In my hats both at The Washington Note and TPM Cafe, I am sponsoring a Washington, DC preview screening of Alex Gibney's powerful new film, Taxi to the Dark Side.

The film already has a Gotham Award Nomination as best documentary and won the Best Documentary Prize at the Chicago Film Festival, the Newport International Film Festival, and the Tribeca Film Festival.

I've seen it -- and it's a devastating chronicle of the Bush administration's Darkness at Noon-style kidnapping, detainment, and torture practices that have been less part of a so-called 'war on terror' than a 'war on America's own democratic principles.'

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Ehud Olmert can no longer be dismissed as “His Accidency,” a small-time politician who achieved the top job only because his larger-than-life predecessor was struck down. At Annapolis, Olmert looked every inch the prime minister of his country, successor to David Ben-Gurion and Yitzhak Rabin.

I think Olmert’s transformation began when he decided that his goal as prime minister was not merely to stay in office (in itself no easy task) but to actually try to end the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Like Rabin, he seems less interested in playing “gotcha” with the Palestinians than in reaching an accommodation with them.

Who can say how long this will last?

Already, some Israelis are saying that Israel need not fulfill its obligations under phase 1 of the Roadmap until the Palestinians have fulfilled theirs. If Israel sticks to that interpretation, the process will be stillborn. In fact, the genius of the Roadmap is that it requires Israel and the Palestinians to act simultaneously. It does not permit either side to duck its commitments by saying the other guy has to go first. The timing of the Roadmap is parallel, not sequential, and that is the only way it can succeed. Olmert surely knows that.

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A common strategy is to blame foreigners when a war is going badly. This has certainly been the case in Iraq. It is convenient to blame foreigner fighters to delegitimize the opposition and to spin a fiction that we are fighting the same guys who attacked us on 9/11. If not for those pesky foreigners streaming into Iraq to cause trouble, the natives would be greeting Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney with flowers. Yet military officials say that only 1.2 percent of the 25,000 inmates in American custody in Iraq are foreign, according to Richard A. Oppel of The New York Times. Even a 2006 State Department report acknowledges that more than 90 percent of the insurgency in Iraq is from domestic sources.

So, the overwhelming majority of insurgents in Iraq are Iraqis. This fact should be borne in mind even though I will analyze the national origins of foreign insurgents in Iraq in this post, my last one.

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Eric Schlosser, author of Fast Food Nation, has a fantastic op-ed in the NY Times describing how one of America's biggest corporations and wealthiest investment banks are pinching pennies in compensating the labor of this country's most poorly treated workers.  Migrant farm workers in Florida, who harvest tomatoes for our country's hamburgers, tacos and salads, work "10 to 12 hours a day, [picking] tomatoes by hand, earning a piece-rate of about 45 cents for every 32-pound bucket."  Last spring, McDonald's agreed to pay these farmers an extra cent (US $0.01) for each pound of tomatoes they harvested.  Burger King (of which Goldman Sachs owns a large portion) was asked to do the same; read how they responded.

I don't think bankruptcy is a sexy political issue. Don't get me wrong: I think bankruptcy policy is critically important to working families. In a world with inadequate health insurance, job insecurity, predatory lenders, family break ups and plain old financial mistakes, bankruptcy can be a family's last chance to get back into the economic mainstream. But no one sees bankruptcy in their future, and those who have been through it want to forget, so there is no special interest group for the protection of bankruptcy laws.

Enter Chris Dodd. He released a major policy statement entirely about bankruptcy. He has good, strong suggestions that revolve around a single theme: Bankruptcy is a critical safety net for families that he promises to strengthen.

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For years, credit cards have rated consumers based on their credit histories.  Senator Ron Wyden is trying to turn the tables: this week, he said he plans to introduce legislation that would direct the Federal Reserve to start rating credit cards based on the riskiness of their terms.

Given the increasingly well-documented excesses of the industry (I posted about a revealing new report by the National Consumer Law Center a few weeks back), this could be a positive development for consumers.  The terms and conditions for cards have become so complicated that it seems like common sense to make it easier for consumers to know what they're getting into.  Unsurprisingly, though, the Banking Association has called this step "premature" and seems to prefer waiting for another credit meltdown before it starts taking corrective actions.

The last chapter of my book, What Makes a Terrorist, considers the economic, psychological and political consequences of terrorism. The chapter concludes that the economic impact of terrorism – at least insofar as terrorism with conventional weapons is concerned – is likely to be small if people and policymakers do not over react. I reach this conclusion by noting that even horrific attacks like those on 9/11 destroy a relatively small share of the nation’s stock of physical and human capital.

I’ve noticed something interesting from talking about this subject at bookstores, alumni meetings, think tanks and other venues. Wealthy people are more likely to argue that terrorism is a major threat to the economy and our way of life. Even pointing out that major earthquakes usually have a small effect on the economy in the long run does not persuade them.

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I've been out of town and not spending my usual massive amounts of internet time. So I really don't know if the Democratic candidates for President have spoken out in support of the negotiating process that was kicked off at Oslo.

I do know that the subject of Israel-Palestine never comes up in debates, as if the moderators don't want to waste time listening to the candidates, one after another, express undying devotion to the status quo (and then maybe bash Walt-Mearsheimer and Jimmy Carter for good measure).

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While there have been fifteen U.S. Senators in American history who became President, only Warren Harding and John F. Kennedy went directly to the White House from the Senate.

Americans seem to want to see some kind of executive/management ability in their president typically, and thus all politics and political affiliations aside, candidates like Mike Huckabee, Mitt Romney, Bill Richardson, and Rudy Giuliani have something in their portfolio a bit different than those who vote but don't get the frills and problems of the buck stopping with them -- like Hillary Rodham Clinton, John Edwards, Barack Obama, John McCain, Joe Biden, Chris Dodd, Dennis Kucinich, Fred Thompson, and Ron Paul.

But for those who were governors or generals, the spotlight will then go to how did they actually perform as chief executives, and were there any shenanigans that raise serious doubts about competence, self-dealing, or blurry ambiguities that simply ought not to be there.

Ben Smith and Politico have discovered under a Freedom of Information Act inquiry some material exposing Rudy Giuliani's bureaucratic technique of hiding and/or billing travel and security expenses incurred during a marital affair within what appear to be inappropriate agencies in New York.

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Subprime loans are often justified on the grounds that some borrowers will never qualify for a prime loan, and a risky subprime loan is their only chance.  Therefore the industry is increasing total home ownership rates, despite the sad foreclosure stories we so often read. Not so, says the Center for Responsible Lending. Their recently released study found that subprime lending caused a net loss of home ownership. 

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The cover article in the New York Times’ Sunday Magazine on November 25th was a long, meandering and sometimes insightful piece by Andrea Elliott that probes the causes of terrorism. (The article is available here) Elliott explored the sources of terrorism by closely examining the lives of several terrorists who grew up in a neighborhood of the Moroccan city of Tetouan known as Jamaa Mezuak. She laboriously chronicles the key players’ descent into terrorism and tries to draw some general lessons from their life histories.

Elliott’s theme is that experts – although she only cites two – are increasingly turning to peer pressure and group dynamics as a cause of terrorism. The article raises some deep issues about the meaning of “causality” and provides some tantalizing facts about the origins of the Madrid.

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The news out of Annapolis is mixed. The optics were certainly all there: a joint statement, uplifting speeches, impressive attendees list and presidential commitment. Of course, the statement lacked substance, but really, it was the statement's existence, not substance, that was important. Failure to produce a joint statement, even one so bereft of content, would have been an inauspicious beginning.

When listening to the speech of President Bush versus that of both Olmert and Abbas, one cannot help but be struck by how jarring, divisive and dangerous Bush continues to be, with his Star-Wars-esque narrative of good versus evil -

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My role on the New School Panel was to provide a salutary reality check on the hitherto uniformly idealistic feminist discourse on women caught in the work/family vise.

If any of you had the sitzfleisch to watch the video you see me frantically pointing at my computer as Heather Boushey, author of “The Opt Out Revolution is a Myth” said aloud that the thirty year long trend of women increasing their work place participation had come to an end.

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In an address delivered yesterday at Kansas State University, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates took the unusual step of advocating major increases in non-military tools of national power, from diplomacy to development assistance.

As noted in an article in the Los Angeles Times, Gates graphically underscored the relative resources involved, noting that the State Department's current roster of 6,600 foreign service officers is "less than the manning for one aircraft carrier strike group."

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A good number of posts raised the question of how terrorism should be defined. This is, of course, an essential issue for any serious discussion of terrorism. Terrorism is a provocative term. As I note in my book, if I were to start again I would avoid using the word terrorism because it is vague and means different things to different people. The definition of terrorism that I have in mind is “premeditated, politically motivated violence intended to influence some audience.” Although terrorism can, and has, been perpetrated by nation states, I focus on terrorism perpetrated by substate actors. The reason is that the nature and determinants of state terrorism are likely very different.

Terrorism is a tactic. The goal of that tactic is not to capture and hold territory, or to kill specific individuals, but to intimidate an audience that goes beyond the immediate victims of the terrorist attack.

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This tidbit just appeared in Robin Wright's recent reporting on the Annapolis Summit in an article titled "Iran: The Uninvited Wildcard in Mideast Talks":

Iran will still have leverage in the event of peace, Arab officials concede. Saudi Foreign Minister Saud al-Faisal said yesterday that any peace agreement would eventually have to include Hamas, since it controls Gaza and half the Palestinian Authority. Moreover, the two major Palestinian parties -- Hamas and Fatah, which controls the West Bank -- would need to join a national unity government, he said.

An agreement signed by Israeli and Palestinian leaders would need ratification by their respective parliaments, and Hamas still controls the Palestinian parliament.

"Unless you bring Hamas in tune with what is happening on the peace side, you are really not fulfilling a basic requirement," Faisal said. "One man cannot make peace; not even half a people can make peace," he told a roundtable of U.S. journalists. "There has to be consensus about peace among the Palestinians for this to go smoothly."

I just thought it worth noting that people ranging from former Secretary of State Colin Powell to former New Jersey Governor and Bush administration cabinet member Christine Todd Whitman (who headed the National Democratic Institute election monitoring mission of the 2005 Palestinian elections) to former US Army Chief of Staff Eric Shinseki to former National Security Advisors Zbigniew Brzezinski and Brent Scowcroft to former Senators Nancy Kassebaum Baker, Gary Hart, Lincoln Chafee, Larry Pressler, Birch Bayh and many others from both sides of the aisle agree with the Saudi Foreign Minister.

-- Steve Clemons publishes the popular political blog, The Washington Note

Adding troops to our forces in Iraq has been so successful that now we need to stay in Iraq forever.

Do I have that right?

We can see how truly knotted is the rope the next President has to untie.

My role on EJ Graff's New School panel (http://www.tpmcafe.com/blog/coffeehouse/2007/nov/26/working_mothers_whos_opting_out) was to talk about activism, about solutions, something I’ve spent my adult life working on. But first we have to frame the problem – because if we don’t define it correctly, we can never solve it.

Consider the frame of the Big Boys – the small number of people who control power and wealth in this country. They say women can do anything.! Look at Nancy Pelosi, Hillary, Condi, Katie! If there aren’t many women in the best jobs, it’s because they choose not to be there – they opt out to be with their kids. And that’s okay, because motherhood is the most important job – unless you happen to live in poverty, in which case choosing to be home with your kids means you’re lazy, dependent, and a bad role model. You’d better get a job, who cares where or what hours, and if you never see your kids or they’re home alone, well, at least they have their pride. If women find themselves angry about their situation, whatever it is, who should they be mad at? – why each other, of course. Let’s have mommy wars! Blame another group of women! And of course, blame the feminists.

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Economist Robert Schiller began his work in the New York Times Sunday morning with a chilling line: "We have to consider the possibility that the housing price downturn will eventually be as big as that of the last truly big decline, from 1925 to 1933, when prices fell by a total of 30 percent." He then documents the big ideas to stablize the American family that came out of the Great Depression--FHA, expanded bankruptcy protection, FDIC insurance. Seventy years later, the main response to the housing meltdown has been a proposal for a super-SIV to keep money flowing to the banks that have sunk themselves in bad real estate mortgages.

Schiller advances some bold ideas (including my push for a Financial Product Safety Commission--thanks, Bob), but the "why" question lingers: Why are there so few big ideas for domestic economic change? With flat wages and the family debt load growing daily, with foreclosure estimates now moving toward three million, with half of all families worried that they couldn't manage the financial fallout from an illness or accident, with students loading on tens of thousands of dollars of debt just to complete their educations and begin their lives, and with Americans worried that they will outlive their retirement money, why are we thinking small?

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Weeks ago, I promised to launch a follow-up discussion, here at the Coffee House, growing from a New School panel about the “opt-out” debate: are mothers dropping out, or being pushed out, of the workforce? What are the labor statistics for moms as a whole? What are the trends among the more privileged women? Ours was an all-star panel—including Heather Boushey, Ellen Bravo, Linda Hirshman, Joan Williams, and a brilliant volunteer in the audience, Pamela Stone, each of whom has researched and written a great deal about working families. We had been talking 'at' each other in print and in pixels for quite awhile (and after the jump, I will give a brief outline of our previous main points.) But this was our first time discussing these issues *with* each other, in person. And with the help of the audience’s questions, we did indeed come to some new thoughts—both agreements and disagreements—about the questions at hand.

Here’s the full video of our panel. If I can figure out how to use video editing software, I will try to post key snippets later this week.

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Today, the Wall Street Journal leads with a story headlined “Citigroup Feels Heat to Modify Mortgages” about how influential non-profits are “racheting up pressure” on lenders such as Citigroup to offer homeowners more affordable terms on their existing loans. These groups should be encouraged to keep up their great work, and servicers such as Citigroup should acknowledge their responsibility for the current crisis and act quickly to modify their sub-prime adjustable rate loans.

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

This week we are joined by Professor Alan Krueger, a professor of Economics and Public Policy at Princeton and an adviser to the National Counter-terrorism Center. He is also the author of several books, most recently, What Makes a Terrorist: Economics and the Roots of Terrorism.

See earlier Table for One guest-blogs:
Jacob Soboroff, Sam Quinones, 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.

The question of “What makes a terrorist” comes up again and again. Indeed, the New York Times raised it again yesterday in its 11,000 word cover story the Magazine Section. We’ll get to the Times’ piece later in the week, as well as to their earlier front-page article on the origins of foreign insurgents in Iraq. For now, however, I want to introduce the main themes of my book, conveniently titled, “What Makes a Terrorist”.

Notice that my title is not followed by a question mark. That bit of bravado was suggested by an editor. I don’t wish to suggest that I have all of the answers, though. In fact, I know I don’t. But I have been able to rule out many of the “usual suspects”, such as poverty and inadequate education, which pundits and politicians often point to as root causes of terrorism.

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As the economy gets more productive and the nation gets richer we should expect that jobs get better through time, right? Well that’s not the way the economy works anymore, and it’s especially not the way that it has been working the current business cycle. 

My colleague at the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR), John Schmitt, examined the movement in the share of “good jobs” in the economy during the current business cycle. He found that the share of good jobs in the economy was actually 2.3 percentage points lower in 2006 than it was in 2000, the peak of the last business cycle.

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A recent Bloomberg News story highlights a moment in a video for the movie ``American Gangster,'' where hip-hop maestro Jay-Z thumbs through a wad of 500-euro notes on a night of cruising the concrete canyons of New York City. Of course he can’t spend Euros in Manhattan, but the scene says something about the value of today’s greenback.

The Bloomberg piece on the dollar's decline begins by reminding us just how cavalier the U.S. was in 1971 when President Richard Nixon, in a stopgap move to cope with the inflationary financing of the Vietnam War, announced that the dollar would no longer be backed by gold: ``It may be our currency, but it's your problem'' was Treasury Secretary John Connally's taunt when the U.S. unhooked the dollar from the gold standard in 1971, unilaterally rewriting the rules of world business in America's favor.

Now Bloomberg notes, “the world is taunting back. Almost four decades after the U.S. tore up the monetary arrangements that governed the post-World War II international economy, the dollar's fall from grace amounts to a tectonic shift in the global hierarchy. This time, the U.S. currency is on the losing side.

 “After declining in five of the last six years, the weakest dollar in the era of floating currencies reflects a period of diminished U.S. political and economic hegemony. Whoever wins the White House next year will confront two unpopular choices: Accept the fall in U.S. clout and the rise of new rivals, or rein in record public and consumer debt that the rest of the world no longer wants to bankroll.”

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A lawsuit filed in federal court in San Francisco has successfully thwarted implementation of a poorly conceived rule issued by the Department of Homeland Security this past August (see Businessweek article).  The rule, part of the Bush war on illegal immigration, would have forced employers to fire workers within 90 days if their Social Security information could not be verified or face potential prosecution for knowingly hiring illegal immigrants.  This marks a victory for all workers: documented and undocumented, unionized and not.

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In the face of polls and horse-race maneuvering, we can try to keep from getting sucked in by it all. We should examine a candidate’s public record and full life as opposed to his or her campaign performance.

This stunningly banal declaration occurs in (a) a fifth-grade civics lesson (if there are any such anymore), (b) the confession of a minor pundit in a minor banana republic, (c) a still-clueless-after-all-these-years mea culpa by one of the most influential journohonchos of recent years, just published on the op-ed page of the NYT.

The answer, of course, is (c). The author of this little masterpiece of the elementary is Mark Halperin, now an eminence at Time, formerly guru of ABC's self-congratulatory "The Note."

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