Thanks to Matt Bunn for keeping the dialogue on Michael's book moving forward. It's hard to know what to add, as Matt's bottom line makes eminent sense -- nuclear terrorism is a real threat, and we need to act urgently to address it. And I also agree with Matt that the vast bulk of our efforts should focus on preventing terrorist groups from getting bomb-making materials in the first place.

But I would still like to add a few points. First, I'm not sure, as Michael suggests, that successful terrorist organizations are "averse to failure," and that this may reduce their incentives to seek and try to use a nuclear weapon. On the recruiting front, the very audacity of such an effort might appeal to a certain sort of potential terrorist, whether or not it works on the first attempt (assuming, as Matt does, that there will be more than one).

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Phil Weiss is a terrific writer who, only recently, began dealing with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. A 49 year old Jewish Harvard graduate, Weiss is not a Zionist and never has been.

But he's a Jew and a proud one (in a non-chauvinist way). He cares about Israel and he cares about Palestine but, mostly, I think, he is cares that a several thousand year tradition of Jewish enlightenment and humanity not be replaced by the kind of ugly neocon chauvinism that has a strong hold in certain parts of the community.

I am a Zionist (more or less) and Phil is not (less and more) but we agree on the central issue that divides Israelis and Palestinians: sharing the land and establishing security and justice for both peoples.

I read him religiously (the only thing I do religiously other than lighting candles and saying kiddush on Friday nights) and, to be honest, we are part of a mutual admiration society. He is a brave and intelligent man.

Read his heartening report about Monday's Israel Policy Forum event (IPF is my employer), see it through his eyes, and know that it's getting better all the time.

ALSO READ THIS SICKENING REPORT FROM SATURDAY'S NEW YORK TIMES ON WHAT PALESTINIANS ENDURE AT THE HANDS OF THE SETTLERS.  

I've been struggling to understand the real point of the Administration's headline-grabbing plan to deal with subprime mortgages. Now that I've read the plan (thanks to Bob Lawless at Creditslips), it seems to be nothing more than a guideline for when some lenders or servicers might let some borrowers extend lower interest payments for a while before the interest jumps up later. The loan on the house stays the same, even the family owes much more than the house is now worth--a circumstance that will cut off any refinancing option and any real resolution of the problem. The plan doesn't require any new laws or government intervention because no one is bound to anything. I can't quite figure out what the plan accomplishes that the lenders couldn't do without the plan--if they were in a mood to deal fairly with borrowers, acknowledge their losses, and start cleaning up the mess before it takes down the whole economy.

So why trumpet a plan that doesn't do anything? CongressDaily (no link) found the answer: "'Totally will sandbag the bankruptcy stuff,' one lobbyist said of the White House announcement." That's what the plan is designed to accomplish--kill off the bankruptcy proposal to deal with home mortgages.

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Blatant fabrication in Middle East reporting by two outlets that take themselves very seriously – The New Republic Online (TNR) and the National Review Online (NRO) – has the blogosphere buzzing. The story went mainstream when the New York Times ran a piece relating how NRO, after months of sniping at TNR for carrying ‘Baghdad Diarist” reports of US military misbehavior in Iraq that proved to be false, was itself found out. But in this story there are only villains- neither TNR nor NRO can be trusted on the Middle East – and it goes way beyond the particular stories in question.

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The error of the pro-mandate faction of the Democratic Party (no Republican candidates are in favor of universal anything in the health sector, except universally disappointing experiences, even for the rich) is this: they see the future and know exactly what regulations must be passed, how they will affect behavior, and what outcomes will result.

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Looks like the cat is out of the bag and the “new family jewels” were destroyed. What am I talking about? Today’s revelation in the NY Times that, “the Central Intelligence Agency in 2005 destroyed at least two videotapes documenting the interrogation of two Qaeda operatives in the agency’s custody, a step it took in the midst of Congressional and legal scrutiny about its secret detention program, according to current and former government officials.”

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Ultimately, the differences Mike and I have been expressing are less important than the points where we agree. Fundamentally, we agree that nuclear terrorism is a real threat; that urgent steps are needed to reduce that threat; that improving currently inadequate security arrangements for nuclear weapons and materials around the world is the foundation of any sensible program to reduce the risk; and that there are also a wide range of other steps that should be taken to reduce the risk, which should be considered in the context of a total system.

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It was nice of Mitt Romney to time his speech with our blog discussions this week. I won’t add to the analysis of his speech, except to say …

We pay elected official to understand complex matters and make important decisions, and these decisions are formed in the context of the reason and values of the official. The elected official’s reason and values, in turn, are formed, trained, and resourced – often unconsciously - by the “framing story” in which he or she lives. (“Framing story” is a term I explain in some detail in Everything Must Change) We receive our framing story unconsciously as children, learning it as we learn our native tongue, from our parents, our culture, our religion or philosophy, even our playmates. As we grow, many of us question it, deconstruct it, and adapt and reconstruct it again and again.

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Matt makes an important observation:

“In judgments about how much effort to put into securing nuclear stockpiles around the world, I repeatedly see gross underestimation, not overestimation, of likely terrorist capabilities.”

This is a fair description of how people in many countries see the threat, and it is a real impediment to progress on securing weapons and materials. But we typically have the opposite problem in the United States.

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New York Times Book Review editor Sam Tanenhaus put his finger on American conservatism’s original sin inadvertently last month at the American Enterprise Institute. He noted that while conservatives once chafed under the soulless leftist managerialism of the New Deal, they let ex-leftist conservative guides such as James Burnham and Irving Kristol lead them on a long march through the institutions they despised to build a managerial class of their own.

In Tanenhaus’ telling, Kristol showed conservative business and political leaders that New Deal managerialism had bred a liberal “new class” of academic, think-tank, and media experts who trafficked in words more than in deeds or missions accomplished. He counseled conservatives to outdo liberals at this game in order to rescue liberal education and liberal democracy for the kind of capitalism and politics conservatives can profit from and enjoy. They might even restore virtue that way to Progressives’ necessary reforms and secure the enlightened “national greatness” conservatism of British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli, whose American admirers would soon include Kristol’s son Bill, David Brooks, and Tanenhaus himself.

Kristol’s auditors took his advice seriously, turning American conservatism’s deepest contradiction -- its inability to reconcile its yearning for ordered liberty with its obeisance to every whim of capital -- into a tragic flaw that is poisoning our election campaigns.

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I largely agree with Mike’s assessment of what we should take away from the NIE. One might argue that for a weapon delivered by aircraft, a design that didn’t require symmetrical explosives and precise electronics would suffice. But if you wanted to put the bomb on top of a missile, yes, you’d need that even for a uranium-based bomb.

I should emphasize, though, that a terrorist group would not need to meet the same technical demands, especially if it used uranium in its weapon. (And it would not use a missile for delivery.) Too many people confuse the two and end up overestimating the demands on a terrorist group.

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The short answer is: it depends on what you think. The long answer is, well, a bit longer. 

Matt makes a strong case for emphasizing the centrality of security for nuclear weapons and materials to any defense against nuclear terrorism – and it would be fair to say that he’s contributed more than anyone else to creating the intellectual foundations for getting that right. His argument backs up Bill’s assertion that the bulk of our money should be invested there.

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Two points that Mike emphasizes in his book struck me as especially surprising. First, he emphasizes again and again that we need to look not only at “worst case scenarios” and “ten-foot-tall terrorists” but at a full spectrum of more realistic scenarios. Second, as he puts it in his first post: “Here is how the process usually goes: someone proposes a defense; someone else points out a way that a terrorist group can get around it; everyone goes back to square one. (I exaggerate a bit, but it's close.)” I see the opposite of each of these phenomena as much bigger problems for the world’s response to the risk of nuclear terrorism.

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Mike’s book is a major contribution to the literature on nuclear terrorism. It provides the first really careful, step-by-step, unclassified look at the difficulties terrorists would have to surmount to launch a nuclear attack that is from a point of view somewhat skeptical of the threat. (Many other skeptical accounts have been simply wrong on key points, such as John Mueller’s recent account in The National Interest, Robin Frost’s Adelphi Paper, or William Arkin’s piece in The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists; I briefly take on the myths of the risk-deniers in this area on pp. 23-24 of Securing the Bomb 2007, and at greater length in the 2004 edition.) Moreover, Mike’s book provides a useful system-level overview of steps that could be taken to reduce the risk.

I remain unpersuaded, however, either that the difficulties facing terrorists are as great and as difficult to surmount as Mike suggests, or that the lines of defense coming after terrorists have gotten the nuclear material for their bomb have as much to offer as Mike hopes. The balance of evidence, in my judgment, justifies far greater pessimism on both these counts.

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Levi's book is especially timely this week in regard to the revised NIE on Iran. And as I interpret his work, it leads to a nuanced and mixed interpretation of the NIE. On the one hand, as George Bush and John Bolton rightly point out, enriching uranium (or making and separating plutonium) is the hardest part of building a bomb, and Iran hasn't stopped its efforts on the HEU front. On the other hand, building a high-quality, modest-weight, high-reliability nuclear bomb isn't trivial even once you have the fissile material. You need good machining, symmetrical explosives and precise electronics, neutron generators, neutron reflectors, etc. So this week's news is good; it does show at least a partial slowdown of Iran's program, even if hardly a "halt" to it.

Greetings, everyone – it’s been a real pleasure to be part of the conversation around “the table” so far this week. This is one of the two best online dialogues I’ve been part of … quality of responses, diversity of opinion, etc. I thought I’d mention that I’ll be leading an “Everything Must Change” tour in eleven cities around the US in early 2008. If anyone is interested, you can get information at deepshift.org.

Early drafts of my most recent book, Everything Must Change: Jesus, Global Crises, and a Revolution of Hope, originally included this appendix. Later, for a variety of reasons, I decided to drop it from the book and offer it online for a broader audience (at brianmclaren.net). It’s the imaginary transcript of a speech that President Bush could have given after September 11, 2001. Perhaps it will offer readers of this blog a venue for reflecting on more positive ways that faith can engage with public life

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Good news.

Some of the more conservative American Jewish institutions are coming around to acceptance of the two-state solution, ending the occupation, and sharing Jerusalem.

It’s about time. The overwhelming majority of Israelis and Jewish Americans favor those positions and, eventually, the more status quo-oriented organizations have to catch up – especially now that the Israeli government asserts that it finally has a genuine Palestinian partner.

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Later today George Bush will announce his administration's plan to deal with the subprime meltdown. Instead of a change in the law, this is a voluntary deal negotiated with some large mortgage lenders and mortgage servicers. If it works, it's a slick deal for the lenders. But it may be too small to do any good. The plan has two features that shape the whole deal:

1) The lenders decide who gets the benefits and who doesn't. This seems to be the Goldilocks Game. If the borrower is too cold (not credit worthy even for the teaser rate), no deal. If the borrower is too hot (could pay on the reset), no deal. Only borrowers who are just right (can pay currently, but can't pay more) will get the deal. And the mortgage servicer decides who gets to be Goldilocks.

2) No permanent solution. People will have up to five years at teaser rates and then they are on their own. The only way this doesn't recreate the mortgage crisis down the line is if families can figure out on their own how to refinance into sustaintable (usually fixed) mortgages. Refinancing means more people heading to mortgage brokers and more fees, etc.

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In case you needed convincing: The excellent Monkey Cage blog has a bunch of links to poli sci papers demonstrating, with the hardest of data, that voter identification laws depress the turnout of minority voters.

Bill Hartung raises a number of important questions. Let me address the first in this post and tackle the others later.

I don’t doubt that there are folks out there who would love to pull off a nuclear attack. And I don’t suspect that many of them would be deterred by the possibility of retaliation. But punishment after a successful attack is different from failure to pull off the attack in the first place, and it’s the second possibility that many of the most ambitious groups fear.

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Today in the Washington Times, I apply some of the ideas in On Nuclear Terrorism to the problem of nuclear smuggling. Drawing from the arrest last week of three people who were trying to sell uranium powder, I argue that bread and butter law enforcement and intelligence, rather than fancy technology, should be central to our nuclear “detection” efforts.

I’ll post soon in response to Bill’s thoughtful points.

My apologies for not weighing in sooner on Michael Levi's extremely useful new book. I have long felt that overly pessimistic views on our ability to prevent acts of nuclear terrorism have gotten in the way of more sensible policies, not only on this issue but on broader foreign policy objectives.

Nonetheless, in the spirit of debate and discussion, I want to raise a few questions that we might discuss further this week.

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Yesterday, representatives from five of the nation’s biggest credit card companies found themselves forced to explain one of their most confusing, egregious and potentially catastrophe-producing practices. Led by Senator Carl Levin (D-Mich.), the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Sub-Committee held hearings as a part of its investigation into how credit card companies use falling credit scores to raise interest rates significantly, without adequate warning or clear notice, even on customers who have consistently pay on time for years. Worst of all, credit card companies retroactively apply this higher interest rate to previously accumulated debt.

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I’d like to reflect a bit on faith in the public square. There are, I think, some problems to be faced on both the religious and the secular sides.

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(Hat tip to Bill Hartung for beating this dog first, but it is a ripe and juicy target.)

“How can you trust the intelligence community to get it right on Iran? They got Iraq wrong in 2002 and now this?” The “this” is the NIE on Iran and its search for nukes.

That in a nutshell is one of the prevalent reactions of neocons and Bush true believers. But wait, there is more. John Bolton told Wolf Blitzer that the NIE was the handiwork of exiled State Department officials hell bent on undermining Bush and this country.

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"[British Foreign Secretary David]Miliband argued that the EU could never rival the economic or military clout of the U.S., China or India in the decades ahead because the club "is never going to have the fleetness of foot or the fiscal base to dominate."

"In fact economically and demographically Europe will be less important in the world of 2050 than it was in the world of 1950," Miliband said.

*****

These quotes from the recently minted British Foreign Secretary reminded me of a dinner I attended with David Miliband in about 2003. I was then in despair over his leader, Blair, and found myself the odd man out in a discussion about the Britain's relationship with the United States and with Europe. I couldn't see the merit of London's ties to Washington, nor did it make sense to me that Brussels was any better as a senior partner.

Miliband kept his mouth shut about Iraq, and I suppose is Foreign Minister now for just that reason. His new leader Brown has been,however, timid enough on Iraq and Iran to put his own position at risk, but Labor at least can say it's stayed in power.

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It’s time to get real about “free trade.” There are no advocates of free trade in high political office or on the nation’s editorial boards. The so-called “free traders” just want to free up trade in the goods and services produced by less-educated (non-college educated) workers.

By opening up large segments of the economy to competition with goods and services produced by low-paid workers in the developing world, they can put downward pressure on the wages of the 70 percent of the workforce that lacks college degrees. For those who work in the protected sectors, this upward redistribution is just great. Cheap manufactured goods, restaurant meals, gardeners and nannies mean that the paychecks of doctors, lawyers and investment bankers go much further.

High-paid workers have been the big gainers from trade, not shareholders.

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A lot of niceties are currently in dispute among Democratic candidates, for example on the question of whether health insurance should be mandated. In the meantime, Republicans are off the hook on matters that are surely of interest to voters. One example: the disappeared issue of contraception.

Consider this: "I fought to define life as beginning at conception rather than at the time of implantation." Thus Mitt Romney on a subject so banal and so revealing, so stunningly revealing, as to have eluded the attention of all the blowhard superintendents of debate at all the Republican encounters so far.

Isn't it past time that not only Romney but the current darling of authenticity, Mike Huckabee, be asked whether they think contraception ought to be curtailed?

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I just received the news that, according to the CCMC PUSH Journal, "new ballot measures proposed in Colorado, Michigan, Mississippi and Montana would provide a fertilized human egg with full constitutional rights and protections under the law. The measure needs 76,000 signatures to make it to the Colorado ballot. Success would ignite a full-fledged debate on abortion just in time for the Democratic National Convention in Denver next October." The LA Times and The New York Times have more on this.

So much for your IUD, birth control pills, and IVF treatments. So much for help for an ectopic pregnancy, as Echidne points out. Feministing's entry on this has some fabulous comments, such as, "Does my fertilized egg need a passport to travel out of the country?" and "Wait, I could score big with this one. Does this mean that my husband and I will get TAX DEDUCTIONS for all the fertilized eggs we created whilst doing IVF?"

Seriously, folks, has the nation gone mad?

John Edwards' declaration that under his health reform proposal anyone who refuses to sign up for health insurance will be subject to having their wages garnished has led to a blogstorm of often confusing debates.  Under national health reform, should everyone be required to enroll? The Edwards and Clinton plans have mandates insisting that all Americans purchase insurance; the Obama plan has a mandate for children, but not for adults.

New York Times columnist Paul Krugman stirred controversy Friday by defending Edwards, and criticizing Barack Obama: “Under Obama’s health care plan, healthy people could choose not to buy insurance—then sign up for it if they developed health problems later,” Krugman observed. “As a result, people who did the right thing and bought insurance when they were healthy would end up subsidizing those who didn’t sign up for insurance until or unless they needed medical care.”

On Sunday former FCC Commissioner Reed Hundt called Krugman out  here on TPM Cafe in a post headlined “Ease up, Dr. Krugman.” According to Hundt: “The very idea of government mandates directed to individuals evokes a command-and-control model that disturbs citizens who want to enjoy certain freedoms in choosing health care.”  His post (below) is drawing many comments--some on point, some muddying the waters.

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The new National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on Iran reinforces what many of us have been saying for a while: that while Iran is seeking to master nuclear enrichment, it is not racing to get the bomb. The findings of the NIE should create a larger opening for negotiations to cap Tehran's enrichment program as part of a bargain involving other political and economic incentives.

Not only did they change their assessment, but the 16 intelligence agencies involved in the NIE had the decency to admit they had made a mistake. Not so for members of the "get Iran" crowd like Michael Ledeen and John Bolton, who have reacted to the new findings with a combination of denial and outright fantasy.

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I’ll let you in on a secret (not really that big a surprise to most, I imagine): a lot of us who are known as “religious leaders” are even more skeptical about religious enterprises and their pathologies than are those who consider themselves irreligious. A surprisingly large number of us would agree, for example, with the respondent yesterday who said,

There's a systemic problem with Christianity -- and other religions -- that yields it vulnerable to "injustice, greed, war-mongering, environmental plundering, vilification, cold-heartedness, racism, bigotry, violence, torture, and fear.”

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There’s a lot of talk nearly everywhere these days about the dangers of radical Islam. In some settings, people express similar concerns about Christianity, especially the dangers of a right-wing theocracy here in America. Whether the warnings come from “the new atheists” like Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens or from secular-political voices on the left, the prospective villains are usually described as the Religious Right, Evangelicals, Christian Fundamentalists, and so on.

But largely under the radar, there’s something else going on in the Christian community in the US and world-wide, and it’s a change worth knowing about. Many of us who are involved with this emergence of a new thing would describe it as a deep shift (don’t forget the “f”), even a kind of repentance. Growing numbers of us Christians are ashamed of the ways that we Christians have behaved in recent decades – from Evangelicals backing unjust and unwise wars to Catholics covering up priestly abuse, from Prosperity Gospel televangelists getting rich by ripping off the poor to institutional religious bureaucracies fiddling around in carpet-color-committee meetings while the world is burning, or at least warming dangerously.

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

This week we are joined by Brian McLaren, founding pastor of Cedar Ridge Community Church, author of many books, and one of Time magazine's "25 Most Influential Evangelicals in America." He's here this week to discuss with us evangelism and what he calls a new kind of Christian.

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.

Bolstering the Center for Responsible Lending's assertion that some borrowers who could have obtained prime loans received subprime loans instead, the Wall Street Journal reported today that numerous prime-worthy borrowers received subprime loans.

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It's great to be back at TPMCafe. And it's a pleasure to have the chance to discuss and debate my new book, On Nuclear Terrorism, which came out just last week.

To understand how to confront nuclear terrorism, we need to get inside as many nuclear plots as we can. There's only one catch: no real-world terrorist attempt at a nuclear attack has ever gotten very far. Without reality to anchor us, we tend to conjure fantastic terrorist schemes, obsess over worst-case scenarios, and demand perfect defenses. That distorts our thinking about how to defend against nuclear terrorism. My book is a guide to kicking that habit.

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Welcome to TPMCafe's Book Club table. This week we're hosting a discussion of Michael Levi's new book, On Nuclear Terrorism.

In the book, Levi takes us inside one of the great nightmare scenarios of modern terrorism, looking at how a terrorist organization might go about planning a nuclear attack and how such a plot might be foiled.

Joining him in the discussion will be Jeffrey Lewis, blogger and director of the Nuclear Strategy and Nonproliferation Initiative and the New America Foundation and Steve Coll, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and president of the New America Foundation.

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., Matt Bai, Katha Pollitt, and Michael Shellenberger, Ted Nordhaus, Daniel Brook, Paul Krugman and Susan Faludi.

The media has been brimming with recession analyses, but as far as I’ve seen, it’s all been from the perspective of financial markets.  The central question of these articles is what impact a downturn might have on the markets.  What’s missing, of course, is an analysis of the impact of recession on those of us who depend on paychecks, not stock portfolios.

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The debate about health care mandates importantly divides Obama from Clinton and Edwards. Paul Krugman blasted Obama on this, which alarms even Obama's supporters. But perhaps Homer has nodded just this once and Obama is on the more solid ground.

Here’s the key point, in my view: either Americans should get insurance from their employers or, if they lack an employer, they should have ways to enroll very easily in a comprehensive health insurance plan through a variety of different techniques. But this approach is quite a bit different than a mandate.

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Even the current administration seems to be giving up on the idea that we should just wait out the subprime crisis and let the perfect market correct itself. Now the battle is shaping up over whether to act through a private, negotiated deal or to change the laws and bind the lenders.

David Sirota weighed in with support for one piece of proposed relief: amending the bankruptcy laws to permit renegotiation of home mortgages. In the special way that only Sirota can do, he lays into the Democrats who are siding with the mortgage companies to fight helping families with high-priced loans that exceed the value of their property.

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