Abba Eban famously said that the Palestinians have never missed an opportunity to miss an opportunity. Like most bons mots, Eban’s was clever without saying very much. The Palestinians, of course, have missed one opportunity after another (most notably when they rejected the United Nations Partition Plan of 1947) but, contrary to Eban’s implication, the Israeli record on seizing opportunities is not much better.

The most egregious example of Israel not answering when opportunity knocked came in January 2000 when it became clear that Syrian President Hafez Assad was ready to sign a peace treaty with Israel.

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What I’ve found especially interesting about this week’s conversation is that although our article is not centrally about whether the United States could have won in Vietnam – it essentially concerns the U.S. government’s unwillingness to see that the war could not be “won” on its terms and avoiding the same trap in Iraq – the comments in reaction to the piece still cleave towards that first question.

A few participants in the debate even seem drawn to the stab-in-the-back argument: if only the politicians had backed off, the soldiers could have won the war. To me, these persistent preoccupations reinforce one of our tacit premises: that American exceptionalism – the idea that fate or God has chosen the United States as an exemplar of wise power – often leads us to think that international and domestic political life is far simpler than it really is.

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The key question surrounding torture tape gate is not who authorized the destruction of the tapes in 2005. Nope. The real priority is who in the Bush Administration knowingly lied to a Federal Judge in the spring of 2003. Either the CIA told DOJ the truth and DOJ lied or the CIA lied to DOJ or the White House directed DOJ to lie. It is that simple.

The fun started on 7 May 2003 during a CIPA (i.e., Classified Information Procedures Act) hearing presided over by Judge Leonie Brinkema. She ordered the government to determine if interrogations of suspected terrorists were recorded. Two days later, 9 May 2003, Judge Leonie Brinkema asked, “whether the interrogations are being recorded in any format”? The Department of Justice, based on info from the CIA, said “NO”. (see p. 4 of letter to Federal Judges by U.S. attorneys Novak and Raskin).

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 In the past, we have debated how soon Americans will be ready for national health reform.  Many observers believe that we’ll only get reform when more people are uninsured—specifically when more middle-class and upper-middle-class families find themselves “going naked.”

Meanwhile, a new Commonwealth Fund Report shows that while two-thirds of low-income adults (earning less than 200 percent of the federal poverty threshold) were uninsured or underinsured in 2006, just 17 percent of those earning more than 200 percent of the federal poverty level (FPL) were either underinsured or uninsured at some point during the year.

In other words, the people with political clout are pretty well covered.

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Today, field operatives who cut their teeth in the Dean campaign are running, or playing huge roles in, several of the most important early primary and caucus campaigns for the top Democratic candidates. The way all field operatives in this campaign season work has been completely transformed by forces that were first unleashed in the Dean campaign.

Zephyr and other writers in this series have picked apart the subtleties of distributed tasks vs. distributed power and other philosophical questions. Those are important subjects. But I'd like to step back and recognize a fundamental development that first appeared in the Dean campaign that has helped to change everything about campaigns: the simple expectation that one should be able to get involved in a campaign by signing up or searching for events online.

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On Facebook, of which I've become a fan, there is a Google interactive travel map titled "Cities I've Visited." I've ticked off 227 cities listed in 42 countries. Each place has a little pin in it noting Steve Clemons has been there.

But in my case, South America, Africa, and Central Asia are pretty big voids.

But what about the Presidential candidates? I asked all of the campaigns to send me their contender's travel roster for trips outside the US since 2004. I don't yet have all of the data, but I will keep working on it.

An early snap shot though has produced some gaps as stunning as my own record in semi-public view on Facebook.

The biggest void that caught my eye was that despite serving as Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee Subcommittee on Europe, Barack Obama has not been there (unless we count Ukraine. . .but I'm not ready to do that yet) -- at least not recently. This was a bit of a follow-up to a piece I wrote the other day that Obama did not call any issue or policy oriented hearings in the Subcommittee during his tenure.

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It is difficult to write about the legacy of the Dean campaign because the forces that catapulted that campaign are still actively trying to change the public discourse and it will be years before the real impact can be measured. It should be noted that much of the leadership of the Lamont campaign was active in Connecticut on the Dean campaign and had even spent some time in New Hampshire for the primary.

The Dean and Lamont campaigns in many ways were closer to movements than any other recent consultant driven political campaigns I can think of. They challenged political orthodoxies, threatened Washington insiders, and provided hope and opportunities to be involved for thousands of people at the grassroots level in a personalized way.

The campaigns were a visible part a larger change in American politics. We were blessed with candidates that had the courage to take significant risks and were willing to speak out against George Bush’s illegal war in Iraq, but the candidacies were only a part of the change.

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Yesterday, Congress finished work on the federal budget for fiscal year 2008, at long last. The budget provides $2.9 trillion for the year, including $933 billion in discretionary spending – that is, non-mandatory or entitlement spending. These figures are precisely what President Bush called for in his budget request back in February. After approving its own budget calling for $955 billion, the new Democratic majority in Congress fought bitterly with President Bush for months over the $22 billion difference.

When the dust settled, the Democrats appeared to have capitulated on all of their spending demands, yielding first on their insistence on meeting the President halfway at $11 billion in additional spending, and then entirely, as the White House issued veto threat after veto threat of spending bills just fractionally over its own requests, repeatedly labeling them "irresponsible and excessive." It appears the Democrats capitulated serially to Bush’s budget demands. On closer examination, however, they managed quietly to redirect billions of dollars in funding to support their own program priorities at the expense of the president’s.

But you won't hear too much about that. The media has focused on the tale of the topline and headlines in the nation's newspapers have echoed the "capitulation" theme.

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I love reading history books about past elections. It's been about all I've read for the past 2-3 years. Books with titles such as "Dark Horse" on Garfield's 1880 election, "Prejudice and the Old Politics" on the 1928 election, and "Grass Roots" on the NH 1988 primary, and dozens more of obscure books on past elections. So when Zephyr asked me about contributing to one on the Dean campaign, "Mousepads, Shoe Leather, and Hope", I thought it an important collection to gather, and glad to be a part of the effort.

The chapter I wrote, "How a blogger and the Dean campaign discovered each other," details the 2002 to early 2003 moments. In order to write the chapter over last winter, I found myself digging through alot of archived webpages. Some of the stuff I wrote about happening in 2002, like setting up a Dean supporter webpage and showing online polls that favored Dean, seem sort of trivial compared with what is happening now. But I also found myself re-living part of that excitement from that time, when ideas of using the web for politics in a decentralized manner were just breaking out-- the birth of the netroots.

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When the summary of the U.S. intelligence community's new National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on Iran was released earlier this month, Steven Lee Myers of the New York Times wrote that "Rarely, if ever, has a single intelligence report so completely, so suddenly, and so surprisingly altered a foreign policy debate." The question now is which way the debate will turn. It won't necessarily be won on logic, unless advocates of unconditional negotiations with Iran pound hard -- and relentlessly -- on their views of the assessment.

In early posts I have discussed the positions put forward by the neo-cons, and by New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman. Now so-called foreign policy wise men (a generally used phrase, not MY view) Henry Kissinger and James Schlesinger have weighed in, with arguments that are both inaccurate and embarrassing.

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Some very searching, interesting comments seem to have surfaced. I don’t think we “conflate” the issue of who advanced the loss of political will and that of whether we could have won, or avoided losing, the Vietnam War.

The idea we are trying to get across is that irrespective of whether staving off defeat was in fact possible, in staying too long we shrunk the range of possible options for trying to do so by amplifying the futility of the war as it had been conducted, and thus lending ever more credence to those who said enough is enough. Had we changed policies earlier in one way or the other – for instance, by moving towards negotiation more earnestly, when we had stronger military traction on the ground to leverage and greater political support at home to back it up – a more agreeable ultimate result would have been more likely.

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First the Supreme Court ruling and now this: Putin edged out Gore for Time Magazine's Person of the Year.

The good news is that this particular recognition usually is the harbinger of failure and collapse. But still: Time Magazine picks a KGB boss turned dictator as the person of the year, but passes up a man who has defined vision and aspiration for all humanity?

As if Russia were going to be anywhere close to one of the top five most important countries in the world for the rest of the century. The odds are long on that.

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In my previous entry, I asked, “Will any of the campaigns in 2008 or 2012 show the sort of bold courageous leadership necessary to have a campaign that is of, by and for the people?” It reflects the way people seem to be thinking about the question, “what is Dean’s legacy on upcoming campaigns?” Maybe that isn’t the question we need to be asking at all.

Whenever I heard Gov. Dean tell people, “You have the power”, my mind always went to that scene in The Life of Brian, where Brian tells the crowd, “You are all individuals” and everyone responds as if by rote, “We are all individuals”. Too often, I attended Meetups where people talked excitedly about “having the power” and then asking the folks around them what they were supposed to do with that power.

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There is a pronounced racial disparity in foreclosures, as many news articles have noted. Foreclosure rates are far higher in minority communities. Blacks are more likely to receive high cost loans than financially similar whites. And as a study by Howell Jackson of Harvard Law School has noted, blacks and Hispanics are more likely to pay yield spread premiums than whites.

But there’s another angle to the racial disparity in foreclosures that has arguably greater social consequences, as my Georgetown colleague Emma Coleman Jordan has observed: a far higher percentage of black wealth is invested in homes than white wealth, despite higher homeownership rates for whites than blacks.

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Foreclosures are very expensive for lenders. On average, the costs alone of a foreclosure have been estimated to cost over $58,000. And lenders are thought to lose 40-50% of their investment. In short, for lenders (not to mention for homeowners, their families, and communities) foreclosure is a rotten deal.

So why aren't lender's reaching more consensual deals with distressed homeowners? Why do we need to permit homeowners to use the bankruptcy system to bring lenders to the negotiating table?

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One of the key questions about H.R. 3609 is whether its provision permitting the modification of mortgages in bankruptcy will drive up mortgage interest rates, as the mortgage industry claims. Currently, the Bankruptcy Code bars the modification of mortgages on single-unit primary homes. This is a special protection that no other type of creditor receives; all other debts may be modified in bankruptcy.

The policy assumption behind the bar on mortgage modification is simple enough. Prohibiting modification will reduce mortgage lenders’ losses in bankruptcy. Lenders will then pass these savings on to all consumers in the form of lower mortgage interest rates, which will encourage homeownership.

This economic rational sounds convincing at first blush. The Wall Street Journal (subscription required) certainly bought into it in their lead editorial last Thursday, claiming that “High levels of homeownership have been the result [of the modification bar]. To repeal this policy and make lenders wonder whether mortgage loans will be secured or unsecured can have only one result—more expensive mortgage loans.” The only problem is the empirical evidence does not support it.

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Rep. Miller and the folks at TPM cafe asked me to join in a conversation about Rep. Miller's housing bill, the housing market in general and the credit crunch. So... here goes.

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Good morning, and welcome to this online forum. I’m Brad Miller, and I’m here with Linda Sanchez —and when I say here, I mean Linda is sitting on the other side of my desk in front of an open laptop. Linda and I introduced legislation to allow bankruptcy courts to modify home mortgages, which will be the topic of the forum today. Also joining us are Professor Elizabeth Warrren, who is well know to readers of TPMCafe; Bob Lawless, also a law professor and a blogger, in his case at creditslips; Adam Levitan, a law professor at Georgetown; and Hale Stewart, a recently-engaged Houston lawyer well known at DailyKos and at his own blog as “Bonddad.”

The law professors are welcome to ask questions on the understanding that their questions not bring back unpleasant memories of law school for Linda, Hale or me.

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I'll be online in a few minutes with my colleague Brad Miller to dicuss the mortgage crisis and what we're doing to address it.

(Because the Washington Post refused to publish this piece rebutting this George Will column, we're publishing it here in full. If you're interested in background on Spakovsky, check out the TPMmuckraker archives. - ag)

Doomsday scenarios of an unregulated 2008 election are being threatened in an attempt to force through the confirmation of a Federal Election Commission (FEC) nominee, Hans von Spakovsky, who is deeply embroiled in the scandals over the politicization of the Department of Justice (DOJ). But, what is forgotten in these scenarios is that it is von Spakovsky’s shameful record of minority vote suppression and partisan abuse of his office while at DOJ that has caused several Democratic Senators to put a hold on confirmation.

We are former career attorneys in the Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division who spent a combined 58 years there. Since the confirmation hearings concerning the nomination of Hans von Spakovsky to the Federal Election Commission last June, we have vigorously opposed his nomination. While he was at the Civil Rights Division, von Spakovsky played a central role in injecting partisan political factors into decision-making on enforcement matters and the hiring process, and made repeated efforts to intimidate career staff. Moreover, he was the point person for undermining the Civil Rights Division’s mandate to protect voting rights.

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Doomsday scenarios of an unregulated 2008 election are being threatened in an attempt to force through the confirmation of a Federal Election Commission (FEC) nominee, Hans von Spakovsky, who is deeply embroiled in the scandals over the politicization of the Department of Justice (DOJ). But, what is forgotten in these scenarios is that it is von Spakovsky’s shameful record of minority vote suppression and partisan abuse of his office while at DOJ that has caused several Democratic Senators to put a hold on confirmation.

We are former career attorneys in the Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division who spent a combined 58 years there. Since the confirmation hearings concerning the nomination of Hans von Spakovsky to the Federal Election Commission last June, we have vigorously opposed his nomination. While he was at the Civil Rights Division, von Spakovsky played a central role in injecting partisan political factors into decision-making on enforcement matters and the hiring process, and made repeated efforts to intimidate career staff. Moreover, he was the point person for undermining the Civil Rights Division’s mandate to protect voting rights.

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Conservatives David “Axis of Evil” Frum and Ross Douthat have been sounding alarms warning that the ideas embraced by the Republican presidential candidates may have gotten just a little too wacky. Frum, alluding to Mike Huckabee’s national sales tax and Ron Paul’s “self-taught monetary views,” concludes that “if it is elitist to expect politicians to be able to see through glaringly false and stupid ideas – well in that case, call me elitist.” Frum worries that the right may have become overly reliant on populism – defending “the commonsense wisdom of ordinary voters against the pretensions of know-it-alls.” Douthat agrees, while nonetheless zinging Frum for supporting Rudolph Giuliani in light of Rudy’s enthusiasm for thoroughly discredited supply-side economics. Douthat writes: “Frum's larger worry about anti-intellectualism in the contemporary Right is one I share in spades.”

But here’s the real problem for today’s conservatives: their movement’s intellectuals and experts are overwhelmingly the ones who have come up with the ideas that have largely proven to be just as bankrupt in practice as the gold standard that Paul wants to resurrect. The brains behind the enterprise don’t have any ideas left in the well to draw from that haven’t already been tried and failed. Frum says, “…politicians who want to deliver effective government and positive results have to care about more than values – and have to do more than check their guts. They need to study the problem, master the evidence, and face criticism.”

Okay, based on the evidence, here’s a criticism: movement conservatism’s lavishly funded think tanks have produced ideas leading to nothing but ineffective government and negative results.

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TPM will be hosting Congressman Brad Miller and several others in a discussion of HR 3609, the proposed bankruptcy amendment that would force the mortgage lenders to the negotiating table in some of the worst subprime cases.

The conversation is important. The Fed announced today its plans to prevent the NEXT mortgage crisis, but fixing THIS crisis is not on their agenda. The mortgage industry is lobbying furiously against the bankruptcy remedy, and the Wall Street Journal has condemned the proposal in editorials replete with misrepresentations of what the bill would do. Treasury Secretary Paulson said his voluntary, industry-backed plan is "not a silver bullet," but he says he doesn't have any other ideas. Now we have the chance to talk directly with the man with a plan: Congressman Miller.

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I'm not sure the analogy with Algeria is quite on point. It's certainly true that extreme French coercion lost the battle for hearts and minds, though--notwithstanding Abu Ghraib and other excesses--I don't think U.S. misbehavior in Iraq has been as systemic or widespread as the French's Algeria.

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As you all know by now, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid decided last night to pull the deeply flawed Intelligence Committee FISA bill from the floor. He announced that we would return to the bill in January. Senator Chris Dodd did a great job controlling the floor for much of yesterday, insisting on full debate of the motion to proceed after cloture was invoked. We made it clear that we will do everything we can to stop this bad bill from being jammed through. Other Senators, including Ted Kennedy, Barbara Boxer, Ron Wyden, Sherrod Brown, and Ben Cardin, eloquently laid out many of the problems with this bill. And even Senators who supported the bill in the Intelligence Committee, such as Sheldon Whitehouse and Dianne Feinstein, made valuable contributions to the debate.

One issue that was given a good airing yesterday is that the Senate is being asked to legislate in the dark, particularly on the immunity issue.

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Mr Wright, (a great name!), thanks for your comment on taking responsibility.

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Fidel Castro has just given the world the opportunity to ponder a new direction for Cuba. Castro has issued a statement that is vague but nonetheless signals that he sees himself departing the political front line and making room for a new set of leaders.

As Center for Democracy in the Americas Director Sarah Stephens said today on a journalist conference call, "Cuban leaders don't communicate by accident." She said that "change is in the offing." And that "Castro is writing the script" of his departure as 'the decider' on Cuba's political life and course.

Peter Kornbluh, also on the conference call, says that the smooth fading into the background by Fidel Castro -- at his own pace -- helps write the final chapter for Fidel and a chapter in which he's clearly in control of the optics of all of this and hasn't been compelled or forced out.

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Note: The following argument is based on the authors article “Viet Not,” recently published in the Winter 2008 issue of Democracy: A Journal of Ideas. The article can be read in its entirety at www.democracyjournal.org.

As public support for the Iraq war has dwindled, and momentum has gathered in Congress for a substantial drawdown of troops, President Bush and some of his supporters have revived the argument that congressional Democrats prevented the American military from finishing a war that the United States could have won in Vietnam. In fact, an American victory in Vietnam was always unlikely, and the Vietnam War’s high political costs resulted from withdrawing not too soon but too late.

By 1969, with American dead and wounded mounting in an effort that appeared increasingly futile, the U.S. public no longer supported the Vietnam War. The United States, however, morbidly delayed its exit, expanding the war to Cambodia and stepping up the air campaign against the North. It didn’t work.

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Zephyr has written about the nature of power and language. Garrett has written about message and medium. I’d like to focus on another aspect of what happened. It’s all about change.

When you get right down to it, that is a fundamental aspect of any campaign. Do we stay with the status quo, or do we embrace change? Incumbents argue for the status quo, challengers argue for change. In a primary of different challengers, the question becomes who will be the most effective agent of change, and what will that change look like.

In some cases, we look at the rhetoric that the candidates offer. This one with change this, that one will change that. Yet, we should look deeper. What sort of change is the candidate bringing about in his or her campaign?

My experience of the Dean campaign was that everyone believed what Gov. Dean said when he told us volunteers, “The biggest lie people like me tell people like you, is that if you vote for me, I’ll solve all your problems. The truth is You Have The Power.”

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Welcome to TPMCafe's Book Club table. This week we're hosting a discussion on Garrett M. Graff's new book, The First Campaign: Globalization, the Web, and the Race for the White House, and Zephyr Teachout and Thomas Streeter's Mousepads, Shoe Leather, and Hope: Lessons from the Howard Dean Campaign for the Future of Internet Politics.

In his book, Graff, webmaster on Howard Dean's 2004 campaign, explains how technology and globalization are transforming both the form and the substance of American political discourse, and challenges politicians and parties to embrace the politics of the twenty first century. In their new book, Zephyr Teachout and Thomas Streeter discuss the revolutionary impact of Dean's campaign and share contributions from a number of Dean staffers.

Also participating in this week's Book Club will be Jerome Armstrong, Zack Exley and Aldon Hynes, all of whom contributed to Teachout and Streeter's book, as well as Tom Swan, manager of Ned Lamont's 2006 senatorial campaign.

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, Susan Faludi, Michael Levi and Ethan Brown.

This morning, the Senate starts debating legislation to expand the government's surveillance powers.

Unfortunately, the bill we are going to be considering is the one reported out by the Senate Intelligence Committee in October, S. 2248. It did not have to be this way. Thirteen Senators joined me last week in asking the Majority Leader to instead bring up a bill that includes the changes approved by the Read more »

We like to think that there's something super special about campaigning on the internet, some sort of special sauce that allows a candidate like Howard Dean or Ron Paul to raise millions of dollars as if he'd turned on a fire hose. In my new book, "The First Campaign: Globalization, the Web, and the Race for the White House," I argue it's much simpler than that.

The book's title comes from my thesis that the 2008 campaign will be the first campaign of the 21st Century—the first where the race is defined by technology, with technology serving as both a medium and a message. Over the past twenty years, we’ve seen technology and globalization weave themselves into the fabric of our culture and our society such that the two interconnected issues now drive everything from our debate over health care or energy and the environment to our political campaigns.

But some important aspects of politics haven't changed, even with the fantastic fun tools and videos we now have at our fingertips.

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I have two thoughts to share, and we can go from there. The first thought is about power, the second about language.

Tom Streeter and I argue in the final chapter of Mousepads, Shoe Leather and Hope that decentralized power is different than decentralized tasks. The internet enables both, but the former increases democracy, whereas the latter increases heirarchical control. The Dean campaign decentralized power; many campaigns have borrowed the tools and innovations from that cycle, but primarily for decentralizing tasks.

Power is decentralized when participants have a meaningful chance to change the structure—what Jonathan Zittrain calls ”generativity.” Power is not decentralized every time a person participates. A supporter can make phone calls, door knock, forward emails, but not be encouraged to strategize on her own; she has little more power than a person sending in a video entry to a Cheerios contest for a new ad campaign. I regularly participate in the newspaper industry by reading papers, but that doesn't give me power to change the structure.

Why should we care? Distributed power leads to distributed responsibility, which is good for a healthy polity.

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In his latest effort to escape the blame for the housing bubble in the Wall Street Journal last week, Alan Greenspan pointed his finger at the collapse of the Soviet Union. There is no reason to go through the details. If anyone other than Greenspan had put forward this argument, it would never have found its way onto the pages of a serious newspaper.

If we (meaning those of us who warned about the bubble on the way up) couldn’t do anything to prevent this train wreck, we can at least try to ensure that the right lessons are learned in the bubble’s aftermath.

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"But in an interview on Friday, Mrs Clinton appeared to raise it again. “I’ve been tested, I’ve been vetted,” she said on Iowa television. “There are no surprises. There’s not going to be anybody saying, ‘I didn’t think of that. My goodness, what’s that going to mean?’"

How exactly was Mrs. Clinton vetted or tested? She has been attacked and embarrassed in the press to a degree that is grossly unfair and similar only to the treatment typically dished out to Presidents. But that's not the same as a vetting or testing of beliefs and opinions; besides, she would be the first to say that victimhood is not a credential for high office. Nor is she running a martyr's campaign, or appealing for pity as a basis for votes.

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Bill Clinton's Charlie Rose interview was one of those moments that every Presidential candidate dreads: when the spouse expresses too clearly and with far too much asperity the aggression and frustration felt by the top ranks of the campaign. Just three highlights follow -- Bill Clinton said:

'• That picking Obama would be a "risk";

• Likened nominating Obama to picking "a gifted television commentator";

• Called Obama a mere "symbol for change," adding that "symbol is not as important as substance";'

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