The real scandal of AIG isn't just that American taxpayers have so far committed $170 billion to the giant insurer because it is thought to be too big to fail -- the most money ever funneled to a single company by a government since the dawn of capitalism -- nor even that AIG's notoriously failing executives, at the very unit responsible for the catastrophic credit-default swaps at the very center of the debacle, are planning to give themselves over $100 million in bonuses. The scandal is that even at this late date, even in a new administration dedicated to doing it all differently, Americans still have so little say over what is happening with our money.

The administration is said to have been outraged when it heard of the bonus plan last week. Apparently Secretary of the Treasury Tim Geithner told AIG's chairman, Edward Liddy (who was installed at the insistence of the Treasury, in the first place) that the bonuses should not be paid. But it turns out that most will be paid anyway, because, according to AIG, the firm is legally obligated to pay them. The bonuses are part of employee contracts negotiated before the bailouts. And, in any event, Liddy explained, AIG needs to be able to retain talent.

AIG's arguments are absurd on their face. Had AIG gone into chapter 11 bankruptcy or been liquidated, as it would have without government aid, no bonuses would ever be paid (they would have had a lower priority under bankruptcy law that AIG's debts to other creditors); indeed, AIG's executives would have long ago been on the street. And any mention of the word "talent" in the same sentence as "AIG" or "credit default swaps" would be laughable if laughing weren't already so expensive.

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Thanks TPM and fellow participants for this week's book discussion. My final thought about this conversation is that while I think Norrell is right to insist that we view Washington within his historical context, it is hard to keep him there. I think this is in part because Washington bequeathed a political legacy - numerous and diverse ones, actually - that have shaped racial politics and visions from his time to ours. I think it is in part also because America has not come close to solving its racial problems - if viewed by disparities in income, assets, home ownership, infant mortality, life expectancy, employment, imprisonment, education or myriad other indices. Arguments over how to solve these problems inevitably raise questions about causes and solutions that evoke the competing (and often intertwined) perspectives that we attach to Washington and DuBois.

We now have an African American president who, seen through this long debate, evinces elements that we associate with each. Speaking about the responsibility of the black poor to change their behavior, or of the dignity of labor, he recalls Washington. Speaking as he did in Philadelphia a year ago about structural racism and the legitimacy of black grievance he sounds more like Washington's critics. As president of the United States, clearly Obama signifies far more than racial politics. Yet the fact of his race fundamentally alters the national identity of a country founded in slavery. And with this alteration comes questions of how best to tackle racial problems in changed circumstances. In this questioning, Washington and DuBois continue to cast long shadows, even as the landscape itself changes in profound ways.

First, my apologies for taking up a disproportionate amount of space at the TPM Cafe Book Club. I've been hoping for more entries by others, but I do have one more commentary, which is the following.

In 1964, at the age of 19, I was a civil rights worker in Clarksdale, Mississippi. It was the Mississippi Freedom Summer, and I taught teenagers in a small Freedom School. Our school was a back-up plan, adopted because the voter registration effort had failed; about 100 people had tried to register at the courthouse, but only about ten were accepted.

We wanted to teach black history at the school--a subject we (another young woman from the North and I) were rapidly trying to learn ourselves. We did, however, ask the students what they would really enjoy studying, and the most popular choice was French. I interpreted that choice as a yearning for something outside the constraints of a segregated Mississippi town--a desire that W. E. B. Du Bois would have approved of.

I "discovered" W. E. B. Du Bois in my effort to learn black history. I got the impression that his writings had been neglected or even suppressed, possibly because he became a Communist at some time in his life.

But I have wracked my brain to remember whether Booker T. Washington ever came up in discussions that summer.

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If you want to watch Jim Cramer self-destruct on live TV, watch here. Stewart is the truth squad this country needs. That the rest of the MSM ignores this story, that we have been trying to expose for a long time, is the real crime. CNBC is an "inside job" wink, wink network. I'm glad Stewart and (inadvertently) Cramer made that clear. But the chance that CNBC is going to change their reporting and commentary style on Monday because John Stewart has proved the emperor has no clothes, is close to zero.

What was that happy sound we heard from Washington this week? Could it be -- the Sound of Common Sense?

New legislation was proposed this week by Senators Schumer, Durbin, and Kennedy for some revamping of the financial system. Hold onto your hats (and your wallets), this doesn't involve more bailout money. It actually costs the taxpayer next to nothing.

The proposal? A Consumer Financial Product Commission. Yes, it could use a flashier name. (How about a contest to Name That Commission?) But if done right, this could quietly (and cheaply) overhaul our financial regulatory system.

Since the early 1980s,regulation over consumer financial products has gotten weaker and weaker. Caps on interest rates were tossed out, regulatory agencies were stripped of authority, and a game of "regulatory shuffle" ensued whereby banks re-incorporated at will, with whatever agency would approve the most trash.

Right now, there are virtually no consumer protections for financial products. We have protections for everything else we buy: Government agencies are always on the lookout for faulty seatbelts, dangerous drugs, or lead in kids' toys. But when it comes to financial products, it's strictly "buyer beware." If a mortgage product has a 1 in 5 chance of sending you into foreclosure, or if a credit card has a provision that even a Wall Street lawyer can't understand, that's just too bad. No one is looking out for the customer.

This could be the first real step to reverse that trend. Hats off to some common sense.

Was Roe vs. Wade, once seen as a great victory for reproductive freedom, actually the beginning of the end for the women's movement? In her review of Jeanne Flavin's Our Bodies, Our Crimes, in Democracy: A Journal of Ideas, former Planned Parenthood President Gloria Feldt laments that the Griswold vs. Connecticut and Roe vs. Wade "victories carried within them the seeds of their own demise, for they were not grounded in women's moral and legal agency for which the law should provide protection equal to men's." In other words, the Court should have used the equal protection clause instead of the privacy clause of the Constitution.

It is not necessarily the case, however, that had the Court chosen another route reproductive rights would be more secure today. Abortion opponents are as creative as they are relentless-no doubt they could have come up with an equally powerful offensive against an alternative defense. The battle to control women, their fertility, and their sexuality is as old as the story of Adam and Eve. One or two Supreme Court cases by themselves could hardly settle the matter once and for all.

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David Petraeus is the most respected general officer the U.S. Army has produced since Colin Powell, and possibly since Dwight Eisenhower.

Rachel Kleinfeld, the executive director of the Truman National Security Project, may be a late entrant to the campaign to apotheosize a general who doesn't need hyperbole, but in the Winter issue of Democracy: a Journal of Ideas she proves herself an energetic booster. Kleinfeld argues that Petraeus should be seen as a progressive hero for bringing down the level of violence in Iraq through a strategy of protecting the Iraqi population. "However progressives feel about the decision to enter the Iraq War," she writes, "we should own its success."

Kleinfeld--like many of the liberal hawks now clamoring to claim the Iraq war a success--misunderstands both progressive national security principles, as well as the issues at stake with the ascendancy of counterinsurgency theory and practice.

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The Stewart-Cramer dialogs are pretty remarkable. Cramer is an interesting subject, but he requires an expertise in clinical psychology that I lack. He seems to be confessing and trying to cover up at the same time, out of mingled instincts of remorse and self-preservation. But we should understand him and CNBC as a symptom, not a prime mover.

The foundation issue here has been little noted, though Stewart half-consciously alluded to it periodically. To get the real, substantive, wonky background we actually have to go back to the Social Security debate.

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In Washington, money talks. And we all know that the folks opposed to the Employee Free Choice Act have lots of money. That means that they are doing lots of talking. And, they are saying some pretty strange things.

Recently, they have sought to promote the argument that unions lead to higher unemployment. To help push this case they have been circulating a study that examines differences in unionization rates and unemployment among Canadian provinces. [Chris Kromm has more on the funding of the study.] This study purports to find that a 3 percentage point increase in unionization rates leads to a 1 percentage point increase in unemployment. Based on this study, the opponents of the Employee Free Choice Act argue that any resulting increase in unionization will cost millions of jobs.

Of course the immediate response might be to ask, if this study's findings are accurate, why Canada's unemployment rate isn't 7 percentage points higher than the U.S. rate? Canada's unionization rate is about 20 percentage points higher than in the U.S., yet its unemployment rate is somewhat lower.

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Former Fed Chair Paul Volcker is briefing President Obama today on how well the stimulus package is doing. I have no inside knowledge of what he's saying, but if I were Volcker (and I'm not -- he's almost two feet taller than I am), I'd say the following:

Mr. President, it's way too early to know exactly what the stimulus is doing because the money is barely out the door, but I've got to tell you I'm worried as hell. Unemployment is at 8 percent, and underemployment is over 14 percent of the workforce. The economy is shrinking much faster than it was when you put the stimulus together. It will be more than a trillion dollars short of its full capacity this year, and I have every reason to believe the same next. State governments alone are hundreds of billions in the hole, creating a huge drag. So your $787 billion over two years, only two-thirds of which is direct spending, isn't going to get us nearly far enough. I'd strongly recommend you make ready a second stimulus, about the same size, and get it enacted as soon as possible, with the proviso that it will be implemented if and when unemplyment hits 8.5 percent or underemployment reaches 15 percent.

Oh, and by the way, Mr. President. You may not want to hear this, but your Treasury Secretary is making things worse. His dithering on what to do about Wall Street, and his incapacity to speak clearly to the Street and to the public about what needs to be done, is spooking everyone. Why doesn't he just put the irrevocably insolvent banks into receivership under the FDIC, sell off their assets, protect depositors, and reimburse taxpayers with whatever remains? Let the rest of the banks fend for themselves -- working out their bad loans with their creditors. As to AIG, well, that's a complete basketcase. Put it out of its suffering. Take it over, sell its assets, protect policy holders (you'll need to create a big co-insurance plan with every other major insurer in the world), then get out.

Want a cigar?

I first met Ross Douthat, the New York Times' newest columnist -- and, at 29, its youngest-ever and perhaps its first op-ed page conservative Catholic believer -- four years ago after reviewing his engaging and gutsy student's memoir, Privilege: Harvard and the Education of the Ruling Class. I've recently reviewed his book, Grand New Party. So herewith some thoughts about the Times' smart and telling but slightly risky choice.

The smart and telling part is that Douthat will outclass not only William Kristol but also a faithless, conniving, faux-populist neo-conservative strain of punditry, whose collapse has been evident recently in loud second thoughts from the historian Robert Kagan at the Washington Post and in the maunderings of David Brooks.

Ironically, Douthat's co-author of Grand New Party, Reihan Salam, worked for Brooks at the Times in 2003-4. But Douthat comes from somewhere else and is going somewhere else, and he is not alone. He may give serious left-liberals an adversary they deserve, because, unlike Kristol and Brooks, he has more beliefs than insecurities.

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Robert Dallek, the great LBJ and JFK biographer,issues a friendly warning to the current President: remember LBJ.

Johnson had absolutely no interest in fighting a war in Vietnam when he came to office in 1963; his wanted to remake America. But he felt constrained by what he believed was his predecessor's commitment. He knew that if he let Vietnam go, the Kennedy crowd (led by RFK) and the Republicans would team up and excoriate him for reneging on JFK's commitment. (Bobby was pro-war until 1967).

LBJ feared that if he ended the war his ability to do anything at home would be compromised.

So he stayed in Vietnam and, when we continued to lose, he escalated. He was knee-deep in the big muddy and felt he had to push on.

In the end, the war destroyed him and his plans for America. Fortunately, he accomplished more in his first three years in office (i.e. voting rights, civil rights, Medicare, immigration reform, consumer protection) than most Presidents do in eight. Nonetheless, Vietnam essentially ended his Presidency in November 1966 when, just two years after his unprecedented landslide, he lost 47 House seats and effective control of Congress.

Had it not been for Vietnam, Johnson would not have had just three years to transform America but ten (he would have run and been re-elected in 1968). Vietnam destroyed everything.

The lesson is rather obvious. Read Dallek.

Messiah came to Jerusalem, a performance of Handel's masterpiece by a fittingly humble contingent of Israel Philharmonic Orchestra players, under the direction of Helmuth Rilling, who brought his brilliant choir, Gächinger Kantorei, from Stuttgart with him. The piece worked its usual magic, and as we approached the Hallelujah Chorus, the question crossed my mind: Stand or not stand?

The kingdom of this world,
Is become the kingdom of our Lord,
And of His Christ, and of His Christ:
And He shall reign for ever and ever,
For ever and ever, forever and ever."

I sat.

Standing at this climax has been a tradition since George II. Every musical impulse, every feeling of homage, suggested that I get to my feet. But this is Jerusalem, Israel, right? This is what we've been waiting for. Jews don't kneel (or so Menachem Begin said), and they don't stand for messianic preemptions. Anyway, it is simple courtesy. There are over a thousand people here in the hall. Why spoil the moment by calling attention to myself? If others don't stand and I do, I will be blocking somebody's view, right?

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I'd like to add a couple of points about Booker T. Washington. I agree with Washington's critics (if that is a fair term for historians; I'm not sure) that he was wrong about the role of farming in the South. After World War I farm prices collapsed, and the number of farmers as a percentage of the population fell (in fact, the decline in numbers had started earlier). Although farming provided many Americans with a good living during much of the century, it was not an industry on which to build long-term prosperity. (However, later government planning projects, such as the Columbia Basin Project in the 1930s, tried to do just that.)

But Tuskegee was about a lot more than farming. It was about teaching practical trades along with productive work habits. Certainly, many African-Americans who were barely a generation away from slavery benefited from this education. I doubt that even W.E.B. Du Bois thought that an academic postsecondary education was suited for everybody, white or black. Unfortunately, Du Bois' conflict with Washington led to hyperbolic rhetoric and polarization. The rhetoric has cooled, but the polarization apparently continues.

In January I wrote that Bernie Madoff's operation looked like it was laundering a lot of mob money. This morning a very well connected intelligence source told me that Madoff's sons turned him in because he had lost so much money owed to Russian mobsters that they figured the only way Bernie was going to live was in government protection.

In comments on my last post, a number of folks keep arguing that secret ballots are an integral part of American democracy. It's a standard part of the current anti-Employee Free Choice Act propaganda line by management, but if secret ballots are so important, why is the equivalent of card check used for most important corporate decision making? Essentially the exact process proposed for establishing unions in the EFCA bill is exactly how corporate boards of directors are chosen by shareholders. To quote wikipedia on proxy voting by shareholders:

Proxies are essentially the corporate law equivalent of absentee balloting. Shareholders send in a card (called a proxy card) on which they mark their vote. The card authorizes a proxy agent to vote the shareholder's stock as directed on the card. The proxy card may specify how shares are to be voted or may simply give the proxy agent discretion to decide how the shares are to be voted.

Substitute the word "union organizer" for "proxy agent" and you have how majority signup would work under the Employee Free Choice Act. So if it's good enough for shareholders running a corporation, why isn't it good enough for choosing a union to bargain with that corporation?

As I said earlier in the week, all this fulminating about the start of the second great depression is way overdone. This morning the Commerce Department figures for retail sales were released.

Sales at U.S. retailers in February fell less than forecast and January's gain was almost double the previous estimate, indicating the biggest part of the economy may be starting to stabilize.

Purchases decreased by 0.1 percent, led by the slump in demand for cars, following a revised 1.8 percent jump in January, the Commerce Department said today in Washington. Excluding automobiles, sales unexpectedly climbed 0.7 percent.

In the Depression, consumer demand fell by 50%. If January sales were up 1.8% and February (excluding autos) up by 0.7%, this hardly qualifies for "the end of the world as we know it" rhetoric flying around the MSM and blogosphere. Yesterday Meredith Whitney, the prescient bank analyst that called the fall of Bear Stearns and Lehman, was on CNBC saying the banks might not want the mark to market rules changed! The damage as already been done and in the next few months they might want to start marking the assets UP!

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The irony is that the GOP is wailing about the potential violations of democratic decision-making embodied in the Employee Free Choice Act -- and they are so concerned that a minority of workers might somehow impose a decision to unionize on the majority that the GOP is going to use the filibuster to impose their will on the majority of Congress.

So since the GOP is so concerned about protecting majority rule, they should support a campaign to abolish the filibuster

I recently got quite ill when I was out of town and had to go to an ER for treatment. Instead of a doctor, I was treated by a physician assistant, who, as it turned out, misdiagnosed me and sent me back to my hotel sicker than before. The next day, I went to a teaching hospital where I was properly treated by doctors. Meanwhile, I just received a bill for the PA's 'exam,' for $519, and a mind-blowing defense from his office explaining that if is diagnosis was incorrect, there 'could have been a problem with the communication.'

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Mark Sanford, the governor of South Carolina, is determined to undermine the workings of O-Stimulation in his wretched state. I say wretched because the Palmetto State's unemployment rate of 10.4% is second highest in the nation, higher than neighboring North Carolina (9.7%), Georgia (8.6%), or Tennessee (also 8.6%). The only state in worse shape is miserable Michigan at 11.6%.

The Guv says he doesn't want to "spend money we don't have." Uh, Sir, if the Feds give you money, isn't that MONEY YOU HAVE? Sanford's grasp of finance seems less than vise-like.

Employment data are released on a monthly basis, so we have the grim task or, if you don't live in SC, guilty pleasure of following the state's economic decline, under the intrepid leadership of Mr. Sanford, egged on by the likes of 'Morning Joe' and others of comfortable station, urging the character-building exertion of discipline and sacrifice among their less-fortunate fellows.

Helpful suggestion: change state motto from "While I breathe, I hope" to "Will chop wood for food."

Until today the story of the "pro-Israel" right's efforts (ultimately successful) to keep a critic of Israel's policies out of the National Intelligence Council has been confined to the blogosphere.

As is usually the case with this subject, the so-called MSM is afraid to touch this issue with a ten foot pole.

But this time the "pro-Israel" right went too far.

And the MSM had no choice but to go high with the successful effort to keep an honest broker far away from the intelligence community. Not only that, the New York Times laid to rest the idea that the anti-Freeman campaign was about anything other than Israel. China? Yeah, right.

Suddenly it's a firestorm.

Also, see this terrific LA times editorial.

PERSONAL REQUEST: I appreciate the large readership my posts here get. However, I am going to lay off this issue if people use my posts as an excuse to bash Israel or Jews in extreme and ugly ways. You are entitled to believe what you want. But I do not want my posts or TPMCafe to be used as a sounding board for ugly stereotyping. Most of the racist anti-Palestinian and anti-Arab types are out of here and I'm glad. I don't want their counterparts on the other side exploiting my presence here either. Hate speech of any kind is not permitted at TPM Cafe and, to put it simply, those who engage in it will be banned. Thanks.

I'm not a historian, so I offer something of an outsider's view. I must ask exactly what it is that Professors Norrell and Luker disagree about.

They agree that Washington should be viewed in the context of his own time. But Luker differs from Norrell by saying that Norrell wrongly offers Washington as a "model of leadership."

The term "model" implies that Norrell is recommending Washington's style as something that we should adopt today. Or perhaps Luker is saying that Washington's model of leadership is inappropriate in a larger, ideal sense. Or perhaps that it was just wrong for his time.

Is that what historiography is about? Is it about evaluating historical figures by comparing them to the present or to some ideal or some preferred alternative that didn't actually happen? Perhaps.

In any case, for me the interesting question is counterfactual, too: Was there another way in which Washington could have succeeded in building Tuskegee, expanding education of blacks throughout the South, and inspiring his generation of African-Americans? If we are going to indulge in "what-ifs," those are the ones I wonder about.

As I wrote in a direct response to Norrell, he does indeed provide an ample evidence of the secret work of Washington, thus providing an important corrective to how Washington's legacy is understood. However, there is a crucial distinction though between public utterance and private action, particularly in the case of a figure to whom most blacks and many influential whites looked to for guidance on the question of black citizenship in America.

It wasn't merely that Washington was silent on the matter of political struggle. He repeatedly claimed in public speeches and writings that blacks had been foolish after slavery to focus on political freedom, wrong now to focus on grievances. It would be difficult to argue that Washington, who dominated black public discourse and had the ear of some of the most powerful whites in the country, did not set the national terms of struggle for black civic inclusion, regardless of his private actions. Other leaders were forced to operate on the ideological landscape he fashioned, or resist his hegemony.

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Liberals are people who won't brag about their best news. Consider this headline: "NEW POLL: America Is Evenly Divided Between Progressives/Liberals And Conservatives/Libertarians." Sounds pretty nice. Sorry, the data are much nicer. Here's the lower half of the press release:

A nation that is evenly split in its political identity is decidedly center-left in its policy orientation:

• By a margin of almost nine to one, Americans agree that "government investments in education, infrastructure, and science are necessary to ensure America's long-term economic growth," (79 percent agree, 12 percent neutral, 9 percent disagree).

• More than three in four Americans (76 percent) also agree with the president's argument that "America's economic future requires a transformation away from oil, gas, and coal to renewable energy sources such as wind and solar."

• Nearly three in four Americans believe that "government regulations are necessary to keep businesses in check and protect workers and consumers" (73 percent agree, 15 percent neutral, 12 percent disagree).

• Nearly two in three Americans (65 percent) agree that "the federal government should guarantee affordable health coverage for every American."

Elsewhere on the CAP site, John Halpin and Karl Agne also come late to their own big story:

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Phil Weiss comes up with some great stuff.

This is something else.

It's nice that Daniel Pipes is such a sweet boss that he touts his employee's success. But Rosen certainly hasn't been shy about his role.

Is this the weirdest thing ever? One, Steve Rosen -- that Steve Rosen -- single-handedly brought down an Obama appointment to an intelligence post over the issue of devotion to the Likud party. Two,

Actually, one is enough.

There are two ways to see Obamanomics.

The first, much preferred by the White House, is as a set of initiatives so modest as to hardly merit a raised eyebrow. Yes, steps must be taken to deal with the current economic crisis. But assuming the economy recovers next year, Obama's budget projects that government spending by the end of the decade will drop to around 22.5 percent of GDP, which is about where it was under Reagan.

What about those tax hikes on the wealthy? Obama merely restores the top two marginal income tax rates to what they were in the 1990s, the capital gains rate to its lowest level during that same prosperous decade, and the rate on dividends to a level even lower than it was in the 1990s. And even these modest reversions to the 1990s will affect only the wealthiest 3 percent of Americans, and not until 2011. Ninety-seven percent of small businesses won't pay a dime more. True, the very rich won't be able to deduct quite as much as they can now for their mortgage interest and charitable donations, but this is hardly revolutionary, either. In fact, it's another throwback -- to the limits in place under Ronald Reagan. All told, taxes are projected to total 19 percent of GDP by the end of the decade. That's even lower than it was in the late 1990s.

Modest as they are, these taxes will generate enough revenue to pay for half of what's needed for universal health care, and still reduce the deficit by about $750 billion over ten years -- to 3.1 percent of the GDP by the end of the decade.

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I'm not sure how Ralph Luker knows what Vann Woodward and Louis Harlan taught me, but the fact is I read their writing in the 1970s and 1980s but subsequently had occasion to study some of the same issues and came to different conclusions which I argue, based on evidence, in my book. In fact I suggest in my book that Woodward and Harlan were aware of most of the evidence I present but chose to emphasize other contexts about BTW's life that I believe skew understandings of the Tuskegeean toward highly negative conclusions. Dr. Luker in fact is fairly typical of recent academic attitudes in his dismissal of Washington's relevance, based on misinformation and anachronistic judgment. All of Washington's children went to Tuskegee Institute and two went to liberal arts schools in addition--a fairly accurate reflection of BTW's acceptance of all kinds of education for black people. I didn't discuss the Tuskegee syphilis situation because it originated long after he died and we don't know how he would have responded.

Dr. Luker reflects the intense partisanship in the academy in defense of the attitudes of W.E.B. Du Bois.

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I know the blogosphere has been waiting with bated breath (whatever that means) to know what I think the implications are of Amb. Chas Freeman's withdrawal yesterday.

I don't know but, after a few conversations, I have an idea. For Steve Rosen and his followers this is the definition of a pyrrhic victory.

See my take here.

Meanwhile the Washington Post tells the Justice Department to drop the espionage case against Steve Rosen.

As a historian of the period about which Robert Norrell is writing, I have two fairly strong reactions to his new biography of Booker T. Washington, Up from History. On the one hand, I know Norrell to be a talented and accomplished historian, whose reappraisal of Washington ought to be welcomed by all of us interested in the subject. It is good to be provoked to rethink received orthodoxies. On the other hand, however, I am not persuaded that his reappraisal is persuasive. Unlike a Frederick Douglass or a Martin Luther King, it seems to me that Booker T. Washington as a leader is so time-bound, so locked within his historical context, that there's relatively little he offers that recommends his model of leadership.

Norrell is certainly correct to insist that BTW be seen in his own historical context. In that context, he certainly has a powerful personal story to tell -- albeit one best told by a ghostwriter. Norrell's implication that W. E. B. Du Bois, C. Vann Woodward, and Louis Harlan either didn't know or systematically ignored the harsh racial conditions within which BTW operated is, however, ludicrous. Tell it to Du Bois, who was walking down the street in Atlanta, when he saw the knuckles of a lynching victim hung in a local butcher shop window as a trophy. Tell it to the NAACP's Walter White, who lived through the Atlanta race riot and regularly investigated lynchings for his organization. Or tell it to Woodward and Harlan who taught both Norrell and me much of what we know about those conditions.

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Joseph Lowndes questions how severe the restraints were on Washington's actions.

"In Norrell's account, Washington faced hostility and opposition no matter what he did. . . . perhaps he had more agency than Norrell gives him credit for. In other words his denigration of political struggle and his public call to eschew the fight for social equality was, in fact, more of a choice than a constraint."

His point is that Washington was criticized for everything he did--so maybe he could have chosen different policies; thus his accommodationist stance was chosen, not inevitable.

Perhaps, but was another strategy even possible? Washington had one clear success--the creation of Tuskegee and its satellites. Could even that have been achieved if he had taken overt political action or challenged whites on the issue of social equality? Antagonists could have burned his school down with impunity. All they needed was justification.

One piece of evidence against Washington's having a great deal of agency is that Washington's Boston detractors did not end up accomplishing very much. After Washington died, they didn't become the leaders of African-Americans and they didn't change the South. The successes of the NAACP, which W. E. B. Du Bois helped start, came about many decades later. This is the way it seems to me, but I'm interested in challenges to this view.

Remember, it had nothing to do with this.

Must have been his stance on EU membership for Cyprus. Or maybe Tibet. Or maybe....

We'll know soon enough, I expect.

Whatever the reason is, his withdrawal changes nothing about the argument I've been making about the full-blown assault on any would-be elected official or policymaker who speaks out against settlements and for rigorous and vigorous pursuit of the two-state solution.

Here's Glenn Greenwald's take.

And Chas Freeman's statement.

Thanks TPM Café Book Club for inviting me to discuss Norrell's "Up From History." In this substantial and well-written new biography of Booker T. Washington, Norrell vividly describes the increasingly vicious landscape of white supremacy in the American South in the decades after Reconstruction. In doing so he effectively demonstrates the constraints within which Washington worked. The potency of antiblack hatred was such that any sort of advance advocated or practiced by Washington or any southern African American was fraught with danger. This, for Norrell describes the limited nature of Washington's avowed program, and the necessity of acting in secret for anything beyond that. Thus the strong criticism to which Washington was subject at the time and since then are misguided and unjust.

I came away with a greater appreciation of the extraordinary range of Washington's activities and of the enormous obstacles he faced. I am left with both historical and political questions, but for this post I'll concentrate on the historical. I am not fully convinced by the strong claims about historical inevitability which are at the heart of the book.

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I'd like to share my understanding of what is different about Up from History. As I see it, Norrell responds to two major problems with historians' treatment of Booker T. Washington.

One is the fact that historians such as C. Vann Woodward and Louis Harlan championed protest as the way to deal with mistreatment of African-Americans. Their "presentism" (viewing the past through the lens of their times) made Booker T. Washington's efforts to accommodate Southern whites look like a weak and losing strategy, even though it may have been the only one that could have enabled an institution like Tuskegee to survive.

The second and related flaw is that historians interpreted Washington's strategy not merely as unwise but also as morally wrong, even cowardly--and thus Washington himself as morally lacking. He was, said Harlan curtly, "schooled in slavery, trained to moderation, accustomed to compromise." Harlan also described Washington as a "feral, power-hungry" man, head of the "octopus-like Tuskegee Machine," a man of "multiple personalities" and "no quintessence. At the center of his intellectual maze was a hall of mirrors...."

To Norrell, however, the evidence about Washington's life is consistent with quite a different character--that of an upright man committed to doing what he could to make former slaves a secure and successful part of American society in the South. Norrell believes that the historians overlooked the viciousness of the environment in which Washington lived.

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It's not good when someone who has devoted his entire career to promoting peace between Israelis and Palestinians sounds like he is giving up.

But Aaron Miller seems to be doing just that. And that is scary because Aaron Miller is invariably right. He is also trusted by Israelis and Palestinians and by the six Secretaries of State for whom he worked.

He says this "But to imagine that we've seen the end of this war is to believe in the peace process tooth fairy. And that means - to use the African proverb - when elephants fight, the grass dies. And the grass in this case tragically is Palestinians in Gaza, Israelis in border communities, and assistance efforts. Talk about throwing good money after bad. But on balance, I suppose there's a rough compensation here: America helped pay for the Israelis to blast a fair amount of Gaza; I guess it's only right that we help defray the costs to rebuild it. In short, without an effort to put the Palestinian humpty dumpty together again with a unified view of governance and negotiations as well as a coherent strategy to achieve Palestinian national aspirations, it's hard to see how there can be sustainable development in Gaza. And doing that is beyond the skill set of anyone I've talked to lately."

Check it out.

Last night on the NBC Nightly News, one of the lead stories was of a homeless encampment in Sacramento, California--complete with archival images of depression era shantytowns. This morning the stock market is up 300 points and GE, which some pundits claimed was roadkill last week, is up 16% in one day. A year ago, I could have guided an enterprising reporter to numerous homeless encampments around LA, but they were too busy chasing Paris Hilton going commando.

I teach at USC's Anneberg School for Communication, so I am well acquainted with the "if it bleeds it leads" impulses of the media, but why don't we all just take a breath here. America, you are getting played. So much of the information coursing through our fire hose of a media system is coming from people with an agenda. Nouriel Roubini is making a fortune telling people we are going into the Second Great Depression. The hedge funds that encouraged every institution to lever up are now profiting by shorting the very banks that were their enablers. Rush Limbaugh and the Wall Street Journal editorial board are creating a "self-fulfilling prophecy" by saying that investors are voting against President Obama's recovery plans by selling their stocks. And don't get me started on the idiots like Jim Cramer and Larry Kudlow on CNBC.

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I wrote this book because in my view leading American historians have committed the anachronistic fallacy of removing Washington from the context of his life. They have done so out of protest against racial injustice--an understandable motive, but one that casts the Tuskegeean as a foil to African-American protest leaders of the 1960s. In the process, a fair understanding of Washington's career and purpose has been sacrificed. The mainstream view of Washington originated largely with W.E.B. Du Bois, the Tuskegeean's longstanding rival for black leadership. Du Bois survived Washington by nearly a half century and shaped the memory of his avowed enemy. Du Bois insisted that Washington's emphasis on material advancement over political involvement, and on industrial schooling over purely academic education, gave black consent to segregation and discrimination.

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This week at Book Club, we have Robert J. Norrell, history professor at the University of Tennessee, discussing his work Up From History: The Life of Booker T. Washington. The book is the first full-length biography of Booker T. Washington in some time and re-examines the life and controversial strategies of this leader of the African-American community. Among the topics given renewed attention are the huge influence Washington wielded in the black community and larger American society and the precarious position he occupied between white supremacists on one side and competing black leaders on the other.

Joining him are Joe Lowndes, political science professor at the University of Oregon; Jane Shaw, President of the Pope Center for Higher Education Policy; Ralph Luker, history teacher and author on race and on religion; and Bruce Kleinschmidt, attorney and librarian. Join us!

A few weeks ago, the White House unveiled its budget with the fanfare and media blitz fit for a coronation. While the big proposals on climate change and health care took center stage in the dog-and-pony show, the budget also included an outline of funding for every veterans' hospital and clinic nationwide.

So what did team IAVA think of Obama's plan for veterans?

Overall, the President seems to have put his money where his mouth is. The top line number for veterans' discretionary funding is about $1.2 billion higher than the amount recommended by leading veterans' organizations, including IAVA. The budget plans increase VA funding by $25 billion over five years. That's a real victory.

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Trita Parsi is probably the best Iran expert in Washington and certainly the best on the US/Iran/Israel nexus.

He's usually optimistic. In fact, Parsi has believed for years that a Grand Deal between the three countries that solved all the outstanding issues between them (nukes,Hezbollah,recognition of the Iranian regime, recognition of Israel,etc) was not only possible, it was within reach until Bush and Rice ignored Iran's quasi-outstretched hand in 2003.

Anyway, Parsi is not optimistic now. He believes that the recent constellation of events are leading back to square one and even to an Israeli attack on Iran.

It's all here.

Meanwhile, Ben Smith's blog in Politico ("must reading" here in DC) reports that the folks trying to defeat Chas Freeman's appointment are trying hard to switch the ostensible reason for their dislike of him from Israel policy to Chinese human rights. It's not working.

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I was opposed to the Gaza war from the beginning. I didn't think it would accomplish anything (other than mass suffering) and it hasn't.

Now a new poll shows that Hamas is more popular in Gaza than ever.

What was Olmert thinking?

President Obama is about to complete his Afghanistan review, and already has proposed $144 billion for Iraq/Afghanistan in FY2009, $130 in FY2010, and $50 billion as a place marker for FY2011 and beyond. These figures are optimistic and not yet broken down between Iraq and Afghanistan/Pakistan. But Afghanistan funding from 2001 into 2009 has been $173 billion overall, according to the Congressional Research Service, and is certain to rise.

Two facts loom: if Obama sinks into a quagmire in Afghanistan/Pakistan, at the current rate of spending these wars will cost over one trillion in taxpayer dollars -direct and indirect- at the end of his first term. If American casualties continue increasing, they could be approaching a death toll of one thousand at the end of that term as well.

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Anyone who thinks the pro-Israel lobby is too domineering should take a look at what the Cuba lobby is up to. This goes farther than anything the pro-Israel lobby has done or contemplated doing.

The vote was scheduled for Saturday. It was on the omnibus spending bill, which funds our entire government -- but the Democrats could not get the 60 votes to thwart a filibuster,

From the Politico: Senate Majority Leader Reid "was forced to delay a pivotal vote on the measure.... The most stinging defection: Reid's own senatorial campaign committee chairman, Sen. Robert Menendez (D-N.J), who told Democratic leaders that he'd be voting 'no' over his objections to the House bill's easing of the embargo against Cuba.

A Senator is holding up funding for the entire government over a House provision supporting his own President's position on Cuba.

He is also holding up Obama's nominees for science advisers. He has no problem with either but he wants to show his displeasure over Obama's tentative moves toward modifying the Cuba embargo.

As I said, the pro-Israel lobby has never even dreamed anything this big and this parochial. And I won't even mention (!) the Bay of Pigs or the Cuban missile crisis, which were the direct products of an insane Cuba policy pushed by that lobby. The Israel lobby has a lot of catching up to do!

By the way, what is the Spanish word for chutzpah?

MORE NEWS: Scarlett Johannson worries if a Jewish girl like herself can play a gladiatrix.

If you've worked on economic policy formulation - or in any large bureaucracy - you know how to get your boss to make the decision you want. The key is to frame the options in such a way that he or she feels that your preferred course of action is the only plausible direction. Alternatives need to be undermined or discredited.

Smart bosses know this, of course, and they seek out sources of information or analysis that are not managed by their subordinates. The problem is that, traditionally, most such sources are not sufficiently well informed, at a detailed level, to be really helpful in the decision-making process. The format of most mainstream media - 800 words for the general reader, 4 minute stories, etc - does not allow engagement at the technical level; and, to be honest, technocrats are very good at manipulating the information flow to even the best journalist (who is usually a generalist). And while there are always outside technical domain experts, research papers appear with a lag and op eds usually have a broad brush (again, a format constraint).

Seen in this context, President Obama - on the face of it - has the role of blogs exactly backwards. But perhaps he is instead telling us something more profound.

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See how they run like pigs from a gun see how they fly . . .

Suppose you walk into the supermarket and are confronted with a sliding scale of discounts on all your purchases. If your income is below the threshold common to the vast majority of Americans, you get a 15 percent discount. If it is in the higher range enjoyed by the happier few, you get a 35 percent discount. Alternatively, suppose we had individualized currency. When you spend a dollar, you get 15 cents cash back, so your dollar is worth $1.15. But your rich uncle spends a dollar and gets back 35 cents, so his dollars are worth $1.35.

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the Republican economic policy. That flaming radical Barack Hussein Obama proposes to moderate this class warfare by reducing the higher discount to 28 percent.

I will explain.

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Like most participants in President Obama's Health Care Summit last Thursday, I was thrilled to be invited to the White House for the big public meeting on health care. At the Summit, the President did what the leaders and activists of the 800 organizations in our Health Care for America Now coalition have been urging: he announced his determination to reform the country's health care system -- to cover everyone and to control health costs -- in this first year of his presidency.

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Mat Yglesias has this.

I know I'm on the right side when I'm with former ambassadors Sam Lewis and Tom Pickering. The rest of these diplomats are pretty impressive too.

The biggest story of the next week will be when we find out just how much of our taxpayer money has flowed through AIG into the pockets of Hedge Fund Billionaires who were speculating in Credit Default Swaps. As Ben Stein notes this morning.

Allowing speculators to buy C.D.S.'s merely to bet against a firm in difficulty just blasts the prices of bonds, kills the balance sheets of banks, insurers and hedge funds, and throws fear into the system.

My guess is the same guys who are running the Bear Raid on Bank Stocks are cashing in on the AIG bailout at par. The Treasury is going to have to surrender the name of every counter-party, not just the big names surrendered yesterday.