flawed premise -- that Iraqis will rally behind a strong central government. That will not happen.

There's no trust within the Iraqi government; no trust of the government by the Iraqi people; no capacity of that government to deliver security or services; and no prospect that it will build that trust or capacity any time soon.

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Come November 2008, the Dems have an excellent chance of enlarging their Congressional majorities and capturing the White House as well. I hate to say it, but this splendid development looks like it will be blown up by a failure to vacate Iraq. The Dem Leadership/Netroots family will become dysfunctional. The weakness and defensiveness of current Democratic criticism of the war is one tip-off. By the power of negative example, Jay Ackroyd provides the case that must be debunked.

There is little effort, in the campaigns or among the netroots, to build support for an alternative, progressive governing philosophy. That combined with dithering on withdrawal, not to mention potential attacks on Iran, could make the great victory of '08 short-lived. More important, failure to bug out sinks U.S. foreign policy deeper in the mire of imperial overstretch.

Wow and wow! Today’s release of the 2005 report by the CIA’s Inspector General is a damning indictment of senior CIA officials, including George Tenet, his deputy John McLaughlin, and Cofer Black, head of the Counter Terrorism Center, for their collective failure to properly organize intelligence community resources and establish priorities to deal with the threat posed by Al Qaeda prior to 9-11.

And yes, before the trolls get rolling, I acknowledge that I wrote an op-ed in July 2001 complaining about our inordinate fear of terrorism. However, my article did not say we should ignore Al Qaeda or that Al Qaeda was not a threat. To the contrary, Milt Bearden and I wrote a piece in November 2000 that very clearly identified Bin Laden as one of the central threats the next President would have to and should confront. So for those who want to argue that I’m somehow responsible for the CIA failures in 2000-2001, it is not true and it is an irrelevant point.

The real news is that Tenet and McLaughlin failed to translate their tough rhetoric into practical action. As the report correctly notes, George Tenet declared a war on terrorism in December 1998 and directed that no people or resources in the CIA or the intelligence community would be spared from working on this threat. And what did he do?

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It’s official. The White House isn’t even trying to make sense on economics.

This morning’s NYT reports on IRS data showing that the average family’s income is lower, after inflation, in 2005 than it was in 2000. It’s down about 1%, just under $500, which ain’t chump change. It helps to explain the squeeze many middle- and low-income families speak of, and the dissonance between their experiences and the clamoring of the economy’s cheerleaders (low unemployment! strong job growth! solid fundamentals! yada-yada...).

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One of my fine colleagues is Benjamin Barber, who wrote very eloquently about the danger of citizens being turned into passive consumers rather than serving as active participants in the political process. He is the first to tell you that what he really wanted to be in life was not to be a political science professor but an actor. He puts his talents in this department to good use by giving lectures that could be readily be put onstage at any old place Off Broadway. Recently he dropped by to visit with none other than the Libyan leader Moammar Gaddafi. Barber found him a much more attractive figure than the Western media has long depicted as the “implacable despot” from Tripoli.

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I don't think it requires projecting some sort of meta-malevolent brilliance onto Rove to believe that his attacks on Hillary are intended to help her in the primary. Of course that's the goal. To think otherwise is to believe that Rove is dumb enough to not know that his attacks on her help her to brandish her selling point to the base as the experienced partisan fighter. Whether or not he's super-smart, he's not that dumb.

Yesterday's debate in Iowa was a good one, the best of the campaign so far. (Thank you, George Stephanopoulos).

But I was struck by one thing: the lack of real anger about Iraq.

On a day when the New York Times ran an amazing op-ed by seven courageous (still active) soldiers describing how hopeless the Iraq situation is and how everything the administration is telling us about Iraq right now is a lie, the Democratic candidates discuss the war as if it was a blunder not a crime.

I don't want to hear how we can and must stay in. I want to hear how we can get out (Bill Richardson to his credit, did tell us that).

America cannot solve Iraq's problems because we caused them. The resistance is to us.

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Last week I floated the idea here that the best way to rescue subprime borrowers struggling to hang onto their homes is to allow them to become long-term renters, paying the fair market rent. This idea got a positive response from dozens of people, including Calculated Risk, a blog that focuses on finance and economics, and the blog Vox Baby, which is run by Dartmouth economics professor Andrew Samwick, who had been a top advisor in the Bush administration.

Given the importance of the issue, and the fact that the main alternatives seem primarily designed to bail out banks and hedge funds, I thought it was worth filling in some details.

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