Okay, that's not exactly right. In fact he just wants to get rid of Social Security and Medicare. Apparently he thinks the world was better back in the days when people over age 65 couldn't get health care insurance and mostly lived in poverty.

Since he considers those days so great, Samuelson no doubt thinks we would be better off without the Internet and the wheel also. After all, if we got rid of the Internet we wouldn't have any more problems of Internet porn. And think how many traffic fatalities could be avoided if we didn't have the wheel.

Samuelson is upset because out broken health care system is projected to cause Medicare to deplete its trust fund in 8 years. Serious people would look to fix the health care system. Samuelson wants to tell the elderly and disabled to die in the streets.

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(Before getting to my point, let me say that I agree with Michael Lind's comment that both sides of the debate get at something that is part of the picture.)

An aspect in this debate about liberal internationalism that has not been brought up is the structural growth of executive power separately from international policy and practice. This is a kind of growth of executive power that is different from the powers granted the executive due to national security emergencies, e.g. the War on Terror. Emergency powers are, by definition, exceptional; the power I am getting at, is not. It is structural, and begins long before the current emergencies. In my analyisis its roots lie in the growth of privatisation, deregulation, and economic globalization: because of these the executive branch, central banks, and a few key agencies, notably ministries of finance, have gained power, even as much of the rest of the state apparatus lost power. It begins with Reagan, after the decades of embedded liberalism when the legislative actually contested and restricted some features of executive power. And it has continued since, regardless of political party....and, in that sense, also holds for Obama (where the question becomes will he use it as good power! see here).

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Max Blumenthal is a brilliant and fearless reporter. His videos (confronting the Christian Zionists, Anne Coulter, Likud fanatics. etc) have all been fine terrifying entertainment -- and incredibly informative.

Now he's in Israel and the West Bank stirring up trouble for the benefit of us all.

Check him out. His videos appear here.

And, Max, be careful. You are in crazy town now!

The premier political event of the week happened Thursday morning, when President Obama and former Vice President Cheney articulated their differing takes on national security - and of course TPM readers had much to say on the subject!

Elisa Massimino, Chief Executive Officer of Human Rights First, believes there was no contest between what was billed as the 'dueling speeches' between Obama and Cheney, and urges the general public to have trust in our values and our institutions.

Jade7243, in reviewing Cheney's "Secrecy & War Crimes" speech (as named in the TPM Photo Galleries here), wonders what his defining iconic statement will be. She names her own of leaders past - everything from Clinton's infamous sexual denial to serious one-line inspiration from FDR and JFK - and other readers join in in the comments.

On a completely different but no less significant note, J. Clarence singles out Obama's catch-22 on gay rights. A thorough representation and analysis of the Obama administration's stance on "Don't Ask, Don't Tell," it's a great read - and especially germane today, Harvey Milk's birthday.

In my contribution to our volume, I attempt to put Wilsonian internationalism in historical context in light of the war in Iraq and of the growing number of pundits who have compared George W. Bush to Woodrow Wilson or have invoked the latter's name in connection with the broader crisis in American foreign policy in the new century. Their commentaries are the latest in a series of writings reflecting on Wilson's centrality that stretch back to the period between the world wars. Like others before them, they are informed by some degree of ideology and partisanship and are freighted in the context of the times in which they were written.

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President Obama's pledge to seek a world without nuclear weapons - reiterated in a speech last month in Prague - represents one of the most critical elements of his national security agenda. Nuclear weapons serve no military purpose, and the use of even one of these instruments of mass terror would cause unparalleled destruction. But that hasn't stopped a chorus of neo-conservative critics - the same folks who pushed for war with Iraq based on false claims regarding its alleged weapons of mass destruction -- from dismissing Obama's anti-nuclear agenda as "naïve," and "unrealistic."

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Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu's visit to Washington was pretty much a bust. That is because the definition of a successful meeting between world leaders is one where some sort of agreement is reached.

The sharpest difference between the two leaders was over the two-state solution and the methods employed to achieve it. Obama repeatedly invoked the two-state concept while Netanyahu simply refused to utter the phrase. This refusal represents a repudiation of Israel's previous policy, a significant step backwards.

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While you hear rightwing state politicians beating their chests about "states rights" and even potential secession, you might have missed them applauding Obama this week taking multiple steps to restore state regulatory authority against an overreaching federal government that, under Bush, had repeatedly overruled states laws in the name of federal authority.

For years, California and a number of states had sought to enact car emission standards, yet had been blocked by the Bush Environmental Protection Agency which refused to allow those standards to go into effect. Obama not only embraced those state standards in action this week but affirmed the right of states in the future to enact additional environmental standards beyond any federal minimum standards.

And in that same week, Obama established a sweeping policy for all heads of executive departments and agencies, ordering them to avoid the preemption language routinely included in Bush-era regulatory preamble statements or in codified regulations unless there is "full consideration of the legitimate prerogatives of the States and with a sufficient legal basis for preemption." More below the fold:

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In response to Tony's post, I'd like to emphasize something that John wrote:

Finally, it was really Truman and the coming of the Cold War that led to the reinvention of liberal internationalism, creating what I would call liberal internationalism 2.0. This involved a more direct role for the United States as a hegemon - working with Europe and other allies, running the system, etc. The United States found itself not just the sponsor and leading participant in a new liberal international order - it was also owner and operator of it. The vision of liberal order turned into liberal hegemony. (And today the debate is whether the United States can renegotiate its old hegemonic order and create liberal internationalism 2.5, or whether we are moving to 3.0 or something entirely new and different).

I think this gets to the heart of the matter, particularly in the case of the neocons. They are influenced more by their idealized image of Truman and the Cold War liberal internationalism of 1949-1989--John's liberal internationalism 2.0--than by Wilson in 1919 or FDR in 1945. Truman (along with Churchill), rather than Wilson or Roosevelt, is the hero of the neocons and like-minded liberal hawks--witness the Truman National Security Project.

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Since I have written so often, and for so long, about soldier suicides, and trauma among veterans in Iraq and Afghanistan and back at home, it was a relief to find a fun read yesterday in the new New York Times image-oriented "Lens" blog: The story behind the front page photo on May 12 that showed a few U.S. soldiers fighting the Taliban -- one of them dressed mainly in pink boxer shorts and wearing shower sandals. Prize-winning Associated Press photog David Guttenfelder snapped it.

The image had gained some attention earlier, with the soldier's name emerging, and the small detail that the shorts were of the "I Love NY" variety. His mother talked to a reporter for her hometown paper in Fort Worth and explained that he had purchased the item during a recent visit to New York. She said when she saw the photo she laughed for five minutes, and explained that her boy was a little guy but feisty and the image didn't surprise her at all.

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First, my apologies to President Hoover's descendants for comparing former Vice President Cheney to their Presidential forbear. Hoover was, prior to his Presidency, a great humanitarian who organized post-World War I relief efforts that saved the lives of millions of Europeans. He was also at the forefront of that small group of Americans who demanded, without success, that the United States make rescue of Europe's Jews a top priority during the Holocaust. As was obvious in his speech yesterday, Cheney hates Europeans -- not to mention humanitarianism.

Nonetheless, there are similarities. Hoover was a failed and repudiated President and so was Cheney. Yes, I know that nominally Cheney was Vice President but every day it becomes more obvious that Cheney was our 43rd President. And it was Cheney's policies which, like Hoover's, were decisively repudiated by the electorate.

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John Ikenberry seems to me to be exactly right that Wilson showed himself to be realistic when the final Covenant of the League was set up. While it would have been preferable that the League be dominated by democratic states, in the world such as it was that could not be. What was possible was a system of collective security composed of a mix of regime types, the hope being that even autocratic states would often have an interest in peace and that the democratic form of government would be making progress in bringing more and more nations to the light. Wilson surely recognized as well that not all autocratic states were the same. I suspect he would have agreed with John Rawls that some were "relatively decent hierarchical states" and could be worked with. That said, Wilson was surely nervous that without the League being dominated by democracies it could be effective.

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(I wrote the following for this morning's Haaretz)
It may seem hard to believe, given America's vital regional interests, but the last president to develop a deal to mitigate Middle Eastern violence - and throw the full weight of his presidency and the international community behind it - was Dwight D. Eisenhower, in 1957. John F. Kennedy had no wars to respond to, and was largely concerned with preventing Israel from acquiring nuclear weapons. But ever since Johnson - since the Six-Day War, that is - one president after another has behaved as though America's role was limited to facilitating a negotiation between Israelis and their neighbors: a kind of regional Dr. Phil. Israel was the client state, yet presidents, in effect, worked to preserve its freedom of action. They might carp half-heartedly about settlements, or empower their secretaries of state to exert economic pressure about particular instances of foot-dragging (Kissinger on Rabin in 1975, or Baker on Shamir in 1991). But presidents did not - how did Colin Powell put it? - presume to want peace "more than the parties themselves."

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I got a reminder in my inbox today about the other face of Israel, not the face of Bibi or Lieberman or the ultra-Orthodox or the settlers. Although, the press release did come from the NY Consulate which falls within the Avigdor Lieberman's Foreign Ministry.
The headline reads:
Just in Time for LGBT Month,
International Gay Icon Comes to New York
and it promotes the upcoming concert by Israeli rock star, Ivri Lider at the very hip Webster Hall in NYC's East Village.

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A few days ago I spoke with a group of TPM regulars about the possibility of opening one or more chat rooms at TPMCafe for more real time discussions. An update after the jump ...

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Saskia Sassen objects to seeing Bush as a legitimate descendant of Wilson by remarking on the vastly different circumstances of the two presidencies, and I agree. But I do think Wilson "intuited" democratic peace theory and this perhaps as early as 1901 and certainly when he was thinking of the Pan American Union and the Covenant of the League between 1915 and 1919. Wilson thought regime type mattered enormously--thus he insisted on the Kaiser's abdication in 1918, and had a "non-recognition doctrine" of Latin American governments that came to power by military means.. Now obviously Wilson was not as sophisticated in his argument as, say, Bruce Russett is, but his intuitive sense was clearly in exactly the sense that the democratic peace crowd moved in the 1990s.

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I elaborated on last week's rejoinder to David Carr on what to do about the yellowing newspaper business in a talk to a University of Westminster (London) conference. If you're interested, you can read a slightly cleaned up text on openDemocracy.

Meanwhile, the British press, unleashed, competitive, rambunctious, has been turning their (un)constitutional system upside down. It's not all T&A over there.

And then, if anyone needed more evidence of what journalism is good for, here's today's NYT on a very specific consequence of fewer journalists looking into death penalty cases: More prisoners die.

This is an excellent discussion - and I want to respond to both Tony Smith and Michael Lind, offering my own version of liberal internationalism's intellectual family tree.

First, Tony argues that "democracy promotion" is at the heart of Wilsonianism. But I simply do not think this is true. Yes, as Michael Lind indicates, Wilson did argue that a peaceful order would best to be built on a community of democratic states. War was the product of antiquated social systems. Accountable governments that respect the rule of law are essential building blocks of a peaceful and just world order. But the world that Wilson envisaged in 1918 was not one where the United States - alone or with other states -- would equip itself to go out and democratized the world. Rather, the Wilsonian vision was of an international order organized around a global collective security body in which sovereign states would act together to uphold a system of territorial peace. Open trade, national self-determination, and a belief in progressive global change also undergirded the Wilsonian world view. It was a "one world" vision of nation-states that trade and interact in a multilateral system of laws creating an orderly international community.

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It was almost like an episode from Bloggingheads.tv. On the one side was President Obama speaking on national security in a measured and statesmanlike way. On the other side was former vice-president Dick Cheney trying to speak on national security in a measured and statesmanlike way.

It wasn't even close. Obama deftly wove his own personal saga and faith in American values with its future. His indictment of the Bush administration wasn't something that Obama wanted to deliver--as he made it clear, he wants to move on. Cheney's campaign to hail his own record forced Obama to recount, once more, why it was that the Bush administration besmirched America's Constitution, why "enhanced interrogation" didn't enhance American security but directly jeopardized it.

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What a pleasure to see my good friend Michael Lind is mellowing with age! He doesn't take sides or swat us all down as in days of yore, but instead tries to bring us together, and more, he does a pretty good job of it.

I agree with Lind that Roosevelt was far more realistic than Wilson and hence would sup with the devil were it necessary. Even Wilson was open to compromise, however. The League as it emerged in late April 1919 was not the League that Wilson hoped for in several key respects for he abandoned his insistence that democracies dominate it in favor of a pledge from those states that joined that they would abide by the peace keeping regulations of the organization and that 2/3 of those already members would accept such a pledge as convincing. But it was FDR who decided that the Occupations of Japan and Germany should change them in fundamental ways internally (democratic regime change linked to economic openness), and called for the meeting at Bretton Woods--developments that were quintessentially Wilsonian. The result as John Ikenberry has argued in other books and articles was a "two track" Cold War, where the US sought to promote a Wilsonian order within the "free world" while containing communism without.

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As a former pawn in Israel's foreign ministry, stationed in New York, the one thing I miss most is not the diplomatic visa, the corner office overlooking the United Nations, or the ability to park anywhere in Manhattan with impunity. What I find myself yearning for is something far more ephemeral and wonderful: the official state visit.

Every few months, when a government official made his way to our golden shores, my colleagues and I would take a few days off from our numbing desk-bound routine, and accompany the visiting dignitary to meetings with other dignitaries. There, facing each other, would sit two grown men in muted charcoal suits who, for an hour or two, would speak voluminously yet somehow, like communication magi, avoid saying anything at all. When the official would return to Israel, I'd be expected to write a report summing up the meeting. Unable to make sense of the hailstorm of drivel I'd witnessed, I would resort to the following beautifully ambiguous sentence: "the discussion revolved around the challenges and opportunities lying ahead in the future." It worked every time.

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I will respectfully sidestep the issue of whether Bush or liberal internationalists are the legitimate inheritors of Wilsonianism and instead reflect on a few of the implications of this rich debate for contemporary issues.

First, it is important to keep in mind that the invasion of Iraq would not have occurred were it not for the attacks of September 11. Neither neoconservatives nor liberal interventionists would have been able to take this country to war in Iraq were it not for the atmosphere of fear and anger that persisted through the balance of Bush's first term. In that sense, the war is not a good test case of Wilsonianism, liberal internationalism, or any other tradition in US foreign policy. The country was effectively in a state of shock - precisely why so many reasonable people of different political persuasion rallied behind a war that was as flawed in conception as it was in implementation.

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Is it possible that both sides in this debate are right? I think it is. Today's liberal internationalists and today's neoconservatives each lay claim to a different yet equally authentic aspect of Woodrow Wilson's thinking about world affairs.

John Ikenberry along with Anne-Marie Slaughter and Thomas Knock are right that Wilson believed in liberal internationalism, defined as a rule-governed, multilateral world order. At the same time, Tony Smith is right that Wilson believed in what nowadays is called democratic peace theory: "A steadfast concert for peace can never be sustained except by a partnership of democratic nations."

In Wilson's mind, liberal internationalism and democratic peace theory coexisted. But neither of these approaches depends on the other, and each can exist apart from the other.

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A long-standing debate between libertarians and others concerns the extent to which a state is needed to enforce cooperative rules. Many libertarians argue that informal, self-sustaining agreements can achieve desirable outcomes even without the state acting as a third-party enforcer. See here for a particularly interesting version of this argument and various counter-arguments.

Bo Rothstein's fascinating paper on efficient institutions concludes with a great story from the TV series "The Sopranos," which speaks directly to this issue and is worth quoting at length.

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The American media mostly understood that Prime Minister Netanyahu achieved nothing that he wanted during his Washington visit. His reception at the White House was the coolest in memory. The two sides ended their meeting at least as far apart as they were before Bibi stepped off the plane. I say "mostly" because the Washington Post, as usual, simply printed spin that was called in by Team Netanyahu. Fox was the only other major outlet that believed that Netanyahu came, saw, and conquered.

He didn't. He failed.

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"You don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows"-Bob Dylan

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Sometimes business groups lie so blatantly that even their strongest allies in Congress have to call their bluff.

That's what happened this week when the U.S. Senate voted overwhelmingly to put new limits on the credit card industry, passing a bill to curtail its ability to raise interest rates at will and charge unreasonable fees. The bill also will require credit card issuers to explain their terms in fewer words and use plain English. The Senate voted 90-5 in favor, following a 357-to-70 vote in the House on April 30.

Even most Republicans voted for the bill, which is likely to arrive on President Barack Obama's desk before the Memorial Day recess.

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On Bloggingheads.tv, Sam Bahour and I explore the importance, and difficulty, of engendering the Palestinian private sector under occupation.

(Let me say that I am just responding to the posted text -not to the book--in the spirit of creating a common platform for dialogue since many may not have read the book).

This is a provocative post. The notion that Bush might be the heir of Woodrow Wilson's internationalism is, at first reading, almost preposterous. But it is getting me to mull this over.

For now, just two points.

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There was a time when economists believed that institutional reform--improving governance--was a key ingredient in improving living standards in the developing world.  "Good governance" is surely a good thing in its own right.  But a lot of recent academic and policy research has focused of late on its instrumental value for growth. 

The argument is simple and appealing. Rich countries are those characterized by democracy, rule of law, political competition, and low levels of corruption.  So poor countries have to emulate them in all these respects if they want to get rich too.

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The government took warrants when it bailed out the banks. Now the banks are trying to weasel out of the deal by buying back the warrants cheap when they pay back the TARP money.

For taxpayers, a lot of money is at stake. The government has an option to buy stock in 579 banks. By some estimates, the warrants on JPMorgan alone are currently worth more than $1.1 billion. They could be worth much more if JPMorgan's share price rose. So far, one publicly traded bank, Old National Bancorp in Indiana, has repaid the government in full by returning its bailout money and repurchasing its warrants. (Two small privately held banks have done the same.)

President Obama didn't say much about Gaza yesterday. The massive suffering in Gaza was a postscript to his statement about the security situation in southern Israel. One would never know from Obama's remarks that Gaza lies in ruins.

Check out this post and video at Israel Policy Forum.

I'm so proud of America these days, but not of our indifference to Gaza.

Here is Max Blumenthal's report from south Hebron. These settlers do to the Arabs precisely what the Cossacks and other pogromchiks did to Jews in the last century. The only difference: as early as Presidents Cleveland and Taft, the US strongly protested those pogroms. Not these.

I appreciate the opportunity to appear on this website. The invasion of Iraq was arguably the biggest mistake in the history of American foreign policy. Our book asks how we got into Iraq so as not to make a similar mistake again. Were Wilsonian concepts responsible for this calamity, or might they spare us further misadventures? John Ikenberry sets the stage well when he opens the book asking, "Was George Bush the heir of Woodrow Wilson?" All four of us will be interested in comments on our contributions.

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By this point, we should not be surprised to realize that the media, after a brief flurry of coverage, quickly dropped the story of John Russell, the Army sergeant being treated for mental issues, who gunned down five colleagues at a stress clinic in Baghdad earlier this month. That's why I was startled to see that Bob Herbert highlighted this episode in his New York Times column today, under the title, "War's Psychic Toll." It was the first mention I'd seen in quite a few days.

The slaughter of five comrades by a "stressed out" U.S. soldier is a true tragedy -- but should not have come as a shock. It's also richly symbolic, with added "poignancy," as Herbert puts it. That's why the story should be fully explored.

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Is George Bush the heir of Woodrow Wilson? This is the question that is at the core of this book by Anne-Marie Slaughter, Tony Smith, Tom Knock, and me. In the book, we have a lively debate - one with implications for liberal thinking about the world and Obama foreign policy.

The book's question is important because we all want to know what went wrong in foreign policy during the Bush years. Bush pursued a controversial security doctrine, launched a preventive war in Iraq, disrespected global rules and institutions, and brought America's standing in the world to a new low. Yet along the way, Bush also wrapped himself in the rhetoric of Woodrow Wilson and the Cold War liberalism of Truman and Kennedy. In the words of his Second Inaugural address: "We are led, by events and common sense, to one conclusion: the survival of liberty in our land increasingly depends on the success of liberty in other lands." So did Bush foreign policy - and the Iraq war in particular - grow out of the Wilsonian tradition or was it actually an aberration or even the antithesis of this tradition? This is another way of asking if liberals share the blame for the Iraq war. After all, many liberals did in fact support the invasion. Was the Iraq war an outgrowth - at least indirectly - of an evolved Wilsonian worldview that is widely shared across the political spectrum in America, or was American foreign policy hijacked by a group of ideological outliers who hid behind Wilsonian ideas but were ultimately wielding a very different vision of America and the world?

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This is a big week for the GOP. Two events suggest that it isn't detached from reality. It's oblivious to it.

The first event takes place on Wednesday, when the Republican National Committee, as today's Washington Times reports, will hold a special meeting at National Harbor in Maryland to decide whether or not to endorse a resolution demanding that the Democratic Party call itself the "Democrat Socialist Party." RNC chairman Michael S. Steele is resisting the resolution even as he uses the term socialist to describe the Obama administration's fiscal policies.

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It was clear from the Obama-Netanyahu press conference that the two leaders most decidely did not see eye-to-eye. That is why there was no joint statement but essentially two statements. Obama put forth his well-known views on a Palestinian state and on attacking Iran. (He wants the first and opposes the second). Netanyahu's views were precisely the opposite.

The whole proceeding seemed kind of frosty. Netanyahu seemed eager to ingratiate himself with Obama while Obama was no more than proper. Anyone who recalls the Sharon/Bush or Olmert/Bush lovefests has to be struck by the difference. In this relationship, Netanyahu can take nothing for granted. And he ought not try.

Over the next week, as the President gets ready for his meeting with Mahmoud Abbas, it will become inceasingly clear that Israel and the United States are farther apart on the key issues than they have been in decades.

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This week at Cafe, foreign policy scholars John Ikenberry and Tony Smith join us for discussion of The Crisis of American Foreign Policy: Wilsonianism in the Twenty-first Century. The book is a collection of four essays - one by Ikenberry, one by Smith, and one each by fellow academics Thomas Knock and Anne-Marie Slaughter - that analyzes the impact of Woodrow Wilson's idealism on today's foreign policy.

Joining the discussion are Michael Lind, Senior Fellow at the New America Foundation, and Policy Director of New America's Economic Growth Program; Charles Kupchan, Professor of International Affairs at Georgetown University and Senior Fellow for Europe Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations; Saskia Sassen, Professor of Sociology at Columbia University and the London School of Economics and prolific author on globalization; Jo-Ann Mort, journalist for The American Prospect and regular Cafe contributor; and Parag Khanna, Director of the Global Governance Initiative and Senior Research Fellow in the American Strategy Program at the New America Foundation.

I want to commend my friend and tpm colleague Bernie Avishai for his post re Jeff Goldberg. I had to check twice when I read Jeff's piece in yesterday's NYT for the byline-that it wasn't signed by Uzi Arad, one of his top security advisors and a man with a well-known hawkish position re Iran and Israel's place in the Arab world.

There is a fight for Bibi's soul. The old Likudnik way of doing things--translated as force works--is up for grabs. And there are several key components out there that never existed before. Here they are:

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I was just reading the rightist blogs on the President's triumph at Notre Dame.

These are really the worst of time for the bad guys. And it is critically important that we enjoy their misery because it may not last forever. (On the other hand, it might).

Who among us expected it? Frankly, I never thought we would see a liberal Democratic President again. I thought that LBJ was destined to be the last and that we were to be saddled with either Republicans or DLC Democrats in the White House forever. In fact, it was so bad that I was okay with DLC Dems. At least, they are Democrats and not out-and-out fascists.

But last year we got Obama.

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Last year, I posted the results of Haifa University professor Sami Smooha's poll, which reinforced hopes that Israeli Arabs, over a fifth of the population, could eventually accept assimilation into Israeli life.

* 75 percent of Israeli Arabs between the ages of 16 and 22 support voluntary national service;
* 68 percent would be willing to live in a Jewish neighborhood, and 80 percent would like Arabs to enjoy parks and share swimming pools with Jews;
* Over 53 percent feel rejected as citizens of Israel;
* Almost 75 percent of Arabs support the return of refugees only to a Palestinian state;
* 45 percent said that they feel closer to Jews in Israel than to Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza;
* Almost half support "comprehensive integration into the Western world."

Prof. Smooha just released new results of his annual poll. These reveal a shocking decline in feelings of identity and citizenship among Israeli Arabs. Only 41 percent of Israel's Arab minority recognize the country's right to exist as a Jewish and democratic state, as opposed to 65.6 percent in 2003. Only 53.7 percent of the Israeli Arab public believe Israel has a right to exist just as an independent country, according to the poll, down from 81.1 percent in 2003. The saddest result of all: over 40% deny that the Holocaust happened. This might be translated as: 40% believe Jews are liars; or 40% believe Jews use the Holocaust to expropriate, or discriminate against, them.

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I pledge that soon I will buy a new, fuel-efficient car - built in America by UAW workers.    

I'm asking YOU to take this pledge with me and get others to do so too.

If enough Americans take this pledge - and pass it on - we can revive our country's auto and manufacturing industries.  And we can give a big boost to the workers and communities -- and to our country - that depend on those crucial industries. 

Click here to take the American auto revival pledge:

I pledge that my next car will be 

__ manufactured in America. 

­__ will be more fuel-efficient than my last one. 

__ and it will be made by UAW workers. 

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I have learned much from Jeffrey Goldberg, and generally admire what he does with his contradictions; but yesterday's New York Times column on Benjamin Netanyahu is troubling on so many levels one hardly knows how deep to drill first.

Basically Goldberg is saying this: You may suspect (given Netanyahu's record, presumably) that the prime minister is an ideologue and something of a manipulator, that he is actually committed to Greater Israel, and is throwing Iranian sand in our eyes, trying to distract us from the occupation and the settlements. But this would be wrong.

Netanyahu, Goldberg continues, truly does believe that Iran is a threat to Israel's very existence, and he believes this for three reasons: strategic, Jewish, and familial. I, Goldberg, do not necessarily believe these things myself, but I have access to Netanyahu and his strategic planners, a purchase on the way Israeli Jews think, and a sympathetic grasp of his family dynamics. So I'm going to explain him to you. (Goldberg does not tell us why, if he does think Netanyahu is misguided, the prime minister's sincerity is a virtue or even worth talking about; or why Netanyahu and his aides particularly like to speak with him. But I digress.)

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There are no limits to what these guys will do.

Arlen Specter is speaking at one of those Daniel Pipes/Steve Rosen anti-Arab hate fests.

And here's Schumer at a an anti-Palestinian, pro-Pollard (convicted spy doing life in prison) celebration.

Next up: Senators to appear at joint birthday parties for Bernie Madoff and hunky Craigs List killer, Philip Markoff.