Amazing, but true; Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac have both announced that they are going to allow homeowners who have been foreclosed to remain in their homes as renters. Apparently they have finally overcome the cult of homeownership to do something to help people who used to homeowners.

It would be great if other lenders followed the lead of Fannie and Freddie. It would be even better if they provided real security of tenure; say the right to remain in the home for 5-10 years, instead of just a month to month lease.

Better yet, Congress could require that lenders provide foreclosed homeowners with the option to stay in their house as tenants for 5-10 years.This would provide immediate help to homeowners with no taxpayer dollars and no bureaucracy. But, intelligent life in Congress? Not likely.

That was Obama statement repealing a number of Bush-era anti-union executive orders and creating a White House Task Force on Middle Class Working Families, chaired by VP Joe Biden and no doubt staffed by former-TPMCafer Jared Bernstein.

I'll skip the substance of the exec order actions and emphasize that Obama statement as far more significant. We have not had a President that so forthrightly identified the health of the nation with the health of the labor movement in many decades. I'm sure Clinton and Carter never did and I'd be curious if anyone has quotes from LBJ or JFK said so strongly.

Remembering that much of the upsurge in labor organizing in the 1930s came BEFORE the Wagner Act was allowed to go into effect by the Supreme Court in 1937, in many ways the most significant tools of the labor movement that decade was FDR's statement early on that, President Roosevelt declared publicly, "If I were a worker I would join a union." Union leaders used that statement to rally workers across the country. Whether Obama's statement will have the same galvanizing effect is unclear, but it may help significantly -- and may help undercut the anti-union stance of Congressional opponents of the Employee Free Choice Act and other labor bills pending.

It's been a great week at TPM. My final post will focus on a few more issues for President Obama and attorney general-designate Eric Holder, as well as some closing words on my 1960s experience in the context of our current moment.

President Obama has enough on his plate that needs urgent attention without adding more. So does attorney general-designate Holder. But there are two areas that cry out for attention even if they do not appear to have the urgency of other issues: political contributions and reform of the criminal justice system. The President need not take substantive positions on these issues right away, but both are ripe for independent bipartisan commissions to examine. Obama can then make his own independent decisions in the light of what an informed bipartisan group concludes.

I think it is obvious that elected officials' dependence on money to run elections makes difficult their independent judgment on policy. Repeated attempts to resolve the problem through legislation have been, at best, watered-down versions of what is necessary. The money that lobbyists earn and contribute is evidence of the importance to business of government laws and regulations, and it is proper that interests be heard. But accompanying argument with money does not improve the chance of rational resolution. Serious conflicts of interest abound, affecting the confidence the general public has in the integrity of both elected and appointed officials.

(Note: Nick Katzenbach is the author of the new book Some of It Was Fun: Working with RFK and LBJ.)

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Ramesh Ponnuru of the conservative National Review proposes a deal for Social Security reform in which Republicans and Democrats each "will have to give up at least one cherished goal." For Republicans, that concession would be to accept that "Mr. Bush's dream of letting individuals invest Social Security funds is dead." Democrats, in return, "will need to take tax increases off the table."

Ponnuru's proposal is about as reasonable as Bernard Madoff offering his former investors a chance to get in on his next deal for only half the fees they used to pay. Why would Democrats even consider compromising over the future of the nation's most successful government program, which is playing an important role in softening the blows of the current economic crisis, when Congressional Republicans have already demonstrated that "saving" Social Security is the last thing they want to do?

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Lots of people are wary about the stimulus bill, and on broadband there was a good deal of concern that it would end up simply funding the incumbents to do what they were going to do anyway, without really taking the opportunity to bring in new models of broadband.  But from the current versions: the version the House passed, and the Senate Appropriations Committee released, I'm actually reasonably optimistic.    

The Senate proposal is better along two dimensions.  First, it stands at 9 billion dollars instead of 6 billion dollars, and is to be disposed purely through the National Telecommunications and Information Administration Technology Opportunities Program.  9 billion is not the 44 billion Free Press was arguing for, but it is no chump change, either.  It's about 40% of what Verizon had planned to spend over six years as its investment to shift to FiOS.  Second, it is all to be administered through the NTIA, through a program that was set up during the Clinton Administration to support experimentation and deployment of public and non-profit efforts, and to study public networks; a program that has been starved of funds for half a decade.

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I'm less hopeful than M.J. Rosenberg, in his brave and necessary post below, about the American news media's focus on the suffering in Gaza. Such coverage delivers no more political enlightenment than it does about any other disaster. Still, Israel's long, incoherent, destructive strategy for Palestinians does come into some focus with the images of 1.5 million people in a holding pen, as I noted here on January 4. Where does Israel go from here?

Perhaps the first thing to remember is that history cuts both ways. Soon we may learn that Hamas has tortured, maimed, or killed hundreds of Palestinians since Israelis left on Jan. 20. Slowly, American bleeding hearts will stop bleeding. The tragedy is that Israel's parliamentary democracy -- in which even the briefly-banned Arab parties will participate on Feb. 10 thanks to a Supreme Court unlike any other in the Middle East -- doesn't seem able to short-circuit the country's own part in this destructive spiral.

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Israel is just days away from elections so it is no surprise that its people are not focusing on whether or not the Gaza war was worth the price. But the polls reveal that well over 90% are satisfied with the way the war went.

They also show that Bibi Netanyahu will be elected prime minister on Feb 10th with the race-baiter Avigdor Lieberman -- he says that Israeli Arabs must sign oaths of loyalty to the Jewish state or lose their rights as citizens -- running a strong third. He will probably win more seats in Knesset than the Labor Party. He is the Israeli George Wallace, not a crazed extremist from outside the system like David Duke or Meir Kahane, but an insider who echoes Kahanist themes. With his 15 or 20 Knesset seats he replaces Ariel Sharon as the political establishment's iron fist, except that his views on Arabs (any and all) make Sharon look like Eleanor Roosevelt.

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John Updike's death hits so hard because nobody has written about it as perfectly and for as long as he has--and he died all the same. Apparently, writing protects you only from life. I liked the Rabbit books, or the Rabbit prose, but after reading Self-Consciousness and Roger's Version, I felt we knew Updike's terrible idea of what he'd be thinking, or half-thinking, as he accepted oblivion. He writes somewhere of a man who, on his death-bed, realizes that he's utterly lost interest in the laws of physics because facts, in fact, no longer mattered. In Rabbit At Rest, Harry Angstrom thinks, clenched, what the people on that Pan Am flight over Lockerbie were thinking as the plane fell to earth, and he catches himself and thinks, we are all falling toward the earth, just a little more slowly. If Updike can die, then who won't? Listen to this wonderful interview of Updike in 2000 by Chris Lydon, who is, thank God, still alive.

At Progressive States, we've highlighted the potential and actual taxpayer ripoffs hidden in the industry siren song of selling off public assets like highways.  States gets what looks like an attratctive upfront payment, but lose in the long-term from lost toll revenue and lost democratic control of transit decisions.

The credit crisis has undermined the financial players who had been leading the charge on privatization, so they are looking for a bailout under the federal recovery plan.   As reported by Reuters, Morgan Stanley, Merril Lynch, and a number of other firms pushing "public private partnerships" -- the industry's preferred euphemism for privatization -- wants part of the stimulus package to flow to them.   Their wish list includes federal rules to push privatization of airports and highways, along with a national infrastructure bank to subsidize loans for private sector deals.  

And the privatization industry appears to have already won one item on their wish list in the federal bill -- an obscure but profitable loophole exempting profits from "private activity bonds" issued by local governments used for infrastructure from the federal alternative minimum tax. 

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The New York Times revealed this morning that Wall Street Paid out over $18.4 Billion in bonuses for last year's great work by their executives.

That was the sixth-largest haul on record, according to a report released Wednesday by the New York State comptroller. While the payouts paled next to the riches of recent years, Wall Street workers still took home about as much as they did in 2004, when the Dow Jones industrial average was flying above 10,000, on its way to a record high.

When asked why he authorized a huge bonus pool in the face of the firm's largest loss ever, newly booted Merrill Lynch CEO John Thain put forth the standard line.

He defended the reported $4-billion bonus pool, saying that "if you don't pay your best people, you will destroy your franchise. Those best people can get jobs other places, they will leave."

Excuse me, but where are they going to get jobs that pay $10 million a year? I don't think their rival firms are actually in a hiring mode. This is total malarkey. The Treasury Department should sue any firm that got TARP funds to claw back bonuses paid for last year. Of course the Rush Limbaugh bootlickers in the House will oppose this because Rush thinks this is class warfare.

When Bobby Kennedy became Attorney General he inherited a sound department with an apolitical law enforcement tradition. His relationship with the president gave the department additional prestige and influence when it came to law. His only management problem was with J. Edgar Hoover's FBI, serious in its right wing obsession with communism and its dislike of Dr. King and black demonstrators. Attorney general-designate Eric Holder has quite different problems, the most serious of which are restoring the constitution and law to government and eliminating any remnants of politicization in the department itself. The latter will take time, but he will have the support of the bulk of the attorneys in the civil service and he can make sure that new appointments are on the merits. Bobby was always concerned that the process of appointing U.S. Attorneys, which involved a recommendation from the Democratic political leadership in the relevant state, exposed the President and the department to local politics. Young politically ambitious prosecutors with an obligation to their Senator could easily begin political investigations into alleged Republican corruption. This was, of course, the opposite of recent problems where such activity was encouraged, but it could have easily looked the same to the public. Bobby brought all potential appointees to Washington and told them in no uncertain terms that he had to be informed and approve any such investigations before they were authorized.

(Note: Nick Katzenbach is the author of the new book Some of It Was Fun: Working with RFK and LBJ.)

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The fiscal stimulus debate is currently hampered by confusion over its objectives. On the one hand, one purpose of the stimulus is to generate economic activity quickly in order to boost aggregate demand and break the recessionary spiral we seem to be in. On the other hand, people rightly worry about the capacity of the government to spend large amounts of money quickly without wasting it, and argue that the money should be put to productive use, rather than paying people to dig holes and then fill them in again. (This is why you see (at least) two versions of criticism of the stimulus plan: on the one hand, the criticism is that the government is incapable of putting money to productive use; on the other hand, the criticism is that money for things like electronic health records will not be spent in time to have a short-term effect.)

My opinion is that both are valid purposes. There probably is a limit to the number of tens of billions of dollars the government can spend next month without wasting some of it. But given the projected duration of the output gap (the difference between potential and actual GDP, meaning that the economy is performing below its full-employment capacity), I think there is also value in programs that take several quarters to disburse their money - as long as those programs are also good investments.

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Responding to President Obama's request, House Democrats cut a provision from the stimulus package that would expand contraceptive family planning for Medicaid patients--usually poor women and girls. He, in turn, was responding to Republicans' opposition to expanding Medicaid family planning for poor women and girls.

Why did this happen?

For years, reproductive justice activists have argued that the religious right's real agenda is not just to eliminate abortion, but to end the historic rupture between sex and reproduction that took place in the 20th century.

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Tim Geitner said today, in response to questions about the prospect of bank nationalization, that the Treasury is considering a range of options with the intent of preserving the private banking system. “We have a financial system that is run by private shareholders, managed by private institutions, and we’d like to do our best to preserve that system,” he told reporters.

Well, it all depends on what "private" means. The fact that the Treasury has not sought voting rights or outright control over day-to-day operations doesn't mean the banks are still "private." Nor does it mean that much remains of the former "system" to be preserved. The Treasury now owns preferred shares and warrants of many of the banks that have received bailout money. These can be converted into common stock and cashed out whenever the government wants. Technically, the Treasury has a controlling interest in many of these banks if it wanted to exercise that interest. As to many other banks, the Treasury could easily gain a controlling interest; their remaining common shares are worth so little now that Treasury could buy just buy them up. In addition, the Treasury, as well as the Fed, is monitoring these banks carefully, and the banks are highly sensitive to what Treasury and Fed officials want from them.

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According to press accounts the Obama administration has decided to create a "bad bank" which would buy up much of the bad debt held by the banks. This is almost certainly a really bad idea, unless of course you happen to run a major bank or own lots of stock in one.

The basic deal is simple. Most of the banks are bankrupt. Their liabilities exceed their assets. However, this is not immediately apparent because they have not written down the value of their bad assets.

Now our bad bank comes along and offers to buy up the junk. Suppose it pays what the junk is worth. In that case, the bank will then have to incur a big loss and show everyone that it is insolvent.

The banks will not voluntarily sell their junk for what it's worth, if it means putting them out of business. Therefore, we can assume that the bad bank will pay more than the junk is worth. This is welfare as we know it now.

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Transit is not stimulus. Sorry. If I was king, I'd spend about $200 billion for SUPERTRAINS. We could use high-speed rail lines in California, the Texas Triangle, Florida, the Midwest hub, and even Rep. John Mica's (R-FL) ginormous D.C. to Boston line. But I wouldn't call it stimulus, because it isn't.

The recession may last two years. That would make it the worst since World War II. It might last four years, which would be epochal. By contrast, optimistically a high-speed rail system takes two or three times as long to get from gleam in the eye to operational. If you want to maximize dollars' impact on the recession, that's too slow. Even a 'shovel-ready' project could take a decade. Twenty billion spent over ten years is not as good as $5 billion spent over two years, say for teachers' aides, hospital orderlies, Pell grants, pothole fillers, and broadband installers.

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There are huge differences between the government Kennedy took over in 1961 and that Obama takes over in 2009. Kennedy took over a relatively stable and prosperous government with respect abroad. Obama takes over a failed economy, a badly divided electorate, and distrust of America in many countries. But there are similarities as well. The New Frontier was full of government officials who wanted to get America moving again--a reaction, not entirely justified, to what they saw as passivity under Eisenhower.

Young veterans, in particular, felt this country could do anything when it pulled together, and those of us in government--and beyond it--wanted new initiatives in many areas not unlike Obama's plea for change. The concept of the New Frontier was an expression of America's ability to overcome and resolve problems and to move ahead into uncharted territory with confidence. Taking up the Soviet challenge in space by promising to put a man on the moon was another expression of confidence in the country, a goal that made Americans feel proud of themselves. Most important, young people were excited by the possibilities of a better world then as they are today.

Hope and confidence that a rational pragmatic approach can find better solutions is hugely important. The risk is always that it will crash against the realities of politics. The key to leadership in our democracy is to keep those hopes alive while avoiding the briar patch of political necessity. For any administration, there will be some issues in which the desire for change at times clashes with and at times is advanced by that rational pragmatic approach. In Kennedy's presidency, one of those areas was civil rights.

(Note: Nick Katzenbach is the author of the new book Some of It Was Fun: Working with RFK and LBJ.)

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It may take an Act of Congress to overhaul that Senate Committee on Foreign Relations website, but the Senate desperately needs to do it. With all due respect to the webmaster on the Committee and to Committee Chairman John Kerry and Ranking Member Richard Lugar, the SFRC website sucks!

I have been looking at this site for years and years, and it just doesn't change. This is the way the site looked during the 2005 John Bolton hearings - and it is probably the way it looked in 1995.

In contrast, the State Department has given its website a spiffy new look. So, to the White House which has imported those sweeping blues from the Obama campaign site.

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For a week or more, conservatives have been touting a Congressional Budget Office report said to criticize the Obama spending proposal on the ground that little of the proposed stimulus would get to work quickly. David Brooks was especially impressed, devoting a column to the subject and promoting this ostensible CBO finding on Friday's NewsHour, while Jim Lehrer sagely nodded and Mark Shields let the matter pass. Other esteemed custodians of the national trust who accepted this CBO story were Andrea Mitchell, David Gergen, Jonathan Karl, David Gregory, and even the usually reliable Ray Suarez, who played he-said-she-said.

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As a friend of mine put it to me, it seemed as if Updike would always be there, like the sea. To reading him, on and off, for close to fifty years (!), was to make contact with some enduring American pain in the heart of the glitter. At his best--the Rabbit series and many stories--he was an avatar of the trouble looming just beneath the skin of normality, and a curious soul trying to keep up. At his funniest--the Bech books--he was as the embodiment of good-hearted WASP playfulness. He narrated his way through enough of the collective life to deserve an enduring place.

And yet. Something went still and cold in him in the face of big tragedy, and it was this, I think, that keeps him out of the company of the American indispensables. His version of David Koresh (In the Beauty of the Lilies) was stillborn.

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Any time Congress spends hundreds of billions of dollars in a hurry we'd better read the fine print. So it is with today's Senate Appropriations Committee mark-up of the next installment -- over $365 billion -- of the economic stimulus package. Tucked away in the bill is $7.8 billionfor the Department of Energy's National Nuclear Security Administration -- the agency responsible for researching, developing and maintaining nuclear weapons. The funding is set aside for a variety of purposes, from construction of facilities to clean-up of weapons sites to "laboratory infrastructure," to "advanced computing development." Whatever the appropriations committee chooses to call it, it represents a bailout for an agency that should be reduced in size, not increased.

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Why is this recession so deep, and what can be done to reverse it?

Hint: Go back about 50 years, when America's middle class was expanding and the economy was soaring. Paychecks were big enough to allow us to buy all the goods and services we produced. It was a virtuous circle. Good pay meant more purchases, and more purchases meant more jobs.

At the center of this virtuous circle were unions. In 1955, more than a third of working Americans belonged to one. Unions gave them the bargaining leverage they needed to get the paychecks that kept the economy going. So many Americans were unionized that wage agreements spilled over to nonunionized workplaces as well. Employers knew they had to match union wages to compete for workers and to recruit the best ones.

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Today, New York Times columnist Bob Herbert asked, why listen to Republicans? Indeed. And yet this morning came the shocking and startling news that our new president has asked House Democrats to cut a provision that would expand contraceptive family planning for Medicaid patients.

Why? According to the AP/Austin American-Statesman, "several Democratic officials said that House leaders likely would abandon the provision at Obama's request, which was made 'at a time when the administration is courting Republican critics of the legislation.' A final decision is expected on Tuesday, when Obama is scheduled to meet separately with House and Senate Republicans."

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It didn't take long to feel comfortable working with Bobby. He listened well and he asked good questions. It couldn't have been easy for him to have surrounded himself with lawyers all slightly his senior and all with professional qualifications far superior to his. He embraced an interesting technique for asserting his leadership: he treated us as a team in which all of us had the same objectives. It was easy to have tension between the criminal division and the tax division, particularly in organized crime matters where the criminal division wanted to see confidential tax returns and the tax division did not see evidence of a criminal tax offense, but Bobby simply assumed that we would work together. Burke Marshall was a superb head of the civil rights division, but that did not mean that the rest of us might not have something useful to contribute. And so forth.

Bobby avoided serious controversy by using his team concept. All of us would be invited to his beautiful estate at Hickory Hill and have candid discussions about our own and others' problems. Differences became mooted and lawyers became teammates, not advocates seeking to protect their own territory. Bobby promoted this further by simply saying "Hey, you guys are all better lawyers than I am but I'm the Attorney General and I have to make the decision. So help me out." We respected each other's views and we genuinely wanted to help Bobby come to the right decision.

(Note: Nick Katzenbach is the author of the new book Some of It Was Fun: Working with RFK and LBJ.)

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The new administration and Congress are busy preparing the second tranche of bailout money for Wall Street -- TARP II -- at the same time they're developing a new set of regulations to make sure Wall Street doesn't get into this kind of mess again. But will the old politics intrude?

Wall Street is one of the biggest campaign contributors to both parties, and the Street's contributions have increased considerably over the last several election cycles. According to the Center for Responsive Politics, by the 2006 elections, Wall Street contributions to the Democratic Party had caught up with its rising contributions to Republicans.

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Peniel Joseph's insightful post last week on equality smartly notes that on January 20th, "the very aesthetics of American democracy changed, both symbolically and substantively, through the ascension of a black man to the nation's highest office." It is the power of that image, and that ideal, that infused the week of inaugural activities from President Obama's address, to the first dance at each inaugural ball to the signing of each new executive order. This was a moment that much of America saw itself reflected back to itself from its leaders, a break from a history of white, primarily Protestant, Brahmin men, a triumph of meritocracy as well as the civil rights movement and perhaps the biggest push towards embracing a nation-wide movement of service to volunteerism in our history. A government by the people and for the people was finally of the people.

And yet amidst those cautious words of hope, I couldn't help but think of the continued economic, social, and tax marginalization of a group of Americans who were cast aside - particularly by this election and the presidential one before it. If we are to address community and equality in the Obama era, the legacy of this election's homophobic statewide ballot initiatives must be redressed through both legislative means and the President's bully pulpit. In the glow of our embryonic racial stabilization, it seems almost churlish to mention, and yet to not do so would be to undermine our communal path towards equality.

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Shortly after Barack Obama was elected president, I boarded a red-eye flight to Washington to make a morning workshop on a juvenile justice bill. I hadn't bothered to take a red-eye for eight years, but now it seemed to matter. Something progressive actually might happen in public policy and, if so, it was worth the jet-lag and back pain.

For the first time in years, activists will need an inside strategy to complement the familiar tactics of fighting from the margins. The new president will have to reach out to progressives as well, with the same energy he invests in the religious and Republican right.

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Neoconservativism existed before Bill Kristol, but before him none had figured out how to market the brand and go viral.

Some may argue that Kristol's neoconservative policy work never actually did go viral, but they'd be wrong. His thinking animated much of Washington, and a rather small group of thinker/activists commandeered the helm of America's foreign policy establishment and changed the course of the nation and American history.

It took quite a while for a counter-force of intellectuals and policy practitioners, spread across numerous think tanks, academic institutions, Congress, and even some inside the Bush administration to nudge the neoconservatives from their privileged spot.

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Bill Kristol's closing words in his close-out sale column:

Can Obama reshape liberalism to be, as it was under F.D.R., a fighting faith, unapologetically patriotic and strong in the defense of liberty? That would be a service to our country.

It's touching, Bill Kristol's long-deferred solicitude for our battered faith, the one whose promise and prowess have not been exactly improved during the many years he and his mates have spent flaying liberalism as synonymous with cowardice, surrender, elitism, moral squalor, and flagrant near-treason, all for refusing to sign up with the swaggering, know-nothing, ruinous policies and assorted crusades of his heroes Ronald Reagan, Dan Quayle, George W. Bush, John McCain, and oh, by the way, that snappy lady from Wasilla.

Kristol coms to the end of his appointed year on the Monday breakfast table, and an anxious world looks toward the succession. It's probably too much to ask that Pinch Sulzberger now replace him with (a) a interesting writer (b) who isn't a predictable party hack and (c) brings to bear some special knowledge about the world rather than a surfeit of attitude. But note: there are conservatives who fit the bill--CATO's Brink Lindsay and the NYT's own Christopher Caldwell, to name two. Economic knowledge being so much at a premium nowadays, there's also the paper's own Pulitzer-winning libertarian-investigative reporter David Cay Johnston.

If I were running the page, I'd invite applicants to submit a sample column in which they acknowledge a serious error they've made in recent years, and account for it.

It's good to be at TPMCafe, and I'm looking forward to discussing some of my 1960s experiences as deputy attorney general in Bobby Kennedy's Justice Department and attorney general and undersecretary of state in Lyndon Johnson's Justice and State Departments. (For intrepid readers interested in more, I go into further detail in my new book Some of It Was Fun: Working with RFK and LBJ.) The challenges we faced were difficult and important--civil rights, the Cold War, equal opportunities for women, the potential of the developing world. Today President Obama faces even more difficult problems. Some are similar; many are different. But although Bobby said as early as 1961 that "In the next thirty or forty years a Negro can also achieve the same position that my brother has as President of the United States," I can tell you most people in the 1960s never seriously thought that the problems of the United States in 2009 would be faced and, I think, resolved, by a black president. Certainly, that is progress. Nor do I think that when I confronted George Wallace to get Vivian Malone admitted to the University of Alabama anyone imagined that her brother in law, Eric Holder, would be attorney general of the United States for its first black president.

But I'm getting ahead of myself. I want to describe some of my experiences back then which I think may have some relevance today.

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(Part one of this post may be found here.)

Palestine is not Hamas and Israel is not its settlers, though the trends are not encouraging. Poll after poll shows that a majority of Palestinians still want a two-state solution with Israel, while surrendering to the logic of violent struggle. Palestinian elites still look forward to cooperation with Israelis on advanced businesses, higher education, construction, and tourism; they may even have some affection for Israelis; they know that their economic dignity and secular life depend on staving off Hamas. And a majority of Israelis still want peace with Palestine, skeptical as they may be of Palestinian political institutions. Israeli elites are raging against Hamas, but are still stirred by globalization and know that West Bank business infrastructure cannot development with 500 checkpoints. They know their own economic growth and cultural vitality depend on peace; their children, many of whom are leaving the country, hate guarding and paying for settlements.

Yet both sides' leaders, no matter who they are, cannot break out of a now impossible bind. They cannot imagine prompting a near-term fight with their own rejectionists, which means wide-scale civil disobedience, even civil war, for a long-term negotiation that would be hostage to the first atrocity. Peace advocates are exhausted, increasingly cynical, overwhelmed by military professionals and insurgent militias depicting their own actions as preempting the other side in a fight-to-the-finish. Hamas and Israeli rightists do not oppose a peace deal the way Republicans oppose Keynes. They have killed their own leaders to get their way. And this--not just a stalled "peacemaking process"--is where America comes in.

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