I had a conversation the other day with a friend who asked me if I was really sure Obama is pro-Israel. "I mean, we know McCain is."

We do? How do we know that? Besides what does it even mean to be pro-Israel?

There is a real irony here, one which most of us who deal with this issue in Washington confront daily. It is that the politicians who are most deft at spouting memorized "pro-Israel" talking points tend to care about Israel the least. The ones who speak from the heart and the head, who study the issue, and try to come up with ways to break out of the deadly status quo are the ones who care the most.

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Now that the House has passed a vital rescue package for Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae, and the Senate will take up that package -- in a rare Saturday vote tomorrow morning at 11 a.m. -- there is still time to consider the implications for U.S. taxpayers.

No one would argue that the package should not be enacted, and the president's last-minute decision to rescind his threat to veto it is welcome.

But it is not too late for lawmakers to address the cost to taxpayers of a worst-case scenario - the failure of the package to restore the confidence of private investors in the financial position of Freddie and Fannie and the investors' unwillingness to provide the liquidity to the nation's two largest mortgage finance institutions.

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The Federal government collects all sorts of statistics on every conceivable topic from unemployment to imports and exports to oil production. These are the types of statistics that, for the most part, have remained off-limits to political interference and as a result are accurate measurements of how our economy is functioning.

There are private sector data collectors too, but these generally supplement, not replace, government statistics. The American Petroleum Institute, for example, collects information on oil and gas production, but the official numbers come from the Energy Information Administration. Imagine a system, however, in which the private sector controlled all the information and could put out any numbers it wanted without fear of oversight or transparency. It's not hard to imagine that many sectors of the economy would suddenly look rosier than they are. That's the kind of world that the telecom giants are trying to create.

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Joe Scarborough warrants, in the words of Jay-Z, only half a bar. He sits at a desk and does interview with flacks and people he works with. An unremarkable former Congressman trumped up into a professional babbler, Scarborough may not be a joke, but as the saying goes, he most definitely plays one on TV. I do find it interesting that fellow MSNBCer Jonathan Alter can speak on blogs as he does, while sharing the studio with people who basically embody the worst aspects of blogging. Alter offers us an unnaunced and warmed-over view of bloggers as mostly a crowd of hecklers, who sit at home popping off and feeding from the trough of presumably legitimate media:

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Saskia has posed some questions below. She asks about how all this sorting business will play out. Lemme give a scattershot, Friday afternoon response:

• Walker Smith has it right: this is sorting by lifestyle, not by demography. I've talked to a lot of people since this book came out and not one described herself the way political writers talk about voters. Think about it. To guess how a person might vote, would you rather know a voter is a "white, college-educated woman, upper class, age 35-45" or an "ocean oriented person" (as one San Diego woman described herself to me)?

  Political writers use demographic categories because that's what they can get. But when I talked to marketing people, they use demographic data only as a last resort. The fellow who did marketing for Apple told me that Steve Jobs had banned demographic breakdowns. Apple tries to find connections to lifestyles, to tastes and ways of living that aren't related to class or age, but are often linked to geography. So, my Apple friend was taking his marketing team to Marfa, Texas, to see why a cowtown in the middle of West Texas could suddenly become the hippest place on earth. This is the kind of marketing that Bush brought to the political world in '04.

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I enjoyed reading many of the posts (well..."enjoyed" might not be the word to capture the experience. More like have been stimulated by the posts).

Here some thoughts. And also questions to Bill: Bill what do you think (based on your data) of the three possibilities I present below?

Three distinctions/possibilities I see coming out of many of the posts:

• The possibility that the oppositions Bill detects can tip into a kind of convergence


• The possibility that sorting does not necessarily imply/require socio-economic polarization


• The distinction between ideas (the ideational experience of life) vs. immediacy/concreteness of everyday life. I would think that sorting can have a foothold on both sides -the ideational and the concrete.

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My thanks to Bill, TPM, and all the book club contributors and readers this week. This weekend, share a copy of Bill's book with your favorite political opponent. It's readable, funny, and enlightening, and you will feel smarter, not angrier.

Bill's last post is a great summary. You can make a strong case that sorting has coincided with much growing inability to resolve conflict in the political culture.

Does it follow that consensus, especially a national consensus, has become harder to achieve because of sorting? I'm not yet convinced. Consensus is hard to achieve, with or without sorting. Here are three problems I would need to address, before I would argue that sorting is one of the causes.

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In 2002, the Ohio State alumni association, acting with the university's approval, signed a contract to give MBNA the email addresses, mail addresses and phone numbers for 55,000 undergraduate students in exchange for a guaranteed minimum-payment and credit-card royalties from the affinity credit cards that the bank would sell to students. Under the contract, the credit card company was allowed to conduct at least five direct mail marketing campaigns each year in addition to three annual phone solicitations. While the credit card company also received information about faculty, staff and the parents of students, the company was explicitly prohibited from contacting these groups by phone. The credit card company was also allowed access to the university campus, where it could use a variety of marketing tactics to pursue students in-person.

Ohio State is far from unique; This week, Businessweek reveals that financial relationships between university alumni associations and the credit card industry are pervasive, explaining, "Some of the country's best-known and largest schools have multimillion-dollar credit-card deals, including the Universities of Michigan, Minnesota, and South Florida. Private schools also have these typically secret deals, but information about public institutions is more readily obtainable under disclosure laws."

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"We don't need more diverse communities, maybe, we just need to let communities be themselves, without interference beyond making sure that the basics of human rights and health are respected and cared for."

Well, that's an option -- one that, apparently, most Americans seem intent on taking. As we burrow into our self-focused communities, it really does seem unimportant what happens over there, in another part of the United States of Those People. The notion of community has been miniaturized and the idea of a nation discounted. There is both more diversity nationally, from place to place, because of the big sort and more conformity in where we live. But missing is any sense of the whole. Maybe the one universal value that remains is that we all agree to "let communities be themselves."

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I know we are supposed to ignore the polls -- especially when we don't like what they tell us -- but I can't. And they don't look especially good. Despite a disastrous month of July, John McCain is still only a few points behind Obama.

That isn't good. In fact, I think it means that Obama is behind. After all, Mc Cain is an utterly flat candidate, the economy is tanking, gas is at $4 a gallon and the best we can do is lead by a few points. I don't like it.

In 1992 and 2000, the Democratic Presidential nominee looked surprisingly weak until he chose a Vice President. The Gore and (I hate to say it) Lieberman choices produced an immediate bump in the polls that held right through election day.

In 1992 Gore was an exciting choice because the ticket was young, cool, good-looking and substantive. With Lieberman in 2000, the choice of the first Jew to run on a national ticket felt historic. Both choices were exciting. That was the main thing. Democrats left the conventions feeling that victory was assured.

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The Columbus Dispatch has an interview with John McCain yesterday, in the course of which he doubled down on his bet that the only thing he has to say is smear itself:

I will repeat my statement again, that [Obama] would rather lose a war than lose a campaign. Because anyone who fails to acknowledge that the surge has worked, who has consistently opposed it, consistently never sat down and had a briefing with General Petraeus, our commander there, would rather lose a war than a political campaign.

Credit where credit is due: The reporters pressed the point. (Next week, will anyone remember that McCain has in an instant turned half of America into surrender monkeys?) Still, too many reporters remain entranced by what they take to be the incontrovertible success of the surge, viz. Katy Couric, premising a line of questions to Obama on a claim of success that she did not question. ("You raised a lot of eyebrows on this trip saying even knowing what you know now, you still would not have supported the surge. People may be scratching their heads and saying, 'Why?') Even the Dispatch reporters, stuck in the lastest news and too hasty for memory to catch up, failed to put it to McCain that he crowed about the great promise of "rogue-state rollback" and American troops are still fighting more than five years on. That's "history."

In the meantime, McCain uttered uncontested drivel:

I know how to win wars. I know how to win them.

How does he know? Which war did he win? Vietnam? Personal courage didn't win it. Nothing did.

Finally, one of the Dispatchers said:

Q: I wanted to know how we pay for it.

A: We pay for it by a great sacrifice on the part of Americans.

Next unasked question awaiting another interviewer in another town: Senator, Given the size of her fortune and the tax-cut benefits that have accrued to the tiny percentage of Americans in her tax bracket, how much of a sacrifice has your wife made?

EARTH, July 25, 2008 -- The entire world drafted an open letter to Senator John McCain (R-Ariz.) today, asking him to drop out of the U.S. presidential race and concede the presidency to Senator Barack Obama (D-Illinois).

"Ordinarily we do not interfere in America's internal affairs," said a spokesman for the rest of the planet, "even when it has become clear, as in recent years, that American voters are about to elect ignorant, incoherent buffoons who will add immeasurably to our immiseration. But this time is different. We didn't think it was worth our while to step up for your Carter or Mondale or Dukakis or Gore or Kerry -- besides, we'd only be bombed or invaded for our trouble. But this time, I mean, come on -- you've got to be kidding me, right? Please tell me you're kidding."

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I have been following along with great interest. I think The Big Sort is one of the most important books to come along in a while, not just because of its analysis of American politics but for its implications for American society and the US economy.

My main worry is that the big sort poses huge implications for US economic competitiveness and a wide range of domestic economic and social issues.

Most commentators see the big sort as a lens into American politics - a window into an increasingly polarized America - red vs. blue, Republican vs. Democrat, McCain vs. Obama, Al Franken vs. Rush Limbaugh.

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Jonathan Taplin digs into some peculiar military spending and Todd Gitlin takes a rummage through American history.

At the Book Club, Bill Bishop explores the strong link between lifestyle and political choice while Walker Smith takes a step back: What does relationship mean? According to Smith, our future looks like this -- a diverse nation self-sorted in a big way into ever more parochial pockets of like-mindedness. It's not a pretty picture.

The Bush administration's decision to move $230 million of the counter-terrorism funding Congress had approved for Pakistan to pay for upgrades to their Air Force's F-16 fleet is beginning to raise hackles in Congress. Since the Pakistani's refuse to use bombing against the Taliban or Al Quaeda, it seems like a curious decision. But like many moves coming out of the military industrial complex, it turns out the decision is being driven by industry not military needs.

The officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity because Congress was weighing the plan, said the timing was driven by deadlines of the American contractor, Lockheed Martin.

Whether Senator Leahy and Congresswoman Lowey, both of whom have objected to this move, will be able to resist the pressures of military contract lobbying is an interesting case study in the long history of the MIC to roll Congress.

Rummaging through American history, I just stumbled on this, from Franklin Roosevelt's 9th State of the Union Address, January 6, 1942:

If any of our enemies, from Europe or from Asia, attempt long-range raids by "suicide" squadrons of bombing planes, they will do so only in the hope of terrorizing our people and disrupting our morale. Our people are not afraid of that. We know that we may have to pay a heavy price for freedom. We will pay this price with a will. Whatever the price, it is a thousand times worth it. No matter what our enemies, in their desperation, may attempt to do to us- we will say, as the people of London have said, "We can take it." And what's more we can give it back and we will give it back--with compound interest.

"'Suicide' squadrons"! "Terrorizing our people"! And now, here is the same country a few generations on, up against a far, almost inexpressively punier enemy in jihadist Islamism-- but today, by and large, we quiver and quaver. Political so-called leadership blusters on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, and purveys fear on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays. For eight years now, the country has found this moral cowardice acceptable. It's enough to make you believe that the nation is in a fever of individual self-seeking, a miasma of moral default, as long as its political leaders fear to say ringingly today that we are not afraid.

Three major trends are driving the consumer marketplace, and, indeed, society at large. Purpose. Well-being. And empowerment. It is the latter that is most important for "the big sort" described by Bill Bishop.

People now have access to information that they have never had access to before. The Internet is the chief reason, but education, income and time make it possible for people to engage the Internet in this fashion. Couple all of that with the steadily eroding trust that people have in institutions and authorities - something Bill Bishop discusses in detail in The Big Sort - and you have a perfect storm of individual empowerment.

But just to be clear, this empowerment is not rooted in trivial things like the ability to PhotoShop pictures or upload videos to YouTube. Empowerment is fundamentally driven by access to information.

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On ABC World News Tonight, David Wright to John McCain:

It sometimes seems, as an outside observer, that both of you guys sometimes get stuck in the past. Senator Obama's kinda stuck in 2003 and whether the war was a good idea in the first place, and you kinda seem stuck sometimes in 2007 and whether the surge was the right strategy. Shouldn't this debate really be about the future and where we go from here?

McCain:

Oh, you're exactly right. It's all about the future. And the future in my view--we have succeeded but it's still fragile. The point is that we are responsible for our records. I was right, Senator Obama was wrong. So therefore I think that I have more credibility on what the future should be as opposed to Senator Obama, who if he'd have had his way we would be--very likely be involved in a wider war today.

The obvious next question is: "Senator, you want credit for being right about the surge, but were you right about the war in the first place?

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A demographer at the University of Michigan measured family formation patterns in the U.S. and noticed an interesting correlation. The states with the largest percentage of people who had cohabitated before marriage voted for John Kerry in '04. The higher the shacking rate, Ron Lestheghe found, the bluer the state.

We've had a lot of discussion this week about how lifestyle links up with political choice. We ought to explore what's behind this relationship.

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Years ago, Frank Sinatra sang a song essentially in tribute to the sense of loss created by the Brooklyn Dodgers moving to Los Angeles. It was about sense of community, sense of being part of a group.

Bill Bishop's Big Sort powerfully and persuasively points out that now our ballparks, our communities, are filled with fans from one team or the other. He makes the case that like-minded individuals are grouping themselves together in increasingly high percentages. There may some sort of "diversity" of demography, but diversity of opinion is too often going by the wayside.

All of this is more than unfortunate. Many of us of a certain generation were taught Political Science 101 in college using the Robert Dahl book that celebrated pluralism--the competition between points of view that resulted in the best of possible outcomes in our American democracy.

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I think I have read every word Barack Obama uttered on his visits to Israel and Palestine and I'm struck by his ability to navigate this tricky issue with such dexterity. After all, everybody is just waiting for him to trip up on the Arab-Israeli issue. Joe Lieberman, the Israeli media, the right-wing pro-Israel organizations are just waiting to pounce on some misstep.

It didn't happen, just as it didn't happen in Afghanistan or Iraq.

And here's why. He knows his stuff. I worked on Capitol Hill for 20 years and I can tell the difference between a staff driven politician and one who knows what he's talking about. The staff driven pol (McCain is an example) is always capable of the big blunder. He does not mix up Shiites and Sunnis because he "misspoke;" he really doesn't know the difference. Same on the economy, he studies a memo and works to assimilate it. But there is no depth.

The sad fact is that most of our politicians are like that. On the Arab-Israeli issue, all they know is that they need to sound pro-Israel. So they end up mouthing the most superficial pieties. They are afraid to talk about the Palestinians because they might say the wrong thing.

They pander and pander, knowing that they won't get into trouble by just sucking up.

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Morning Cafe-ers! We're well into a discussion on Bill Bishop's The Big Sort. Be sure to check out the comment threads in this week's book club, Bill and the other participants have been weighing in regularly. Also intriguing: Dean Baker's question about Fanny and Freddie shareholders, and William Hartung's critique of Benny Morris' New York Times article about bombing Iran.

Plus, an excellent reader review of Jared Diamond's classic Guns, Germs and Steel.

Okay, we all know the argument for bailing out Fannie and Freddie bondholders. If we didn't , then homeowners would be paying much higher interest rates on mortgages for many years to come. But, why are we bailing out the stockholders? After all, aren't stockholders supposed to lose their shirts when they invest in a bankrupt company?

I've heard members of Congress say that the stockholders have already lost 80 percent of their investment. So what? Losing 80 percent is better than losing 100 percent. Furthermore, not all stockholders bought their shares last year. Some bought their shares last month, just before the Fed, Treasury, and Congress came to the rescue.

So, what's the deal? I don't want to think bad things about our political leaders, so what legitimate reason could they have for putting Fannie and Freddie stockholders ahead of children needing child care and health care or seniors who can't afford to pay for heating oil this winter?

Come on TPMers, be creative!

Here's another potentially big problem with the Big Sort (again, the phenomenon, not the book). Sorting can make the electorate, as a whole, look more radicalized and polarized than it really is.

Is the public more politically polarized, across the board, than it used to be? Could be, and I wish I knew. That question is at the center of a big and unsettled debate within political science. But this much is certain: just because you and I are sorted into more homogeneous communities, it doesn't mean that you and I, as individuals, are more likely to disagree, or that we disagree more strongly. Maybe these things are true, but sorting, by itself, doesn't make them so.

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The political segregation of America has nothing to do with politics. This is the paradox of "the big sort" that has been so thoroughly, so convincingly and so unnervingly documented by Bill Bishop in his book The Big Sort. The political divide in our country is not, at root, a divide over politics or political issues. It is a divide over lifestyles.

As income, education and technology have grown, so have mobility and self-determination, particularly when it comes to where to live. Geographic roots no longer hold us fast in place; instead, we are freer than ever to decide for ourselves where to live. But we don't choose where to live because of politics. We make those decisions because of lifestyle preferences.

We settle down where we feel comfortable, where we like the people, the neighborhoods, the amenities, the schools, and the proximity to shopping, entertainment and work. We don't ask the realtor how the county voted. We ask ourselves whether the neighborhood feels right.

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Bill Bishop's book The Big Sort frames a fairly simple question:

What happens to political minorities in communities with large political majorities?

In many part of the traditional church in the West, what has happened is something called the "emerging church" phenomenon. As large church majorities grew in power, many people on the edges experienced a sense of conflict between what was moving in their soul & the institutional containers that were built all around them. Some of these folks left the church setting, following faith paths outside the traditional constructs. Some have tried to renew or even reform their institutions - as an example, look at the recent election of Bruce Reyes Chow as the moderator of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), a model of traditional faith institutions in the U.S.

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What happens to political minorities in communities with large political majorities?

They shut up. At book club or in church, they cut short any conversation bordering on politics. A woman in Washington State, a Democrat, told me that as her county grew increasingly Republican, she began to feel "like a second-class citizen, not entitled to have opinions." I interviewed Democrats in one Texas Hill Country town (80% Republican) about a float they built for a July 4th parade. "We got it all ready," said the county Democratic chair, "but nobody wanted to ride." Nobody wanted to be identified as a Democrat in a staunchly Republican community.

Who could blame them? When a Republican in my overwhelmingly Democratic neighborhood ventured on to the community listserve to recommend a Republican for the board of the community college, he was shouted down and told keep his opinions to himself. The lonely Republican said he began feeling a bit paranoid when he walked his dog around the neighborhood. A Republican county commissioner in Austin left his Democratic neighborhood after his car (sporting Republican stickers) was keyed and egged. (The attack was politically motivated. The stickers were ground zero for the egg salvo.) "You really do recognize when you aren't in step with the community you live in," he told me.

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I'm still livid over the New York Times' decision to publish an inflammatory piece by the respected Israeli historian Benny Morris entitled "Using Bombs to Stave Off War." The thrust of the article, which ran on Friday, July 18th, is that is that Israel must bomb Iran by the end of this year, as military action offers the only hope of ending Tehran's nuclear program. Going a step further, Morris expresses pessimism about whether even this will work to end Iran's pursuit of nuclear weapons, and suggests that absent strong international support to disarm Iran "an Israeli nuclear strike to prevent Iran from taking the final step toward getting the bomb is probable."

What is Morris thinking, and what were the Times editors thinking when they decided to run his article?

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Here below, let me bring in a few trends that come out of my work that tend to support the bifurcations described int he Big Sort. But they do not go as far as what Bill is getting at.

1) While all the presidential elections of the last few decades have been very close --2% or so advantage of the winner-- The Big Sort shows us that at the local level, half of the elections were won by landslides on both the Republican and the Democratic sides. We are not as balanced politically as we look at the presidential level. We are far more virulent than that. (which may explain a few things that seem so "un-American" ...)

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Occasionally people ask me why I'm so hard on New York Times columnist David Brooks, who some find quite insightful and others so irrelevant they can't understand why I get angry at all.

At last, I've found a way to explain it. It's all there in his column of today, "The Culture of Debt." I'm sure that many of my correspondents will find the column reasonable on first reading. Yet it captures everything that is wrong with this man and his ideas -- and maybe with readers who believe him.

Brooks, a self-described conservative and sometime practitioner of "comic sociology," author of On Paradise Drive and creator of the all-American working-class "patio man," knows he has to say something about the devastation raging through countless recently-viable neighborhoods like the one in Cleveland featured on Bill Moyers' Journal last Friday night.

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In 1972, when I was a kid, I remember hearing that 98% of U.S. Saab owners voted for George McGovern. That statistical nugget seems plausible, and it illustrates how the idea of matching cultural and consumer preferences to political ones isn't new. Thomas Edsall, in 2003, found that a community's rate of porn rentals correlate with opinions on abortion and gun control. These patterns can be truly entertaining, but not always insightful or predictive.

Sorting, as several comments have noted, need not have political implications. In fact, non-political sorting can lead to the opposite of political sorting (a phenomenon we can label convergence). This leads to one of the most important themes in Bill's book, which hasn't yet been mentioned: modern political sorting seems to have a relationship to the phenomenon of post-industrialization.

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If you doubt the possibility or the relevance of geographic self-segregation in America, consider two easily forgotten realities.

First, the U.S. is enormous, even in a world shrunk by technology. The distance from Seattle to Miami equals, within six miles, the distance from London to Tehran. You already know that the population keeps growing; in 1965 (an apocryphal year in Bill Bishop's The Big Sort), the U.S. population was less than 200 million, and now it's over 300 million. You may have noticed that many of these people are insufferable, either because of their ideas, priorities, or decision making. Even if they just comprise 1% of the population, you'll find three million insufferables. Living with these people is a pain. Governing with them is even worse. Compromising with them eats away at your self esteem.

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In my adult life, I have lived in parts of the U.S. that might be considered on the far ends of the diversity continuum. When people imagine a lack of diversity, it is easy to think of the northern suburbs of Dallas, TX or Plano, TX or Texas A&M. These places have a lot in common with Agrestic, the fictional setting for the Showtime series Weeds. When people imagine a diverse community, it is easy to think of the San Francisco area or of New York or even South Austin - all areas that fit the "cultural creative" arch-type to a tee.

I must say that I've learned & unlearned a lot about diversity over the last 30 years. As a white male, diversity is not a theoretical issue or even something to be sensitive to. It is the air I breathe, that I inhale, it is the seats at MY table that I spread across. Building & maintaining an echo chamber of people like me takes planning & hard work - it is vigilant work to foster homophily, the mortal enemy of diversity. But the truth that I found on both ends of the continuum is captured in this simple statement from Global Voices Online founder Ethan Zuckerman:

Homophily makes you stupid.

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Great data! They illuminate several critical bifurcations in key trends that are often obscured by aggregate indicators. I find strong echoes in these data with some of my findings on spatial segmentation at all levels: national, regional, urban, sub-urban, in a sort of Babushka doll effect. In a later post I want to pull out some of these.

But first, let me get at the heart of the matter that worries me in these findings.

Overall, this is a very bad story. If Bishop's analysis is right: the more poeple live in neighborhoods full of people like themselves, the more racist they become (rather than finding security and magnanimity in this security of being surround by like-minded, they become a bit (or a lot) more vicious. It suggests that the old notions about the cities and their diversity which "enforces" interaction is actually a better option. It may be that the the conflicts we see in these cities are far more visible as violence/conflict that in those homogeneous neighborhoods where it all looks so peaceful but in fact racisms find a free-ride.

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The quickest way to describe The Big Sort is with a simple calculation. In 1976, about a quarter of the voters lived in a county where either Jimmy Carter or Gerald Ford won by 20 percentage points or more. The number of people living in landslide communities increased steadily over the next seven presidential elections. And by 2004, in another very close vote, nearly half of all voters lived in one of these landslide communities.

Places were becoming more politically homogeneous. You could see it in the data pieced together by statistician Robert Cushing. Counties would tip Republican or Democratic in presidential elections, and then the majorities would grow larger. (Seven out of ten people leaving red counties move to other red counties.) The red and blue state maps were meaningless to how we lived. In ink blue California, for example, 17 counties were growing more Democratic, 30 were becoming more Republican and the parties were getting more competitive in only 11 counties. Sixty percent of the nation's voters today live in communities that haven't changed their presidential party choice since 1988.

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This week at Cafe we'll be discussing Bill Bishop's The Big Sort: Why The Clustering of Like-Minded America is Tearing Us Apart. It's a timely topic, as the conventions loom near, and we've got a great-- and widely differing-- group. Joining us: Rich Florida, Author of The Rise of the Creative Class, blogger Bob Carlton, Bill Greener, Program Coordinator for the RNC, Ian McDonald, PhD candidate at Duke University, Saskia Sassen of Columbia University, Walker Smith, President of Yankelovich Partners, and Matthew Yglesias of The Atlantic (and former TPMer!). Bill's first post will be up in a few minutes. Should be an exciting week.

The NYT's Sabrina Tavernese and Jeff Zeleny today report the Maliki sidestep as it ought to be reported-- as a lame cover-up:

Diplomats from the United States Embassy in Baghdad spoke to Mr. Maliki's advisers on Saturday, said an American official, speaking on condition of anonymity in order to discuss what he called diplomatic communications. After that, the government's spokesman, Ali al-Dabbagh, issued a statement casting doubt on the magazine's rendering of the interview.

The statement, which was distributed to media organizations by the American military early on Sunday, said Mr. Maliki's words had been "misunderstood and mistranslated," but it failed to cite specifics.

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It has become popular among at least some folks in Washington to complain about the growth of inequality over the last three decades. Due to the rise in inequality over this period, the bulk of the workforce has seen little gain from the growth in productivity since the 70s.

The response to the rise in inequality has focused on improving the plight of those at the bottom, for example through increases in the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) or raising the minimum wage. These are good, if limited, policies that can improve the plight of tens of millions of people.

However, if more money goes to those on top, there is less available for those in the middle and bottom. This is simple arithmetic. In the last three decades, a huge amount of money has gone to Wall Street. The Wall Streeters' share of compensation rose by 2 full percentage points from 1976 to 2006. If profits rose accordingly, the growth in this narrow portion of the financial sector is sucking $200 billion a year from the rest of the economy; enough to hand every worker in the bottom 70 percent of the wage distribution a check of $2,000 a year.

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Nobel Prize winner Al Gore this week called for the United States to move all electricity production to a zero carbon-emissions energy base within 10 years.

This is not only a bold statement. It is also quite ingenious, in at least three dimensions: selection of target, legislative and regulatory implications, financial possibilities. Although I have communicated with Al on this topic, he hasn't authorized what I'm posting here; this is my thinking about the corollaries of his very important statement.

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Benny Morris is a prominent mainstream Israeli historian so his words matter. And, according to what I hear, the views expressed here reflect what many Israelis think. So we better pay attention.

Morris predicts that Israel will attack Iran sometime between the Presidential election and Inauguration Day. He says that we all (including the Iranians) better hope that the Israeli attack succeeds in eliminating Iran's nuclear program because, if it doesn't, Israel will have to resort to using a nuclear weapon.

For Morris, there is no alternative (he dismisses the idea of negotiations). For Morris it is simple. Iran is working on a nuclear weapon. It won't be stopped by sanctions. The United States is too chicken to attack Iran. So....Israel has to do the job.

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