In 2000 Al Gore was pilloried by the mainstream media ("MSM") for his alleged untruths or exaggerations -- Love Canal, Love Story, Internet, Who he visited in Texas. In every instance, at the very most he had chosen the wrong word or failed to clarify the misunderstandings of others.

Now in 2008 the McCain-Palin ticket revels in inaccuracy, wallows in whoppers, lies like a pair of rugs, buys ad time to tell still more lies. So tell me why the MSM doesn't talk about their dishonesty endlessly, turning them from celebrity stars into pathological figures?

The contrast is absolutely clear. What's the explanation?

And note WaPo puts on the front page an article excusing Sarah Palin for not knowing anything about George Bush's foreign policy. Does anyone recall WaPo defending Gore?

Just asking.

Thirty-eight percent of Israelis support the Arab League Initiative (formerly, the Saudi peace plan) while 69 percent of Palestinians do.

That is the finding of a September poll conducted jointly by the Harry Truman Institute at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem and the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research in Ramallah.

Read more »

All Americans obtain the greatest part of their news and information about national events from the television, including broadcast and media. The television content is informed to a large degree from the major newspapers, and many papers own some television businesses. So by the mainstream media or MSM, we mean the large conglomerates that, across newspapers and television cable and broadcast outlets, provide the largest share of news and information to Americans.

And my goodness is that MSM sabotaging democracy. By far, this is the worst election coverage in the history of electronic media.

The primary problem is that the MSM has virtually en masse decided that the election is a celebrity feud, Entertainment Tonight, verbal WWF, high school hallway shoving match -- and that both truth and the direction of America are quite irrelevant to the sheer fun of broadcasting each twist and turn of the name calling emanating largely from the McCain camp.

Read more »

Well, not war, but a milder though satisfying combat and a valuable moment of self-redemption. By network standards, Gibson was a lipstickless bulldog. The encounter was combative enough to blow some of her Teflon off.

Much has already been written on segment one of the Gibsonthon, aired on World News Tonight Thursday. Palin didn't recognize the pillar of Bush's foreign policy, and then mischaracterized it. She repeated her absurdity about command of the Alaska National Guard and proximity to Russia. (He might well have asked her what she'd learned from all that proximity.) She declared that she was ready for war with Russia. Mild-mannered Charlie, who is always wishing us a good day, confessed: "I get lost in a blizzard of words there." I've never heard him so blunt.

On the Friday night 20/20 segment, Kate Snow's teaser began: "You discover her story is part fact and part fable." Palin was an earmark queen, winning $27,000,000 for 6000 people. She spent $8,000,000 on a road to nowhere. "Some of her best friends...are reluctant to endorse Sarah Palin the candidate," Snow reported.

Read more »

One might disregard that the New York Times published a savage review of a well-meaning book. However, one cannot ignore -- especially as we about to face a changing of the guards -- a call for a foreign policy that ignores moral considerations and is built on costs and benefits. Killing people is very often much more efficient than helping them build a life for themselves, but helping people is clearly the right course, and happens to be what the book at issue calls for.

Read more »

Rick Hertzberg's post about proportional representation precipitated unusually informative comments about how Israel's political system has helped to create the current stalemate, presumably by empowering smallish parties to hold bigger ones hostage to marginal views. There may be some lessons here for Americans.

Strict proportional representation was always good for national solidarity in that it gave (as Rick would have predicted) all views the guarantee of a voice; rates of voter participation were close to 80% in the 1960s and 70s. A downside was that it tended to empower party secretaries (and simple hacks) who waited their turn to rise to the top of party lists which they controlled, sort of the way junior professors work their way up to tenure and ultimately to control of their departments. (Peres had been an aid to Ben-Gurion, Olmert, to Justice Minister Shmuel Tamir, Sarid, to Finance Minister Pinchas Sapir, etc.; only top army officers were considered to have achieved something in their own right.)

Read more »

As you can tell simply by scanning the headlines of any major newspaper in the United States these days, something is gravely amiss in the current political debate in this country.

You see - along with the presidential palaver and front-page pieces about pigs and lipstick - stories about a metastasizing financial crisis facing the country. The U.S. government just bought a huge pig in a big poke this week - it's not a joke, and it should not be on the U.S. taxpayer.

Whatever the outcome of the country's mortgage and broader credit crisis, this much is now clear: American taxpayers and voters need to know what is at stake for them in the government seizure of Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae, what risks they face, and what the policy choices are.

Read more »

I agree with Bernie's latest piece re:Obama's foreign policy options and needs. In his words,

There will soon be three head-to-head debates. To win the election Obama must convincingly win the foreign policy piece; and to do that he must change the terms of debate. He must redefine the world's challenges in a way that demands what he is uniquely equipped to become: a president with, not just the power to deter, but the power to attract. He must, that is, show how terrorism is but a piece of a larger, complex challenge; that in the face of this challenge, we need the ability to 1) build out a system of collective security with other countries, 2) develop regional alliances in all parts of the world based on the common interest of regional players, Middle East, Asia, and Africa, 3) build global institutions for a patently global economy, and 4) win the hearts and minds of young people from Rio to Jakarta.

I've never heard the case for Obama as commander-in-chief, not just for military but for strategic options, put more succinctly. I hope that someone on the Obama team is reading TPM Cafe and its blog sheet!

Read more »

The discouraging part first: An Obama video called "Still" makes the case that the world has changed (computers! e-mail!) since McCain first went to Washington, but McCain hasn't changed: he doesn't know how to use stuff; his tax policy is still regressive; and so on. This is supposed to show that he's old, out of touch; unhip. (If you're going to say he's unchanged, at least still say that he never had the temperament to be president and he still doesn't.) I imagine it's supposed to get to the young. In any case, I hope no serious money's being spent to send "Still" out to general audiences. The main thing the campaign needs to be saying right now is that McCain is mercurial, unsteady, unreliable; he's worse than a flip-flopper, he's rudderless, a man with no ballast, a poseur; there was once a McCain with a claim to honor but that McCain has changed--into a mendacious, unscrupulous Republican like a certain current resident of the White House.

Now for a morning bonus, my favorite wingnut reaction to Charlie Gibson: "Gibson is a tool. This will only help the GOP ticket. It never ceases to amaze me just how dumb these intellectuals are." In the eyes of the Base, the Devils who run The Media, along with anyone who knows anything, are (gasp) Intellectuals, and enough said about them.

Now we know why among the very first people Sarah Palin sat down with after being nominated was Joe Lieberman and the head of AIPAC.

She needed the latest talking points and, boy, did she learn her lines. Read this from the Gibson interview.

GIBSON: Let me turn to Iran.... : What if Israel decided it felt threatened and need to take out the Iranian nuclear facilities?

Read more »

Some questions, taking off from something Alvaro de Soto said early in this colloquy: that "the political system in Israel allows small, one-issue sectors to effectively prevent the government from following the wishes of the majority."

Israel's electoral system--I think I've got this right--is the ultimate in proportional representation. The whole country is one district. Voters each cast one vote, for a party list. To get into the 120-member Knesset, a party needs two per cent of the vote. Once a party has reached that threshold, it gets one seat for every 1/120th of the total national vote it has received.

Read more »

As if the mortgage crisis weren't bad enough already, voters who lost their homes to foreclosure last year may be disenfranchised in the November election. A CBS News report this summer explained how voters with outdated addresses on file may face hurdles when they go to cast their ballots this November.

Read more »

As promised by Josh early this morning, below the fold is a second preview of the new community tools we'll be launching in about 4 weeks (after we finish our server upgrade and move to the newest version of our blogging software).

The first picture is of the new interface you'll get to use for putting up your posts. The second is of the new layout for each reader blog. The third is of the community dashboard you'll have to keep track of people you think are interesting and people who are responding to you in comment threads.

Read more »

Earlier in the year, Lou Dobbs and other media were giving the impression that anti-immigrant forces were sweeping the country.  Immigration was supposed to be the grand wedge issue of the rightwing. Now, recent elections, including the Presidential primaries, showed the ultimate hallowness of the anti-immigrant political card, but it's worth understanding that below the hype, most states have quietly been promoting sane, sensible and positive programs to integrate new immigrants into our communities.

As a report Progressive States Network released this week (which I authored with support from our staff), what's astonishing is that at the actual point of implementation, anti-immigrant policy is dwarfed by progressive, integrative policy towards immigrants. Just a few facts from the report:

Read more »

Look at this: A Maine reporter, from WCSH in Portland, asks McCain some questions about Palin, and he lies, stumbles, evades, blathers about Alaska-next-to-Russia Palin-fights-the-old-bulls, a hypothetical gas pipeline. He can't even get his talking points out crisply: they sound more like stumbling points.

H/T: Joe Sudbay at Americablog.

Today, 9/11, seems the right day to ask how American foreign policy, and the Middle East conflict particularly, are playing out in the presidential campaign. What, if anything, can Barack Obama do to frame the conversation and, not coincidentally, get himself elected?

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which we have been discussing in this space over the past few days, may seem a side issue here. It is not. Obama himself made the case when he returned from the region in July that any US advance toward diplomatic normalization with Iran, or toward a regional alliance to help out in Iraq, would be tied-up in large measure with Israeli-Palestinian peace. It is a matter of hearts and minds in the greater Arab world.

Moreover, as many of us have argued, the US is the key to any future deal. Given the strength of the Israeli right (and the vendetta culture of Israelis and Palestinians more generally), we cannot expect an Israeli leader to rally an incipient Israeli majority to an actual deal, that is, risk undermining national solidarity for a long while--not unless an American administration and Europe together force the issue, offering a larger, plausible vision, boots on the ground, new investment, and so forth.

Rightist notions like "the global war on terror" have shown how Israel's conflicts are consonant with America's. The Israeli government's ambivalence about ending its occupation, its default to military force, its tensions with Iran, etc., have seemed a kind of US policy agenda in microcosm. And if America approaches its Middle East problems, as Obama insists it must, not with military preemption but with an emphasis on collective security, patient alliances, containment, the power of the global economy, and so forth, how can this not imply a verdict on Israeli occupation?

Read more »

Seven years ago this week, I stood on the pile of burning rubble at the south end of Manhattan with thousands of other Americans who in our nation's defining hour did what we could to make a difference. Firefighters, doctors, soldiers, cops, steelworkers, and nurses--we all came together to serve our country in a time of exceptional need. I will never forget the demonstrations of courage and the expressions of sorrow, the sight of the bodies and the smell of the smoke. And I will never forget the bold promises of our leaders, uttered loudly before the smoke even cleared.

They stood on the pile with bullhorns, they issued press releases, and spoke at benefit concerts. We heard politicians from every corner of America swear: "Never Again! We'll make them pay! The terrorists won't win! We will rebuild!"

Seven years later, that hasn't happened. And we should all be embarrassed as a nation for one simple reason more than all the others--there is still a mammoth, gaping hole at Ground Zero.

Read more »

For some reason, I find this column in today's New York Times almost comforting.

Somehow, taking the seven year 9/11-Bush nightmare and putting it into Biblical cadences works. At least it does for me.

Cohen reminds us that today we mourn just just for the victims of 9/11/01 but for the country we lost on that day -- not due to anything the terrorist monsters did, but thanks to the Bush/Cheney neocon gang.

Cohen writes:

"And in the seventh year after the fall, the dust and debris of the towers cleared. And it became plain at last what had been wrought.

"For the wreckage begat greed; and it came to pass that while America's young men and women fought, other Americans enriched themselves. Beguiling the innocent, they did backdate options, and they did package toxic mortgage securities and they did reprice risk on the basis that it no more existed than famine in a fertile land."

Worth reading.

Greetings Folks --

Last week I discussed the various problems we're having with commenting and reader blogging due to the extreme volume of traffic we're now experiencing since the beginning of the conventions and what we're doing to try to solve them.

We met today to finalize our schedule for the upgrade and roll-out of new features. So I wanted to bring you all up to speed on planned dates for switch-overs and when you should be able to expect relief/improvements.

Read more »

Three big issues seem worthy of clarification outside the strings of comments.

1. Alvaro de Soto shrewdly suggests that Israel has need of (at the very least) a two-state solution, but lacks a leader with the brass or brains to take the country there. He is, of course, right. And I would take this observation one more step. Given the peculiar features of Israeli politics, it is structurally almost impossible for any such leader to emerge. I am not exactly speaking about the power of the religious parties, and so forth. I am thinking about something rather worse, which is that although polls show a decisive majority support the two-state solution (the elements of the Clinton parameters, etc.), this support drops precipitously when pollsters suggest a violent fight with the right to get there. 

Read more »

Lincoln Chafee was one of my favorite moderates in the U.S. Senate. His common sense progressive realism in foreign affairs was essential during the battle over John Bolton's confirmation. Unlike a number of others who sought higher national office, Chafee voted against the Iraq War Resolution.

I think that now that he has become a political Independent and quit the Republican Party (he told me that he has always voted Republican in every race until 2008 though he said that he wrote in George H.W. Bush in the 2004 presidential race), Chafee is well-positioned to serve in an Obama cabinet or to run as an Independent for the governorship of Rhode Island. I would support him on both fronts.

However, Chafee added a bit of color to his profile yesterday and in a very lucid, lay it all out there talk at the New America Foundation about how he was let down substantively and politically by Bush/Cheney, he expressed some strong views about Sarah Palin.

Read more »

Let's face it: McCain and Palin have run off with the Change banner.

I was always worried that "Change" was too vague by half, one of those pallid euphemisms of our degraded politics intended to excite (somewhat) a society many of whom think politics is the devil's work or in any case far less interesting than gadgetry, sex, and the pursuit of personal happiness. Who doesn't want Change?

And who doesn't want Reform, for that matter? A certain George W. Bush ran off with that mantle in 2002: "Reformer with Results." Now the plutocratic, bomb-and-drill, culture-war, abortion-stopping, tycoon-loving, polar-bear-drowning wolf-shooting reformers are back with a vengeance.

Read more »

Outer Wingnuttia (AP) -- Alaska Governor and Republican vice-presidential nominee Sarah Palin drew rapturous cheers -- and raised a few eyebrows -- at a rally in Lancaster, Pennsylvania yesterday when she called for drilling in the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation.

Coming on the heels of her claim that the crisis facing lending giants Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae shows that the mortgage finance agencies had "gotten too big and too expensive to the taxpayers," Palin's advocacy of drilling in the FDIC raises the question of how much she understands about the American financial system.

Read more »

This is an important piece by one of America's leading political scientists Andrew Hacker.

I knew that the GOP makes it difficult for African-Americans to vote. I did not know just how sophisticated their vote suppression efforts are. According to Hacker, vote suppression could be the key to a McCain victory this year. It comes down to this: our chances of winning depend on an unprecedented increase in the African-American turnout. Their chances hang on blocking that turnout.

They are ready.

We better be. We weren't in 2000 or 2004 and a strong case can be made that it was vote suppression (not to mention other forms of cheating) that won it for them,

Yesterday, the Wonk Room highlighted a new report by the Center for American Progress called Green Recovery, which lays out a plan to spend $100 billion over two years to create approximately 2 million new jobs, focused in particular on the construction and manufacturing sectors, which have been particularly hard-hit recently. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics job report released on September 5, the manufacturing lost 64,000 additional jobs in August, and construction has shed approximately 388,000 jobs since peak employment rates in February 2006, though losses in that sector have slowed considerably since the first half of this year.

The CAP report was prepared by Dr. Robert Pollin and University of Massachusetts Political Economy Research Institute economists, and would focus investment in six separate strategies:

Read more »

I think it is absolutely right that our Presidential candidate go after their Vice Presidential candidate.

Why? Because, as the Republicans learned under Karl Rove, you go after the other side's strength not its weakness. You attack Kerry on his military record or Gore for being smart. The idea is that if you hit them where they are strong, the rest collapses too.

Sarah Palin has turned out to be the GOP's #1 asset this year. That is not only because she's a woman and an interesting character. It is because McCain is just so utterly flat and uninspiring.

He is now running on her coat tails and it's up to us to cut them off. Both Obama and Biden should go after her hard, laughingly rebuke the GOP's shock and horror that they would attack a mother, and let the media do the rest. Today's NEWSWEEK story could be an indication that the Palin master stroke could well end up destroying the GOP's chances. Hit 'em where they are strong and let the old white guy fade into oblivion. (Not that we shouldn't attack him too).

But, first, sack the QB. That's Palin.

I feel a little shy about joining a discussion like this one. Thirty-plus years ago, when I was in the running to join The New Republic as its nominal editor, I sat down with my friend and ex-tutor Marty Peretz for a nice four-hour chat in a Cambridge coffee house. By the time we were done, (a) I had the job and (b) Marty and I had agreed to disagree about the need for a Palestinian state, which had been our topic for at least one of those hours.

For the next twelve years we continued to disagree--on that topic, at least, agreeably. (On other topics, not always so much.) One reason our disagreement stayed agreeable was that I wrote nary a word about Israel, though I edited thousands of Marty's. My view was, If he's going to pump millions into this magazine and let me say whatever I want about everything else, I'm going to let him run the Middle East Desk without any rude pipsqueaking from me. Michael Walzer and, sometimes, Leon Wieseltier usually said what needed to be said anyway.

Another complication was my upbringing. My father was a secular atheist Jew; my mother was a nice Protestant lady. I've never been completely sure what that makes me, though I guess the decibel level on my dad's side of the family, plus my telltale name, make me a hair more Jewish than not. On top of that, Dad, who wrote a monthly column for Commentary about Middle East developments, including Israel's founding, during that then-liberal magazine's first few years of publication, was an anti-Zionist, a proponent of a bi-national state. He thought that a state that self-identified as Jewish would end up becoming just another small-minded Levantine theocracy. Some version of these biases probably lingers in me.

Read more »

My friend Bernie's comments about my comment are spot on.

The Palestinians have earned a reputation for being chronic opportunity missers. For Palestinians the delay results in continued suffering and deprivation. The problem is that there is a heavy price to be paid by Israel as well if a two-state solution is not achieved soon: over time it will become an existential question. Writing recently in the New York Times about the urgency of a two-state solution, Tom Friedman said that "Israel is becoming permanently pregnant with a stillborn Palestinian state in its belly."

Read more »

Israel's President Shimon Peres came out unequivocally this past weekend against a military strike on Iran. "There are two ways [to deal with Iran] -a military and civilian way. I don't believe in the military option - any kind of military option...it will not solve the problem...an attack can trigger a bigger war." Many have argued, myself included, that Israeli interests would be better served by ratcheting down the military rhetoric and embracing a more far-reaching diplomatic approach - especially given statements by the Pentagon's top brass against a military strike and the impact that war talk has in emboldening and strengthening President Ahmadinejad's hard-line camp in Tehran. What is remarkable though is the political timing of the statements by Israel's president and other senior Israelis coming as it does in the thick of an American political campaign that pits the uber-belligerent "bomb bomb" Iran ticket of McCain-Palin against the more savvy 'tough diplomacy for a tough world' ticket of Obama-Biden.

Apparently, if Israel's president has anything to do with it, all the talk of a possible Israeli strike in the November-January window (if Obama wins out of concern for his possible policies) - would be consigned to the total nonsense file.

Read more »

Barack Obama has too many good ideas to choose decisively. John McCain has no ideas but is decisive about them anyway. It's "Smart but weak" vs. "Dumb but determined." Both claims are caricatures, of course. But only if you make the second one do people call you an elitist for calling their guy stupid.

Columnist Thomas Friedman got away with that on Monday, though, in an interview with NPR's Terry Gross. "You have pretty strong feelings!" the normally unflappable Gross almost gasped after Friedman denounced McCain's positions on energy as "disgusting" on the grounds that "He's making people stupid!"

The reasons Friedman got away with it might be instructive to certain pundits who merely insinuate their preferences instead of arguing forthrightly for what they really want us to believe. Few who listen to Friedman's interview would call him "elitist," because he was too substantive, and too outraged, to be talking down to anyone. And, wow, did he land his punches.

Read more »

Every major media outlet has now reported that Sarah Palin is not telling the truth about her aggressive earmark-seeking and her support for the Bridge to Nowhere (until Congress cancelled it and she took the money for other projects). Now, today, the Washington Post gives us the amazing revelation that she routinely charged the State of Alaska for her living expenses while she resided at home, and charged family costs to the state when she traveled on (mildly) official business to burnish her personal image. This is the portrait of a liar and someone who milks the public for personal advantage. Regardless of legalities in a formal sense, Palin has a sleazy profile. She is no reformer.

Read more »

This is great news for Democratic chances in Florida.

Former New York Mayor Ed Koch has endorsed Barack Obama. Koch's big issue is terrorism and he endorsed Bush in '04.

But Palin pushed him over the edge.

"I have concluded that the country is safer in the hands of Barack Obama, leader of the Democratic Party and protector of the philosophy of that party. Protecting and defending the U.S. means more than defending us from foreign attacks. It includes defending the public with respect to their civil rights, civil liberties and other needs, e.g., national health insurance, the right of abortion, the continuation of Social Security, gay rights, other rights of privacy, fair progressive taxation and a host of other needs and rights.

"If the vice president were ever called on to lead the country, there is no question in my mind that the experience and demonstrated judgment of Joe Biden is superior to that of Sarah Palin. Sarah Palin is a plucky, exciting candidate, but when her record is examined, she fails miserably with respect to her views on the domestic issues that are so important to the people of the U.S., and to me. Frankly, it would scare me if she were to succeed John McCain in the presidency."

Bravo, Mayor Koch. Memo to Obama Campaign: Get Koch to every synagogue in Florida!

This op-ed by Jeff Goldberg is definitely worth a read.

He writes that experts believe that there is a 20-50% chance of a WMD attack on a major American city over the next decade. He is referring to the so-called "dirty bomb." He maintains that A-Q is seeking a weapon and will deploy it when it can. (He says that smuggling it into the US should not be hard; just hide it in a cocaine shipment).

He also points out that the Bush administration has not only done nothing to defend us against an attack but has made things worse. In addition to the pointless slaughter, the Iraq war is also a giant diversion from the real threat. And now the Bush administration is suspending nuclear cooperation with Russia to punish Russia for its intervention in Geogia. Typical idiocy).

Read more »

So far, a number of quite reasonable objections to the path implied by The Hebrew Republic have cropped up, the most challenging (and authoritative) from my friend, Alvaro de Soto, who was the UN's chief diplomat to the Quartet's peace process a few years back. Alvaro writes:

There is plenty of room to doubt whether a two-state solution is still possible, whether the chance wasn't missed at some indeterminate point not too long ago. The Hebrew Republic may be a Hail Mary pass (an expression which I hope I don't have to explain to non-Catholics), but, I say, let us pray.

I agree that a two-state solution, such as the one we all imagined 20 years ago, is not easily imaginable now.  That is in part because (as I've written here before) Israel is itself something like two states now, secular Israel (anchored by Tel-Aviv) and orthodox-settler Judea (anchored by Jerusalem), and it is by no means clear that Israelis will be prepared to confront Judeans for the sake of Palestinians. Moreover, the Israeli and Palestinian economies are highly inter-penetrated. It is not clear that they can be disentangled. But if objections to a two-state solution, or even just a grim prognosis for it, imply endorsement for a one-state solution (some of the other commentators clearly endorse this), then we are into even more unimaginable territory.

Read more »

I spent last Friday night in my local park watching an outdoor showing of the Hitchcock classic "North by Northwest," in which advertising man Cary Grant is mistaken for a CIA agent by the name of George Kaplan. It ends up that Kaplan is not a real person at all but an illusory character created by the Agency to entrap a ring of foreign spies led by the coolly evil James Mason. But once Grant has been mistaken for Kaplan, CIA bigwig Leo G. Carroll decides that he makes a better decoy than the faux character they have created, so they use him to reel in their prey.

Granted, I've been a bit disturbed of late -- not least of all by the Republican convention -- but I got to thinking after the film of the parallels between the Cary Grant character and America's star of the moment -- Alaska Governor Sarah Palin.

Read more »

First, I would like to thank everyone at TPM Café for hosting this discussion.  And I would particularly like to thank friends and associates who have agreed to keep the discussion going over the next week.  Somewhere in the back of every writer's mind is the dream of enabling this kind of give-and take.  I do not take such gifts lightly.

Let me briefly set the stage.  My first book, The Tragedy of Zionism came out in 1985, three years after the ill-fated Lebanon War.  The book focused on how Israel's mounting military crises grew, not only out of Arab enmity, but out of certain failures in its own democracy: that the settlement movement, especially, was not simply the result of some post-1967 intoxication with the land, but that settlement was inspired and materially supported by residual Zionist institutions that should have been retired in 1948.  That Israel's state apparatus was only doing outside of the Green Line after the Six Day War what it had been doing inside the Green Line after the War of Independence. 

I argued, in effect, that the State of Israel had been founded as two states: a democratic state encasing a revolutionary Zionist settler state, the former developing a Hebrew civil society, the latter privileging Jews (defined by Rabbinic strictures) over non-Jews, which developed a world of its own in and around Jewish Jerusalem and the settlements of Judea and Samaria.  (In recent years, many of the settlers have actually begun to say they live in Judea, not Israel.) 

Read more »

Happy Monday Cafe-ers!

This week at Book Club, we'll be talking about Bernard Avishai's latest, The Hebrew Republic: How Secular Democracy and Global Enterprise Will Bring Israel Peace At Last.

Bernie's post will be up shortly, and I'll let him introduce the argument. But just to give you a hint of what's to come, and why this conversation seems important now, in the rush of election madness, to remember how much is at stake in the world at large, he concludes his piece like this:

You see, this whole way of looking at peacemaking must change. Israelis must begin to understand that there is a world to win: that peace means further integration to a larger system of collective security--that they are not alone in the world, and that the absence of peace means economic disaster. Israel, they must see (and perhaps only an Obama administration can help them see it), is not being asked to embrace anything more that all European countries have embraced. We have to get past the idea that the peace process means Israelis saying: well, let's give the Palestinians some land, and maybe they (and the world) will leave us alone.

Joining him in the discussion are Yoram Peri, Head of the Rothschild Caesarea School of Communication and Professor of political Sociology and communication at Tel Aviv University, Hendrik Hertzberg, Senior Editor and staff writer at The New Yorker. Sherman Teichman, Director of the Institute for Global Leadership at Tufts University will also be participating along with Dov Frohman, founding CEO of Intel-Israel, and Charles Glass, freelance journalist, broadcaster and author most recently of The Northern Front (2006). Last, but certainly not least, Ambassador Alvaro de Soto, Peruvian diplomat and former UN Special Coordinator for the Middle East Peace Process will be adding his seasoned voice to the mix.

Join us!

On his new New Republic blog, The Flack, Howard Wolfson says HRC won't fall into the trap of lowering herself to fight Sarah Palin. That is, she won't let herself get cast as the senior cat scratching the eyes out of the perky kitten for the general delectation of extreme sports fans.

Absolutely right. Rather, HRC should be unleashed to the battleground states where she ran well, to remind her voters, and others, that McCain is (1) a devoted practitioner of Bush-Gramm "Tough Luck for You, Whiners" economics and (2) a neocon who'll send us into wrong-headed, unnecessary, America-wasting wars.

The polls haven't been looking good lately. Part of this is simply erratic movements in polls and some post-convention bounce for the Republicans. But part of the story is real. The Republicans have again managed to paint the Democrats as wimps.

While some of this is just vicious/racist garbage (e.g. Rudy Giuliani's complaints that the Dems don't talk about "Islamic terrorism) some of the wimp riff was handed to them by the Dems. Specifically the "you're on your own" theme that Senator Obama and his campaign have seized upon.

The Republicans are no more about "you're on your own" than the Dems. They just think that the government is there to give a helping hand to rich people.

Read more »

I simply can't fathom it. Why would anyone vote for the Republicans this year?

Other than this. The New York Times today offers a valentine to our Sarah, the mom to end all moms, the new feminist/activist/working mom who is an nspiration to all womanhood.

It seems to be working. But why?

Okay, I understand that Republicans, for the most part, vote Republican. Democrats are, for the most part, equally loyal to their party.

But what about independents and swing voters. Other than the factor one is not supposed to discuss (but which we all know is a big one), why would any American vote to continue the status quo?

It's almost un-American, the idea of perpetuating bad times. Overwhelmingly the American people think George W. Bush was a terrible President, that the Iraq war was a mistake, and that the economy is in a free fall.

How then can they vote for four more years of the same. Again, I have no problem with Republicans voting Republican. And I know why racists and neocons and the abortion-obsessed will vote Republican. But why would any normal patriotic American vote for the continuation of a status quo that, we pretty much all agree, sucks?