In the 1980s, when Judge Sonia Sotomayor was on the board of New York's Puerto Rican Legal Defense and Education Fund, I was a columnist critical of some PRLDEF initiatives on racial election districting and on police and fire department promotional exams.

I knew some PRLDEF staff but hadn't heard of Sotomayor, and since I've sworn off posting for awhile to write a book on other subjects, I don't know if she supported the specific suits I criticized. But it's likely, and, in response to some inquiries, I offer here some leads. (Also, my columns on Obama's handling of race in the 2008 campaign are in "Sleeper's Obama Chronicles.")

Republicans look ridiculous going into heat over Sotomayor's comments about her "Latina" perspectives. But that shouldn't stifle criticism by serious observers of positions she took at PRLDEF, or questions about whether her thinking has changed.

First, on what a "Latina" or other ethno-racial viewpoint should and shouldn't bring to court deliberations, here's an instructive, if anecdotal assessment, in Dissent, drawn from my serving on New York juries.

Read more »

We know it's not easy being an economist these days. Everyone blames you for the fact that they are losing their jobs and their homes, and their life savings. They hold you responsible because you didn't warn the country about an $8 trillion housing bubble.

Well there's no point in mourning about the past. The point is to get it right next time. And this is next time.

The recession continues to deepen and throw more people out of work by the day. While the stimulus passed by Congress in February will be helpful, it clearly is not enough given the severity of the downturn.

So, it's time to step up to the plate and seize the opportunity. Add your name to the list of those calling for a third stimulus. It's what the economy needs and you can make your kids proud by saying it clearly.

The frustrating thing about grand historical moments is that you can't always recognize them for what they are until it's much too late.

I would know: growing up in Israel in the 1990s, I've had my fair share of instances of great import, which didn't always feel like much until the political particles stopped swirling and the entire vista became visible. The newspaper reports announcing the signing of the Oslo Accords, for example, seemed to me, when I read them one hazy morning in 1993, like a crude hoax, a "War of the Worlds"-like stunt, exchanging a Martian invasion for the only slightly less ludicrous notion of peace in the Middle East. And Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin's assassination in 1995 looked, from my restaurant table two blocks away from the assassin's perch, like an eddy of shoves and shouts and confusion.

Read more »

When I decided to inquire as to whether we had the whole story behind the rise of the Bush Dynasty and its most controversial member, I began coming upon previously-hidden facts that I found deeply disturbing. I would show my discoveries to friends high in the journalistic firmament. They would raise their eyebrows, fret a while, and then they would speak. First, they would tell me that I had terribly important information to impart. Then they would beseech me to keep it to myself.

Certain things, certain topics, I was told, are considered verboten by the establishment, including its liberal fringe. Publishing these things was simply going to be hazardous to my career. I would be attacked, or, worse, my five years of work would be studiously ignored.

Read more »

Among Sonia Sotomayor's many judicial accomplishments is the piercing of one of the federal government's unnecessary and counterproductive claims of secrecy--and the right-wing conspiracy theories it generated. As the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press notes, in 1995, Sotomayor ordered the public release of the legendary Vince Foster suicide note.

Sotomayor's Republican critics may not want to call attention to her jurisprudence in this case. Her order helped drain the fever swamps of right-wing fantasists who said that Foster had been murdered. It also effectively silenced the editors of the Wall Street Journal, Rush Limbaugh and others who had kept the bogus claim alive for years with little more than innuendo.

Read more »

The Israeli government insists that a nuclear Iran is an "existential threat" and that, accordingly, it will decide for itself how to handle it.

And yet, the same Israeli government that is determined to alert the world to the dangers it believes are posed by Iran is equally determined to preserve an occupation that would spell the end of Israel's existence as a democratic Jewish state.

One can argue about whether Iran is developing nuclear weapons or would use them against Israel, knowing that doing so would be suicidal. The experts are divided on those questions.

But there is no way to argue that a democratic State of Israel can survive once it has a decisive Palestinian majority, an eventuality that is just a few years away if Israel maintains its control over the occupied territories.

Read more »

What's the Administration's specific aim in bailing out GM? I'll give you my theory later.

For now, though, some background. First and most broadly, it doesn't make sense for America to try to maintain or enlarge manufacturing as a portion of the economy. Even if the U.S. were to seal its borders and bar any manufactured goods from coming in from abroad--something I don't recommend--we'd still be losing manufacturing jobs. That's mainly because of technology.

Read more »

Amos Elon died earlier this week at age 82. I published this appreciation of him on New Yorker.com.

Read more »

The central thesis of my Interregnum meme is "the old is dying, but the new cannot be born". This is because the revanchist forces still fight from their bunkers. Case in point, the Big Banks are fighting Obama on derivative reform.

For credit-default swaps, information about intraday trades and prices has long been controlled by a handful of large banks that handle most trades and earn bigger profits from every transaction they facilitate if prices aren't easily accessible.

For example, credit-default swaps tied to bonds of companies such as General Electric Capital and Goldman Sachs typically have a pricing gap of 0.1 percentage point between the bid and offer price. That translates into a $40,000 margin for every $10 million in debt insured for five years. Greater price transparency could narrow that gap, lowering costs for buyers and sellers but reducing fees for banks.

Goldman Sachs and the other big trading banks have never liked transparency, because their trading and arbitrage profits have always been based on an information imbalance.

Why would they want to change this?

My group got into Gaza two days ago, and it feels like a month already. I think the most significant impression I can convey is my surprise at how vibrant and alive the place is. I'd steeled myself to see endless destruction. Certainly every image of physical destruction that we saw last December and January can be found; but the shock is the realization that Palestinian life goes forward with incredible perseverance and charm and dignity. Downtown Gaza city is vibrant, full of street life, and the traffic is now and then interrupted by a flatbed truck going by with a wedding band banging drums on it, and a Mercedes carrying the bride and groom in tow.

Read more »

Last week's meeting between Benjamin Netanyahu and President Obama was a circus. Surrounded by intense media scrutiny and intrigue, the meeting was preceded and followed by endless speculation and analysis. Today's meeting with Mahmoud Abbas? Not so much.

The face to face is scheduled for later this afternoon, and so far the discussion leading up to it has focused on whether Abbas is even still relevant. Tony Karon asks this question over at Time.com, pointing out that "his political authority over his own people is so limited that he is unable to effectively negotiate on their behalf." Howard Schneider made a similar point for the Washington Post in his article "Abbas's Credibility Problem."

Read more »

Check out this blockbuster interview with former ambassador (twice) to Israel, Martin Indyk. It appears in Yediot Achronoth today in Hebrew and is very different from standard interviews with former and possibly future diplomats,

Here's a typical bit of Indyk truth-telling. After the journalists suggest that the United States tried and failed to bring peace at Camp David in 2000, Indyk says that America's problem was "because President Clinton did his best to meet the wishes of your prime ministers." He says: "We worked for you....Clinton felt that Barak used his for his own purposes, misled him."

Read more »

Russ Baker's new book, which I have not yet read, validates -- and I assume, greatly augments -- the points made in my 2004 volume American Dynasty about the Bush family's clandestine backstage role in the national intelligence community going back to World War One and its embrace of the Religious Right in 1986-87. The subtitle of American Dynasty - it rose to number 2 on the New York Times bestseller list -- was "Aristocracy, Fortune and the Politics of Deceit in the House of Bush." To me, it was mind-boggling that the national media never picked up on easily confirmed data in Dynasty, for example the material in Appendix A which detailed some Walker-Bush family interlocking directorships in the 1914-1940 global netherworld of banking and armaments.

Read more »

The crazy right is now charging that Judge Sonia Sotomayor is a racist because she has said that as a Latina woman, she brings something to the bench that a white man might not.

Newt Gingrich, the GOP's 2012 nominee (I'd put money on that) says that this is racism, pure and simple, as reported in the Washington Times.

"Imagine a judicial nominee said, 'My experience as a white man makes me better than a Latina woman.' New racism is no better than old racism," Mr. Gingrich wrote on Twitter, which he uses regularly to discuss politics or promote his television appearances.

Mr. Gingrich followed his initial tweet a few minutes later with: "White man racist nominee would be forced to withdraw. Latina woman racist should also withdraw."

Newt is full of it and he knows it. Here's why.

We do not, and should not, apply the same standard to the historic victims of hate that we do to those (usually the powerful) who have never suffered from it.

Read more »

Like Greg Mitchell, I plead guilty to not having read Russ's book yet--and that inevitably limits whatever I can add to the discourse. Regardless, I have no doubts that Bush senior's operational experience with the CIA went beyond his service in 1976 as DCI. Many years ago I co-wrote a piece in The New Yorker with Murray Waas that showed how when then Vice-President Bush was on a widely heralded "peace" mission to the Middle East in 1986, he secretly relayed operational military intelligence to none other than Saddam Hussein. At the time, Iran was balking at an arms for hostages deal because they didn't need any weapons. Bush and William Casey figured out that Iran might change its mind if Saddam bombed the hell out of them--and knew what the right targets should be. In other words, Vice-President George H.W. Bush had gone undercover as an intelligence operative.

Read more »

Thanks to Greg, Craig and Greg (hey, I feel outnumbered in the "similar name department" ;-] ) for participating. All three are distinguished figures. I would like to particularly tip my hat to Greg Mitchell, who was kind enough to admit up front that he has not read Family of Secrets. From the relatively narrow comments of the others, it seems as if they have not either.

That's perfectly understandable. But our audience should know this: the book is not a polemic or a conventional analysis of the Bushes' politics in the normal framework of liberal vs. conservative. It is a voluminous work of investigative reporting--500+ pages of almost all new revelations about the Bushes, based on documents and interviews. The thrust of Family of Secrets is that our standard discussions of the Bushes fail to take into account a secret history. That secret history positions both George Bushes, H.W. and W., in the service of power elites in finance, resource extraction, and other industries, with a significant overlay of covert operations that have undermined democracy here and abroad. These activities long predated their rise to the presidency, and are therefore of enormous importance in understanding their political success.

Read more »

In his executive order strengthening the Freedom of Information Act, President Obama declared that the law should "be administered with a clear presumption: In the face of doubt, openness prevails." Many have applauded Obama's intentions but whether his beautiful words can actually reverse extreme claims of secrecy has yet to be determined.

Case in point: my lawsuit against the Central Intelligence Agency for a batch of records on a decorated undercover officer named George Joannides. In December 2003, I sued the agency under the FOIA for the files of Joannides, a psychological warfare specialist who played not one, but two interesting roles in the story of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in November 22, 1963.

Read more »

Without wading into the "true conservative" debate here (having not yet read the book) let me just offer these observations from my perch as something of a media critic.

There's little questions that whatever their true-blue (or rather true-red) conservative views and values, the press bent over backward to paint both Bushes as moderate, sensible, nice guy Republicans -- for most of George the Elder's time in the White House and for George II during the crucial 2000 election and then the early years of his reign.

Read more »

I've been quite critical of both Bush 41 and Bush 43, but I differ a bit from Russ in that I see very sharp differences between the two. More specifically, I see W's religiosity, his relationship with his father, and the roles of Rove and Cheney as much more than distractions.

For all his flaws, Bush 41 was a pragmatic realist (at times, a very brutal one), not an ideologue. And he hated the neocons. Brent Scowcroft, 41's best friend, saw the neocons swarming around "W" as early as '98, when Bush was still in Austin. He failed, of course, but I'm convinced he tried quite hard to stop the Iraq War--with 41's assent. That's a very real difference.

Read more »

Put on your seatbelts. Many Republicans have been itching for this fight. They figure if they can make Sonia Sotomayor appear "too liberal," "too activist," or "intemperate" -- and cause Obama to withdraw her nomination, or if they can defeat her outright -- they can slow the Obamomentum that's leading to universal health care, cap-and-trade, more spending on education, and higher taxes on the rich. This would also give them a crack at winning back a number of seats next November, which they know they can't win if their major issues are torture and taxes and if their major spokesmen are Dick Cheney and Rush Limbaugh.

Read more »

One can disagree with everything the new Israeli prime minster says and does and still admit that he raised an important question during his recent visit to the White House. Benjamin Netanyahu stated "I want to make it clear that we don't want to govern the Palestinians. We want to live in peace with them. We want them to govern themselves, absent a handful of powers that could endanger the state of Israel." The same issue was addressed by two leading foreign policy mavens not suspected of a pro-Israeli bias, to put it mildly, namely Zbigniew Brzezinski and Brent Scowcroft. Both favor pushing a two state solution on Israel, as they see it as the way to turn around the Middle East (which they define as including Afghanistan and Pakistan). Three elements of the plan the US is to push are well known (no refugee return, a divided Jerusalem, and redrawn 1967 borders), but the fourth is much less often explored. Namely that the Palestinian state be disarmed and that US or NATO troops be stationed along the Jordan river. They pointed to this condition in a new book America and the World, composed of interviews with Brzezinski and Scowcroft, conducted by Washington Post columnist David Ignatius. In the book both authors agree that "they [Israel and the Palestinians] need a heavier hand by the United States than we have traditionally practiced" (87). Furthermore, Brzezinski suggests "an American line along the Jordan river" and Scowcroft favors putting a "NATO peace keeping force" on the West Bank. That is, they do not want the Palestinians to have what most people consider a true state, one that is free to arm itself.

Read more »

In a Q&A with Washington Post readers to discuss his book Family of Secrets, Russ Baker responded to a question about George W. Bush and Dick Cheney by writing: "I would question whether either man was a real conservative. They are, more accurately, corporatists, and comfortable with tilting the playing field for their friends. Real conservatives are highly principled, and believe in a fair shake based on performance. What we have seen, time and again, in Iraq, Afghanistan, Katrina response and elsewhere was that their friends and cronies got contracts, then ended up over-billing and doing a poor job."

Baker's reply, like his book as a whole, fails to adequately recognize the deep connections between the ideas of the modern conservative movement about governing and the countless failures of the Bush-Cheney administration. Those ideas to a large extent were developed and propagated for decades with the funding of the corporate interests and well-connected Republicans of the sort Baker fixates on. But it's neglecting a central part of the story to leave out the arguments that Bush, Cheney, and pretty much every conservative Republican made from Reagan onward about how government was the central problem, how privatizing and contracting out public services would lead to greater efficiencies, how government "bureaucrats" were inherently incompetent, how tax cuts for the rich would make everyone better off, how regulations kill jobs and should therefore be subverted, and how militarism would make the country safer. Russ refers in his opening post to those policies as "radical," but they also were long advocated by most mainstream conservatives.

Read more »

We don't understand our country's present and future because we don't understand the past--even the very recent past.

In trying to comprehend how the improbable world leader George W. Bush rose to the top and executed an array of radical policies, I began digging into the Bush family's history for clues. During my five years of research, I found that I had to re-examine the conventional wisdom and even my assumptions--not just about George W. Bush, but also about his father. Once I started taking a hard look at the particulars of both men's lesser-known activities over their lifetimes, I began finding that the public personas of the two men little reflected their true mindset or most enduring alliances.

Read more »

This week, Russ Baker joins us at Book Club for discussion of his book Family of Secrets: The Bush Dynasty, the Powerful Forces That Put It in the White House, and What Their Influence Means for America. The book is a portrait of the presidencies of the two Bushes that questions the family's connections and insistence on secrecy. Baker is an award-winning investigative journalist whose work has appeared in The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, The Nation, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Village Voice and Esquire.

From Baker's first post:

The two George Bushes, different as they appeared to be, both presided over administrations whose hallmark was extreme secrecy and the aggressive projection of military might to secure, among other goals, commercial opportunities for their friends and allies. This was no accident. As I make plain in Family of Secrets, the Bush policies were but the ultimate expression of a powerful if largely obscured current running through our country's history. Once we begin coming to terms with the real history of this country and the influences that shape it, we will have a better sense of the difficulties faced by Barack Obama, and the tremendous pressures upon him to continue serving those narrow interests, rather than the public good.

Joining the discussion are Greg Mitchell, editor of Editor & Publisher and author of Why Obama Won; Greg Anrig, vice president of policy at The Century Foundation and author of The Conservatives Have No Clothes: Why Right-Wing Ideas Keep Failing; and Craig Unger, author of The Fall of the House of Bush and House of Bush, House of Saud.

Many of the headlines greeting North Korea's nuclear blast yesterday carried the phrase "as big as the Hiroshima bomb" or words to that effect. But that's not the only reference point that Hiroshima should evoke.

Simply stated: The fact that the U.S. first developed, and then used - twice - the WMD to end all WMDs against heavily-populated cities, killing a quarter of a million civilians (and very few soldiers), has severely compromised our arguments against others building the weapon ever since.

Read more »

Most national security analysts see the provocative second nuclear test by North Korea as a direct "poke" at Barack Obama -- testing his resolve in a high stakes international stand-off and demanding senior level US attention.

These analysts are partly correct, but the other part of the equation is that North Korea's nuclear gaming and short range missile launches today are embarrassing for the leadership in Beijing. According to one Chinese international security expert once affiliated with Peking University's International Studies Institute, China's tools for influencing North Korea are pretty minimal -- and the illusion of that influence just collapsed in front of the entire world.

Read more »

I can be pretty critical of Paul Krugman, but this morning he absolutely nails the current California Fiscal Crisis.

The seeds of California's current crisis were planted more than 30 years ago, when voters overwhelmingly passed Proposition 13, a ballot measure that placed the state's budget in a straitjacket. Property tax rates were capped, and homeowners were shielded from increases in their tax assessments even as the value of their homes rose.The result was a tax system that is both inequitable and unstable. It's inequitable because older homeowners often pay far less property tax than their younger neighbors. It's unstable because limits on property taxation have forced California to rely more heavily than other states on income taxes, which fall steeply during recessions.

Read more »

Your weekend newspaper--assuming your town still has one--will be stuffed with pages of glossy advertisements for holiday sales. Your local TV news will do a story on the folks waiting in line in the dark for your local mall to open its doors. All weekend, people will be firing up their grills or spending a day at the beach.

Nothing's wrong with enjoying your three-day weekend. But I worry that, even after almost eight years of war, too many Americans see today as just another summer holiday. Memorial Day should mean much more than barbecues and clearance sales.

Read more »

This Times piece makes wonderful Memorial Day reading.

Donna Reed was a beautiful and famous actress in the 1940's. She was the mom in "It's A Wonderful Life" and, for boomers like me, Jeff and Mary's mom on "The Donna Reed Show in the 1960's."

But, apparently, for Yanks overseas during the war, she was one of the biggest pin-up stars.

And they wrote her letters, thousands of letters of which she saved a few hundred. Her family did us all a favor by releasing them to the Times for Memorial Day. They serve as a reminder of what young American boys were like two generations ago. Their innocence seems both lovely and incredible.

Read more »

During the presidential campaign, I thought Obama made only one big policy mistake. He criticized John McCain for proposing to tax all employer-provided health benefits. McCain’s overall health plan was regressive – he would have turned the savings into tax credits for purchasing health care – but he was right about where the revenues should come from. I worried that Obama would come to regret the position he took.

Half a year later, it appears that the President will need to tax employer provided health benefits in order to finance universal health care. Or at least the tax-free benefits now enjoyed by higher-income employees. Many in Congress and in the White House are convinced it’s the only good option. Max Baucus, chair of Senate Finance, expliticly put it on the table last week. Peter Orszag, the President’s budget director, has told Congress the option should remain on the table.

Read more »

Here's a headline you don't see everyday: Netanyahu Supports Evacuating Settlement Outposts by Force if Necessary. It's from today's Yediot Achranot, Israel's mass circulation daily. Bibi is taking this minor step in response to his U.S. visit and he's got the perfect person to do the dirty work: Israel's Defense Minister, Ehud Barak, the leader of the lost and forlorn Labor Party.

Read more »