This is a terrible story. It appears in The Independent, on page one. The Independent is about as mainstream a British paper as you'll find anywhere. In the UK, it it respected the way the New York Times or Washington Post is respected here. In other words, it is an establishment newspaper and a great one (better, I think, than any here).

I point this out to note that there is no way a story like this would appear in a mainstream newspaper here. There is too much intimidation (advertising!). But in Britain -- no powerful lobby -- you can read whatever you want. Same in Israel, no lobby, read whatever you like (although the crazy lobby group CAMERA did announce that it will start "monitoring" the Israeli media too, from its offices here!).

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The Reuters headline says "Clinton Says Obama Can't Stand The Heat". Obama's speech in Raleigh the day after the debate does not look like man who has lost his cool. Hillary, McCain, ABC and the cable news networks are all playing the Swift Boat Game while Obama continues to try to talk about Iraq, jobs, health care and education.

Every day on TPM, we try to wrestle with the real problems of our age--and there are many of them. If some idiot is not going to vote for Barack, because he stopped wearing an American Flag Pin--because he thought it was an empty symbol dressing the jackets of reckless leaders like George Bush and Dick Cheney--then they are probably voting for McCain anyway in the General Election. If they're voting in the Democratic Party primaries, they are probably part of Rush Limbaugh's Operation Chaos

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I'm doing this post in no small part because I've never been a Lieberman-hater, a New Republic-hater, a Marty Peretz-hater, or a Jamie Kirchick-hater. Indeed, I've defended Lieberman against some of the sillier attacks on his past (if not his recent past), such as the idea that he lost Florida for his own ticket in 2000. And I continue to read and appreciate The New Republic, despite the occasional expression of views with which I don't agree.

But Kirchick's current argument at The Plank, in an exchange with Jonathan Chait and with (most recently) Isaac Chotiner, defending the proposition that Joe Lieberman can be a "loyal Democrat" and also endorse John McCain for president, is just bizarre.

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It's been a long time since I've seen young Jews optimistic about anything related to Israel.

I'm not talking about the college activists who, shocked at the anti-Israel sentiment on campus, find themselves joining up with conservative mainstream Jewish organizations to defend Israel to their skeptical peers. Those kids have always been around. I know. I was once one of the best-known campus activists for Israel, battling late 60's and 70's anti-Israel radicals almost non-stop.

And I give those kids credit. It's hard work but utterly ineffective because you can't defend the occupation and sell Israel at the same time. The only message that works is "Israel, yes. Two-states, yes. Occupation, no." But the mainstream organizations prefer losing the battle to supporting pro-Israel, pro-peace activism. And so they are losing the campus battle big time.

But I'm talking about young opinion leaders who are turned off by the occupation and identify Israel with settlers there and neoconservatives like Feith, Perle, and Krauthammer here. They hate the paranoid style in which all dissent from the status quo is deemed anti-Israel or anti-Semitic and, generally, have no use for the mindless emotionalism and ethnic sentimentality that characterize so much of the organized pro-Israel community.

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[Note: The following is a sign-on letter to ABC to which I was a signer. I am posting it in my slot at TPMCafe to help circulate it, not because I played a lead role in drafting it.]

We, the undersigned, deplore the conduct of ABC's George Stephanopoulos and Charles Gibson at the Democratic Presidential debate on April 16. The debate was a revolting descent into tabloid journalism and a gross disservice to Americans concerned about the great issues facing the nation and the world. This is not the first Democratic or Republican presidential debate to emphasize gotcha questions over real discussion. However, it is, so far, the worst.

For 53 minutes, we heard no question about public policy from either moderator. ABC seemed less interested in provoking serious discussion than in trying to generate cheap shot sound-bites for later rebroadcast. The questions asked by Mr. Stephanopoulos and Mr. Gibson were a disgrace, and the subsequent attempts to justify them by claiming that they reflect citizens' interest are an insult to the intelligence of those citizens and ABC's viewers. Many thousands of those viewers have already written to ABC to express their outrage.

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George Stephanopoulos has addressed criticism of his and Charles Gibson's conduct as moderators in last night's ABC-sponsored Democratic candidate debate, in the form of an interview with TalkingPointsMemo's Greg Sargent. And George went straight to the "electability" defense:

Stephanopoulos strongly defended his handling of the debate. He dismissed criticism that it had focused too heavily on "gotcha" questions, arguing that they had gone to the heart of the "electability" that, he said, is forefront in the minds of voters evaluating the two Dems.

Ah yes, "electability," which makes discussion of any criticism of a candidate, frivolous or serious, instantly relevant, on the theory that the opposition will hit the nominee with all this crap, so we might as well see how they handle its endless repetition today.

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After spending much of the day doing the sorts of things that normal teacher/scholars do, I returned to the blogosphere to see a raging debate about who said what at the January 1995 meeting convened by the Clintons at Camp David to help them sort through the 1994 election debacle and help him prepare for the 1995 State of the Union Address.

I was there (the only female intellectual-scholar invited), and the tenor of the discussion was one of the instances I was referring to last Saturday in my post on TPM (I also attended a late 1993 intellectuals' dinner at the White House, where similar discussions occurred). The early 1995 meeting at Camp David was a many-hours-long seminar featuring about a dozen intellectuals plus a bunch of White House insiders, talking with Bill and Hillary Clinton and Al Gore. It was a fascinating window into how the Clintons were coping with the massive health care debacle and Congressional election defeats of late 1994.

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Obama said today that what happened at the debate last night foreshadowed what the Republican campaign will run on last night. He's right and the challenge to Democrats and especially progressive bloggers is now clear.

Already the Republican spin machine has started generating its ersatz issues. The Democrats are now the party of flagless lapels, angry preachers, and Hyde Park liberals.

It is irrelevant that my side is right about the war, the economy, income inequality, the budget, climate change; it doesn't matter that McCain is wildly wrong in his pronouncements on every single issue important to Americans. Look at the lapels, not at the positions; accuse others of lacking the true religion (check that out with Romney by the way) because that's what leads to solutions for income inequality; and damn everyone by association not with their own ideas and positions but with people they found value in or merely met outside of politics.

While I'm for Obama, don't think for a second this attack machine isn't aiming at Clinton too. For these purposes, her clothes demonstrate that she isn't patriotic (she should have voted not for a flag law or amendment, but a lapel amendment!); she can't possibly meet the religions test Karl Rove will concoct according to his get out the vote strategy because sincere belief is irrelevant (ask Romney about that); and oh yes she too is from Chicago, that spawning ground of liberals. The latter alone should disqualify her but being from New York seals the deal, according to the right.

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Kevin Phillips once gain does us all a service with his sharp and wonderfully lucid discussion of finance and politics. Since we can take it for granted now that neither the Democrats nor the Republicans are going to attempt any reforms of the US financial system this year, the task is going to fall to the next President to propose something. I wish I could find real grounds for optimism, but that's not easy.

Here is a table that I've prepared for a short presentation at an academic conference. It is an analysis of "early money" (defined as that contributed before any voting took place)  in the current presidential election. It covers the usual universe of large firms and investors that I typically investigate every four years.[If you are interested in details, just see my Golden Rule (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1995).]

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This is an appealing new YouTube video on Senator Wyden's Healthy Americans Act:

I think this is quite effective, and reminds me of the Center for American Progress's recently-launched campaign to rebrand progressivism.

What do you think of video ads like this? Do campaigns like this divert funds from more efficient forms of policy advocacy?

The Gibson/ Stephanopoulos Show was the kind of thing that gets some people in my political niche to griping about the "corporate media." The phrase does a great deal of cultural work, depending on the sentence in which it finds itself: sometimes it's hooked up to a belief that The People would be turning out in droves for the Kucinich/ Gravel ticket if not for the corporate media; sometimes it's trotted out to admonish "cultural studies" theorists for overemphasizing the wonder-working powers of Active Audiences® (you know, the people who do really quite clever things with Star Trek or Buffy) and forgetting that the media are owned by corporations; and sometimes it comes embedded in the full-bore Chomsky/ Herman argument about how the corporate media "manufacture consent" and dupe the masses into (a) misrecognizing that their real interests lie with the Kucinich/ Gravel ticket or (b) fooling around with bread-and-circus distractions like Star Trek and Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

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Now we have facts:

"More than 10 million viewers tuned into Wednesday's Democratic debate on ABC, making it the most-watched debate of the primary election season.

The debate, the first to air on a weeknight on a broadcast network, attracted an average of 10.7 million viewers between 8 and 10 p.m., according to Nielsen Media Research.

The debate topped the "reality" fare of "Deal or No Deal" on NBC and "Big Brother" on CBS during the 8 p.m. hour."

So from ABC's perspective, and certainly for George S and Charles G, the raucous, murderous, sharp-edged, animalistic idea-free style worked perfectly -- unless Nielsen also reported that many people turned off during the debate. I bet that didn't happen. Like the crowds of the ancient Coliseum, millions watched to see if vulpine George or ursine Charles would slash or bash to political death either of the two gladiators, or whether the two would otherwise finally conclude their andabatarian struggle, live, on the studio stage, with one fallen and the other triumphant.

So, blame the audience, ABC is concluding. They watched it, so they must have wanted it the way we gave it to them.

This morning Senator Ron Wyden and I are testifying before the House Financial Services Subcommittee on Financial Institutions and Consumer Credit at a hearing in support of a "Credit Cardholder's Bill of Rights." As has been previously discussed on this site, credit card abuses are widespread, well-entrenched and unlikely to end without a legislative ban. I commended the Subcommittee this morning for tackling credit card reform and taking the steps needed to ban unfair practices that are causing so much pain and financial damage to hard-working families; I also commend those of you who have written and commented about these complex (and abusive) practices.

Here's an update on where our legislative efforts stand: over a dozen bills are now pending in the House and Senate to correct credit card abuses.

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Whew! What a miserable night for Citizen Charles and Citizen George. These are not dumb fellows, and they didn't fail to prepare for the debate. Obviously, they worked hard to develop such intensively emotional, biased, hostile questions, and they were very focussed on avoiding the important issues that will shape the future of the republic for the next generation.

So what gives? What were their motives? What did their bosses give them for a purpose?
This is the central question for the mainstream media: why do good people provide such bad journalism from the perspective of the ideal electoral system?

Is it really true that ABC got and held a bigger audience by adopting such a crazy perspective on the debate?

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Let me say something so sweatily self-referential and implausible that I had to think awhile before saying it: Barack Obama's remarks at that California fund-raiser were well-intentioned and decently modulated, and he identified currents I have reason to know are deep, But that's the problem: Those currents are really deep.

I need for you to do something now that most casual blog readers don't: Please click this link now and read a description, written 32 years ago,-of what he has gotten himself into by remarking that small-town people "cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them, or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations."

Do stop and read this story of January 28, 1976 -- in the Harvard Crimson, of all places (editor-in-chief, Nicholas B. Lemann) --- about how I persuaded some young, white working-class Boston guys to go to hear James Baldwin address a heavily black audience of undergrads at Harvard. Thirty-two years later -- a few months ago -- most if not all of these same men became part of the reason why Obama lost the Massachusetts primary, despite endorsements from Ted Kennedy and the state's first black governor, Deval Patrick.

As this ancient tale foretold, some working whites' not-so-hidden injuries of class were rubbed raw by Harvard whites' preference for elevating selected blacks above themselves. It isn't just what Obama said; it's that he said it at an exclusive California fund-raiser to rich whites who spend so little time caring about poor blacks in Oakland or Watts that they're quick to blame their plight on working whites and want this black Harvard lawyer to lighten their own moral and political responsibilities by balancing things out.

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Sunday's Washington Post published an informative and disturbing article about how undergraduates are "majoring in plastic," relying heavily on credit cards to finance tuition and basic living expenses, such as food, gasoline and housing. The story reports on the incredibly aggressive marketing campaigns waged by credit card companies, which target students by staking out tables on college campuses and handing out a variety of freebies.

The article raises two interesting issues that suggest the need for significant policy changes in order to give young people a real chance at building solid financial futures. First, the article suggests the need for significant increases in low interest education financing. The article reports the results of a U.S. PIRG survey of 1500 students at 40 colleges in 14 states which recently found that 2 out of 3 students had a credit card, 55 percent of whom used their card to finance day-to-day expenses. Fifty-five percent charged their books and almost one quarter paid their tuition with a credit card. Freshmen who were not financially assisted by their parents had an average balance of $1,301; seniors had an average balance of $2,623.

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In recent weeks, I have met very senior advisors for the Obama, Clinton, and McCain camps. In each case, the senior presidential aide was quite aware of critiques I had offered regarding a variety of foreign policy issues.

In the case of Obama, I've been critical of his recent triangulation on Israel/Palestine issues and his unwillingness to embrace at least the Bush administration 2001-2004 "status quo" in US-Cuba policy.

In the case of Hillary Clinton, I have been critical of her Cuba stand, her failure to mention Israel-Palestine in what her staff called Clinton's definitive foreign policy vision statement, and critical of her stand on the Beijing-hosted Olympic Games and her views about how to pursue better human rights conditions for people inside China, Tibet, and Darfur.

In the case of John McCain, whom I have admired and written positive treatments on many occasions at TPM Cafe and at The Washington Note, I part company on his approach to the inevitability of more wars in the Middle East, his glib embrace of bombing Iran, and his stand on a long-term deployment in Iraq.

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Kevin Phillips' description of the Ponzi pyramid seems about right.

I'd add that at the bottom was the growing gap between the 25 year slowdown in wages and middle class incomes and the intensified pressures of a "shop-til-we-drop" culture. I don't know how much of the story was culture and how much was inadequate incomes.  But the drop in the personal savings rate from 10 percent when the Reagan era began to less than ½ of one percent today clearly reflects a working/middle class whose definition of a decent life is now beyond their monthly income - and for many, if not most, their monthly payments as well.

The most telling number in Kevin's collection of charts shows the expanding importance of finance in the economy.

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Last month I wrote about the possibility of global food riots and was roundly mocked in the comments by assorted sunny optimists like Ellen who were confident this would never bother our financial elites. The World Bank told the G-7 Finance Ministers over the weekend that global food prices have risen 83% in the last three years and spiked in the last three months.

At a weekend conference in Washington, finance ministers and central bankers of seven leading industrial nations called for urgent action to deal with the price spikes, and several of them demanded a reconsideration of biofuel policies adopted recently in the West.

Perhaps the "its not our problem" smugness will recede in the next few weeks.

In re Bittergate:

Reader Waldengirl argues that the Clinton camp's response is particularly duplicitous, in light of its recent dismissal of "the relevance of small-town American states during Hillary's string of losses in January and February."

The Zaftig Redhead just gives in and lets the acrimony flow.

Finally, reader cheekymonkey riffs on Clinton, Obama, and. . . Aristotle.

"Bad Money" refers to (a) the shaky U.S. dollar, (b) the persuasion of Americans to use their homes as ATM machines; (c) the predatory and speculative U.S. financial sector; (d) the waves of bubble-making and liquidity pumped out by the Federal Reserve over the last quarter century; or (e) all of the above.

Answer: (e).

The book's overall thesis is that a dangerous set of U.S. predicaments - unprecedented U.S. levels of public and private debt, imploding home prices, the emergence of a swollen, hubris-ridden and speculative financial sector, ballooning commodity inflation, oil supply perils and a declining dollar - have started to converge in a way that jeopardizes U.S. global economic leadership. Some pundits and financiers are already worried about the greatest financial crisis since World War Two or the 1930s.

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The New York Times's lead editorial today, "Foreclosure Politics," opens with some important points about the expensive, irrelevant, and counterproductive tax breaks riddling the Senate's inaptly named "Foreclosure Prevention Act." But from there, the editorial swerves off course and confuses readers about the House bill aimed at preventing foreclosures and minimizing economic pain.

The editorial says that, under the plan by House Financial Services chair Barney Frank (D-MA) to provide $300 billion in refinanced mortgage guarantees, loans could be modified en masse. But the plan also has flaws. One is political: taxpayers could be on the hook if F.H.A. borrowers defaulted. Congress cannot ask taxpayers to step up without doing all it can to solve the problem without shifting the risk to taxpayers. The way to do that is to allow bankruptcy courts to modify mortgages for troubled homeowners.

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As Jonathan Taplin's discusses in an earlier post, candidate McCain gave a big economics speech today. Allow me to elaborate on why this stuff should scare you.

First, the gas tax holiday is smart politics but lousy policy. As Taplin aptly described, high gas prices are sending an important economic signal and jamming that signal is ill-advised. On the other hand, as one of the commenters points out, this idea could really help some strapped families.

The problem is there's absolutely nothing to stop the oil companies from claiming a big chunk of this subsidy by raising the pretax price of gas at the pump. Prices go up in the summer anyway, and I'll bet you a gallon of premium that they go up even more than usual, such that some of that 18.4 cents/gallon ends up back in Exxon's wallet, not yours.

Which leaves us with a nice little transfer from taxpayers to oil companies. Nice work, John.

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John McCain has said that he doesn't know much about economics, but this morning he set out to prove that fact.

McCain urged Congress to institute a "gas-tax holiday" by suspending the 18.4 cent federal gas tax and 24.4 cent diesel tax from Memorial Day to Labor Day. He also renewed his call for the United States to stop adding to the Strategic Petroleum Reserve and thus lessen to some extent the worldwide demand for oil.

At the very point when the market is sending signals to consumers to buy more fuel efficient vehicles and the United States Treasury is increasing its borrowing to fund McCain's War surge, McCain want to make gas cheaper so people will keep buying SUV's and cut income to the Treasury so we will have to borrow more from the Chinese government. Back in February during a Republican Debate, McCain said he was going to cut wasteful spending so much that we would no longer have to borrow from the Chinese. He's a magician!

These brilliant economic strategies probably issue from the mind of McCain's key advisor, former Senator Phil Gramm, a man who did more damage in his short Senate tenure than most bad politicians can do in a lifetime.

"Phil Gramm's career was as the most aggressive advocate of every predatory and rapacious element that the financial sector has," Mr. Galbraith said. "He's a sorcerer's apprentice of instability and disaster in the financial system."

The very idea of Phil Gramm as Secretary of the Treasury boggles the mind.

This has been talked about for years. But today the "J Street Project" is being rolled out.

It's purpose is to raise political money for candidates who manifest their support for Israel not by assiduously, devotedly, and energetically defending the status quo but by supporting the two-state solution.

This is good news. There are several good groups in the business of educating, advocating and lobbying for the two-state solution. But, until now, none has directly got involved in raising campaign funds to promote peace and security for Israel and the Palestinians. (By law, these organizations cannot do that).

But that it what J Street will be doing.

At this point, who knows if it will succeed. It is up against perhaps the most powerful foreign policy lobby in the country, one that freely exercises that power to keep Congress and the executive branch in line. (Also the media, former Presidents, professors, and dog catchers).

But J Street sees an opening. Most Americans and most Jewish Americans support the two state solution and are tired of having a Likud-oriented lobby speaking in their name.

Let's see what happens but I think this could be big.

Here is the NPR report on J Street from this morning. and Spencer Ackerman in The Washington Independent.

It is amazing that right-wing Israelis and their American enablers have managed to convince even a single person that West Bank settlements are not at the root of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Think about it. The conflict is about who will ultimately control the West Bank, Gaza, and East Jerusalem. It is no longer about Israel's right to the 78 percent of historic Palestine that is pre-'67 Israel; the PLO conceded Israel's right to statehood in that land 20 years ago and has never backed away from that concession. It is no longer about whether the Palestinians are entitled to a state because Israel conceded that the Palestinians have that right 15 years ago and have never backed away from that concession. It is not about each people's right to live in security (free from terrorism and other military threats) because the two sides have agreed to that principle a half-dozen times since the Oslo agreement was signed.

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I've been reading avidly through law professors' comments about Professor Yoo, and I will trouble you, dear readers, with only a few reactions.

All the professors are mighty quick to defend the sacrosanct nature of tenure, on the grounds that academic freedom permits them not only to say, but to think and right pretty much anything they want, no matter whether their comments make as much sense as a frog's croaks or whether they are acting in service of the most reprehensible acts. But I think they go too far. First, isn't there a standard of morality that must be met to retain tenure? And if there is, Dean Edley rather quickly prejudged the matter in announcing that there was no moral equivalence between Yoo and the President; he was rather harsh on the President, too, in his rush to judge Yoo exonerated. It seems to me that at the least Boalt ought to investigate the question of morality, by learning the facts and disclosing them. We shouldn't need a legal action to learn what actually happened in the case of the infamous memo.

Second,

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With April in full swing, a rising generation of future college and graduate students is combing through financial aid awards and contemplating the five- and six-figure of student debt necessary to becoming marketable in the global economy. The effects of the subprime mortgage meltdown have extended to the student loan market, with recent failures in the auction-rate securities market squeezing dozens of lenders out of federally-backed student loans and making other lenders choosier.

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Hillary Clinton must now think that Barack Obama has offered her the wedge she's been looking for with his guns-religion-antipathy remark. His comments about small-town "bitterness," she said, were "not reflective of the values and beliefs of Americans."

So it's come to this: the laggard tasks the frontrunner with being, in essence, un-American. As Theda Skocpol more or less puts it in a letter to Josh, for shame.

At his fundraiser (in San Francisco, yet), Obama spoke artlessly, forgetting that the first law of American politics is: Flatter the rubes. He said small-town people get bitter, not "some people are angry." He said "cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them," not "vote on wedge issues," and did indeed fall into the Tom Frank vulgar Marxist trap of seeming to say that love of guns or religion (or antipathy, even) is merely derivative, not fundamental.

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As an additional consideration in the case of People vs. Yoo, a government attorney must meet not only the standards of professional responsibility that come with being an attorney, but also must comply with his or her oath, taken upon assuming office, to support and defend the Constitution. That attorney's duty is to the principles of the Constitution, as amended (and in this particular case, as amended by the 8th Amendment), and not only or merely to the President or, more correctly, the Presidency.

In practical terms, the purport of the oath in a constitutionally sensitive case is that the advising attorney must reflect in his/her work a wholistic and long-term understanding of both the relevant precedent and the precedential effect of the proposed instant action by others relying upon that advice. In other words, it is imperative to examine how history will judge and also how history of our Constitution will be altered by proposed conduct.

This sort of review and this sort of thinking is what it means to have a written Constitution and to live under a rule of law where that Constitution is a living and meaningful document. Did Professor Yoo live up to his oath? It's not the same question as asking whether a lawyer in private practice exceeded the boundaries of zealous advocacy.