Are there some deals that are so bad that they shouldn't occur? Or it is enough to say that people have choices, and if they make bad choices, tough?

I had lunch with a bankruptcy lawyer, who followed up with an email story:

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Despite the spooky echoes of the "Brooks Brothers Riot" in 2000, on the part of the Clintonistas at the Rules Committee hearing, the committee voted to seat the Florida and Michigan delegation with one half a vote each. My guess is the final victory of Obama will come with the votes of Montana on Tuesday evening.

Even thought Ickes is threatening to take the Michigan decision to the credentials committee, I believe its an empty threat.

Col. Peter Brownback was a retired Army judge who agreed to come down to Guantanamo to hear terrorism cases. He was assigned to a case of Omar Khadr, a 21 year old Canadian.

During a proceeding on May 8, Judge Brownback expressed irritation that military prosecutors had failed to turn over records of Mr. Khadr's incarceration to defense lawyers. He threatened to stop pretrial proceedings if the records were not supplied by May 22. They met that deadline.

At the time, Judge Brownback said he had been "badgered and beaten and bruised" by the chief military prosecutor in the case, Maj. Jeffrey D. Groharing, to move the case toward a trial quickly.

Yesterday Col. Brownback was summarily dismissed without explanation, from the case by Maj. Groharing.

At a time when the duplicity of the Bush Administration policy is so evident, this is how we teach the world about the American rule of law?

...And the 20,000 residents of Sderot. In his earlier post, my friend MJ Rosenberg was right to point out the mind-boggling decision of Israel to prevent 7 Gazan students from taking up their Fulbright scholarships to travel to the US (as reported in today's New York Times). If the Bush Administration cannot get their Israeli friends to grant permits to 7 students who have demonstrated all of the necessary qualities demanded by Fulbright, then why are we even talking about checkpoints, settlements and border negotiations--it just gives a bad name to punching below ones diplomatic weight, and MJ is right to call on Congress to take action.

But these 7 bright youngsters make up just 0.000005% of the population of Gaza. What about the other 1.4 million Gazans living with collective punishment and under a closure that continues to have a devastating impact on every social, health and economic measure that one can imagine? And what about the 20,000 residents of the Israeli town of Sderot, and the neighboring communities, who are coming under frequent rocket barrage, including occasionally the town of Ashkelon, with its 117,000 residents? Where is American diplomacy? A possible cease-fire is being negotiated, but as with just about every diplomatic development in the Middle East right now, you can search high and low for an American role that you won't find.

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Just two points in response to Rick. The first has to do with right and left as essential characteristics. The second addresses the claim that left and right are finally dispositional. These are not minor points, and in fact mulling them over a bit might help us toward a greater understanding the rise of the modern Right.

First: it may be that there are timeless qualities of left and right, but rarely if ever do they divide neatly in American politics. Time and again, principles of civic republicanism, liberalism, and democracy have been mobilized for ends that were liberating to some and repressive for others. And these liberating and repressive dynamics are deeply connected. In a country that is founded on black slavery and native genocide, and yet with fundamental commitments to freedom and equality, could it be otherwise? Jacksonian democracy linked white suffrage to native genocide. Populists linked opposition to monopolies to nativism and sometimes worse. The social gospel movement tied passionate devotion to equality and social welfare to intolerant piety. Progressive Era reformers sought to clean up political machines in part by disenfranchising immigrant voters in cities. I could go on here with too many more examples. In the case of modern conservatives, their success required a language of anti-elitism and freedom from control from above. And as has been the case in so many times past, this discourse was greatly aided by the legacy of white supremacy.

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Tristero has a great post up about Nixonland where he also talks about the dramatic shift upwards in the quality of pop culture in the 60s. I'm linking it, because one of my favorite pieces of rock and roll trivia to banter with is about my favorite band Devo and the Kent State shootings. The band was actually formed by a bunch of Kent State students who befriended each other in the late 60s/early 70s, and the bassist Jerry Casale was actually witness to the shootings. Legend has it that it was the critical moment when the band moved from being an airy joke to a blackly comic multi-decade art music project both denouncing and celebrating "devolution".

VR: You said that the Kent State shooting sort of served as a catalyst for your theory of Devolution, which spawned Devo.

JC: Absolutely. Until then I was a hippie. I thought that the world is essentially good. If people were evil, there was justice and that the law mattered. All of those silly naïve things. I saw the depths of the horrors and lies and the evil.

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Today's New York Times reports that the State Department has withdrawn funding for seven Palestinians from Gaza who were to be awarded Fulbright scholarships to study in the United States. It is hard to determine if the decision to take this action was made in Washington or Jerusalem but it needs to be reversed.

The Fulbright is our nation's most prominent and prestigious international education exchange program. Established in 1946, the program currently awards 7,000 grants each year and operates in over 150 countries. As the State Department website explains, "the Fulbright Program creates a context to provide a better understanding of U.S. views and values, promotes more effective binational cooperation and nurtures open-minded, thoughtful leaders..."

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• First and foremost, Dan K put up an excellent post the other day, asking TPM readers to formulate a broad vision for the American Left in 2058. In his words, "Take a momentary holiday from triangulating, strategizing, and poll-testing, and really let yourselves go." A worthy request, indeed. Reader clearthinker comes up with some incisive policy proposals in response, but I think Dan's calling for some broader thinking, so keep at it.
• Big Blue profiles potential VP candidate, Gov. Mark Warner. Reader David throws in his own two cents as to why Warner is the "obvious" pick.
• Waldengirl takes a thoroughgoing look at the arithmetical acrobatics behind the Clinton camp's latest claims.
• Finally, Project Vote's got the update on recent steps (and regressions) in the world of voting rights reform.

A story in this morning's New York Times shows another consequence of the foreclosure crisis: a huge tax bill for those losing their homes. When a home is foreclosed on borrowers whose mortgage exceeds their home value, the difference is considered "cancellation of debt" income. Consequently, the borrower must pay full income tax on it. This could be a huge bill because borrowers will owe the IRS up to 35% of the difference. Congress fixed the problem for those whose mortgages are secured by the homes they live in under the Mortgage Forgiveness Debt Relief Act, which is effective from Jan. 1, 2007, through Dec. 31, 2009. But this act does not apply to those facing foreclosure on second homes. This tax is affecting many middle-class borrowers and pushing many into bankruptcy. But it is unfair and inconsistent with fundamental tax principles.

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If you said nobody, you're exaggerating, but only slightly. A new report from the Pentagon's Inspector General's office, made public by the Project on Government Oversight (POGO), indicates that even as military spending has more than doubled in the Bush years, there has been no increase in Pentagon auditors. The average auditor is now responsible for over $2 billion in contracts, compared to $600 million-plus at the outset of the Bush era. But that's not all.

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This has been a humbling and astonishing few weeks for me. Not every day a pinko like me gets props from Roger Stone! I thank you for all these generous responses. Let me reflect on Joe's first.

A big part of the balance I try to strike in my work is to respect Joe's very important point that "the right," like any complex set of human institutions, is always growing and changing, while still honoring my bedrock sense that there is also some things about "the right" that are in fact unchanging and rather essential--a fundamental facet of the diversity of human character. A big part of my approach to understanding political identity is dispositional: my sense that "right" and "left" are fundamental, and perhaps permanent, ways of being in the world, not a mere list of policy positions; that, as William Gilbert of Gillbert and Sullivan wrote in his libretto for Iolanthe, "every boy and every gal/ That's born into the world alive; Is either a little Liberal/ Or else a little Conservative." Of course the content of these dispositions, and the way they play out in our lives and institutions, are exceptionally complex, and also can, of course, change within the individual over time; and, of course, "rightness" and "leftness" are ideal types that exist to various degrees within each of us in rich combination; and that "left" dispositions can surface within "right-wing" institutions (think of the manic insurgent energy of the young conservative pranksters I write about in Before the Storm) and "right" dispositions can surface within "left-wing" institutions (think of the mid-century union militants whose sense of social solidarity came from an embrace of corporatist Catholic social teaching).

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On October 19, 2005, Lawrence Wilkerson -- Colin Powell's aide, friend, and chief of staff respectively for 16 years -- cleared his throat and conscience about what he saw as a Cheney-Rumsfeld cabal that was warping and distorting the nation's national security decision making process. Wilkerson gave an amazing speech that I helped organize for the American Strategy Program of the New America Foundation -- and it took serious guts and courage for him to do this.

There are some jeering at Scott McClellan for not resigning earlier and not speaking up sooner (as he has now done in his new book) about what he knew about the misdeeds and deception being promulgated from Oval Office central in the White House.

But history needs those who had a front row seat to what was going on to speak up and put this material out into the public record.

This doesn't change what has happened and that Scott McClellan was part of the Bush machine -- but the fight over this president's legacy and awareness of the crimes this administration propagated really do matter. The political left really doesn't need to be convinced, but many on the political right do.

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Rick Perlstein has written an enthralling and indispensable book about our collective life and times--and "indispensable" remains a useful adjective even if Madeleine Albright taints it by overapplication to American foreign policy. At least the first 435 pp. of Nixonland qualify--this is as many pages of the book as I've been able to read while navigating through an intense cold. I can't say I "couldn't put it down." I have to keep putting it down. Fifty pages of Perlstein in one reading leaves me in a state of rage and dumb horror, entailing the need for a recovery interval. Thus "enthralling" is also precisely what I mean. The momentum is unrelenting--an extraordinary writerly achievement. And no matter how much I thought I know about those times, Rick unearths actual cold facts I didn't know.

But let me say a few words about concepts. First, where I wholeheartedly agree: Rick is right to focus on "positive polarization." This is how Nixon made himself the victor of the 1968 Gotterdämmerung. I'm sure he's also right that Nixon excelled at managing the unleashed rages of the "silent majority" because he was so much one of them. The power of "positive polarization" taught a lesson that remains at the core of the Republican party--cf. Atwater, Rove, Bush, and stormy, huffy McCain, the McCain of whom we'll be seeing a lot more over the next five months. Positive polarization is the core idea that has to be grasped to understand the '60s et seq., and Rick grasps it.

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• RE comments on the ridiculousness of campaign promises given the financial state of the country. "It's like listening to someone who is going into foreclosure on their house and making plans for a trip to Europe at the same time."
• Big Blue is at it again. Hillary Clinton is the last (but not least) profile in an Obama veepstakes series.
• Doug DeLong explores and reports back from the Hillaryis44, the "Church of Hillary." His verdict: "anyone who would so easily abandon their party just because they're miffed that their candidate lost is not a true Democrat."
• Ingoman calls our attention to journalist Adian Hartley, who has been investigating atrocities of the Ethiopian transitional government and military.

Yesterday in Denver, John McCain gave a speech setting out his latest views on nuclear weapons. Citing Ronald Reagan, he stated that it was his "dream" to "see the day when nuclear weapoons will be banished from the face of the earth." But can McCain's proposed policies get us there?

McCain's current patchwork position doesn't look like a recipe for nuclear disarmament. But we should remember that it was Ronald Reagan who started out denouncing the Soviet Union as the "evil empire" and ended up negotiating deep nuclear cuts with Mikhail Gorbachev, including the historic 1986 meeting at Reykjavik where he almost agreed to eliminate nuclear weapons (before some of his hard-line aides reeled him back in). Of course, Reagan was pushed by a mass movement, including the Nuclear Freeze campaign in the United States and the European Nuclear Disarmament movement across the Atlantic. Today's most visible push for eliminating nuclear weapons comes from the foreign policy elite, including former Secretaries of State George Shultz and Henry Kissinger, former Defense Secretary William Perry, and former Senate Armed Services Committee chair Sam Nunn.

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For a while, on the long and torturous campaign trail, Obama seemed to focus excessively on the easier side of communitarianism: that we are all one; the hope and joy of togetherness. However, during his recent Wesleyan speech he revived the other half of his message: the call for service for the common good, a much more demanding subject.

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Since it's one of the new conversations, I thought folks might enjoy hashing it out in a thread. So many things to discuss: persuasive Webb backlash, discussion of short-term and long-term trade-offs, a whole series of profiles in the reader blogs.

What are you thinking? And don't just give a name, make a case for a candidate or a criteria for making the decision.

• Amid all sorts of conflicting opinions, Genghis tries to explain the "Importance of the Popular Vote on Legitimacy"
• Reader Scientific draws our attention to the debate concerning the proposed Washington D.C. MLK memorial, an unpleasant reminder that many Americans still find the notion (or in this case, image) of a "confrontational" black man too hard to swallow
• With respect to this week's holiday, Jason Miller discusses "constitutional dilemma" posed by standing armies
• Reader MassDem - Obama supporter and father of two - offers a heartfelt thank you to Sen. Clinton
• In case we needed further proof, AnitaBee lays out conclusive evidence that the Clintons' claim that calls for Hillary to drop out are unprecedented doesn't hold any water
• In his/her ongoing series, Big Blue looks at what a potential Bill Richardson VP candidacy might look like

Wow. I was startled, this morning, to see the new Field Poll* numbers on California's response to its Supreme Court's marriage decision:

The poll found 51 percent of registered voters favor the idea of allowing gay and lesbian couples to wed, while 42 percent disapprove.

Never before have I seen such a polling result outside Massachusetts--and in Massachusetts, we got majority approval only *after* same-sex couples had been marrying for awhile, and after the shock of the court decision had worn off.

Two points are amazing (to me):
--the numbers are identical (albeit flipped)when Field asked whether voters approve of this fall's proposed constitutional amendment, which will ask voters to define marriage as being between a man and a woman. Only 42 percent of voters approve, while 51 percent disapprove.
--the poll was taken only two days after the decision. In the past, opposition has usually been highest right after marriage equality hits the headlines, and fades in the months afterwards, as everyone sees that absolutely nothing changes (no locusts, etc.) if the two nice women next door are not just living together but married.

*A note: The Field Poll is the nonpartisan, independent poll that is considered the gold standard in California attitudes.

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Investigations into Israeli PM Ehud Olmert's predilection for cash-filled envelopes reached a new milestone today with the testimony of Morris Talansky. New York-based Talansky confirmed that he had "transferred Olmert some $150,000 over 15 years, and that Olmert had tried to aid a Talansky business venture", but that "he [Talansky] never had any personal benefits from this relationship whatsoever." As more information is made public in this case the pundit-class is increasingly adamant that Olmert will not be able to politically survive this storm.

Fairly or not, Ehud Olmert is likely to be tagged as Israel's most dishonest Prime Minister--yet in many ways he has been more honest to his public about Israel's regional predicament and the steps it needs to take than almost any of his predecessors. In his latest outpouring of home truths, Olmert yesterday told one of his detractors that anyone who believes that it's possible to hold onto the greater land of Israel, the territories captured in '67, is "delusional". With the resumption of talks with Syria last week, despite a distinct lack of enthusiasm from the Bush administration, it seems that Olmert maybe going out on a high and is leaving an interesting diplomatic legacy.

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As another leftist who has spent the last decade writing about the rise of the modern conservatism, I agree with Rick that much has changed in recent years in terms of how left and liberal intellectuals approach the Right. It's hard to imagine how we could have any meaningful grasp on politics and society today without taking conservatism seriously. But that said, there is much at stake in how we understand the rise of the Right.

The first attempts on the left to make sense of the unhappy fact that the Reagan Revolution was real and enduring focused on how the left helped bring about its own demise. Much of this self-critical work carried good insights, yet too often it read as an internal story that still treated the Right as a static entity. Worse yet, in many cases pieces of the Right's own account of the 1960s as being too excessive and identity-focused was absorbed uncritically.

Since then there have been works on the Right that are neither condescending nor self-flagellating, and which squarely assess the power and appeal of conservative ideas, affect, organization, and institution-building. Before the Storm is a good example, as is Nixonland. As a result we now have begun to understand what actually has happened politically in these last thirty years.

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I just want to start off by agreeing with Rick that the notion that there's a "liberal elite" that condescends to poor conservatives is a hoary old myth clung to by the true conservative elite---like George Will---to convince a fraction of the white working and middle classes to vote out of spite. If anything, I think the tide has turned, and most condescension goes the other way, with conservatives preening about how they own morality, values, and patriotism, apparently unaware that liberals have morals, values, and patriotism.

Still, I think there's little doubt that the Franklin/Orthogonian split he details in Nixonland still shapes the political landscape in frustrating and, as I'm about to argue, nearly impossible to escape ways. Of course, once you bring this up, there's always going to be someone in comments who says that you can predict voting behavior pretty much entirely by family background, race, and class status, and that's true to a large extent. But with one exception, and we all know it anecdotally to be true: The largely white middle class frustratingly and unpredictably can go either way, liberal or conservative. Look at this chart of income levels coming out of the polls in 2006.

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• Chuck Keller writes in on the horrors of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, and the difference between the wall of names in Washington and the "wall" those with PTSD have built up in their own minds.
• Big Blue offers Missouri Senator Claire McCaskill as a possible VP for Obama but ultimately doesn't see her as the best alternative to Clinton on the ticket.
• Andrew Sprung looks at Obama's Wesleyan speech and analyzes what he meant when he called on recent grads to pursue a life of service over "the big house and nice suits."
• Francesca Hamilton explores the "new segregation"-- the reddening of red America and the blueing of the blue, and whether Obama has the potential to ease the divisions proposed in Bill Bishop's book The Big Sort (book club, July 21-25).

Wouldn't it be nice if the grand concept of Global Internet Freedom applied to the U.S. as well as to the rest of the world?

Sen. Dick Durbin (D-IL) recently held a hearing of his Subcommittee on Human Rights and the Law that hit all the right themes and said all the right words when referring to the. At the top of the list was "Internet freedom," in all its glory. There was testimony about sophisticated computer routers being used to hamper the free flow of information and about restrictions to free speech from Google, Yahoo and Cisco.

Our government seems to think it's a big deal. The State Department established a Global Internet Freedom Task Force a little more than two years ago. "The Internet is a potent force for freedom around the world, but challenges to its independence by repressive regimes threaten its transformational power," the Department said at the time.

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Let me plunge right in, thusly: I've been absolutely riveted by the right-wing response to the book. It's been an extraordinarily useful X-ray of our political moment. There have been three distinct categories of response; here, I'll focus on one of them--a response that, like a coin, has two opposite but interconnected sides: the conservative obsession with, and refication of, the notion that liberals are best described as "condescending."

Exhibit A--the first side of the coin--came in its purest form from Mark Hemmingway of National Review. He interviewed me for the magazine's web site. It was a surreal experience. First question: "It's my general sense that liberal or popular historians don't seem to be very interested in conservative history and ideology. Why are you?" In other words: why is the left--except for Perlstein!--so condescending that they refuse to take the right seriously.

This was so dead wrong--turned around 180 degrees from the facts on the ground, to be exact--that I hardly knew where to begin.

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• Reader Waldengirl reflects on the divisions between class, race, and gender identities which threaten to fracture the Democratic party, and discusses the difficulties of transforming the "big tent" into a unified front
• Despite a generally optimistic feeling on the left, Robert Koulish argues that the prevailing influence of Conservatism on American politics is far from dead
• Princeton historian Sean Wilentz, who has been sticking his neck out for Sen. Clinton throughout the campaign, recently wrote up a piece arguing that an Obama nomination threatens to break apart the Democrats' century-and-a-half old demographic base. Reader Akbar Jenkins says Wilentz is silly to fault Obama for failing to hold together Andrew Jackson's winning coalition


• Over the last couple weeks reader Big Blue has been working on a series of profiles of potential VP candidates. This week he looks at the possibility of John Edwards resurfacing as Obama's second in command

If you would like to help the millions of low and moderate-income homeowners who are facing the loss of their homes, but don't want to bail out the banks or take money out of the pockets of low-income renters, there is now a bill for you.

Representative Raul Grijalva (D-AZ) introduced the Saving Family Homes Act last week. This bill would give families facing foreclosure the option to stay in their homes up to 20 years as renters paying the fair market rent. This is a variation of my own-to-rent proposal from last summer.

The smart money doesn't think this bill much chance of passing, but of course the smart money also bet on subprime mortgages and Internet stocks. We shall see.

--Dean Baker