In accordance with a law passed by Congress at the urging of the Pentagon last year, the military this week implemented new rules to protect service men and women from payday and other types of risky loans.  This is part of an effort to promote our military readiness by ensuring the financial security of our soldiers.  That effort also includes increased access to financial planning, financial education course offerings, and the encouragement of emergency savings accounts.

As I've blogged about before though, how can certain types of loans be predatory and harmful for one class of citizens but a beneficial part of the free market for everyone else?  If these types of loans are really a healthy part of the free market because they provide consumers with more choices, why shouldn't soldiers have access to them too?

Finally, let me end my blog by saying that one wonderful way to understand
Mexican immigration is to listen to the songs of Los Tigres del Norte.
Los Tigres are the greatest Mexican pop band and easily the best
bi-national band around.

They are immigrants themselves, from Sinaloa living near San Jose,
California, and the grand chroniclers of the immigration epic. No one
understands immigrants and immigration like this band, in my opinion.

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I have not commented thus far on the publication of the Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer book on the Israel lobby. The reason is simple – I agreed to review the book for Haaretz and so have waited for that to be published. That review is now out and can be read in full on this post.

It is a long piece, but I hope that you stick with it. To briefly set out my stall: while I certainly take issue with the specific recent policy examples in the book (Iraq and Syria in particular), I would argue that the relationship between the US, Israel and the lobby that speaks in its name needs to change for everyone’s sake, that this book contributes to a re-think and that the authors are not driven by prejudice.

I am not an American Jew (despite the valiant and appreciated efforts of Matt Yglesias to enfranchise me as such). I can at best empathize with the sensitivities of American Jews and the raw nerves that the book and the debate surrounding it have touched. Some of the commentary, including from people I respect, admire and personally like – JJ Goldberg, Jeffrey Goldberg and Leonard Fein (I had to find a non-Goldberg) for example, pushes back powerfully against the book and comes from a place that is undoubtedly sincere and, I believe, often emotional. It is an emotive subject for me also, but my emotions are those of an Israeli (by choice admittedly) who has witnessed the devastating consequences of the lobby-mediated US policy towards Israel, on our ability to build an Israel of hope, peace, decency and dare I say, longevity.

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It’s not at all surprising that the president is out touting today’s jobs report. We added 110,000 jobs last month, and August’s dismal report was revised away: new, more complete data show that we didn’t lose 4,000 jobs in August, we gained 89,000.

It’s really hard to diagnose the economy in the face of such large revisions, but I give it my best shot here. Summary: we’re doing better than we thought but we’re not out of the woods.

But Bush went way beyond the revised numbers, and started riffing about how great job growth has been on his watch. It just ain’t so.

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I have been subject to some criticism about ‘shamelessly’ promoting my book Security First – For a Muscular, Moral Foreign Policy so as to exalt myself rather than to propagate the new approach to foreign policy that it laid out. I think the best way to express my view on this “self” promotion is to draw attention to the struggle of one of my colleagues.

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I’d like to talk about a few things that Mexico needs to do to begin to become a country that poor people no longer feel they have to leave.

What follows is, of course, a partial list. You’ll note that none of it involves reforming the notorious criminal justice/police problem. That’s not because that’s not necessary, but rather because if these things are done first, it’ll make that job a little easier, I think.

Also, I’m focusing on things that can be done legislatively, which is a lot.

The country’s problem is that it remains the captive of Mexico City – or, better put, Congress and the harmful insular political culture of Mexico City.

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It is an honor to have my book discussed so seriously-- and at such length!-- by writers I admire. Thank you, everyone.

One of the surprises about the response to the book for me is that it is taken as a tell-all confessional, in which, as Rebecca Traister wrote in Salon, I "caper naked as a jaybird." I don't know how naked jaybirds are (don't they have feathers?), but we have indeed become rather stuffy if other women are embarrassed by the common life experiences I write about.

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Yesterday, President Bush used his pen to veto the State Children’s Health Insurance Program (SCHIP), which would have covered four million children. What are they thinking in the White House?

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Mexican immigrants are entirely integrated economically. But by and large, they are absent politically and civically.

This is new for America, and, given Mexicans’ spread across the United States, it’s harmful for this country.

Most immigrant groups have progressed economically and politically roughly at the same time. Mexicans are different.

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Picture an open landscape under an ominous, purple sky, perhaps at sunset. An empty road leads from you to the distant horizon where it finally meets both the last rays of the setting sun and the increasing darkness of the horizon itself. But you cannot really see that meeting point. It is too far away and the sky is too dark. If you wish to know what might lie behind the horizon you must travel down that road.

This is how I see the image on the front cover of my copy of Katha Pollitt's Learning to Drive, and this is also how I see the essential story that the book is telling us; a story about roads to take, about finding directions in life, about trying to make sense of our lives, the choices we make and the circumstances which are sometimes forced upon us. This activity: personal map-making, is to me the central theme of Pollitt's essays.

In the title essay "Learning to Drive" it takes the concrete form of "observing" reality (traffic, pedestrians, the stop signs) and of doubting that very ability to observe. What happens when for some reason we can't use direct observation to guide us? How do we recognize the landmarks and the hidden perils? How do we navigate around them?

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As I said in an earlier blog, I believe Mexican immigration to the United States is unique in at least two ways.

First, Mexican immigrants are now everywhere in the United States in large numbers. Anchorage. Atlanta. Wyoming. Nebraska. North Carolina. Georgia. On and on.

They are the first group of immigrants to spread throughout America in such numbers. The arrival of Mexicans marks the largest influx of foreign-born workers to the South since slavery.

Second, unlike other groups of immigrants, they have settled now in small towns in large numbers. Typically immigrants have settled in big cities, then later generations have moved to smaller towns. Mexicans are different.

All this is enormously healthy, and poses huge costs at the same time.

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It's not every day when The New Republic says that someone is not anti-semitic! In fact, it's never.

But today John Judis, TNR Senior Editor, finds Rep. Jim Moran (D-VA) not anti-semitic for having said that the pro-Israel lobby pushed for the Iraq war.

I don't read TNR (for obvious reasons). I depend on young geniuses like Matt Yglesias to do it for me. (Matt's blog at The Atlantic is phenomenal). ALSO, CHECK OUT MICHAEL KINSLEY on the Moran/AIPAC story. Brilliant.

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The announcement of a deal that calls for the disabling of the heart of North Korea's nuclear weapons establishment by the end of this year is a giant step forward for global non-proliferation efforts. As reported in an article by Glenn Kessler of the Washington Post, the accord calls for Pyongyang to "disable the 5 watt experimental reactor at Yongbyon, a fuel reprocessing plant, and a nuclear fuel rod facility." China's Xinhua news agency has made the text of the agreement available.

What does this all mean? Has the Bush administration had a brain transplant? Could this diplomatic success spur further efforts along these lines?

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Let me pause amid the hurricane to talk a little about what I think Mexican immigrants are leaving when they leave Mexico.

I believe what Mexicans are leaving is Mexico City. … Or, better put, what Mexico City represents in Mexican culture.

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As someone who comes from a long line of people who learned how to drive late in life, and who only got her own license in her late 20s, I loved the title essay of Katha Pollitt's collection Learning to Drive, And Other Life Stories when it came out in The New Yorker. I've recommended it to so many of my non-driving New York friends over the years that I was a bit taken aback to find it at all controversial upon republication. To me, this essay was much more about learning to drive than about a failed relationship, but then again I always thought not knowing how to drive was a quintessentially New York City thing, rather than a chick thing.

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The way the British are abandoning Basra is hardly novel. I saw British troops sneaking out like thieves at night from Palestine in 1947, without turning over their installations or the authority to govern either to the Jewish or to the Arab communities, nor dividing the turf among the contending sides. A bloody war immediately followed. Although the turn over of power in India in 1947 was much more orderly, the parting arrangements the British made were very unstable. They became one reason many hundred thousands of people were driven out of their homes and land and armed strife ensued.

Now the British are claiming that they can leave Basra with impunity because Iraqi forces are ready to take over security there...

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There’s a feminist saying that I occasionally see on bumper stickers or buttons: Feminism is the radical notion that women are people. Given the mainstream media response to Katha Pollitt’s new book, I think we may need a similar reminder of the radical notion that feminists are people.

It’s somewhat unbelievable that the fairly non-controversial exercise of writing about your personal life could make people so uncomfortable, not to mention disappointed. Without going into the anti-feminism that was brimming over in several of Pollitt’s reviews, it seemed that critics like Toni Bentley, who found Pollitt’s honest prose “shameless” and thought she was “giving up her dignity,” were more distressed over finding out that Pollitt was fallible (you know, like people tend to be) than anything else.

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This is Part I of a three part article. Parts II and III will appear here on successive Wednesdays (October 10 and 17).

I. Introduction: Reveille for Liberals

The Democrats smell blood. If one more Republican gets caught in a men’s room, the Grand Old Party might save its 2008 campaign funds for another year.

Not surprisingly, the bookstores are full of books about the Democrats. In the next six months, yet more liberal journalists are going to avow their liberal consciences and show how history is on their side. As others have said, neither tactics nor avowals are likely to revive political movements. Only philosophy – principles about what it means to be human and how people should live together – can ultimately do that.

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Norman Podhoretz, slogging deep into the big sandy of what he knows to be World War IV, recently took to the temperate op-ed page of the Wall Street Journal to warn against a liberal stab-in-the-back. So it goes. What got my special attention, though, is that he lifted a phrase out of a sentence of mine in order to smack down the entirety of the left; and, moreover, part of that sentence became the headline. Then the Journal's new op-ed editor rejected my response on the ground that it was "vicious and uncharitable."

Well! Imagine!

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Some readers may be interested in an interview about my new book with the knowledgeable Scott McLemee, to whom all praise for actually having read the book; and in Scott's own appraisal, both at Inside Higher Education.

Seymour Hersh's latest New Yorker article provides important new information on the state of Bush administration planning for possible military action against Iran.

The most important theme of the article, as evidenced in the title, "Shifting Targets," is the notion that the Bush crowd has given up on using the Iranian nuclear program as a rationale for war, and turned toward "marketing" military action on the argument that Iran is undermining U.S. efforts in Iraq and killing U.S. troops in the process. But even Hersh's grim assessment offers a few (admittedly small) bright spots for opponents of the war.

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The first thing I want to say about Katha's new book is that it's an absolute pleasure to read. I devoured it in about a night and a half. It is funny and smart and lyrical and profound and searingly, almost wince-inducingly, honest at points. It's that honesty that is the source, I think, of some readers' discomfort with portions of the book, particularly the first two chapters, which previously appeared in the New Yorker.

Katha says that she's surprised the book is controversial, and I am as well, but its central theme -- the way "personal and the political were opposing forces" in her life -- really gets at the central conundrum of living life as a feminist specifically, or a leftist in general. If you're a lefty (or. actually, a fundamentalist Christian), you live in a world guided by all sorts of hierarchies and regimes that you believe to be unjust, invidious and destructive. But unless you move to a commune, you still live in the world. You're subject to the same cultural messages about female beauty and masculine virility. You burn the same fossil fuel and are complicit in the same supply chain of global capitalism when you buy cheap goods.

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When I was in high school, we read about a once-widespread practice with the ungainly but memorable name of extraterritoriality, wherein, during the heyday of Western imperialism in Asia, powerhouse Europeans, Americans, and Japanese were beneficiaries of a special privilege: they were exempt from local law. Extraterritoriality caused huge resentment, especially in China, where it was imposed as a result of the Opium Wars.

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Clearly, the topic of Mexican immigration can move people to eloquence like almost nothing else.

You’ve made too many points (great ones) for me to deal with. So forgive me if I just talk about what I think is important in all this.

I’ll start with the houses, and what they say about the nature of Mexican immigration that I think is important to understand.

In Antonio’s Gun and Delfino’s Dream: True Tales of Mexican Migration, one of the stories I tell is about a man from the state of Zacatecas who built a house back home.

Zacatecas is a beautiful place in north-central Mexico. But if you want to understand the harmful effects of Mexican immigration, go there. ...

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In the last few weeks the Redskins added two wide receivers, and de facto deactivated Lloyd, for whom they paid $10 million. No one wants to be adding new receivers during the season, given that the quarterback has little or no time to get used to them.

This all shows bad personnel selection, coupled with poor decision-making during the pre-season. Of course, the team was also unable to make the necessary big move when it was possible: note that Randy Moss is starring in New England.

The Wapo in its usual manner can't get to the heart of the matter. It reports isolated issues, but won't give us the whole picture, because the powerful might be unhappy. The truth is that the owner is terrible, the front office is a mess, the president of the team makes bad personnel decisions and he is also the coach who can't call plays and make decisions quick enough for NFL time.

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The apologists for treason–you know, the guys and gals who excused the behavior of Scooter Libby in helping expose the identity of CIA officer, Valerie Plame Wilson–need wonder no longer about the true economic cost of the investigation. It turns out it is cheaper to commit treason than to get a blow job in the Oval Office. By a factor of almost 20. Here are the facts and linked references.

Patrick Fitzgerald investigation total expenses thru 31 March 2007 $2,396,283.00 .

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Today's New York Times had an article by Thom Shanker on the continuing role of the United States as the world's top weapons supplier. The article is based on an annual report by the Congressional Research Service that assesses global arms sales, with a special emphasis on exports to the Third World.

As usual, the normal reasons given by the Bush administration for serving as arms merchant to the world pale in comparison with the negative consequences of U.S. transfers.

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I wasn't surprised that the NYTBR looked for a reviewer for Learning To Drive who would squeal about how undignified it is for a feminist woman to tell a personal story about what seems to me, from reading the book, to be a sadly typical situation of a smart woman embroiled in a bad relationship with a man who has entitlement poisoning. Anti-feminist critics have always perceived that women sharing their stories and especially their anger with each other had the power to upset the system, and so they've always set out to shame women out of doing just that. The women's liberation movement that managed to enact so many powerful changes to society rose out of story-sharing---both the radicals with their consciousness raising groups and the liberals with The Feminine Mystique started off with simple stories about the miseries in women's lives from live in a male-dominated society and went on there to action. And even back then, when the power of consciousness raising was more immediate and evident, critics who wished to derail feminism dismissed it as nothing but a bitch session. Anti-feminist critics are irritating, but they wear their motivations on their sleeves. Bentley couldn't even resist taking digs at feminism with a look-at-me-boys-I-don't-demand-respect tone that marks the entire genre of "post-feminism".

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Over the next week I'll be elaborating on themes of my new book of non-fiction stories about Mexican immigrants to the United States.

The book is called Antonio's Gun and Delfino's Dream: True Tales of Mexican Migration. (www.samquinones.com)

The stories in it grew from 10 years (1994-2004) I spent covering Mexico, and especially immigration, as a freelance writer.

Mexican immigration to the US is one of the most important issues facing both countries. If you're American or Mexican, it will change your country for years to come.

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First of all, thank you so much TPMcafe book clubbers, for reading Learning to Drive. I'm grateful for the chance to have this conversation.

The response to my book has really surprised me, especially the extremely energetic negative piece by Toni Bentley in the New York Times Book Review. Perhaps that was naive of me -- after all, the NYTRB panned my last book too, and quite apart from San Tanenhaus' taste in books and politics, I am not so vain as to think that there are no two ways at looking at what I write. Still, it is a strange experience to be accused of telling too much by the author of an 'erotic memoir' about sadomasochistic anal sex, in which she describes, among many other graphic details, saving her used condoms in a box. I'm no Freudian, but the concept of projection does come to mind. It is a strange experience, too, to have an obvious joke (the infamous "men are rats") quoted as my actual opinion.

Most of all, though, it's a strange experience to be attacked in virulently misogynistic language by a woman. I'm used to 'shrill" and "rant" and other gender-coded terms -- in fact, these words are so often employed by reviewers to describe any vaguely discomfiting non-reader-flattering writing by a woman that whenever I see them I think, Oh here's a book that's probably pretty interesting! But "vagina dentata intellectualis"? That's low. If a male reviewer described a woman writer that way we'd never hear the end of it. Except that we'd probably never hear about it, period, because it would have been edited out.

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Welcome to TPMCafe's Book Club table. This week we're hosting a discussion of Katha Pollitt's new book, Learning to Drive and Other Life Stories.

In her book, which caused some consternation in last week's Times Book Review, Pollitt reflects on selected experiences of her life, and on the state and future of feminism. This week we will discuss the latter, and the implications of Pollitt's thoughts on the subject.

Joining Pollitt in the discussion will be Garance Franke-Ruta, Jessica Valenti, Amanda Marcotte, Chris Hayes, and Todd Gitlin.

Previous Book Club discussions have covered the work of 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, Chris Hayes, Josh Kurlantzick, Glenn Greenwald, Todd Gitlin, Jonathan Chait, Greg Anrig, Jr., and Matt Bai.

Welcome to Table for One, the guest-blogging section at TPMCafe.

This week we are joined by L.A. Times reporter Sam Quinones, who comes to discuss his book Antonio's Gun and Delfino's Dream: True Tales of Mexican Migration. Having spent a decade in Mexico working as a freelance journalist, Quinones uses the book to examine the circumstances, effects, and selected personalities of Mexican migration to the United States, "the largest movement of people from one country to another in our time."

See earlier Table for One guest-blogs:
Jeffrey Toobin, Ben Naimark-Rowse, Charlie Savage, Congressman Steve Kagen, Congressman Earl Blumenauer, Scott Winship, Robert Hormats, Bill McKibben, Rajiv Chandrasekaran, Sen. John Edwards, the ACLU's Anthony Romero, Rep. Bernie Sanders (I-VT), Andrew Rasiej, Gov. Tom Vilsack,Gen. Wesley Clark, Rep. Sherrod Brown (D-OH), and Sen. Russ Feingold.

George W. Bush, the guy who tricked the country into a never ending war in Iraq with stories about Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction and links to Osama Bin Laden is up to his old tricks again. He’s determined to do yet more damage with his famous “Bush stories” before he leaves town.

Bush is again declaring war on Social Security, claiming that the program is going bankrupt and will impose an unbearable burden on our children and grandchildren. In an apparent effort to lay the groundwork for a future president to privatize and/or cut the program, the Treasury Department is circulating a new set of Bush stories that are designed to convince the public that the Social Security program must be changed.

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for the United States to attack Iran on ground, sea, air as outlined by Sy Hersh, inter alia, is a very dangerous idea:
1. The attack would probably produce a crackdown on reform elements inside Iran. It is not likely to produce a better and more pro-Western ruling regime, which should be our primary goal.
2. Iran might launch a ground invasion of Iraq, which the United States could blunt but only with large loss of life for Americans and Iraqis, as well of course as for Iranians. The United States does not have enough troops to mount a ground attack in Iran and occupy the country.
3. The economic impact on the United States could be dire; if Iranian oil were taken off the market the Saudis and Gulf States could not replace it in the long term.

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