Yesterday, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates reportedly suggested that the Guantanamo detainees could be brought to the United States. This possibility has been raised before, and then, as now, there has been considerable opposition to the idea. Americans worry, apparently that the suspected terrorists could pose a threat to, in the words of Mitch McConnell, "our neighborhoods." A year ago, the community around Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, responded in horror at the idea of detainees being brought to the maximum security facility there. Then as now, Kansas residents displayed a 'not-in-my-backyard" attitude about the pending moving of the prisoners to a US neighborhood. And today, Montana weighed in. "Not on my watch," U.S. Senate Max Baucus told the AP despite some support for the idea among city council members. Opponents cite the presence of Gitmo detainees as a security risk which these communities are not necessarily equipped for.

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Ali al-Marri's plea deal coming just two months after moving his case to federal district court from his long military detention at the Charleston Naval brig is one clear example that our existing institutions were perfectly capable of dealing with the challenges posed by al Qaeda terrorist suspects. Karen's description of the early days at Guantanamo is another. Even though the mission was somewhat unusual, General Michael Lehnert's selection as the first commander of the detention camp at Guantanamo was based on his experience handling previous migrant crisis operations, upon which the early military plans for the camp were based. It's time we get our institutions back to the tasks they were designed for: prosecuting crimes in federal courts and using military detention only in direct support of battlefield operations.

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For the past nine months I've been pretty clear that Chrysler would enter bankruptcy this year. It is only fitting that a hedge fund created the mess and another one applied the coup de grace. Stephen Feinberg of Cerberus Capital was dumb enough to think he was stealing Chrysler from a desperate Daimler Benz, anxious to unload their American mistake. Of course it turned out he bought at the top of the market, not the bottom. But it was a couple of "vulture funds" that tried to play chicken with President Obama on Wednesday night that forced the Chapter 11 filing.

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This is amazing stuff.

Aluf Benn, a top Israeli journalist, is predicting an imminent Israeli attack on Iran. He thinks Netanyahu has already made the decision.

Read this and be scared. This is a lot more dangerous than swine flu.

The news just keeps breaking these days. NPR reports that Supreme Court Justice David Souter has informed the White House of his intention to retire and return to New Hampshire. He'll remain on the court until his replacement is confirmed.

What do you think? Who do you expect President Obama will put in there? We don't know a lot yet, but never too soon to start talking!

GM just announced it was laying of 21,000 more of its workers, as a means of assurring the Treasury Department the company is worthy of more bailout money. A Treasury official was quoted as saying approvingly that the goal is a "slimmed-down" GM.

What? Having General Motors or Chrysler cut tens of thousands of jobs in order to be eligible for a government bailout reminds me of "saving" Vietnam by bombing it to smithereens. Aren't we giving these companies billions of taxpayer dollars to save jobs? If not, we're just transferring money from taxpayers to GM and Chrysler bondholders and shareholders.

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Timothy Geithner seems intent on moving forward with his scheme to subsidize the banks by providing up to a trillion dollars of non-recourse loans to investors to buy their junk assets. As many of us have pointed out, this is a subsidy in that it creates a "heads the investors win, tails the taxpayer loses situation." If the investment turns out well, the investor makes lots of money. If the investment does poorly, then the taxpayer gets most of the loss.

As many of us have pointed out, this will allow some investors to do very well on investments they would have made otherwise, since the government is giving them a large dose of cheap loans. More importantly, it is a huge subsidy to the banks, since it will lead investors to pay considerably more than the market price for junk assets, since the government is bearing most of the downside risk. There are also ample opportunities for gaming, which the shrewd Wall Street crew can be expected to fully exploit.

While this all looks pretty bad, we can use PPIP as an opportunity to remake Wall Street.

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Tonight, Israel celebrates its 61st Independence Day. As usual, the country's commentators are offering mixed reviews, filled with angst and back-patting, celebration and worry. But, today I had the privilege of an unexpected 'Yom Hatzmaut' commemoration of my own, as an Israeli friend of mine was honored by Survivor Corps, an NGO that works with people who have been hit by land mines, torture, war and genocide.

My heroic friend, Nomika Tzion, lives in an urban kibbutz that she helped create, in the rocket-ravaged poor city of Sderot, just three miles or so from the Gaza border.

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Universal health care and the reform of outdated labor laws are shaping up to be the two great policy battles of the year, if not the century. Business interests are dusting off decades of campaign rhetoric warning about the doomsday scenarios if Congress enacts "socialized" health care and the Employee Free Choice Act to give workers a decent shot a organizing unions. They're wrong about both issues, but will politicians and pundits believe them anyway?

Crying wolf has been a successful formula for business lobby groups. It has helped them thwart every attempt since the New Deal at achieving universal health care and leveling the playing field for workers. Now, after 40 years of declining wages for most employees, as well as growing numbers of uninsured and underinsured families, the stakes for workers and the economy couldn't be higher.

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Today it looks like the international interest in prosecuting the Bush lawyers is heating up once again. The Spanish central criminal court has apparently decided, notwithstanding the Spanish attorney general's intervention, that it will charge forward in the case against the Bush Six. Indeed, it seems to be reading all the documents that come out of Washington as they break, because the investigating magistrate has expanded his case to take into account and he opinion reflects special attention to the OLC memoranda and to the Senate Intelligence Committee's play-by-play recounting of the steps involved in the creation of the OLC memos. At the same time, Judge Jay Bybee, who has kept quiet up to this point, has decided to answer a series of questions put to him by the New York Times. He wrote those opinions in good faith, he insists to the paper of record. He holds to the same views today.

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I have been reading interviews with PresidentS since JFK, and I have never read anything like this.piece which the Times released today.

It is not only that Obama comes across as the first real liberal in the White House since LBJ, or that he articulates ideas better than any President I can remember, but also that everything he says seems informed by his actual life experiences.

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Today is Israel's Independence Day. For reasons I understand only dimly, I had the impulse to usher it in by listening once again to Zadie Smith's marvelous, yet finally vexing lecture about the acquisition of--dare I use the word?--identity; a lecture she delivered at the New York Public Library honoring the New York Review's Robert Silvers--a lecture you can listen to here or read as an essay here.

Smith's argument, so precisely and gently wrought, explores the ways we acquire voices through our lifetimes, for writers, crucially, early in one's lifetime. We think we are merely "adding" experience when we come to live in a new place, or work to gain a discipline. But like Eliza Doolittle, we actually transform ourselves into something hybrid; we come to see the self-conscious complication of the self, the navigation from voice to voice, discourse to discourse, as a surprisingly and sadly precious form of sovereignty.

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I see it all the time at USC, when I talk to the really smart athletes in my undergraduate lecture. Ultimately we all want play for the winning team.

Obama is on an amazing roll.

But Mr. Obama's 68 percent job approval rating is higher than that of any recent president at the 100-day mark. Mr. Bush had the approval of 56 percent of the public at this juncture.

I admit that when I first saw the title of Karen Greenberg's The Least Worst Place: Guantanamo's First 100 Days, I was a bit concerned. I couldn't match the description of Guantanamo as the 'least worst' anything with the images of orange jumpsuit-clad detainees with bags on their heads shackled to the floor of a military cargo plane or them shuffling off to their make-shift wire mesh cells. But displaying the kind of intellectual rigor and analysis that was sorely lacking during the period it portrays, Karen's book challenges our perceptions and greatly adds to our understanding of how we ended up in such a mess.

The most common defense of the Bush administration's policies on detention and interrogation is that the period just after 9/11 was dominated by constant threats of new attacks and top officials were casting around for anything that would keep the country safe. We now know from this and other recent revelations that top Bush officials consciously chose to grasp at straws rather than rely on the established procedures designed for just this mission and fought the existing military and law enforcement leadership to implement their disastrous policies. We got the Guantanamo we know today because that's the way the Bush administration wanted it.

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I arrived in Moscow from Washington highly optimistic, a day after the vigorous, historic handshake between President Medvedev and President Obama in London. I left--after visits with officials and colleagues--more than a bit concerned. My optimism was not based on such cheerful gestures as pushing reset buttons, although such tone-setting steps have their place. I believed that a major deal between the two countries could be made, one based not on identical or even complementary interests of Russia and the United States--but one that would build on profound differences in saliency.

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Arvind Subramanian is onto something: he asks why the crisis has spawned a debate on capitalism in the advanced countries, but not in the developing nations.  As he notes, there is very little clamor for rolling back markets once one moves to the periphery of global capitalism:

Surprisingly, in the emerging markets, including India, there has been no such existential angst about capitalism, no serious questioning of the role of the market. It is not that these countries have not been affected by the crisis. Indeed, all countries—rich and poor—have found themselves in the same financial maelstrom, if not in the same boat, and the effects have been substantial. There has also been serious discussion and action on the appropriate short-term responses to the crisis. But, there have been no serious calls or indeed actions to roll back capitalism, to erect protectionist barriers, or to re-nationalise the economy. Most surprising, there has not even been a pitch to restrict inflows of fickle foreign capital that were arguably at the centre of this crisis for many emerging markets. The crisis may have exposed the claim of a decoupled world economy, but it seems to have emphasised the decoupling in policy debate and long-term policy choices.

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I am delighted that Arlen Specter (R-PA) is now Arlen Specter (D-PA).

But I am not sure how much it matters. With the President's decision to push through his top agenda items by means of reconciliation -- i.e, dodging the need for 60 -- we probably don't need Specter during this Congress anyway. And after the 2010 elections, we'll be above 60.

Nonetheless, I am very excited about this because it is partial payback to the GOP for what they have done to America in recent years and especially since 2000.

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Without a doubt, Arlen Specter's switcheroo makes sense for him. Yes, it's a tribute to the shrinking base of the Republican Party. I gather that the Dems lack a can't-miss candidates of their own to throw into the Senate race of '10.

Even this big-tenter is not thrilled that another anti-EFCA vote hops into the big Democratic tent. I wonder if Dem bosses (that's Fast Eddie) have procured a promise that a Dem Specter will vote with Senate Dems on cloture, and reconciliation, to weaken the filibuster. Even if so, I wonder what such a promise is worth.

I hate to spoil the party, but a boost for the Bayh-Nelson-Lincoln-Pryor-Landrieu wing of the Democrats where something better ought to have been possible strikes me as a decidedly mixed blessing.

A cheer and a half, then. Maybe one-and-three-quarters.

One thing that comes up in the book and seems to last to this day that I think needs further thought - and I'm wondering if Michael and others have thought about - is the way in which the Public Affairs Office at the Pentagon has had so much control over the Guantanamo story.

Now, here is a story about the uniformed military being opposed by the civilian Pentagon leadership. But all inquiries have to go through the Pentagon Public Affairs Office, and if you contact the uniformed military directly - they say they cannot respond until they clear with Washington. This makes for an absolute control that, along with military protocols about obedience and following the chain of command, successfully keeps the real story hidden. So, while following the rules may have worked to some better effect in these early days, it has also led us down the wrong path time and time again in the detention effort. The PAO office is but one example.

I don't know whether Bank of America shareholders will oust Ken Lewis from his chairmanship this week. I don't know if Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner will eventually do it, either. What really worries me is I don't know who would actually be responsible for doing the deed, or by what criteria.

When it comes to keeping top corporate executives in line we usually entrust the job to shareholders -- or, as a practical matter, boards of directors that are supposed to represent shareholders' interests. When it comes to keeping top public servants in line we generally trust voters -- or, as a practical matter, the elected officials who represent them. But when, as now, the public has committed large amounts of its money to particular companies in the private sector, we're in a quandary.

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Or vice versa. 

It began with this paper, which I found out later had exactly the same title as this one by Barry.  Then, when I wrote my guest Economics Focus column for The Economist, Richard Baldwin chided me for repeating arguments that Barry had made elsewhere and which he assumed I was familiar with and had borrowed.  And now Barry has come out with an excellent piece (what else would I call it?) which I wish I had written.  (A more vain version of me thinks that I actually have, some of it published, some not.)  

There are quite a few points in Barry's piece that are really noteworthy.  One is that the problem with economists is not that we did not have the models and the tools needed to understand that the crisis was on its way, but that we focused excessively on the more benign models that we had. 

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A lot has been written about Guantanamo. But Karen Greenberg's amazing page turner of a book The Least Worst Place on the first 100 days of Guantanamo is unique. No other book describes the struggle by some military people, particularly the head of the Joint Task Force running the camp, Michael Lehnert, to adhere to law and humane treatment. When he was told that the Geneva Conventions, did not protect the detainees he still tried to apply their provisions. When he was told that the detainees were the "worst of the worst," he was still willing to treat them humanly and concluded that many should not have been there at all and were not terrorists. He even brought a Muslim chaplain to the camp. It is not that Guantanamo was so wonderful under his leadership, but within the confines of what was possible once Rumsfeld and others had sent the detainees to an off shore penal colony, he was able to lessen some of its harshness.

The book describes the struggle between Lehnert on the one hand and Rumsfeld, Haynes (DOD counsel) and other DOD personnel who wanted all of the rules thrown out including the Geneva Conventions. This was anathema to many career military people. Sadly, within a few months Lehnart was gone and the genuine brutality we correctly associate with Guantanamo was let loose. Karen's book demonstrates that many within the military were shocked and tried to fight back against the lawlessness. If you want an inside look at Guantanamo from the perspective of those given the job in the first 100 days, read this book.

With President Obama's call for the closing of Guantanamo and his tasking of groups to consider new detention and interrogation policies, the way we got into this mess becomes more and more important. My intention, in researching and writing The Least Worst Place: Guantanamo's First 100 Days was to discover, at the on-the-ground level just what occurred when the Pentagon's intentions to deviate from law, policy, custom, training procedures and the like became clear to those who were first given the mission of detainee incarceration. Yet over the course of my interviews - with soldiers and marines, with officers and enlisted men, with the international community represented by human rights advocates and law enforcement officials involved with Guantanamo, with Washington officials, with detainees themselves, and with myriad observers who visited Guantanamo in these early days - I learned much more than I had set out to do.

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Karen Greenberg joins us this week at Book Club for discussion of her book The Least Worst Place: Guantanamo's First 100 Days. Greenberg details the period at Guantanamo Bay from December 2001 through March 2002, when 300 prisoners captured in Afghanistan from the newly launched war on terror were brought to the prison camp. The book's title references the December 2001 statement from Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld that Guantanamo might be "the least worst place" to send the detainees.

Greenberg writes in the preface:

Seen through the eyes of the officers on the ground, these 100 days shed light on later crimes that were ordered and committed at Guantanamo, making us wonder: Could those subsequent circumstances have been avoided? Though fleeting, these early days suggest as much by showing us the human condition when it tends toward dignity rather than disgrace.

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Certain commentators seem stumped as to why Dick Cheney is taking such a high public profile against the Obama Administration. Even his own Republican partisans question his judgement.

"Generally speaking Dick's voice is probably not going to move the ball forward," one prominent Republican, Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, said.

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The Post had an amazing piece yesterday (featured very prominently) by former CIA spook Michael Scheuer on torture. It celebrates the marvelous utility of torture and portrays President Obamas as a silly adolescent for being uncomfortable with it. See Richard Silverstein's brilliant take down of Scheuer.

Scheuer is someone anti-war types may like because his isolationism makes him sound reasonable. He hated Bush, condemned the Iraq war, and rails against Israel's settlements.

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Before Inauguration Day, President-elect Barack Obama said he wanted to hit the ground running. Instead, he hit the ground sprinting and hasn't stopped.

Consider: A $787 billion stimulus package. A 10-year budget including universal health insurance and a cap-and-trade system to combat global warming. Subsidies to help distressed homeowners stay in their homes. Public-private partnerships to clean up the big banks. A bailout of the auto companies. New regulations to clean up Wall Street. A G-20 meeting to harmonize global economic policies. A proposal to regulate greenhouse gas emissions. A thaw in relations with Cuba and Venezuela. Overtures to Iran. A start to immigration reform. Even a dramatic rescue from pirates.

And this is just the first 100 days.

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Any doubt that the election of Obama has changed our country gets dispelled here.

For decades, white male Christianist Rep. Chris Smiith has fought to block family planning because it offends his Catholic faith. (Hey, eating pork offends Robert Wexler's and Keith Ellison's faiths but they don't deny the rest of us the right to eat barbecue til we explode!)..

Until Clinton, everyone has deferred to this bully.

No more. BRAVA.

Hillary's next Chris Smith is named Bibi.

This is a big story.

George Stephanopoulos flew off to Iran this week to get an exclusive interview with President Ahmadinejad.

He asked him what he will do if the Israelis and Palestinians agree on a two-state solution. Will he accept Israel then.

The response is here. ALONG WITH FULL TREXT OF INTERVIEW