No one knows for sure if Iran is pursuing nuclear weapons. But its president gives every indication that it is.

Addressing a cheering crowd in Tehran on Wednesday, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said that the United States and the European Union had failed in their efforts to prevent Iran from going nuclear. "They've tried by military threats . . . and political pressure to stop [us] from our luminous path. But today they have seen that all their planning has failed. Today the Iranian nation is standing on the nuclear heights."

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John McCain's new Senate Financial Disclosure Form, look like he was either running his campaign off the American Express Platinum Card his wife gave him, or they have one hell of a high living lifestyle.

The bulk of the McCains' obligations stemmed from a pair of American Express credit cards that are held in Cindy McCain's name. According to the disclosure reports, which present information on debts in a range rather than providing a precise figure, Mrs. McCain owed $100,000 to $250,000 on each card.

I know what American Express charges for interest on a Platinum Card. A fiscally responsible household should probably sell some of the million of Anheuser-Busch stock they own and stop paying that 17% ARP on $500,000 worth of Amex charges. There are some other stark contrasts between the McCains and the Obamas. The McCains have a net worth around $40 million, almost all of it from Cindy's holdings. The Obama's net worth is closer to $4 million, most of it earned from Barack's two recent books. Instead of going into debt they have managed to put $250,000 in a college savings account for their two daughters.

McCain's books don't seem to do very well. Whereas Obama earned $ 4 million in the last year in book royalties, only earned $176,488. That's better than his new economic guru Carly Fiorina

Arianna is right that "It wasn't elected officials who led the struggle for civil rights or the drive for women's rights or the fight to end the war in Vietnam or the war in Iraq - it was the people." More specifically, it was the people making politicians more scared to support the status quo than to support change.

Yes, we're back to the concept of fear - and how to make it work for positive ends.

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I met Tim Russert when I was a 27 year old just put in charge of press for a statewide campaign in NY. In 1982, I was press secretary for Lt. Governor candidate Carl McCall, who was running in the primary with Mario Cuomo; this was Cuomo's first run for the Governor. He was successful. Carl lost.

Carl was an African-American candidate running in a NYS still obsessed with ethnic and racial politics. Tim was running Senator Moynihan's re-election campaign at the time.

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Cautioning against making war for democracy in Iraq, Colin Powell famously cited the Pottery Barn rule: You break it, you own it.

Cautioning against chasing neoliberal prosperity, I'm sorely tempted to warn that the currents and powers driving its transactions will break you, own you, and throw your body into neoliberalism's iron (if padded) corporate cage and your civic-republican dignity into history's dustbin.

One mustn't say that, of course, and it's certainly not what Francis Fukuyama had in mind in The End of History or Tom Friedman in The World is Flat. But look honestly at America's decay and face the painful truth which David Brooks helped Harvard neoliberals to avoid facing in Bobos in Paradise: "C'mon," he purred (I'm characterizing his thesis, not quoting him), "You know that you love your unearned income and real estate and that you'd rather circulate commodities than ideas, and [wink, tickle], that's okay!"

It's not okay, and Brooks, moving along now in his political makeover, is beginning to wonder what we've paid for it. He won't take us far toward an answer. Nor, he therefore assures us, will Barack Obama, a Harvard neoliberal, even though he has all the grace notes Larry Summers lacked. From elsewhere on the spectrum, the political philosopher Michael Walzer agrees, telling a conference in Istanbul this month that "leftist economists will be critics from the outside" of Obama's circle. We are all in the neoliberal cage, it seems, except for a few tenured radicals and union fuddy-duddies.

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I think it is hard to overstate how important the Supreme Court decision was to force George Bush to restore Habeus Corpus to our system of justice. Since September 12, 2001, the phrase "9/11 changes everything" has been the mantra flowing out of Dick Cheney's mouth into George Bush's ears and thus into our national policy. In the great dystopian novels like 1984 and Brave New World, there is always an unnamed war going on overseas that justifies the government to spy on its people and curtail their basic freedoms. The citizens have lost track of just where this war is, because it has lasted their lifetime.

The Global War On Terror was becoming just such an excuse for an unending suspension of the constitution. But in Justice Kennedy's majority opinion, he spoke truth to power: "The laws and Constitution are designed to survive, and remain in force, in extraordinary times."

Now of course the matter gets much dicier.

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I have to recant. I'm always saying mean things about Charles Krauthammer. I admit it. It's just that ever since he interrupted our Yom Kippur synagogue service by bellowing at the rabbi for endorsing the concept of peace, I have thought him to be utterly unhinged.

No more. In today's Washington Post, he has advice for John McCain that is, as everybody says these days, "spot on."

In a column titled, "Make the Election About Iraq," Krauthammer urges his candidate to stake his whole candidacy on the utter rightness of the Iraq war. Krauthammer says that for McCain to run away from the sterling success of the war would make mean he is unfit to be President.

"McCain's case is not hard to make. Iraq is a three-front war -- against Sunni al-Qaeda, against Shiite militias and against Iranian hegemony -- and we are winning on every front:"

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For weeks now, we have been hearing from feminists that Hillary Clinton was badly treated in the primaries. Some arguments are overblown -- sexism is not why she lost -- but it has been valuable to raise the issues. Now, though, the issue is how another working mother is to be treated: Michelle Obama. The attacks gathering on her are scurrilous, profoundly sexist and racist. Will prominent white feminists and female pundits and officials -- including Congressional Republican women -- speak up forcefully against slurs on Michelle Obama? It will be a strong test of their good faith. Do they care about fairness to all women involved in public life, or are they just whining for Hillary or maneuvering for her voters?

Apparently the Supreme Court has declared that even Gitmo inhabitants have human rights.

Thank God. I've been ashamed for years to be living in a country that would imprison people without even a hearing on whether there was a reasonable suspicion that they had done what they were accused of doing--a country that had abandoned the rule of law. I want to cry with relief.

Slate's Convictions blog is having a fascinating discussion about the precise meaning of the ruling. To follow the discussion, start here and work your way upward, via the "prev" button.

• Fredrick Bernanke weighs in on Jim Johnson's resignation as Obama's veep vetter, and asks what it takes for Private Sector officials to withstand the intense scrutiny their Public Sector counterparts are subjected to.
• San Fernando Curt looks at the phenomenon of DINOs (Democrats in Name Only) that have consistenly voted Republican since Reagan, and why the economy might push them back to the left this year.
• Jason Miller argues that the authors of the constitution never intended for the U.S. to have a large military that polices the world. He suggests some ways to scale military spending back and use the money to fund an "American Renaissance" of good works at home.

Like many progressives I was disappointed to hear the line-up for Obama's economic team going into the general election. The lead figure will be Jason Furman, who was the director of the Hamilton Project at Brookings. This project is the brainchild of Robert Rubin the leading light of the Wall Street Democrats. While my friends and fellow progressive economists, Jared Bernstein and Jamie Galbraith are on the team (I have also been contacted), it is clear who has the leading role.

I was disappointed by this line-up, but not surprised. After all, Senator Obama wants to be president

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Today's retail sales report for May revealed a much better-then-expected jump of 1%, the best monthly showing in six months (year-over-year growth of 2.5% is still sluggish). It wasn't just spending on gas either (core sales, ex-autos, ex-gas were also up 1%).

Given what we know about incomes and the job market right now (and what we know ain't pretty), the sales report strongly suggests folks are spending their rebate checks. Yes, I know there's too much spending and too little saving in our economy, but at a time like this, with the economy growing well below trend, we really need folks to kick up their consumer spending (it's 70% of the economy!), most usefully on non-imports (i.e., not just on gasoline).

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I tend not to agree with James Carville about very much. But I do agree with him on this. Al Gore is, by far, the best candidate we could possibly have for Vice President.

I don't suppose many Democrats would disagree. But I do think that many would say that he'd never take it.

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Today the Irish will be given an opportunity to vote on whether or not they are willing to give up a major chunk of their national sovereignty. It is an opportunity that was denied to all the other citizens of the 27 nations that make up the European Union. The EU champions democracy for other nations, to the four corners of the earth; however, it is refusing most of its own citizens the right to vote on an important issue, namely whether they are willing to allow the EU government to make major decisions directly affecting their lives--circumventing their nationally elected bodies. True, the EU has been making decisions for all its members for decades, but most of the important ones were in effect subject to veto by each nation, as unanimity was required. Now the EU plans to change its setup and allow for majority vote on numerous important matters.

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Jason Furman is smart, principled, honest, and very well-informed. He also helped lead the idea-based and fact-based challenge to the completely disingenuous so-called reform of Social Security proposed by George Bush.

Now that Jason is on the Obama economic team, reporters for the MSM should compare and contrast Jason and the rest of that team with the McCain team, with particular focus on the record of what McCain actually supported -- starting with social security, where, like the Bush Administration, the record is none too savory.

The headline above is a quote from former West Virginia Supreme Court Justice Richard Neely, describing what his role was as an arbitrator at the National Arbitration Forum (NAF), a for-profit company hired to enforce mandatory arbitration clauses for credit card consumer loans. "NAF is nothing more than an arm of the collection industry hiding behind a veneer of impartiality," says Richard Neely.

To echo Elizabeth Warren's post, the devastating expose by BusinessWeek on mandatory arbitration has stories by Neely and other former arbitrators who describe from the inside an arbitration system stacked completely against consumers-- a system where creditors win 99.8% of all disputes involving companies ranging from Bank of America to Sears to Citgroup. Arbitration clauses buried in the fine print of credit card offers means consumers lose the right to have disputes decided in an independent court and instead are forced into corporation-selected arbitration firms.

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In response to an earlier post, several respondents suggested that elaboration on a formula of security based on national self-confidence rather than based on fear would be helpful. This has been the task of years and several books. But the essence is this: Whereas the perceived Cold War threat was based on the fear of Soviet encroachment into Europe and the threat of a nuclear exchange, threats to security and stability in the 21st century include the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, viral pandemics, failed states, climate change, mass migrations, jobs lost to globalization, and a host of similar new realities. These threats cannot be solved by military means and they cannot be solved by a single nation alone. Thus, we are led to the need for a new era of internationalism, the creation of new cooperative alliances similar to that of 1945-48, and a more inclusive understanding of what it takes to make us secure.

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David is absolutely right. The question in not whether the Democrats can make the case that their version of strength is superior to the fear-based one propagated by the GOP, the question is whether they will. Indeed, it's 2008's $3,000,000,000 question (see the price tag for the unnecessary war in Iraq, which would rise even higher since McCain thinks bringing our troops home is "not too important").

As Gary Hart said: The current success of the Republicans' "be afraid, be very afraid" ethos "will continue until a new Democratic administration gives security a new definition, one that is based on national self-confidence rather than fear."

But what will it take for Democratic leaders, who again and again over the last decade became enablers behaving more like loyal lackeys than the loyal opposition, to make that happen? What will allow them to stop being so easily cowed by attacks on their patriotism and by the cynical exploitation of fear and the now ritual waving of the banner of national security? What will cure the rot afflicting our politics?

In one word: character.

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I think one part of the debate about "national security" as an issue should be about how much of our economy (and of the wealth of the wealthiest) depends on military expenditures. Holding up the taxpayer for the money to pay for all sorts of weapons systems, new technology, and innovative equipment seems to be the drug of choice for the military industrial complex. Can or will the Congress, under the Democrats, staunch the flood? Given how lopsided our economy is, I don't really think so. I think that the MIC has been the engine driving the economy for several decades now, and the effect has been "if we've got the weapons, let's use them (and make more)." As a result, everyone loses except the equipment manufacturers.

At the same time, it is always a sign of decadence when a nation or an empire begins seeing its "national security" as solely dependent on weapons and aggression, but if the weapons manufacturers are siphoning off all the funds, then other essential contributors to national security--healthcare, infrastructure building and maintenance, education, agricultural productivity, etc--fall by the wayside, and all we've got is weapons. Oh, and fear. Military aggression becomes a self-perpetuating operation--the more countries you attack, then the more insecure you are, and so the more countries you attack, and so the wealthier the weapons manufacturing corporations are, and the more insecure you are.

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Barack Obama plays for keeps.

He did not want the Jim Johnson flap to dominate the headlines so he accepted his resignation on the very day the first headlines appeared.

He understands just how much depends on his election and that he cannot let the campaign get bogged down on trivia. Jim Johnson, a good Democrat, also understands which is why he pulled the plug.

Obama just demonstrated that he knows how to play like Bill Clinton. Maybe he learned it by running against Hillary who learned it from Bill.

In any case, this is a new day for Democrats. This is a Democrat who acts swiftly and with resolution. Actually, it's not so new. It's very FDR.

Happy days are here again!

• Robert Feinman writes about Internet Service Providers agreeing with the New York Attorney General to filter child pornography. Using this development as a jumping-off point, Feinman brings our attention to other ways ISPs have been censoring or throttling content for political or profit-driven motives.

  Until now the telecom companies have always maintained that they are 'common carriers.' They provide the road and what sort of vehicle you drive or where you are going is of no concern to them.

  This is changing, Feinman says.

  Adding in a bit of censorship to protect 'children' is like the proverbial camel's nose in the tent.

• AmericanDreamer is delighted that Virginia has been getting more Democratic at all levels of government, and particularly calls attention to Judy Feder, who has the chance to unseat Frank Wolf in Virginia's 10th Congressional District.

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Since the winter, we've been going from Washington (actually Bethesda, Maryland) to Manhattan (Penn Station block) every other weekend. And we've taken the bus.

We taken Vamoose which is, of all things, a Hasidic-owned company that charges $25 each way with a free trip after every four paid trips. Vamoose is one of about a half dozen new bus companies that have sprung up recently just on this run.

In the winter the Vamoose drives made the trip in 3 hours and 40 minutes or so, which is better time than I've ever gotten by car. The buses are packed. I have never seen so many yuppie types on a bus. And everybody seems happy and amazed that the bus experience can be so pleasant.

But now it's summer.

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• DF looks at the trend of skyrocketing gas prices, and analyzes some of the causes.
• Waldengirl reaches back to 2000 to examine how Obama became such a force for change in this election cycle. In a nutshell, "Obama's success is not just a mirage or due to some kind of hypnotic spell. Obama has succeeded by responding to the emerging progressive movement and giving it a voice. He has not created the movement, but rather the movement has 'created' him."
• LaKayeMichelle responds to Ta-Nehisi's post. LaKaye: "As the nomination process went on, Barack's blackness came on display. Suddenly, black folks didn't see Barack as not 'black' enough, they saw him as 'one of us.' What we failed to realize is that Barack is everyone of us. He's not black or white, he's a human being."

One of the most annoying habits of journalists who write about public policy is to pooh-pooh ideas that aren't new, even if those ideas have proven to be effective in the past. Time magazine's Justin Fox mails in the latest such dismissal of Barack Obama's proposal to strengthen the economy by extending unemployment insurance benefits, funnelling money to hemorrhaging state governments, and shifting the tax burden upward -- ideas that have all worked well before.

These add up to what you could call the stock Democratic response to tough times. They're not necessarily bad ideas, but they're not what you could call new or transformative either. Obama throws in a few populist panders -- he favors a windfall profits tax on oil companies (which could discourage investment in new energy resources), and says he would oppose raising the Social Security retirement age (which if phased in over a long enough period would be the fairest, most sensible way to ease some of the system's long-run funding challenges). Near the end of the speech, there was a hint of Obama's "yes, we can" vision: a plan to give $4,000 a year in tuition aid to college students who pledge themselves to community or national service after graduation.

Why do policies have to be "new and transformative?" If they have proven be effective in the past, doesn't that make them "good" as opposed to "not necessarily bad." The conservative movement pushed for all kinds of new and transformative ideas that led to one disaster after another. Enough with that.

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Last September, I wrote a Salon.com article explaining the many reasons why despite neoconservative obsession with bombing Iran, President Bush would not do so. He had tacked a different direction.

Part of my case, though not all of it, rested on the fact that one of Vice President Cheney's staff members had allegedly told a private group in Washington that the VP himself was frustrated with the President's tilt towards Condi Rice, Bob Gates and others who emphasized a mix of diplomatic options over hard power gestures.

More recently, however, in the last six to eight weeks, many of my sources in the State Department, the White House, and the intelligence community tell me that the losers last summer and fall are winning again.

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Arianna is one of the great provocateurs of the digital age, but her first question in this discussion is actually less provocative than we need to be at this historic moment. She asks, "Will Democrats be able to make the case that the war in Iraq - a war McCain is passionately, almost perversely, committed to continuing - has made us less safe by taking our eye off the real terrorist threats?"

But of course they will be able to make that case. Polls, after all, show the American people already believes it and further, that they are waiting for a party to articulate a whole new national security strategy that redefines the very concept of "strength." For more than a generation, politicians and pundits have defined "strength" as fat white old men sitting in Washington's air conditioned offices ordering other Americans' kids into combat and phoning in air strikes against dark skinned foreigners. But the Iraq War has shown that such a definition of "strong" national security policy is, in fact, the definition of "weak" national security policy - one that makes us less safe.

The question, then, is not whether Democrats could make the case that "strength" includes better diplomacy, limiting military engagements, and defeating the ideas, ideologies and pathologies that actually fuel terrorism. The question is will they - and why haven't they already?

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Think about your next dispute with your credit card company. A mistaken charge? Failure to credit a return? A penalty fee that they promised to waive? Or ratchet it up a little: Identity theft? A lost payment that triggered penalty interest and fees? If you think you'll be protected from mistakes, think again.

Business Week has a cover story this week on how credit card disputes are settled through arbitration, specifically through NAF, an arbitration outfit that, by its own accounting, arbitrated 18,075 cases between a business entity and a California consumer. The score? Business 18,045/Consumers 30. Whether you know it or not, you may have already lost your next dispute with your credit card company--even if they made the mistake and you can prove it.

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Hi, Everyone. Thanks for letting in a non-specialist. I appreciate Arianna's dauntless efforts--both their courage and their energy. She is an inspiration!

So, let's look at all the cards that the Republicans normally have in their electability hand--the race card, the fear card, the patriotism card, the money card, the morality card, the lying and cheating card, and the party loyalty card. In the last eight years, all of these have been more or less devalued, but the Republicans haven't got anything else. Given the present state of the economy and the past state of John McCain's morality, I think the two M cards are losers. All the Democrats have to do is tie McCain to the Bush economy over and over, and plant audience questions about McCain's history of womanizing.

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"Fear itself," an authentic American president remarkably said, is what we have to fear most. Seven decades later, the incumbent president said, in effect, "be afraid, be very afraid." Years from now historians will wonder, without resolution, how George W. Bush might have governed absent 9/11. It is at best an academic question but one that focuses on the catastrophe that gave his presidency whatever meaning it might have.

Without 9/11, what justification would the Cheneys, Rumsfelds, Addingtons, Yoos, and others have found for the toxic and unconstitutional theory of the "unitary executive," a theory used to consolidate power in the White House, ratified by a compliant partisan Congress, and unquestioned by a complacent ideological Supreme Court? Nixonian at its roots, it was used to justify torture, massive wiretap surveillance, outing of covert agents, repeated deception of the American people, manipulation of intelligence, extraordinary rendition, secret prisons, unlawful detention, suspension of the writ of habeas corpus, and the wholesale violation of whatever remains of the Constitution.

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• RobertoW recaps Hillary's concession speech and contrasts it to the understated talk Obama gave to his staff afterwards (it has since shown up on YouTube). According to Roberto, as opposed to Clinton, "What is so startling, and so moving in its quiet way, is how adamantly Obama rejects this tempting self-mythologizing, even as he attracts celebrity-level attention. He refuses to make himself the living symbol and attention-seeking center of gravity of his own campaign, even though his unprecedented, truly historic organization could not have arisen without him."
• Billy Glad points to the rise of citizen journalism, "citijour," and suggests how it can be a powerful force in this fall's general election.
• LisB relates, very personally, why we need to uphold Roe v. Wade, and how one issue can convert a lifelong Republican.

Jason Furman, Director of the Brookings Institution Hamilton Project, has just announced that he is joining University of Chicago economist Austan Goolsbee as part of Barack Obama's (paid) economic policy team. This is really interesting news given the tug and pull over economic policy that has taken place already inside the Obama camp.

There are exceptions in their broad policy profiles and work, but essentially, both Goolsbee and Jason Furman are serious economists who generally subscribe to a neoliberal economic policy framework. They would be called "free traders" for the most part -- and because no free trade is really a free trade deal given the thousands of pages and negotiated side arrangements that comprise an FTA, it's fairly easy for each to say that they are on the side of working families and want to prevent the worst impacts from hitting the American middle class while in theory, they would prefer to see a genuine, frictionless free trade system in which efficiencies are created throughout the economic ecosystem.

Furman (a friendly acquaintance of mine and close associate of one of my New America Foundation colleagues) is also well known for his budget-hawkery. He has been part of the Democratic Party economic class that has successfully stolen from the Republicans the ethic of fiscal conservatism and advocates a Social Security entitlement reform process that begins to wrestle with America's long term entitlement obligations.

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Thanks much to Arianna Huffington for inviting me to respond to her posts this week.

First, let me say that Right is Wrong is an important and enlightening read. Many of us are already there in terms of the book's main message (see title), but what I'm finding indispensable is its collection of pointed examples of just how out of touch the right has been for lo these many years. My latest favorite--somehow I missed this one in real time--was Bush's erstwhile Treasury Sec'y, John Snow, saying that the best remedy for the damage from Katrina was to make the Bush tax cuts permanent (see pg. 253).

That's some real chutzpah. It's also mindless, callous, and infuriating.

Now, on to Arianna's first post re the role of the fear card in 2008.

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New York Times columnist, Bill Kristol, epitomizes neoconservatism. He is a direct descendant of the neocons' founding father and mother, Iriving Kristol and Getrude Himmelfarb. He is a de facto member of the other big neocon family (Norman Podhoretz, his wife Midge Decter, son John Podhoretz and step-son-in-law Elliot Abrams). He is also the most prominent and prolific neocon.

In his Times column today, Kristol says that for him, the number one issue in the 2008 election is Iraq and that it is their respective positions on the "surge" that should decide the election.

"Early 2007 was as close as we're going to get to a commander in chief moment for Senators McCain and Obama. They had to make a judgment in a difficult real-world situation -- not on the healed planet of Obama's dreams. With the Iraq war going badly, McCain took the lead in calling for a change in military strategy and a surge of troops. Obama, by contrast, went along with his party in urging withdrawal. Now, 18 months later, McCain seems pretty clearly to have been right," Kristol writes.

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Last week's resignations of Air Force Secretary Michael Wynne and Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. Michael Moseley were linked publicly to the service's mishandling of nuclear weapons, from unwittingly sending nuclear-armed cruise missiles across the country to shipping nuclear weapons parts to Taiwan by mistake. But as Noah Schactman first noted in a piece on Wired.com, there was much more beneath the surface. The real bones of contention included fights over control of unmanned aerial vehicles, issues over the relevance of the Air Force's flagship F-22 combat aircraft to current wars, and an unauthorized $81 million Air Force ad campaign touting their centrality to said conflicts; in short, bureaucratic turf wars and budgetary politics.

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Greetings. I am delighted to be a part of the TPMCafe Book Club -- it's one of my favorite bookmarked sites. And I am grateful to Jared Bernstein, Gary Hart, George Lakoff, David Sirota, and Jane Smiley for joining the discussion.

Fear -- specifically the right wing's masterful manipulation of it -- has come to dominate our politics.

In Right is Wrong, I document how, since 9/11, the Right's fear-mongering has been relentless and revolting. It bottomed out during the 2004 presidential campaign with a sewer-level attack ad against John Kerry put together by a 527 group largely financed by a pair of longtime Bush-backers. The TV spot showed pictures of Osama bin Laden, 9/11 hijacker Mohamed Atta, the Chechen school murderers, and the Madrid train bombings and asked: "These people want to kill us. Would you trust Kerry up against these fanatic killers?" Somewhere -- and I don't think it's heaven -- Karl Rove's mentor Lee Atwater was smiling.

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If there is one thing I'd like my white readers to get out of this blog, it is some sense of the great diversity of opinion and sensibility which exist within black America. One of the most poisonous ideas to emerge out of the cultural wars of the 80s and 90s was this portrait of black America as a hotbed of radical leftists who spend their days berating Jews, demanding reparations, and thinking of new and exciting ways to make white folks feel guilty.

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