According to the NY Times, it appears that the Service Employees International Union is developing a strategy to hold Democrats accountable to pro-working-class policies once in office:

"In a move likely to upset some Democrats, the delegates approved an "accountability plan" in which the union would spend $10 million to pressure or punish political candidates who made pro-worker, pro-union promises, but broke them after being elected."

This is straight out of the Right's playbook--and exactly what progressives should be doing.

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Even as Hillary Clinton exits the U.S. race for president, the leadership race is in full swing in Israel. The woman to watch: Tzipi Livni.
As Israel's Prime Minister Ehud Olmert is in freefall after one too many corruption scandals, the men are circling the wagons to prevent Foreign Minister Livni from gaining the top post. She's one of the most popular politicians in Israel and practically the only potential candidate without the stain of previous scandal, but for her to win, she'll have to get past her own party primary first. How she does will gravely impact the peace process and the future of the U.S. role in the region, too.

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Sweltering DC humidity arrived on schedule this morning, but it brought with it a truly lousy jobs report. I give the full low-down here, but the punchline is that the unemployment rate leapt up a big half-percent in May, from 5% to 5.5%, the largest monthly increase since the mid-1980s, and the highest unemployment rate since late 2004. Payrolls contracted for the fifth month in a row, down 49,000, led by job losses in most industries, including construction, factories, offices, and retailers.

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• Joe Perez puts Hillary's concession in perspective. He specifically compares the long nomination battle to the 1984 primary campaign between Mondale and Hart. Perez: "So, students of history, when did Hart drop out of the race? After Mondale named himself the victor, Hart challenged: 'Welcome to overtime. It is not over.'"
• Scientific's post "Prophet Sharing" explores the messianization of Barack Obama, and (by way of Jordana Horn of the Wall Street Journal) draws a parallel to Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel. Scientific quotes Heschel: "Above all, the prophets remind us of the moral state of a people. Few are guilty, but all are responsible." While the post makes it clear that Obama himself is not a prophet, his "courage" is in "speaking truth to power." In conclusion, "Obama shed any hope of being a prophet - and became something even more useful in the process. He became presidential.

When I first heard about Scott McClellan's charges that the Bush administration had lied and deceived Americans during the months and years leading up to the war, I burst into tears of happiness. No, nothing he wrote was new. And even if he still seems like a sleazy public relations expert in obfuscation, an insider was finally telling the truth, in one book.

My story is different from those who felt seriously constrained about raising questions about the administration's obvious lies. I worked as an editorial writer at The San Francisco Chronicle, where a liberal editorial board raised serious objections to the war. And yet, in the years following 9/11, I felt editorial restraints that never allowed us to tell the whole truth about the lies and deception that led to America's most catastrophic foreign policy disaster.

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Barack Obama' speech to AIPAC on Wednesday was a hit. Contrary to predictions that the AIPAC crowd would receive Obama coldly, he was met with enthusiasm. A friend who was in the room said, "Obama was a huge hit. The college kids in particular went crazy. But all the people I saw seemed to want to be part of Obama's historic journey."

John McCain also scored with the AIPAC members. That is less newsworthy because McCain has not been the target of a vicious and libelous smear e-mail campaign within the Jewish community.

While the crowd inside the Washington Convention Center was pleased by Obama's speech, a lot of people outside the room were not. One phrase in particular was a turn-off for the critics. It was Obama's reference to Jerusalem as "the capital of Israel" which "must remain undivided." The statement was widely criticized as pandering, particularly by Dana Milbank in the Washington Post. Other critics said that Obama's position would doom Israeli-Palestinian negotiations because if the city is to remain undivided, there is nothing to negotiate about.

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This discussion has given us all much to think about and I'm grateful to the others who joined me and for their kind comments about The Candy Bombers. I think we're all in vigorous agreement about the value of history. Yes, analogies can be overused and misused, but history does teach us about present as well as the past. Perhaps I put it less artfully than I should have but when I sought to compare Berlin and Baghdad in my original post, I was not drawing some equivalence between the two. Nor was I saying we are in analogous times. In fact, I made a point to say that we were not. Nevertheless, I do believe that the manner in which we turned around the American occupation of Germany and the way America inspired people all around the world in 1948 are moments that offer lessons about how we should act as a nation - and they serve as rebukes to what has gone wrong in recent years.

Mike Tomasky is right to look forward and ask "What now?" We are in a moment where we need to look again to 1948 - not to replicate what they did then, but to repeat it; to take some of those same principles and apply them to our own time. Now, as then, America is facing new types of national security challenges in a different kind of environment. Then it was a global ideological and military threat at a time that we were - for the first time - operating at the summit of world power. Now it is a set of interconnected threats that know no boundaries - global terrorism, global warming, global poverty, global disease - at a time that most of the world's people live in democracies. Just as Truman and the others had to create new institutions and principles in 1948 to deal with the new situation they confronted, we have to do the same to respond to a world where American foreign policy will no longer just be conducted in embassies but will have to speak directly to people all over the world - to get them to instruct their governments to change course but also to get them to change course in their own lives. To combat terrorism, we will need to convince ordinary people in the Middle East and elsewhere to turn their backs on jihadism and turn in the cell leader who may be living next door. To fight climate change, we will need to convince a factory owner in China to change the way he does his work or change his lightbulb. To fight the spread of deadly diseases, we will need to convince a farmer in Africa to start living his life differently.

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Historical analogizing is essential in private, risky in public. Any time policymakers meet in the White House, at State, Defense or CIA to discuss a thorny foreign challenge, they must have people at the table with an historical sensibility. They don't have to be professional historians, as Andre has proven with his book. But they must be able to "think in time" if they are to have any hope of arriving at a wise decision. The analogizing should not be the primary frame of the discussions; that must be about the interests at stake and the particulars of the situation. But once it's time to drill down into the decision, historical comparisons can help structure the conversation. Exploring how various analogies apply and how they don't will almost always bring greater clarity.

But as Condi Rice's simplistic analogizing suggests, history can be a dangerous weapon in the wrong hands. That is usually the case when it is used publicly in speeches and interviews to sell a policy. There is no time in public forums to explore the complexities of the analogy--where it fits and where it doesn't. Instead you get a crude historical reductionism that actually sets back the debate. It's important for journalists and others to introduce history into public conversation. But policymakers should reserve their insights for private deliberations, or only those public forums that allow for lengthy exploration of the analogy. Otherwise it becomes a talking point instead of an insight.

Having gone on for far too long about the perils of extrapolating from historical similarities, what strikes me most about the history recounted in The Candy Bombers are the overwhelming dissimilarities between 1948 and 2008. Not so much on the international scene as simply in the realm of leadership, if that's not too quaint a term to use here. The John McLoys, the Lucius Clays, the James Forrestals--where have they gone? In place of them, we have who? Sandy Berger? Paul Bremer? Today's smarmy foreign policy elites, for all of their moral posturing and inflated self-regard, don't exactly rise to the level of their predecessors. To put down The Candy Bombers is to feel orphaned.

But Andrei's vibrant chronicle unfolds on two levels, transporting us easily from the White House to the cockpits at Tempelhof. There, at the micro-level, I was encouraged about the present and for a simple reason: We no longer have Harry Trumans among us, but we do have Hal Halvorsens. I have seen them--winning over sheiks three times their age, calling in medevacs, and there in the ruins, dispensing candy to children. Hence, my own take away from Andrei's book: so long as we have candy bombers, there is hope.

I've written many columns over the last three or four years arguing that the Democrats need to recapture the legacy of 1948, referring not just to the airlift but the Marshall Plan and the general atmosphere of building a more humane world after the war. I've never argued that the American men who created that world did everything right by our standards today, because they did not, by a long, long shot. But they were attuned to their times and often chose a sound middle course between capitulation and confrontation, the kind of choice exemplified by the airlift itself. It's not an analogy, specious or otherwise, but an assertion to say that the Democratic Party today needs that kind of creativity and rigor in its approach to foreign policy.

Nothing - nothing - has made me angrier in recent years that the neocon assertion that today's neocons are the true heirs of the (mostly) Democratic foreign-policy makers of 1948. In April 2003, Bill Kristol wrote that proponents of the Iraq war were the real heirs of George Kennan, while opponents represented "the Dominque de Villepin left" (this, while Kennan was still alive, and against the war!). It wasn't only necons of course; some liberals bought into this mendacity too. Joe Lieberman still hauls it out. He is either a disgraceful liar or, if he actually believes that Truman and most of the men around would have backed a war like the Iraq adventure in the aftermath of an event like September 11, an extremely stupid man.

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• Big Blue looks at the downfall of the Clinton campaign--particularly the failure of Mark Penn to portray her as a candidate with a message voters wanted to hear.
• Reader nyg2008 proposes Chris Dodd for Vice President, and gives a number of reasons Dodd would be Obama's best choice.
• Doctor Cleveland contrasts Obama's approach to foreign policy with the McCain/Bush/Lieberman method of dealing with enemies. Cleveland: "The goal is to humiliate one's opponents and make them lose face, while looking more impressive to one's own local admirers; essentially, this is the Gangster Rap School of Diplomacy."
• Doc Nebula shares his/her long transition to disillusionment with Hillary Clinton. Nebula: "At some point, Senator Clinton pretty clearly decided that she was fated to be the next President of the United States, that this was the way things were going to be, and anyone or anything that tried to get between her and her glorious destiny had better run for the high country."

The Independent in London, reports that Bush is trying to rush through a deal with the Iraqi government before his term ends that would have major long term effects and will become an issue in the Obama v. McCain campaign.

A secret deal being negotiated in Baghdad would perpetuate the American military occupation of Iraq indefinitely, regardless of the outcome of the US presidential election in November.

The terms of the impending deal, details of which have been leaked to The Independent, are likely to have an explosive political effect in Iraq. Iraqi officials fear that the accord, under which US troops would occupy permanent bases, conduct military operations, arrest Iraqis and enjoy immunity from Iraqi law, will destabilise Iraq's position in the Middle East and lay the basis for unending conflict in their country.

But the accord also threatens to provoke a political crisis in the US. President Bush wants to push it through by the end of next month so he can declare a military victory and claim his 2003 invasion has been vindicated.

The reporter, Patrick Cockburn, has had impeccable sources in the past. If this one is true, it's time for the Democrats to raise a ruckus. Obama needs to ask McCain if he supports this new Bush Policy of a permanent American force in Iraq. The long term oil price and fiscal situation is bad enough. This is going to make it worse

Sunday morning TPM reader Ellen posted a letter she said she had received from Wells Fargo, responding to my earlier post about a customer who was the target of some very sharp dealings. The "facts" in Ellen's post--the customer's divorce, her repeated solicitations for the loan, Wells Fargo's efforts to help by paying off her credit cards--put a very different light on the story. So I got in touch with the lawyer who had originally written to me. The lawyer rechecked the facts with the client, and there are no ambiguities. the client has never been married, and there was NO credit card payoff. The counter-story is simply not true.

Ellen posted a fake. Did the fake come from Wells Fargo? Was it from someone else? I assume Ellen has more information about who it came from and how the person found only her. She can decide what to do with that information. And, if Wells Fargo has something it wants to say about its car lending practices, it is certainly welcome to post.

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My fellow admirers of The Candy Bombers seem genuinely puzzled by my opposition to using historical analogies as anything more than an auxiliary to the empirical record. Can analogies be useful as heuristic tools? Sure. As explanatory tools? Sure. As narrative embellishments? Why not (and, again, Andrei barely hints at Iraq and all the rest in The Candy Bombers)?

My complaint was two-fold. First, Andrei writes in his initial post that he set out to write The Candy Bombers, in part, "to excavate a 'usable past' for progressives." Well, to me, that sounds like he set out to write a historical analogy, rather than the careful and meticulous history that he actually did write. (His discussion of Henry Wallace, I suspect, won't be so usable). My concern here is that the search for a "usable past" may end up distorting the actual past. The author in search of a usable past does not ask a question; he makes a declaration. But my harping on the subject responds to Andrei's provocative post, not his wonderful volume.

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This is the kind of scene that would not happen in Israel. Clayton Swisher from Al Jazeera English asks as impertinent question about the upcoming AIPAC trial and gets thrown out.

In Israel, the question would have produced a debate -- screaming, hollering and God knows what else. Here, the reporter is banned. Good journalism though. I wish Swisher was asking this kind of provocative question at the White House press room. We need less politeness by reporters (again, see Israel).

Meanwhile the lawyer representing the AIPAC guys asks in an op-ed in the Forward. Why haven't these guys received their constitutional due of a speedy trial. The case looks very flimsy. Try them or free them. Just letting them dangle in the wind seems indefensible.

RESPONSE FROM AIPAC AIPAC's spokes person, Josh Block, called to say that "There were some 463 reporters at Policy Conference, including over 25 from Arab TV channels alone and numerous others from outlets consdidered unfriendly to AIPAC, all of whom had equal access to cover events throughout the 3 days." He said that all reporters were told that "the opportunity to ask questions at the forums is reserved for delegates who pay and travel from across the country to attend the conference." The substance of the question was irrelevant. Block made clear that Al Jazeera English is a welcome participant at the conference.

I was very struck by Lawrence's post, which seemed to stake out an entirely novel critical response--damning by lavish praise. It was as if his admiration for Andrei's narrative gifts were in inverse proportion to his regard for Andrei's intellectual acumen. I, too, have some reservations about the value of post-war Europe as an analogy to our current situation, but I have to admit that I have never heard what Lawrence describes as an old saw: good history saves you from plausible analogies. I would have thought that good history saves you from facile analogies.

But I want to talk about this whole question of specious analogizing, because I think that this administration, whose foreign policy ranks have been staffed by some quite erudite people, has suffered from rampant, and grisly errorneous, historical thinking. Condoleezza Rice, if I may go back to my favorite hobby horse, famously told Brent Scowcroft that the Middle East was primed for democratic transformation just as Eastern Europe had been at the end of the Cold War. Scowcroft was nonplussed. And yet this parallel was much present in the minds of many of those to whom our addled President listened. In The Case For Democracy, a book which Bush read in the months before delivering his second inaugural, and apparently experienced as revelation, Natan Sharansky treats the analogy as a matter beyond dispute. (Sharansky is also said to have influenced the 2002 speech in which Bush promised to support Palestinian statehood if only the Palestinians would cast out their own leadership.)

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Very sorry, Andrei, for the delay. I only just picked my jaw up off the table from last night. Apropos of which, I was most intrigued by your account, on pages 453-456, of Tom Dewey's calm acceptance of Harry Truman's stunning upset victory in the 1948 election. As you note, just 25,000 more votes for Dewey from the right places would have sent the thing to the House of Representatives. And yet there was Mr. Prosecutor, the day after this heartbreaking defeat (his second, of course), taking matters with equanimity and agreeing that it was "most essential" that America continue to pursue a bipartisan foreign policy. What a model for certain people to follow.

Now, let's get down to business. I'll begin by adding to the encomiums from others. The book is really a terrific piece of work in every way. The research is thorough, the narrative thread is powerful, and the writing! Gore underused you is all I can say. This book would make a great capstone to a career, worthy of mention in the first paragraph of your (far-off) New York Times obit. Not that you won't top it. But it's that good. I recommend it highly to readers of this thread.

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It could have been a case of terrible timing. The first speech after claiming the nomination is delivered at AIPAC. Talk about your tough crowd.

But Obama won them over. He received standing ovations, cheers and even some tears (when he talked about the Holocaust and about slain Jewish civil rights workers, Michael Schwerner and Andy Goodman who were murdered in Mississippi with James Chaney in 1964).

Obama won AIPAC over without dropping his commitment to the two-state solution or engaging in the Palestinian bashing that is normal in that venue.

So how did he do it? It turns out the timing was perfect. Suddenly there is an awareness of the dimensions of Obama's accomplishment. And people want to be part of it. (The AIPAC crowd has a huge contingent of students who are not exactly enthusiastic about returning to the campus in September as McCain supporters).

A friend of mine walked out of the speech with this analysis. It is clear that AIPAC senses a huge shift in America and it wants to be on the right side of it."

Cool.

PS. I am not troubled by Obama's reference to maintaining an "undivided Jerusalem." That is what I favor. Unified city, two sovereignties i.e. shared. I love Jerusalem and the idea of walls going up to divide Jews and Arabs is anathema to me. Share it, don't split. I don't kbnow what Obama meant but I believe that his commitment to an undivided city is right.

Here's Michael Powell on Obama in the morning NYT:

He waxes incandescent at rallies, but in the 18-hour days leading up to primaries, he can sound aloof and querulous before smaller audiences. Condescension can creep in. He suggested, for example, that his youthful travels to Asia and Europe had left him more knowledgeable than Mrs. Clinton or Mr. McCain about foreign affairs.

So the claim that knowing something of how people live abroad is highly useful for the conduct of foreign affairs is condescension? Michael Powell's example arguably exhibits presumption or exaggeration; but condescension? The Random House Unabridged Dictionary defines condescend thus: "to behave as if one is conscious of descending from a superior position, rank, or dignity." But if another candidate claims foreign policy knowledge on the basis of official trips as first lady, or a visit to an Iraqi market in the company of a hundred armed guards, by these dim lights does the claim qualify as exhibiting an absence of condescension?

I pick this nit because the stamping of the condescension label onto Obama's forehead is a big deal. A Nexis search gives 303 examples of newspaper stories over the past year which mention "condescend" or its variants within 10 words of "Obama." The comparable figure for John McCain is 54.

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John McCain, in defining his mission last night as reforming and reinventing government, said: "The wrong change looks not to the future but to the past for solutions that have failed us before and will surely fail us again....Like others before him, [Barack Obama] seems to think government is the answer to every problem; that government should take our resources and make our decisions for us." But it's precisely the hostility toward government that McCain expressed, under the leadership of his fellow conservatives, that caused government agencies to deteriorate and fail during the Bush administration. Restoring public confidence in FEMA, the Environmental Protection Agency, the Food and Drug Administration, the Consumer Product Safety Commission, the Federal Aviation Administration and so on most definitely requires learning from past experience. And the lessons of the past are quite clear: public trust in those institutions was much higher when they were adequately funded and run largely by non-political professionals who actually enforced laws and regulations rather than sabotaged them. Because McCain is no maverick when it comes to the conservative movement's hostility toward regulations, civil servants, and funding for agencies that protect public health, safety, and the environment, and because his support comes from the same industry sources that have benefited from the dismantling of those agencies, there's no basis for believing that he would do anything to reverse their decline.

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After confused signals last night from the Clinton campaign, Hillary Clinton began her speech to AIPAC today with a magnanimous and clear message--that she will support a President Obama and that he will support Israel. AIPAC sure has lucky timing to hold its convention on the day after the Dem primary winds down. It puts the organization front and center and doubtless will start the blogs and pundits wagging (as I am here...) about the central role of the organization in American politics.

But, that's not the issue. The issue is what about American foreign policy, not what about one organization. And on that score, Senator Obama laid out a vision that will be key to America's revived role in the Mideast region. Both he (and Senator Clinton) made clear that only sustained involvement by the U.S. will create peace in the region. Here's the thing:

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• There was an avalanche of reader feedback to last night's news, but a post by Desidero Auroleu on following the rules hit all the right buttons. Reader Doctor Cleveland also wrote an inspiring entry on Clinton's important barrier-breaking campaign and what she accomplished in spite of her defeat. Cleveland writes: "The perverse triumph of Senator Clinton's campaign is that she lost, by and large, for the reasons other politicians lose. She was tied to an important vote that became a political disadvantage as circumstances changed." Reader Atreides Hawk wrote on why Obama shouldn't pick Clinton as his veep.
• In non-Obama news, Russ Hoyle writes about Nathaniel Fick, an Ivy League-educated commander in Iraq who wrote a memoir, and has spoken out on why Iraq never "posed a strategic threat to the U.S. that justified the death of a single U.S. Marine under his command."
• Reader ItsNeverOver writes about a trip to Cuba, and seeing the town of Guantanamo and everything it represented. "Here was a structure, a prison, which stood to represent American-branded justice, yet its very existence went against everything our country stood for."
• The night wouldn't have been complete without a good McCain post. Nathan Jaco delivers with an entry that lays out why voting for John McCain is voting for war with Iran.

Obama's primary victory speech came to Istanbul in the early light as muezzins atop minarets stirred the city wıth their raw and ancient cacaphony of "Allahu Akbar" and as Turkey lurches toward a constitutıonal crisis beyond our scope here but arresting to Jurgen Habermas, Ian Buruma, Benjamin Barber, Seyla Benhabib, and others at a small "Dialogues on Civilization" Conference organized by the International Reset Association.

Circumstances ın this hauntingly beautıful pre-market culture of honor, buffeted by global-capıtalıst currents, encourage not horse-race handicapping but countercyclical musings about Obama, sown before dawn ın wrıterly furroughs at the margins of the American field.

From here, the comıng election looks all the more fateful-because he's trying to ride two swift, distinctively American currents that usually boıl against each other yet have converged in Obama's candidacy and might converge, at last, in the general electorate.

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The very next thing Obama has to do is to pick a VP. Now.

Traditionally, a candidate does not pick a running-mate until the convention. What else is there to make a convention exciting?

This year nothing is as remotely exciting as the nomination of Barack Obama. Only convincing FDR or JFK to join the ticket could make the Democratic convention more exciting.

The point to doing it now is to avoid being steamrolled into picking Clinton. He's not going to do it. Perhaps that was a possibility, and not a bad one, a few months ago. Now it is impossible for a dozen obvious reasons.

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Israel's former Consul General to New York, and now Labor Party parliamentarian, MK Colette Avital, has called on Israel's leaders to cut ties with Hagee in an op-ed in today's Haaretz. Colette Avital is one of the most respected members of Labor's parliamentary faction. She was the party's first woman candidate for President and has been a leader in fighting for the rights of holocaust survivors, women's equality, and the well-being of the Bedouin in the Negev.

Today she began what will hopefully be a push from the other end of this equation, from Israel itself, to end the obscene relationship that has been embraced so enthusiastically by so many in the pro-Israel community with Hagee, his Christians United For Israel organization, and the dispensationalist wing of Evangelical Zionism.

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The latest speculation that Clinton will acknowledge Obama's victory, but keep her campaign going is beyond bizarre.

Hillary Rodham Clinton told colleagues Tuesday she would consider joining Barack Obama as his running mate, and advisers said she was withholding a formal departure from the race partly to use her remaining leverage to press for a spot on the ticket.

Exactly what leverage does she have except being a skunk at the garden party in Denver? The stories on her husband advanced in Vanity Fair, which have been off bounds in the MSM for the campaign, will only increase now. She would be the Vice-President from hell and Bill would never stop meddling. As I've said before, the 76% of women who oppose an overturn of Roe V. Wade are not going to vote for John McCain (and make that nightmare a reality) just out of pique over Hillary's loss.

I want to address today's question, but first need to address a couple of Lawrence Kaplan's points.

Lawrence is on target when he hails Andrei's narrative. It is superb scholarship, thrilling story-telling and another example of why those academics (you know who you are) who like to belittle journalists trying their hand at writing history should chill. I'm not saying this is a problem among TPM readers, but it's a frequent complaint in the faculty clubs. These folks need to judge the work, not the credentials (or lack of them) of the author. The whole idea that only PhDs can get tenure at even the least prestigious university may be time-honored, but it makes no sense. It's the work, not the sheepskin, that should count. Even crazier is that if Andrei wanted to go teach history at a public high school, even one desperate for teachers, he would be turned down for lacking a teaching certificate. (Some states have alternative certification). I know this sounds like a tangent, but I had to get it off my chest.

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Word is that something is going on in politics that is distracting America's top political journalists from weighing in today. (I had to laugh this morning when cable news briefly tuned into a Capitol Hill news conference unveiling the Climate Change Act but then went away once the producers realized the senators were only talking about a threat to the planet and not superdelegates). We'll welcome Mike Tomasky, Jon Alter, and Michael Barone when they're available and, in the meantime, press on.

I very much appreciate Lawrence Kaplan's kind words about The Candy Bombers but must admit to being as confused by his post as he was disappointed in mine. If I read him correctly, he seems to, on one hand, denigrate the idea that we can learn from history in his disappointment with my call for searching for a "usable past" at the same as he admits that those who believed we should go to war with Iraq in 2003 relied on historical analogies to come to their conclusions.

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Two weeks ago, immigration officials raided a kosher meat plant in Iowa. Over three hundred people were arrested under suspicion of being in the U.S. illegally. In Iowa, feds had to lease a fairground to house the arrested workers. 260 were shuffled through quick trials at the Electric Park Ballroom (without even a permanent courtroom) and sentenced to five months in prison. A month before that, they raided Pilgrims Pride Poultry Plants in Tennessee, Texas, Arkansas, Florida and West Virginia. 311 people were arrested.

What's the purpose of these raids? There are an estimated 12 million undocumented workers in the U.S. - scattershot raids are unlikely to put a significant dent in that number. So far, the plant owners have not been charged with any crimes.

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Ben Smith of The Politico has written an astute piece on why Hillary keeps going, and going, and going, against insurmountable odds.

As Smith writes, "winning, for Clinton, has been surviving." Smith continues that Hillary's stalwart refusal to give up has created some confusion among her advisers and has in some ways muddled her message, concluding that the "last believers in the mythology of Clintonian invincibility appear to be the Clintons themselves." You should read the whole thing -- but there are many more levels beneath the surface here that are worth exploring.

Here's my stab at trying to answer the question of why this controversial and in some ways enigmatic figure has refused to quit the race. One key reason she has stayed in, I believe, is that it strengthens the inspirational power of Hillary's political narrative and persona, and, ultimately, strengthens her emotional grip on her supporters.

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• Big Blue continues profiling potential Obama cabinet members with "media darling" Chuck Hagel.
• Reader twinkletoes digs up an article on Obama's foreign policy platform towards Iran, which, according to this reader, was about as progressive as a "Cheney stump speech."
• San Fernando Curt points us towards a Guardian story about the government's continuous use of floating dungeons for detainees. Curt mentions that 39 of these detainees have actually disappeared: "Something makes me doubt they've been given new names and identities, and work as cable installers in Idaho and Wyoming."
• Scientific discusses Obama's choice to leave Trinity United Church of Christ, and the media's need to "stoke our insecurities for the sake of ratings and start a fire they cannot control."

The leaders of the Cult of the Cut, whose axiomatic belief is "tax cuts, spending cuts good; any other fiscal policy bad, deficits be damned" warned darkly last week about an ominous, imminent tax increase. Cult leaders - a small band of administration royloyalists - took the unprecedented step of alerting the nation to this prospect by issuing a White House press release entitled "The Largest Tax Increase in History Is Looming."

The urgent tone of the press release reflects their belief that "In this time of economic uncertainty, one of the worst things we could do to our economy is raise taxes on the American people. Thanks in part to the President's tax relief, our economy continues to grow." [Emph. theirs]. Let us set aside the prescience behind the assertion that, after a contraction of GDP growth from 4.6 percent in the last quarter of 2007 to less than one percent in the first quarter of 2008, the nation's economy is in fact growing.

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Andrei,

I do not think your blog post does The Candy Bombers nearly the justice it deserves. I am not aware of a blog posting that has improved the world in any meaningful way--although readers of this site will adduce evidence to the contrary--but your book, which I approached warily and cynically, could do exactly that. Not so much in the way you seem to intend: we cannot have historical writing without analogies, but, honestly, enough is enough. And not so much to judge by your output on this website, as opposed to the sheer loveliness of the volume's prose. For those who prefer blogs to books, consider a typical passage from The Candy Bombers: "One shell hit the riding stables of the Tiergarten, sending a herd of shrieking horses stampeding down the city's streets with their manes and tails on fire...The Siberian [Red Army soldiers] washed their faces in the toilet, believing that this was what they were for. Unaccustomed to electricity, they would marvel at lightbulbs. They demanded the glowing orbs be handed over, held them delicately, packed them away carefully..." Andrei, I thought you were a political operative.

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Politico's Martin and Smith float the radical notion that the heart of the right wing online media machine, Matt Drudge, is a quiet Obama supporter.

After skewering Al Gore and lampooning John Kerry, he's emerged as an unreliable ally for the GOP, while trumpeting Obama's victories and shrugging at his scandals.

"It's clear to us that Barack Obama has won the Drudge Primary, and it's one of the most important primaries in this process," conceded a senior aide to Hillary Rodham Clinton, who also acknowledged that Drudge's treatment of Obama could make the Illinois senator more electable in November.

Wow! Rupert Murdoch and Matt Drudge on Barack's side. Evangelical's and Miami Cubans coming over to Obama's positions. Does the earth still revolve around the Sun?

If anyone is interested in a rather deep discussion about the future of the Web as a democratic instrument, there is a long post on my regular blog. It's far too long for TPM Cafe, but some of you might be interested.

My 17-year-old son just wrote a paper for his American History class laying much of the blame for McCarthyism on Truman's anti-Commuinist rhetoric. I said to him, among other things, "Read The Candy Bombers." Yes, Truman was not above harvesting political advantage by blurring the distinction between naive admirers of the Soviet Union like Henry Wallace, and outright Communists; but to read Andrei's book is to be struck by how very measured, and how fine-grained, were the responses of Truman and those around him to the very terrible threats of 1946-8. Andrei makes clear that the Soviet blockade of Berlin seemed to many leading figures to offer little choice save withdrawal, on the one hand, or a nuclear strike against a hopelessly superior Russian land force on the other--or quite possibly the one followed by the other. Truman had the steadiness, and also the confidence, to choose the one path which required neither surrender nor cataclysm.

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Robert Samuelson's oped in today's WaPo is workin' my last good nerve.

The basic argument is that a cap-and-trade carbon tax is anti-growth, and he cites lots of numbers to make it sound terribly expensive and painful. But what Samuelson fails to do, and this is far too common in this work, is to consider the benefits side of the equation.

When assessing environmental policies, if you fail to consider the economic costs of doing nothing, everything sounds horribly expensive and distortionary. That is, you can claim, as does Samuelson, that the cost of the tax on industry or households amounts to $X, and since you neglect to factor in any of the environmental benefits of X's impact, X ends up looking awfully problematic.

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Thank you, Max Blumenthal, for working the Hagee beat so the rest of us don't have to. So the guy who was AIPAC's keynoter last year and whose Christians United For Israel is hosting Joe Lieberman this year believes that the Anti-Christ is a Jewish gay guy. (Uh oh, I may know him).

This is crazy stuff but is also pure unadulterated old-fashioned anti-Semitism.

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The weeks of delay in delivering humanitarian aid to the suffering millions in Myanmar highlighted one more time a new transnational norm, that governments have a duty to protect their people, and--that if they do not discharge it, they forfeit their right to sovereignty. It is a fine norm, but as it turns out, more than a new norm is needed.

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• Reader nathanjrod brings our attention to a story buried in the back of McClatchy describing a marine-turned-Christian-missionary who was evangelizing at gunpoint. Comparing this soldier to American evangelicals he/she says, "My hunch is many Americans would not view Jehovah's Witnesses in the same light if they were suddenly armed while making their conversion pitch."
• Reader chaunceybaker describes his father, the son of a German immigrant in Chicago, and a Clinton supporter.
• Richard Thompson speculates how Hillary would do if she ran as an independent. He says, she could "appeal to a 'vast' middle ground that's uncomfortable continuing Bush's policies," but "unwilling to go with the unknown reformist." In other words, she would create "an orderly revolution."
• Big Blue delivers once again. The first post in a new series on Obama's potential cabinet members is Delaware Senator Joe Biden.

Hello all! First of all, thanks to TPM - one of the premier places for serious conversations about books - for hosting this discussion. I am truly honored to be joined this week by Jonathan Alter, Michael Barone, Lawrence Kaplan, Michael Tomasky, and Jim Traub - a group of writers and thinkers whom I have greatly admired and learned much from over the years.

I'd like to kick things off with an event that took place a month ago that has been widely noted (including in a story on the front page of the New York Times) but whose significance has been ignored. On April 26, an unprecedented, citizen-demanded referendum took place in Berlin. For the first time in the city's history, enough Berliners signed a petition to put a matter on the ballot of a special election. The subject was whether the city government should shelve its plans to shutter the small Tempelhof airport located smack in the center of the German capital.

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All this week we'll be focusing on Andrei Cherny's book The Candy Bombers: The Untold Story of the Berlin Airlift and America's Finest Hour. Cherny will lead a discussion on what this pivotal event teaches us about democracy and occupation.

Joining him will be Michael Tomasky of The Guardian, James Traub, a contributing writer at The New York Times Magazine, Lawrence Kaplan, editor of World Affairs, Jonathan Alter of Newsweek and Michael Barone, a senior writer for U.S. News & World Report.

Cherny's first post will be up later today.

Last night I wanted to talk about the difference between banning certain transactions and merely "nudging" people away from them, so I posted a story I from a bankruptcy lawyer that told an unflattering story about Wells Fargo.

A reader posted a response that she evidently received sometime between 10:15 Saturday night and 5:30 Sunday morning from "Ms. xxx xxxxx" at Wells Fargo Loss Mitigation Department. The letter includes a lot of information about the debtor, whom Wells Fargo evidently could immediately identify. The letter also explains that the people at Wells Fargo "follow Prof. Warren's publications and speeches most carefully."

Good.

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It was nice waking up to today's New York Times to read a full-blown repudiation by its public editor (i.e. by the Times itself) on a libelous piece it ran by neocon Edward Luttwak on May 12. That piece argued that under Islamic law Obama was an apostate and that therefore would be the target of Muslim assassins. It was a crazy piece, and it was amazing to see it in the Times. (Why would they publish a piece by a neoconservative on Islamic theology? That's like publishing a piece by Pat Buchanan on Jewish dietary laws).

Anyway, it was all lies. And today the Times flatout admitted it in a long apologia.

The Luttwak hit job was part of the anti-Obama campaign that is emanating from the tiny right wing of the Jewish community. It's pretty intense. The haters are out in full force, exploiting racism and legitimate worries about Israel's security in an effort to elect McCain and preserve a neoconservative foreign policy.

Now they are going after David Bonior.

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