by Asim Khwaja, guest blogger

The post-9/11 emphasis on Pakistan continues to portray madrassas (religious schools) as a focal point – their rising prevalence the subject of great concern. What is surprising is that this “myth” persists despite evidence to the contrary – that madrassas are in fact not the real revolution in the Pakistani educational landscape but rather it is affordable private non-religious “mom-and-pop” schools that now dot the (rural) landscape.

In a series of papers in the past few years using publicly verifiable data sources and established statistical techniques my colleagues and I have documented this private sector revolution and the relative absence of a madrassa revolution.[1]

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The many questions in Yediot Aharonot's weekend poll gives us a feel for Israeli society, much like many touches give the blind man a feel for the elephant. My friend Jo-Ann Mort suggests that the key finding is a solid majority for evacuation of settlements; and its is true, and reassuring, that by 52% to 43%, respondents now actually favor a "freeze." But I think we might keep feeling around.

The responses do reveal Obama's window of opportunity. But the window is small and it will take consistent outside power, hard and soft, to pry it open. The questions are themselves a kind of code. The responses reveal a deeply divided country that would prefer not to confront its own divisions.

FIRST, THE BAD news. About 54% approve "natural growth" in the more than 150 settlements that already exist. So saying "freeze" new settlements may simply mean no new settlements are necessary to consolidate Israel's presence in the Palestinian territories, whatever the fate of this presence proves to be. Besides, the majority for a freeze, like the minority against "natural growth," includes Arab respondents. If we are speaking of Israeli Jews alone, the numbers are more discouraging.

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I'ved poked around Washington today, talking with friends on the Hill who confirm the worst: Big Pharma and Big Insurance are gaining ground in their campaign to kill the public option in the emerging health care bill.

You know why, of course. They don't want a public option that would compete with private insurers and use its bargaining power to negotiate better rates with drug companies. They argue that would be unfair. Unfair? Unfair to give more people better health care at lower cost? To Pharma and Insurance, "unfair" is anything that undermines their profits.

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President Barack Obama is getting tough on Israel. He is insisting on a total settlement freeze (with no exceptions) and expects Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu to endorse the two-state solution (with no conditions). In his groundbreaking speech in Cairo, Obama made it clear that just as the right of Jews to their own state cannot be questioned, neither can the right of Palestinians to theirs. For people like me, who have worked for years to achieve a fair US Middle East policy, the Obama shift seems almost too good to be true. Yes, I always have expressed optimism that an American President would actually grab this bull by the horns but sometimes I was expressing only hope, hope based on little evidence.

And now Obama does this and, as I have predicted, the opposition has begun to crumble. Even the media, which has always been even more timid about criticizing Israeli policies than Congress, has found its voice. It is an earthquake, and I think there is no going back.

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Since this is my final post and I've been addressed as Thomas Frank, one thing I should clarify is that Thomas Frank ("What's the Matter With Kansas?") is a Goliath, whereas I, T.A. Frank ("What's the Matter With My Rent Check?"), am rather more a David. I don't intend to take five smooth stones and fire them at Thomas Frank's head, but I wouldn't mind shifting the balance of power my way by peaceful means.

At any rate, Marshall Ganz has responded with interesting posts in the comment section of our entries, so be sure to check them out. Let me focus on one of them. Ganz notes that the tightening of a labor markets in the 1960s represented "the creation of opportunity as a result of one's resources suddenly becoming more valuable." But, he notes, important organizing also happened in the early 1930s, when labor markets were anything but tight. Given that we face similar circumstances today, we may need to think along similar lines.

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I'd like briefly to address some points made by Kim Bobo and Janice Fine about immigration and labor organizing. Without question, stagnant wages and increased workplace abuses are due to many things, and it's debatable how much of a role illegal immigration has played. But to say something isn't "the" cause doesn't mean it's not "a" cause.

Kim Bobo says the main trouble comes from Goliath employers who feel free to "underpay workers because they know how hard it is for workers to find other jobs." But how is that not consistent with oversupply? Janice Fine says that the "American state cannot stop immigration of low wage workers seeking better lives: workers will get in and flows will vary with market conditions." But, surely, we're not market absolutists. Why should supply and demand be forces we're able to tame when it comes to wages and working conditions but unable to tame when it comes to inflows of labor?

It was all-too-familiar for those who recall the run-up to the Iraq war when scary front-page New York Times stories would be cited by Dick Cheney as proof that we needed to oust Saddam Hussein ASAP. The reminder: A May 21 piece by Elisabeth Bumiller revealing that a not-yet-released Pentagon report declared that 1 in 7 prisoners released from Gitmo had returned to waging "jihad." Today, the Times, finally issued a weighty Editors' Note correcting the article's two main assertions, long after bloggers and others (myself included) had attacked it.

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Janice Fine asks the question "who is Goliath" in response to Thomas Frank suggesting that immigrant workers collectively are a Goliath in the workplace.

Goliath is clearly employers like Wal Mart. Goliath represents power - arrogant power. If you read the Biblical text, Goliath taunted the Israelites and then taunted David when he stood before him with a slingshot. We see that kind of arrogance among employers right now. "If you don't like this job and how I pay you, go find another."

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A quick post to respond to Josh and to some of the others who commented on my settlements' post and Friday's poll. The important thing to remember is that the Israeli public has never dropped below a majority of support for leaving the settlements; what that means ultimately is up to a political solution and a political leadership in Israel--along with a viable Palestinian leadership and US support to turn the majority into a politically viable reality.

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Cesar Chavez is undeniably the most revered union leader of the past four decades. Okay, you might say he hasn't had much competition on that front. As someone who has long written about labor matters, I have often wondered what catapulted Chavez to that exalted perch - the most respected labor leader since the great Walter Reuther..

In his very smart book, Why David Sometimes Wins, Marshall Ganz goes far to explain Chavez's extraordinary rise and success. Ganz, picking up the baton left by Saul Alinsky, has written a primer that explains how underdogs like Chavez can emerge victorious.

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Every Friday, the Israeli papers publish a national poll catching a snapshot of the public's mood. This week's poll is unequivocal in showing major public support for an end to the settlement foolery. This gives Bibi Netanyahu the political cover he needs, if he wants to transform, but as the Friday commentators also point out in the Israeli papers, whether his own personality and personal history trap him in the paradigm of the past is the question of the moment....as one top Israeli commentator says, if he doesn't respond to Obama's program, the current government is on a collision course that puts it on a trajectory for toppling and soon....the right politician in Israel (with help from Israel's friends) can capture the current mood and make progress --Here is the poll:

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It's all changing.

The tremors started before Obama but then he was sworn in and from, day one, showed it was a new day.

Today the Walt-Mearsheimer book is the story of what was, not what is.

And the polls from Israel today show that a strong majority wants Bibi to yield to the President on settlements.

It's happening. Once again, America shows that we remain dynamic and revolutionary. But, again, none of this could have happened without Barack Obama.

A dad can brag, right.

My younger son who is a DJ, radio personality, and all around big shot in New York did a cool interview this morning with Dave Matthews.

Check it out. My kid is great (so is his brother, his brother's wife, and especially the twins). And Dave Matthews, well, he's a demigod, but without the demi.

Not only did Barack Obama's Cairo speech amply vindicate his election and inauguration as Barack Hussein Obama against the scare-mongering of 2008; it flushed out disingenuous ideologues on both sides of the Israel-Palestine conflict.

And -- stunningly, though so far not widely remarked - Obama made arguments against violence very much like those made here in April, thanks to the Israeli writer Gershom Gorenberg and the American writer Jonathan Schell, on the indispensability of coercive non-violence to struggles for liberation.

Obama's truths and arguments made believers in the armed-struggle, people's-liberation left squirm. But they made believers in the "This land is our land," Israel-Lobby right squirm, too. It's worth noting how.

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I don't think I could improve upon M.J. Rosenberg's summary of what the meaning of the Obama speech would be to the Mid East. Clearly it was directed at that audience and its reception (except perhaps in the Likud and other expansionist parties in Israel) was very good. What struck me was how a similar speech might be addressed to an American audience, perhaps at one of the Think Tanks that is at the heart of the American Military Industrial Complex. This is a speech that Americans may not be ready for, but some time in the next three years, Obama should make it.

Obama seeks a new beginning with the Arab World. Part of that is the acknowledgement of what can only be described as the Imperial history of American intervention in the Arab world. There are hints in the Cairo speech that he understands this legacy.

The relationship between Islam and the West includes centuries of co-existence and cooperation, but also conflict and religious wars. More recently, tension has been fed by colonialism that denied rights and opportunities to many Muslims, and a Cold War in which Muslim-majority countries were too often treated as proxies without regard to their own aspirations...

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The Obama team's remarkable wordsmithery and the president's unparalleled capacity for delivery were exquisitely on display again today in Cairo. But this speech should perhaps be remembered as much for what was not said. Gone was the arrogance and lecturing: there was no lavishing of praise on Egypt's undemocratic leader - the word 'Mubarak' was not even mentioned once. Out too was the purple finger version of democratization and even the traditional American condescension toward the Palestinian narrative. But perhaps most remarkably of all, the words 'terror' or 'terrorism' did not pass the president's lips. Here was a leader and a team around him smart enough to acknowledge that certain words have become too tainted, too laden with baggage, their use has become counter-productive, today the Global War on Terror framing was truly laid to rest.

Particularly striking was that President Obama almost certainly has emerged from the Cairo speech having accumulated additional capital rather than expending it, with greater popularity, traction, and respect among not only his ostensible target audience, the Muslim world, but also globally, including at home in America and even in Israel and with the world's Jewish community. His future leverage across a range of issues has been enhanced.

It's true that whenever the speech descended from the lofty heights of 30,000 feet to the 100-feet resolution of policy specifics and details, the magic dust seemed to dissipate as it emerged from the clouds, and those details were too often more autopilot than reset. But this was a big picture speech, and there is room later to make those course corrections on policy detail.

Here then are ten quick thoughts:

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Of the many important lessons in his work, Marshall Ganz reminds us that the essence of strategic capacity is information, social knowledge and getting the target right.

So here's my question for Thomas Frank:

Forty-three million low wage workers in the United States and 25% of the workforce at poverty level: how do we diagnose the problem of exploitative work?

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T.A. Frank should become aware of the ongoing David vs. Goliath story of UNITE HERE, whose hotel and gaming workers includes many immigrants and has much demographic similarities to the UFW in its heyday. UNITE HERE has won card check neutrality agreements and unionization against powerful international hotel and gaming conglomerates, and has brought the wages of unionized hotel workers to nearly double that of non-union hotel workers in the same city.

UNITE HERE uses many of the same strategies and tactics that brought the UFW success, particularly the consumer boycott. In fact, UNITE HERE's Hotel Workers Rising campaign used videos of the UFW grape boycott to train staff and community supporters on running hotel boycotts; the success of the latter pressured hotels to both agree to card check neutrality and greatly increase wages and benefits for UNITE HERE members.

UNITE HERE is the union most impacted by UFW alums, and I think Cesar Chavez would be quite impressed by its accomplishments.

Take a look at what top Israeli journalist Gideon Levy has to say in Ha'aretz today.

To be honest, it is precisely what I've been saying for a long time. But this argument is especially significant when it comes from an Israeli.

It comes down to this, according to Levy.

"The American president has the power to end the Israeli occupation within months. The conquest of the "Third Kingdom of Israel" following the 1956 Sinai Campaign collapsed within weeks. We could return to that situation, despite the stumbling blocks of the settlements, with a clear timetable for evacuation, severe sanctions for noncompliance and generous assistance for those staying the course. The tailwinds Obama is enjoying have already changed the prevailing tone toward Israel, even among its traditional "supporters" - those who so blindly and irresponsibly endorsed its occupation and wars.

"The tools in Obama's kit are varied: A congressional delegation visiting here recently entertained the idea, in private conversations at least, that the U.S. prohibit Israel from using American weapons in the West Bank; someone suggested levying strict limitations on Israelis entering America. But perhaps it would be enough to simply retract the automatic U.S. veto at the UN - and this is without mentioning stopping the flow of aid."

Check it out.

And here is Glenn Greenwald explaining that "as long as you live in our house, you have to observe our rules" and how that teenage mantra applies to Israel.

Immediately after President Obama's speech, Israeli television interviewed a strapping West Bank settler: "It was very professional," he said, "very well crafted. It focused brilliantly on the rights of man. But he also quoted the Talmud; and if he read that, then he knows that the land of Israel belongs to the people of Israel." This curious response suggests why, yet again, Obama's instincts are better than mine.

You see, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is full of people like this. In the end they will have to be confronted. But though the end cannot be allowed to seem far away, the end is not the beginning. Why push people into a corner before showing them the corner--before showing them also the people who will be pushing with you? Why not take things in their natural sequence which allows everybody to adjust to the new reality?

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The attacks on September 11, 2001 sent shock waves throughout the world. This act of terrorism, despite its horrific brutality, created a global period of solidarity and mourning. It also presented an unprecedented crossroad where the world could choose a new era of engagement.

Today, in Cairo, President Obama began to work toward exactly that. He gave the speech that should have been given after the events of 9/11 setting the stage for a more abundant, prosperous and secure world not by demeaning others, but by asking them to join in creating a secure and affluent future for all. A feat that can only be accomplished by nations working together.

Make no mistake, changing the dynamics of the global propensity toward fear and mistrust will take time. Further, altering embedded systems that have been around for centuries is no easy task.

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Marshall Ganz's new book about the lessons of Cesar Chavez and the United Farm Workers is superb, and I only wish this discussion group had even more time to examine all of the points it makes--one of which is that David, after having defeated Goliath, can easily fall prey to the same delusions and hubris that weakened Goliath. (Chavez started as a David but undid many of his achievements once the UFW became a minor Goliath.) For example, now that the Obama campaign, which started as a David, has become a Goliath in the form of an Obama White House, how does it retain the qualities of David that made it thrive in the first place?

But I can't ask everything, so instead I'd like to focus on the topic of labor supply, since unions today are weak and income gaps in the United States are as wide as they've been in many decades. Ganz makes it clear that tight labor markets in the country were integral to the success of Cesar Chavez in organizing the United Farm Workers (or its precursors) in the 1960s and 70s. This isn't to say that tight labor markets guaranteed the success of the UFW--strategic mastery was essential to capitalizing on the opportunity--but they set the stage.

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President Obama didn't disappoint all those in the Middle East and America who care about enlightened progress. He continued with his relentless push to end Israeli settlement activity and he spoke as an American leader reaching out to the Arab world that can be, to a Middle East that can be.

As one of Israel's Knesset members, Haim Oron of Meretz, put it: "The speech was the feat of enlightenment." For Israel, this is precisely the choice--will it be a country of the 21st century or a country of the shtetl?

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Myself I was impressed by Obama's offering himself to the Muslim world as a leader, the supple use of the Koran and of Islamic teaching, the embrace of his own Muslim background, and the willingness to dive into women's freedom. The students here were wild for him on this basis too, many of them say the speech was "amazing," a word I heard again and again from them. Several have told me how moved they were by his appreciation for Islamic prophets.

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Mission accomplished. For the first time in memory, an American President spoke to Muslims and Arabs not as antagonists who need to take certain actions before achieving US acceptance but as equals. Not only did the speech specifically reject western (and American) colonialism, its entire tone was the antithesis of colonial. This is a profoundly different American voice, one that will do much to advance American goals rather than to sabotage them.

Arab leaders who were listening to this speech might want to consider a similar speech of their own to their people. That is not going to happen. But they have to realize that this speech will significantly raise expectations among their own people. This is the kind of speech they have never heard before, and they will expect something like it, but from their own potentates next time.

The President conveyed eight distinct messages.

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From the New York Times:
"Senior Israeli officials accused President Obama on Wednesday of failing to acknowledge what they called clear understandings with the Bush administration that allowed Israel to build West Bank settlement housing within certain guidelines while still publicly claiming to honor a settlement 'freeze.' "

I think I see a problem here. The Israelis do not understand our form of government. The fact is that it simply does not matter what the Bush administration agreed to. Eight years ago, the Bush administration came in and reversed every Clinton decision they could including international obligations.

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Has Ben Bernanke suddenly become a deficit hawk? In remarks to the House Budget Committee he sounded like one -- calling on Congress to come up with a plan to restore fiscal balance over the long term. “Unless we demonstrate a strong commitment to fiscal sustainability in the longer term, we will have neither financial stability nor healthy economic growth.” This from a Fed Chair who's loosened the money supply more than any Fed chair in recent history, printing money as if it were going out of style. What's going on?

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At least since Adam Smith's era, every nation in the world has used low cost, government supported loans to help pay for critical projects necessary for economic development. This is how in the United States we built the Erie Canal, fought wars, and constructed schools. And now we need a Green Bank to support low cost loans that steadily over twenty years, starting right away, will finance the conversion of America's energy industry from carbon to clean.

That is why more than fifty businesses have come together to form the Coalition for the Green Bank, of which I am the co-chairman. We have received expressions of support from many business lobbies as well as the Center for American Progress and environmental groups. Congressman Chris Van Hollen proposes to charter our Green Bank through legislation he has introduced in the House Ways and Means Committee. Our immediate goal is to have that Committee pass the Van Hollen Green Bank Act either as a standalone measure or as an amendment to the monumental Waxman-Markey bill passed by the House Energy and Commerce Committee and now referred to Ways and Means.

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Here is a little thought experiment. Imagine that both the Islamic world and the Palestinian nation suddenly agreed that the mosques on the Noble Sanctuary in Jerusalem's old city were not that holy after all; that the Jews were welcome to take them down and build a temple if they wanted to. Could Jews really want this? Okay, forget the animal sacrifices. I mean a temple that, whatever its rites, purports to be ground zero of divinity, the building of buildings on the spot of spots--the here and now of a holy of holies. If Jews believed in such things would they be practicing Judaism at all?

This is not a merely hypothetical question. Very few Jews speak seriously about rebuilding the temple in question, but very many--perhaps a majority--are deadly serious about the divinity of the mount in question. From the mayor on down, ordinary Jews in this city seem overwhelmed by the mount's gravitational pull. Close, it is said, matters only when playing at horseshoes, but close also matters greatly when playing at Jerusalem. Most reject out of hand any notion of surrendering Israeli sovereignty over the mount. They think next to nothing (to take just one example) of leveling the Arab neighborhood of Silwan in order to build a kind of biblical theme park close to the mount. Even secular writers say casuistic things like "there is no Zionism without Zion," Zion being the mount overlooking the mount. (In fact, the original halutzim, and Zionism's Emerson, Achad Haam, avoided the place, but never mind.)

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It wasn't the biggest scoop of the 2008 campaign, but it produced some rather barbed, funny and unusual commentary. Which news outlets, in this day and age, would quote an ex-President, even on the Web, using the word "scumbag"?

In its account of the Huffington Post scoop on Bill Clinton's tirade against Todd Purdum for his Vanity Fair profile last June 2, The New York Times quoted some of the ex-president's epithets, including "sleazy" and "slimy" but drew the line at "scumbag." Other leading news outlets were not so coy.

Clinton, of course, was responding to the quite negative profile about him written by Purdum. He apologized for some of his "inappropriate" language, captured by Huff Post's Mayhill Fowler.

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One hundred thousand people marched in the annual "Salute To Israel" parade in New York on Sunday and apparently a post-parade concert in Central Park turned into a hate-fest. Rabbi Sidney Schwarz of Potomac, Maryland writes about his reactions to being part of a Jewish assemblage in America in which participants sing "all the Arabs must die." Read his piece here. Is it any wonder that Israel's rightwing supporters here are feeling so uncomfortable in Barack Obama's America?

"Then a band launched into a rousing rendition of Am Yisrael Chai. I spent more than 25 years as an activist for Soviet Jewry. This was our theme song signaling solidarity both with the history of our people and with all those oppressed Jews in the world whose cause we championed. A group of young men in their 20's....were right in front of me dancing in a frenzy. But they alternated the verse that meant ''the people of Israel lives'with 'all the Arabs must die.' It rhymed with the Hebrew. Given the way all joined in, it was clear that this was not the first time it was sung.

"I leaned over to a young man who was next to me, also wearing a kippah and tzitzit. I nodded at the dancers and asked: 'Does this song bother you?' He looked at me with a suspicious look and replied: 'This is Zionism.'"

That's Norman Finkelstein at right, posing questions last night to three Hamas officials at left. The questions came from the delegation to Gaza that I'm with, which was organized by Code Pink, the antiwar group. Notice the microphone in Finkelstein's left hand.

I asked about a statement by John Ging, the head of United Nations relief organization here (UNWRA), that some of the victims in the Gaza war were "killed because they were taken as human shields."

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This is one of the tunnels going to Egypt from Gaza. You're looking down the shaft on the Gaza side, about 25 meters to the bottom. People say there are hundreds of tunnels and if you walk around Rafah, the border town in the Gaza Strip, you can see scores of tents and shacks that enclose the work of the tunnels. If Israel wanted to destroy the tunnels, it could.

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Why can the powerless sometimes challenge the powerful successfully? Why can resourcefulness sometimes compensate for lack of resources? Why can "David" sometimes defeat "Goliath"? In this book I respond to these questions, questions to which I've devoted a lifetime of practice, study, and teaching.

Based on an analysis of the struggle of California farm workers to organize a union - a struggle undertaken at four moments since 1900: prior to World War I, during the 1930s, in the late 1940s, and, finally in the 1960s. Each time immigrant associations, radical organizers, and the AFL tried, but until the 1960s, each effort failed when the growers used mobilization for war to suppress the organizing and import new workers. In the early 1960s, three groups took advantage of the end of the Bracero Program to try once again: the AFL-CIO, in 1959, the Teamsters, in 1961, and an independent farm worker association, later to become the United Farm Workers, led by Cesar Chavez, in 1962. But in 1966, when a breakthrough was achieved, victory belonged to neither established, well-financed, and well-connected union, but, rather, to the fledgling farm workers' association.

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Marshall Ganz is joining us this week for a book club on his new book on the labor movement: Why David Sometimes Wins: Leadership, Organization, and Strategy in the California Farm Worker Movement.

Joining the discussion are Janice Fine, assistant professor of labor studies and employment relations at Rutgers University and author of Worker Centers: Organizing Communities at the Edge of the Dream; Randy Shaw, author of The Activist's Handbook; Steve Greenhouse, New York Times labor reporter and author of The Big Squeeze: Tough Times for the American Worker; T. A. Frank, Consulting Editor at The Washington Monthly and an Irvine Fellow at the New America Foundation; Nathan Newman, Policy Director for the Progressive Legislative Action Network; and Kim Bobo, Executive Director of Interfaith Worker Justice and author of Wage Theft in America: Why Millions of Working Americans Are Not Getting Paid - And What We Can Do About It (her recent book club can be found here).

Join us!

Serious economists are now arguing that we should not reflexively celebrate "innovation" in the financial sector as we do innovation in the real economy. I was ahead of my time. I said the same thing almost two years ago, and people laughed at me.

Okay, that may have had something to do with how I said it.

When the House debated predatory mortgage lending legislation on November 15, 2007, I responded in an extemporaneous floor speech to Republican arguments that the legislation would throttle innovation in the financial sector, using an example of innovation in the real economy that was within my reach:

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It's starting already, at least according to Politico.

Likud Democrats Anthony Weiner (D-NY) anfd Shelley Berkley (D-NV) are joining Eric Cantor (R-VA) in telling the President to stop pressuring Israel.

Here's the beauty part. They are complaining already although Israel has yet to make one concession to the Americans. They are outraged at the very idea that the President has the temerity to ask Netanyahu to do anything.

Fortunately, Weiner and Berkley are not exactly Congressional heavyweights. On Israel, each supports the Likud platform 100% and neither has ever deviated from a position well to the right of even AIPAC. Cantor is just...Eric Cantor.

Robert Wexler(D-FL) and Gary Ackerman (D-NY) do know better and are players. They should be backing Obama's call for a total settlement freeze, no ifs, and or buts.

Obama interview

Video journalist Max Blumenthal talks to many in the Jewish settler movement who put it all out there. Winners of the Moskowitz Prize state frankly that they want to continue the ethnic cleansing of Occupied Territories -- and young kids parrot the meme that Palestinians have no right to lands that are Israel's holy lands.

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Will it ever end? Probably not. Once again a Republican presidential hopeful is accusing a Democrat of being soft on (what else?) national security.

Today it was Mitt Romney's turn to sing from the old hymnal at the Heritage Foundation in Washington, DC, where he announced that President Obama is imperiling America's freedoms by speaking too freely. His speech showed the extent to which the GOP remains trapped in a cold war narrative of America as the righteous redeemer that only needs to increase defense spending constantly in order to save the rest of the globe.

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American Likudniks are threatening Rep. Donna Edwards (D-MD) with a primary because she did not support a House resolution hailing the disastrous Gaza war.

Politico has the story and it's all bluff. Donna Edwards, who is incredibly popular in her Maryland district, is not going to face a primary. And certainly not one based on her support for Obama's position on the Middle East and not Netanyahu's. If she did, she'd win 90% of the vote -- including the Jewish vote.

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"To those who cling to power through corruption and deceit and the silencing of dissent, know that you are on the wrong side of history; but that we will extend a hand if you are willing to unclench your fist." President Obama could hardly improve on this line, from his inaugural address, during his forthcoming much-heralded major speech to the Muslim world on June 4th. Better yet, he has already further reinforced this position when he announced--after an extensive strategic review--that the United States' goal in Afghanistan was "to disrupt, dismantle and defeat al Qaeda," full stop. To further this message, we have outlined here points we hope the President will include in his scheduled speech.

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As president of General Motors when Eisenhower tapped him to become secretary of defense in 1953, “Engine Charlie” Wilson voiced at his Senate confirmation hearing what was then the conventional view. When asked whether he could make a decision in the interest of the US that was adverse to the interest of GM, he said he could.

Then he reassured them that such a conflict would never arise. “I cannot conceive of one because for years I thought what was good for our country was good for General Motors, and vice versa. Our company is too big. It goes with the welfare of the country.”

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At Duke Law School back in 2005, Judge Sonia Sotomayor said that "the court of appeals is where policy is made." Conservative pundits have immediately jumped on these words as proof that Judge Sotomayor is an "activist" who will legislate her own preferences on us all from the Supreme Court bench.

This is nonsense. Appellate judges do "make policy," and it's an uncontroversial and even necessary piece of their job description.

She uttered these words during a panel discussion for the benefit of Duke law students, many of them aspiring law clerks to judges around the country. One such student asked her how trial courts are different from appellate courts. Judge Sotomayor replied that whereas trial courts are concerned with the specific facts of the cases before them, appellate courts are "where policy is made."

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The Obama administration's plan for General Motors is a serious effort to try to make the best of really awful situation. In the current economic situation, sitting back and allowing GM to be liquidated was not a serious option. This would have wiped out a whole network of suppliers and ancillary businesses in Michigan, Ohio, and Indiana, devastating the economies of these three states.

The federal government would have been forced to step in with large-scale aid in this case just to prevent mass destitution.The state and local governments would have lacked the resources just to maintain basic services like schools, hospitals, and sanitation facilities. Of course the plan is not perfect and it can be argued that one or another of the parties got too much or too little.

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"Court Choice Pushes Issue of 'Identity' Back to Forefront," went yesterday's NYT headline on a Peter Baker story. "Identity politics is back with a vengeance," Baker wrote. "The capital once again has polarized along familiar lines."

Note the sources Baker quoted. On Sotomayor's side: Obama himself, David Axelrod and Rep. Nydia Velazquez. Declaring that Sotomayor is a poster child for identity politics: neocon ideologue Abigail Thernstrom (Sotomayor is "a quintessential spokesman for racial spoils"), William Burck, a deputy White House counsel under President George W. Bush, and those discerning analysts, Rush Limbaugh and Newt Gingrich. As if the debate that matters is the one between the administration and the wingnut right. The fact that Republicans themselves are divided on whether to demonize Sotomayor, as reported by TPM's Eric Kleefeld on Friday, evidently doesn't count.

That creaking sound you hear is the NYT bending over backwards to prove it's fair-and-balanced by sanctifying the viewpoint of the far right--perhaps that it even has "empathy" for them.

P. S. In the Monday paper, John Harwood deftly punctures Peter Baker's balloon with a single sentence: "Notwithstanding fierce criticism from the likes of Rush Limbaugh and Newt Gingrich, there is scant evidence of solid opposition from Republican senators."

Symbolic analysts have been hit by the current downturn, just as everyone else has. But over the long term, symbolic analysts will do just fine – as long as they stay away from job functions that are becoming routinized. They will continue to benefit from economic change. Computer technology gives them more tools for thinking, creating and communicating. The global market gives them more potential customers for their insights.

To be sure, symbolic analysts are popping up all over the world. More than half of all Fortune 500 companies say they're outsourcing some software development or expanding their own development centers outside the U.S. But apart from recessions, demand for symbolic analysts in the U.S. will continue to grow faster than the supply. Innovation creates that demand, and demand for it, in turn, generates more innovation.

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Everyone in Washington policy circles agrees that we need a systemic risk regulator to prevent another economic disaster like the one we are now experiencing. This quest ignores the fact that we already have a systemic risk regulator. It's called the Fed.

The Fed has often stepped outside the narrowly defined realm of monetary policy when it perceived larger risks to the economy. The two most obvious examples are its efforts to stem the stock market crash in 1987 and its intervention in the unraveling of the Long-Term Capital hedge fund in 1998. In both cases the Fed acted because it argued that there would be much greater damage to the economy if it just let the market run its course.

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Obama's announcement of Sonia Sotomayor as his pick for Supreme Court Justice dominated much of the news cycle this week - but it certainly wasn't the only news.

artwrite beseeches the media to "calm down" and notes that the "All Sotomayor, All The Time" syndrome is pushing other pressing issues to the side: North Korea, Obama's meeting with Mahmoud Abbas, and of course, the still-struggling economy.

TPM readers, as we all know, are a good antidote to the mainstream media, and focused on important news outside of Sotomayor:

astral66 points out a little-talked about report from a UN human rights investigator that states that "the U.S. is failing to properly investigate war crimes committed by soldiers."

astral66 and coonsey note an interview with General Petraeus where he admits that we violated the Geneva Conventions and have been "rightly criticized" for it.

Bill Bowman shares a rather scandalous tweet from Michael Savage that appears to have slipped under the radar, in which he calls Secretary of State Clinton "Clitler." Seriously.

And if you're in the mood for some seriously old-school prose, dickday has a fun retelling of one of Cicero's famous orations, in which the great Roman philosopher calls out Cheney for his eight years' worth of lies. (This isn't exactly one that got away, judging by the 55 comments on it, but I had to note it!)

The Netanyahu government continues to resist the administration's call for a settlement freeze. And there is no reason to think that is going to change. His government and the settlers are in panic mode -- terrified of a battle with Obama which they would lose -- but don't know what to do.

Accepting a settlements freeze would bring down Netanyahu's government which is a fearful prospect for Israel's right. But it wouldn't change much for us. Either new elections would bring in the far far right (no big change). Or Tzipi Livni would come in (marginally better on policy than Bibi and infinitely better at PR).

It's hard to see much gain in those contingencies. And to achieve what: a settlements freeze i.e a freeze in place with the Israelis in control of the West Bank and Gaza's borders, seaways, airspace, etc. Smart rightwingers would take that deal in a heartbeat. But he Likudniks aren't smart so they will probably instigate a gigantic clash with the United States instead.

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