For thirty years Iranians have been demonized in this country. Ever since the hostage crisis, many Americans viewed them as the worst kind of fanatics. The advent of Ahmadinejad only solidified the general impression that Iranians are, how to put it, nuts.

For some reason we never viewed them as victims of a horrific regime as we view, say, the North Koreans. No, in the case of Iran, the government was terrible and the people were bad. When New York Times columnist Roger Cohen (now bravely in the streets with the Iranian masses) reported that Iranian Jews were not suffering anti-Semitism despite the loathsome dictator's words of hate, he was excoriated. How could he report that? How could anyone report anything about Iran that did not fit in with the view that they are hateful human beings.

They are so bad , we were told, that they would destroy Israel and then happily see themselves blown up in retaliation because they are fanatics and don't even value their own lives. It's part of their religion and culture They are not like us. Hence, we should prepare to bomb them before they bombed our friends.

But that is all over now. The images coming out of Iran now have turned them, in the eyes of most Americans, into the Czechs of 1968.

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As I write, hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of mainly young Iranians are deciding whether or not to risk going out into the streets. There is little someone like myself can add regarding the poignancy of their decision. Yet one thing seems obvious: a generation of Iranians has been changed by these rallies--changed in roughly the opposite way they would have been had Israeli military intelligence got its way, and won American and IDF agreement to an aerial strike on Iranian nuclear facilities earlier this year.

Even in the face of mass protest, not only did Mossad chief Meir Dagan refuse to admit the obvious--that an attack would have caused widespread carnage, put Iran on a war footing, and preempted its twittering liberalism--but he's had the audacity to predict to the Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee what nobody could possibly know at this point, that the protests will peter out; that, anyway, a Mousavi government would be worse than Ahmadinejad's regime, for it would give Iran's nuclear program a prettier face. ("To hell with those students; the PowerPoint is done.")

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A few readers asked to see a map of the West Bank and the settlements.
The best up to date information on the settlements is at the Americans for Peace Now website. They are the experts on the settlement issue (truth in advertising--I am an officer of APN in the US). Here is the link. www.peacenow.org
go to the focus on settlements page. there are maps, updates, photos of 'natural growth,' which is not natural at all, but expansion and building into a future Palestinian state.

Max Blumenthal's video has been banned from Google's youtube.

Here's the story from JTA plus a link to the offending video.

It's crazy. What is GOOGLE thinking?

Also, see Ha'aretz on youtube issue.

Mr. President:

Momentum for universal health care is slowing dramatically on Capitol Hill. Moderates are worried, Republicans are digging in, and the medical-industrial complex is firing up its lobbying and propaganda machine.

But, as you know, the worst news came days ago when the Congressional Budget Office weighed in with awful projections about how much the leading healthcare plans would cost and how many Americans would still be left out in the cold. Yet these projections didn't include the savings that a public option would generate by negotiating lower drug prices, doctor fees, and hospital costs, and forcing private insurers to be more competitive. Projecting the future costs of universal health care without including the public option is like predicting the number of people who will get sunburns this summer if nobody is allowed to buy sun lotion. Of course the costs of universal health care will be huge if the most important way of controlling them is left out of the calculation.

If you want to save universal health care, you must do several things, and soon:

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Ayatollah Ali Khamenei's speech gives a virtual green light to the thuggish -- and massive -- Basij militia. It also raises the "moral" and Iranian constitutional ante on future demonstrations. From now on, demonstrators aren't legitimately petitioning for redress of grievances. They're civil disobedients - and, to a dishearteningly hate-filled part of Iranian society, they're something worse.

In civil-disobedience, you break a law non-violently and accept the legal punshiment to show that it's the unjust law that has betrayed the constitution, not your breaking that bad law publicly in order to defend the very rule of law. That strategy is risky enough here, but in Iran, it's inconceivable. Even just demonstrating peacefully will now demand more moral and physical courage than it did yesterday, or than civil disobedience usually does here. It will be cast as disobedience to the constitution itself - to the "Supreme Leader."

Watch the first 20 seconds of his speech and see his listeners' quintessentially fascist salutes, and you know what's coming. But consider that the U.S. hasn't always been better, and that some Americans still aren't.

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Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu's insistence that Palestinians recognize Israel as a "Jewish state" seems to rely on the certain knowledge that the Palestinians will never agree.

This demand is of recent vintage.

How recent? In 2006, after Hamas won the Palestinian elections, Israel demanded that the West insist on three conditions before dealing with it. Now known as the Quartet Conditions, they are still in effect today: "Hamas must recognize Israel, forswear terrorism and accept previous Palestinian commitments."

Note condition one. "Hamas must recognize Israel." Full stop. Not as a "Jewish state" or as anything else.

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The management of the WP, in its collective unwisdom, has decided to terminate Dan Froomkin's fine "White House Watch" online column effective early next month. The official statement:

Editors and our research teams are constantly reviewing our online content to ensure we bring readers the most value when they are on our Web site while balancing the need to make the most of our resources. Regrettably, this means that sometimes features must be eliminated, and this time it was the blog that Dan Froomkin freelanced" to The Post's Web site.

Everyone knows the dimensions of the newspaper crisis. Last month, the WP company overall reported "a net loss of $19.5 million...for its first quarter ended March 29, 2009, compared to net income of $39.3 million in the first quarter of last year." Income plunged in all the company's divisions--broadcast, cable, even the Kaplan cram course cash cow that's been carrying the company in recent years.

Here's a business plan: Your company's tanking. You've been buying out your most knowledgeable, most experienced hands. You've been shuttering foreign bureaus, even removed the globe that for years pinpointed their sites from your the newsroom--in embarrassment, presumably. Your paper's lost respect. Its editorial section has gone neocon. What to do?

Let's see: Guess you'd better can the liberal online column there. John Podhoretz is probably available for a substitute, maybe cheaper.

As events continue to build in Iran, so do the settlers outside of Israel's Green line, the internationally recognized border between Israel and the Palestinian areas. The settlers are not feeling threatened by the Obama Administration nor by Bibi Netanyahu's speech. That is because they are so entrenched in the Israeli political establishment, especially now with the right wing government. And, Bibi's speech last weekend did nothing to dissuade them.

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The Washington Post op-ed page has become the main forum of neocon opposition to President Obama's approach toward Iran. Today it features two pieces. The first is by Paul Wolfowitz, the other by Charles Krauthammer.

Wolfowitz's is measured and stimulating. But that does not mean that it is necessarily correct. Wolfowitz draws on his own experiences in the Reagan and Bush 41 administrations to argue that Obama is being too cautious. He notes that Secretary of State George Shultz was dismayed by Ronald Reagan's initial reluctance to call out Philippine president Ferdinand Marcos for election fraud in 1986. Reagan, Wolfowitz says, shifted gears after Shultz persuaded him he had to back away from the longtime American ally. But that is the key difference in the Philippine situation--Marcos was a venal authoritarian dictator that America had been helping to prop up. Major domo Ali Khamenei is not an ally of America's but the reverse.

Wolfowitz goes on to point to the attempted coup against Mikhail Gorbachev in 1991. George H.W. Bush was notably circumspect about backing Gorbachev.
According to Wolfowitz, "it was Yeltsin--with a powerful personal letter--who persuaded Bush to abandon equivocation and oppose the coup." The difference with Iran, of course, is that Gorbachev was the reformer in power whom retrograde forces were trying to oust. Once again, the reverse of the situation in Tehran.

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This week, we've seen John and Kate inch closer to divorce, the President stand trial in the court of public opinion for fly-homicide, and another Washington elite publicize infidelity via press release.

Somewhere in-between these trivial water-cooler discussions, reality sunk in. IAVA's Deputy Policy Director for Public Affairs, SSGT. Todd Bowers, called me from Afghanistan, where he's deployed on his third combat tour. And no, he wasn't trying to find out if Miss California's been fired.

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It's not easy being a neocon right now.

How to decide what will make it more likely that President Obama will allow Israel to bomb Iran?

Initially, in the weeks running up to the Iran election, there was near unity in support for Ahmadinejad's re-election. Speaking for the whole gang, Daniel Pipes said: "I would vote for Ahmadinejad."

Martin Peretz chimed in that it wouldn't matter who won. They were all the same. (Once one make distinctions among Iranians, it is harder to bomb them).

Anyway, before the election, the neocons were all Ahmadinejad, all the time.

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In Bloggers On The Bus Eric Boehlert, despite being a big fan of the netroots, doesn't pull his punches when talking about some of the sorrier episodes of the 2008 election season, including the way the Obama/Clinton primary got ugly and the rumors that flew about the blogosphere regarding Sarah Palin's last pregnancy and whether or not she faked it. The former is too big a topic for one blog post, but the latter raises some interesting questions.

The problem for liberal bloggers is that while we automatically have better ethical standards than the mainstream cable news media by virtue of not using Matt Drudge as our guiding light, we don't get the benefit of the doubt the way they do, because we're not as shiny or expensive. But a lot of bloggers, particularly smaller ones trying to make a name for themselves, feel the same pressure that the cable news networks do to scoop everyone else. The cable news can afford to take the risk of being wrong in order to get to a story first, but since establishment media and politicians are eager to discredit the bloggers, we can't afford goof-ups like promoting the false story about Palin's pregnancy.

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Many Israelis and their supporters just love to argue that they "have no partner for peace" on the Palestinian side. (And therefore that, with "deep regret", an Israeli government that wants nothing more to make peace, currently finds itself unable to do so... Cue the violins.)

I have generally given these pleadings short shrift. I mean, if an Israeli government came forward and put a good-faith and reasonable offer to make peace on the table, then there would certainly be a Palestinian party on the other side of the table ready and willing to negotiate.

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Tonight I went to a book party on the Upper West Side for the posthumous memoir A World I Loved, by Wadad Makdisi Cortas, late mother of Mariam Said, at whose apartment the party was. Cortas was a Lebanese educator who died in 1979. Her life was devoted to girls of the Arab world. A secular missionary, by her daughter's description, and a liberated woman. Worked all her life. Handed her memoir, in English, to her son-in-law Edward Said, and died soon after.

Ham Fish of Nation Books spoke, charmingly, about Mariam Said's mother making her children take their shoes off in the house. I saw Eric Foner, Eric Alterman, Mona Khalidi, Carl Bromley, Walter Moseley and Katrina vanden Heuvel of the Nation. Robert Simon of 60 Minutes was there, I congratulated him for his amazing West Bank settlers piece that helped change the moment a few months back. We talked about the hateful Nablus scene in the piece, when the Israeli soldiers take over an Arab house.

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The last word on why President Obama can do what none since Eisenhower could--or would.

The future of liberal blogging is an issue I've been perhaps surprisingly unconcerned with. It's something that arose organically, and as Eric documents it evolved from venting, to community, to media influence, to fundraising and activism, to, in some sense, a networked interest group and coalition. While one shouldn't discount the contributions and efforts of individuals in all of this, I think it's fair to say that no one blogger has been critical to the strength of the blogosphere. And while its role and influence will continue to evolve, as it has since the beginning, it's difficult to imagine its key features and strengths fading away.

To me, since the beginning, the blogosphere's key feature has been to provide a sustained and cohesive unapologetic liberal narrative not found elsewhere. While I certainly hope that the Obama administration moves the country in a more progressive direction, and I will continue to push for this, like Amanda I don't have any sense bloggers are owed some sort of seat at the table.

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Perhaps like some others, I've run short of time this week, trying to keep up (at Editor & Publisher, and via Twitter etc.) with what's going on in Iran, including the media crackdown. So just a few words for now.

First, I've read Eric's book and can certainly recommend it. I was especially keen to read it as my own recent book, Why Obama Won, highlights Web/blog influence and claims it one of the real keys to his victory. So rather than take a broader look at the future of liberal blogging, as some have done here, let me briefly return to the campaign and try to guess what will happen in future elections.

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Keith Ellison, the first Muslim elected to Congress, is one of the most thoughtful House members I've ever met (and I've met a few!).

He recently returned from Gaza and Israel and has some interesting things to say about what it feels like to speak one's mind on this issue without choosing one side or the other. Congress could use another 400 Ellisons.

Check it out.

In a word: No.

The plan doesn't stop stop bankers from making huge, risky bets with other peoples’ money. It does increase capital requirements and oversight, but it doesn't require bankers to take their pay in long-term stock options or warrants, and it doesn't even hint that banks should go back to being partnerships instead of publicly-held corporations.

All this means traders still have very incentive to place big and often wildly risky bets as long as the potential winnings are big enough, and top executives have very little incentive to monitor what traders are up to as long as the traders are collecting large commissions on the bets.

Nor does the plan do anything to prevent banks from becoming too big to fail. It doesn't hint at a return to the days before the late 1990s when commercial banks were separate entities from investment banks -- before mammoth bank supermarkets like Citigroup came to be so tied up with so many other commercial and investment vehicles that they couldn't be allowed to go under. And there's not the slightest mention of antitrust, to break up the largest banks.

The plan does focus on a few conflicts of interest, such as how credit rating agencies are paid. And it does establish a new agency to oversee all forms of consumer loans -- thereby helping make sure borrowers know what they're getting into, and can comparison shop. But these are small potatoes relative to the size of the overall problem. The Fed is given new oversight powers, but there's no suggestion that regional Fed bank presidents, who already have a substantial oversight role, should be recruited from the ranks of people who are not bankers and don't have a big financial stake in keeping oversight to a minimum.

In short: It's a mere filigree of reform, a sheer gossamer of government. Wall Street must be toasting its good fortune. Unless Congress shows some spine, the great Wall Street meltdown of 2007 and 2008 -- which lead to the biggest taxpayer bailout in history, very likely the largest taxpayer losses on record, and the largest investor losses since 1929 -- will repeat itself within a decade, if not sooner.

In fact, the banks that have repaid their TARP money are already planning to resume supersize bonuses, even though many of them are still awash in toxic assets and their non-performing loans are up. Bad credit-card and commercial property debts are mounting. Foreclosures are soaring. Yet several of the big banks are showing profits. How are they pulling this off? First, they strong-armed the Financial Accounting Standards Board into allowing them to assign whatever value they wanted to all the junk on their balance sheets. Then they played hardball with the Treasury staffers whose so-called "stress tests" lapsed into little more than negotiations over numbers and probabilities. (The national unemployment rate is already approaching the highest unemployment rate in the stress tests.) Then they convinced investors that financials have hit bottom and were now good bets. Presto!

Watch your wallets. The Street is up to its old tricks. And the White House's so-called reform is little more than a whitewash.

Opposing Views: Video of Iran Riots, Police Fire on Protesters

To someone who has watched and studied the Iranian revolution of 1979 with fascination, developments in Iran today have an eerie reminiscence. Then there were massive protests that filled the streets, often marching in dignified but ominous silence; there was bloodshed as nervous security men with guns faced determined but unarmed crowds; there were sullen mourning parades; there were catchy chants and ritual calls of "Down with the shah!"; at night the rooftops rang with shouts of allahu akbar.

You need only change "shah" to "dictator," and you have a description of what is happening in Iran today.

But there is one very big difference. Thirty years ago, Iran had a charismatic cleric named Ayatollah Khomeini who had a refined sense of strategy and a willingness to risk everything for the cause he represented. On the other side was Mohammed Reza Shah, who had been on the throne for some 37 years and who commanded one of the most powerful military and security regimes in the world. On the surface it appeared to be an uneven battle - guns against turbans - but the ruler with the guns wavered and the turbans grew in size and confidence until the old order collapsed.

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Gary Sick, who knows as much about Iran as any American, thinks that the whole Iranian situation might not be under anyone's control. Khameini seems confused. And Mousavi is not in charge of the masses in the street. This could come down to the Revolutionary Guards vs. the people. Tony Karon, whose writing on the Middle East is invariably on target, says this in TIME.

In these situations the thugs usually win win. But the world has spun a few times since 1989 when one monstrous regime after another collapsed. One minute Ceausescu was on the balcony speaking and the next minute he was dead.

No one expected the collapse of the satellite regimes or the Stalinist state. But they fell anyway and without the assistance of the revolutionary new media.

On the other hand, Iran could go the way of China after Tienanmen.

In any case, President Obama is playing it just right. Given our history with Iran, the best gift we can give the Iranian people is to butt out.

But I can't help but feel joy at the possibility that a vicious fascist regime is teetering.

Mohammad of Vancouver (a Canadian-Iranian) has relatives in the streets of Tehran, but he says that Ahmadinejad likely won the election, and the west, with its "warm ears" for Moussavi, is choosing to hear what it wants from the demonstrations. And Ayatollah Rafsanjani, the former Iranian president, has manipulated the electoral crisis in Iran for his own gain.

Based on opinion polls conducted a few weeks before the election by Terror Free Tomorrow (TFT), Ahmadinejad was expected to win with even a larger margin than announced in the official vote. The polls were reported both in the Huffington Post and the Guardian and had several interesting findings. First, even if the majority of the undecided votes went to the reformist camp, it was still highly likely that Ahmadinejad could secure the 50% + 1 vote needed to avoid a run-off.

Second, more than half of the electorate had a neutral or favorable view of the economic situation, and there was a relatively-even split between those that felt who the president's economic policy positively contributed to the reduction of inflation and the unemployment rate and those who did not. Lastly, the vast majority of the Iranian electorate believe that religious expertise is a very important attribute of a successful president. While some may claim that bias or fear led to these results, these same Iranians were not afraid to answer extremely-controversial questions. For instance, a free press and free elections were seen as important issues that the government must address-- by pluralities of the electorate sampled.

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Avigdor Lieberman arrived today in the US today for his first visit as Foreign Minister. He is scheduled to cover all the bases over the next two days meeting with Hillary Clinton, National Security Adviser James Jones, Joe Biden and leaders in Congress.

We've been giving a lot of attention to the recent Israel Project poll which shows American support for Israel dropping like a rock, and Lieberman seems aware of the trend in general. Over on the Peace Now's blog, Ori Nir quotes Lieberman as telling the Knesset's Security and Foreign Affairs Committee that Israel "'cannot continue with a successful foreign policy without changing the way we are perceived' internationally. He lamented: 'We have a fundamental problem: we are not perceived well.'"

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From a temporarily secure and undisclosed location (when not in the streets), a former student of mine who's freelancing in Tehran for a European newspaper and two online publications is telling the untold story behind the opposition demonstrations.

I won't light up his name by linking him right now, but here's his find: Many Iranians who voted for Mahmoud Ahmadinejad voluntarily and with a clear conscience are deciding that he used them to consolidate power in ways they don't like. Yes, Ahmadinejad had legitimate electoral support. But where is it now?

The answer, almost literally, is blowin' in the wind: The next 24 hours should tell whether the regime can suppress the rising anger. The clerks and teachers my former student describes aren't all taking to the streets; they're asking neighbors with friends in the thuggish militia,"Don't the Basij have parents, don't they have children?" Such appeals to decency from Ahmadenijad voters matter in nationalistic, "revolutionary" Iran.

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If the neocons are to be believed, Ahmadinejad's theft of the Iranian elections - and his continuing crackdown on dissent - are not the results of internal dynamics in Iran, but rather of the words of conciliation spoken by President Obama prior to the vote.

As the latest incarnation of Mitt Romney - the fire breathing hawk - put the right-wing case on ABC's "This Week" with George Stephanopoulos, "It is very clear that the president's policies of going around the world and apologizing for America aren't working."

An excellent post by Ali Frick that ran on Think Progress earlier this week quotes Iraq-war advocates Richard Perle and Frank Gaffney asserting that Obama's willingness to talk to Iran about curbing its nuclear program has helped legitimize Ahmadinejad's regime and emboldened the "thugs" in Tehran due to "our weakness." And Robert Kagan has put in his two cents worth in today's Washington Post in an article entitled "Obama, Siding With the Regime."

What would the neocons do differently? What should be done in the face of Ahmadinejad's repression, and how will it influence efforts to stop Tehran from seeking a nuclear weapon?

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As many commentators have pointed out, this is not the first time the Iranian students have protested the repressive regime.

The Iranian government tolerated student-led uprisings in 1999 and 2003 for only a few days before unleashing fearsome crackdowns, sending Basij vigilantes onto campuses, where they flung a few students from the windows; bloodied as many heads as they could with bricks, chains or truncheons; and jailed scores.

Three things seem different this time.

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Dwight Eisenhower refused to do it. John F. Kennedy didn't do it. George H.W. Bush didn't do it. Were they betrayers of freedom?

The "it" in question is, of course, going to the mat against dictators to support upheaval against them. In 1953 Eisenhower remained passive as East Germans rioted in June against the communist regime in the wake of Stalin's death. Three years later he remained mum when the Kremlin quashed the Hungarian revolution. Five years later Kennedy did nothing to prevent the construction of the Berlin Wall. Bush moved as quickly as possible to restore good relations with China after Tiananmen Square. In each case, an American president adopted a prudent course that evoked cries of a sellout among conservatives.

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The uprising, or whatever, in Iran is bringing out the highest of revolutionary prose (in English; Allah knows how it plays in Farsi). Consider this passage from an anonymous academic reproduced in Juan Cole's blog:

The procession passes through an underpass and just as there is great pleasure in honking the car horn in tunnels these many people send up an enormous cheer, echoing off the walls. From dark to light the crowd emerges from the underpass and looks back to see what they have done. There is above them stretching across the tunnel a dissonant sight, a sign with the visage and message of the Supreme Leader. He watches over this protest in the manner of TJ Eckelberg...

The whole piece is wonderfully vivid.

Move over, John Reed. May this uprising pan out better than the last time ten days shook the world.

So in one of the largest organizing events I've ever helped organize, the White House and Capitol Hill will both be hosting events for a delegation, organized by Progressive States Network, representing 700 state legislators from 47 states who have signed onto a letter demanding a public option, employer responsibility and affordability measures in any federal health care bill. That letter includes 4 Speakers of the House, 3 Senate Presidents, and 7 Party Caucus Leaders, along with 33 health committee chairs - the very legislators chosen by their colleagues to represent them on health care issues.

Secretary Sebelius and Nancy Ann DeParle will be receiving the letter at the White House at 3pm-- with a press conference -- and Senator Tom Harkin will be hosting a Capitol Hill press conference with key state leaders to highlight the letter and legislator voices in the federal health care debate. As we've highlighted, states have already pioneered legislation for public plan options -- so it's worth highlighting what state leaders have already done in understanding what federal lawmakers should do.

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I think the 'now what?' question for the blogosphere remains paramount, as it faces a real two-fer. The first was the completely expected exit of W. Bush from the national political stage and what that would mean to an online movement that was essentially created to oppose him.

The second is more unexpected: the rise of Twitter and other more immediate communications. For context, I finished writing/reporting the Bloggers book back in December and at the time very few people (relatively speaking) were talking about Twitter. This week it's on the cover of Time.

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I'm perplexed that anyone takes Prime Minister Netanyahu's utterance of the "two state" phrase seriously.

First, he wrapped his "acceptance" of the concept in so many conditions that he rendered it worthless.

And, second, peacemaking requires some belief in the value of both peace and reconciliation.

When Yitzhak Rabin and Yasir Arafat laid aside their enmity it was because they each saw the tragedy of continued war and the promise of peace.

Netanyahu doesn't. He was dragged, kicking and screaming, to utter a formula. He could barely bring himself even to do that.

His speech was meaningless. He is dedicated to holding on to the West Bank, continuing the occupation, and keeping the Palestinians subjugated.

Nothing in the speech indicated otherwise. He said what he had to say to make President Obama get off his back.

The speech changed nothing except for indicating, that even with US pressure, the Likud government has no interest in yielding an inch.

In that, and in that only, it has some value. It clarifies.

Ali Gharib writes:

The regime is NOT going to collapse. And that's not the goal of any of those marching Tehran's streets.

This is not about ending the Islamic Revolution, it's about getting back to it. For all his talk of returning it to its roots, Ahmadinejad's slow crawl from a defacto dictatorship to a dejure one is a shift away from the Revolution, which was, let's not forget, first and foremost about getting rid of the dictatorial and tyrannical Shah, not about Islam and that state.

Moussavi has made clear that the people are behind him not for his sake, but for the sake of the Republic that they love. Likewise, the emerging ritual of standing at windows, balconies, and rooftops at around 10pm and shouting "Allah-o-akbar" is a call of hope for the idealism of 1979 -- hardly a time an anti-IRI movement would look to. I think it's the most moving thing to come out of the whole ordeal so far:

**
Read more at Mondoweiss.

President Carter was in Gaza today, and met with Ismail Haniya in addition to visiting other sites. Here are some of his comments as reported by AFP in the article "Carter says Palestinians being treated 'like animals'":

"My primary feeling today is one of grief and despair and an element of anger when I see the destruction perpetrated against innocent people," Carter said as he toured the impoverished territory.

"Tragically, the international community too often ignores the cries for help and the citizens of Palestine are treated more like animals than like human beings," he said.

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As the White House unveils its long-awaited proposals to prevent another Wall Street meltdown in the future, keep a lookout for three essentials. Without them the Street will revert to its old ways as soon as the coast clears. In fact, now that the government has bailed out the Street, the biggest banks will take even larger and more irresponsible risks because they’re officially too big to fail. So these three reforms are critical.

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Ken Ballen and Patrick Doherty - The Iranian People Speak - The Washington Post

Ken Ballen and Patrick Doherty of Terror Free Tomorrow wrote an op-ed in the Washington Post that has attracted a lot of attention. They report that the claim of very substantial electoral support for Ahmadinejad is not as far-fetched as it might appear. They cite their own public opinion survey showing him leading by more than a 2-1 margin.

This polling, which is done by long distance telephone is an immense service to our understanding of long-term trends in Iran. As it turns out, people in Iran are remarkably willing to discuss even sensitive political issues over the phone.

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"One giant leap for Benjamin Netanyahu, but just one small step for Middle East peace."

That was how commentators in both of Israel's leading dailies, Yehidot Ahronot and Ma'ariv, chose to describe the Prime Minister's address on Sunday. One thing can definitely be concluded from the speech, Ben Rhodes has not been on loan from the White House and stationed in Jerusalem for the last week. It was a poor speech stylistically. Even the historical and biblical quotes were of the predictable and plodding kind, it lacked grandeur or any sense of occasion. More importantly, it was also a mean-spirited, often petty and parochial speech in its substance, "a speech without a gram of nobility," as commentator Ofer Shelach wrote in Ma'ariv.

Israel has just lived through two prime ministers who made significant journeys from their right-wing roots and even if neither entered the promised land of peace, both made gestures in that direction. Ariel Sharon acknowledged the occupation as did his successor Ehud Olmert, who went much further in recognizing a Palestinian narrative and displaying some empathy to, for instance, the Palestinian refugees. Judging from the Bar-Ilan University speech, Benjamin Netanyahu has barely set out on that journey. For him, there was no occupation, talk of Judea and Samaria but no West Bank, and there was no sense of humanity in his approach to the Palestinians. Although they are his neighbors and even 20% of his own citizenry, their world would seem to be totally alien to him. He called, for instance, on the Arab world to develop together joint tourist sites, such as, "around the walls of Jericho and the walls of Jerusalem," with no apparent appreciation for the irony of referring to walls in this context.

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Veterans have heard time and again about their fellow troops falling ill after serving near burn pits in Iraq and Afghanistan:

Dennis Gogel was stationed in Balad twice between 2004 and 2006. He said he was in housing just a few hundred yards from the [burn] pit and would often jog past the pit. The 29-year old Gogel said that in the last two years he's had upper respiratory infections, skin irritation and he's lost 60 pounds since deployment.

"I have blotchy spots on my face. I was treated for psoriasis, but it won't go way," he said. Gogel said his doctors do not know what caused the problems.

Gogel said it has affected his fitness, too. "I used to run two miles in 10 minutes. I am up to 17," he said. --CNN

Already, seven class-action lawsuits are pending on behalf of troops and contractors who say they were sickened by burn pits in Iraq and Afghanistan. And at least one servicemember, Air Force Maj. Kevin Wilkins, may have died as a result of the toxic exposure.

These reports are troubling, but they may be only the beginning. For years, the military has been using burn pits to dispose of hazardous waste at its bases in Iraq and Afghanistan. The pits burn everything from dining and maintenance materials to waste from medical facilities. This practice has potentially exposed thousands of servicemembers to toxic air and poor health conditions.

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Summer is supposed to be the time for light reading. But this past week a slender book arrived that deals that with weighty matters. I found it impossible to put down and read it at one blow. It's called Rosenfeld's Lives. The author is Steven J. Zipperstein, a professor of Jewish culture and history at Stanford University.

Zipperstein's reconstruction of Isaac Rosenfeld's life is a minor masterpiece of biography. It is both beautifully written and meticulously researched. You might think that the topic of the New York intellectuals, who constituted what was once known as "The Family," would be exhausted by now, but it clearly isn't.

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First, a word of praise for "Bloggers On The Bus"---I'm so used to reading hostile reactions to liberal bloggers from the mainstream media and so many instances of exploiting some of the worst episodes or worst blog comments to smear us all that I'm slobberingly grateful to read an account of liberal blogging that's accurate and respectful (while not shying away from talking about some of our uglier issues). There's a lot to address that he covers in the book: the Clinton/Obama blog wars, policing liberal bloggers who want to make like wingnuts and trade in conspiracy theories, pushing back against the Dirty Hippie stereotype, and the "where do we go from here?" question.

But I want to address the question Eric raised about how the Obama campaign and administration has, while using the larger netroots and social networking structures already in place, put the bloggers themselves at a distance. As he details in the book, this upset a lot of bloggers, especially since the blogs themselves mostly broke for Obama and had a lot to do with raising his profile above Clinton's. Despite this, while Edwards and Clinton had blogger outreach, Obama didn't.

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Eric lucked out. This is an auspicious time to discuss his book on networked politics -- you can't scan Google News without coming across reports of how blogs, Twitter and cell phones are channeling political protest in Iran. Tuesday's New York Times, for example, reports on how the Iranian government's repression has focused on technology.

The crackdown on communications began on election day, when text-messaging services were shut down in what opposition supporters said was an attempt to block one of their most important organizing tools. Over the weekend, cellphone transmissions and access to Facebook and some other Web sites were also blocked. Iranians continued to report on Monday that they could not send text messages.

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In his post kicking off the discussion of his book, "Bloggers on The Bus: How The Internet Changed Politics and The Press, Eric Boehlert writes:

I wrote Bloggers on the Bus because I wanted to help tell the story of the rise of the liberal blogosphere. . . .I thought the liberal blogosphere deserved respect and I felt it was important to document its rise.

Eric performs an admirable job in the telling of that story. If you care at all about political blogging, you must read Eric's book. At the end of his book (and in his post), Eric basically poses the question what now? I would hope that the question is answered by remembering why it came to be at all. It was not just a question of available technology. It was issues that spurred the birth of political blogging. No political party invented it. No political party owned it. It truly was bottom up - driven by concerns about issues - not the fortunes of political parties or individuals.

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The Obama administration is having a tough time getting its request for $108 billion for the IMF through Congress. Bank bailouts are rapidly losing popularity. And bailouts of foreign banks are probably even less popular than bailouts of U.S. banks.

But, NPR is rushing to the rescue. It had a piece this morning telling listeners that it was important to get the IMF more money to help the poor countries of the world. The piece never mentions the fact that the bulk of the IMF lending at present is going to East European countries, not the developing world.

The basic problem is simple. The West European bankers proved to be every bit as stupid as the Robert Rubin-Citigroup crew in dishing out loans. The main outlet for their bad loans was Eastern Europe, where they made enormous loans denominated in euros.

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The neocons were dancing in the street over Ahmadinejad's election. They figured that now the United States would surely give the go-ahead to bomb those totalitarian lunatics.

But then came the first glimmer of worry. What if it was stolen? Then it could mean that the people actually did not choose Ahmadinejad. Then Americans might feel sympathy for the Iranian people. Then the case for bombing grows weaker.

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(ed.note: Lila postdated this post for publication on Monday June, 15th. It refers to her last day at TPM, which was June, 10th.)

It feels strange to write this. After editing Cafe for a year, today is my last day, and I'll be moving over to join the news team at the Huffington Post. And I'm very excited about the move. But, what can I say-- I'm going to really really miss this place. All of my co-workers. All the Cafe regulars-- without whose dedicated posting Cafe would be a lonely and hollow place. All the book clubs I've done, and authors I've worked with. (As a side note: if there were just three book clubs to read from the past year, I'd recommend Philip Gourevitch's, Jane Mayer's, and our first foray into fiction, Netherland by Joseph O'Neill.)

And Josh. Oh Josh! I don't think I've ever worked with an editor so finely tuned to language, so relentless in his news investigations and so demanding of excellent work. To grow under his care and scrutiny has been a privilege.

So thank you, everyone. How does one wrap these things up? When Sarah Palin was asked on November 4th if she had any regrets about her campaign she didn't blink: "The blogosphere." She went on: "The two-, three-hour news cycles, where just too much is reported based on gossip and innuendo and things taken out of context." Well, what can I say Sarah? On both regrets and definition, I feel the opposite.

Right now, there are hundreds of thousands of Iranians demonstrating in Tehran, Rasht, Orumiyeh, Zahedan, and Tabriz. The mostly non-violent demonstrations are the largest, and most evocative, of the 1979 revolution against the Shah that Iran has seen. The pictures coming out of Iran are amazing and focus attention on what is really at stake in this conflict - just how much of a Republic is the Islamic Republic of Iran going to be?

We believe this is an existentially important moment for Iran - perhaps the most important one since the Revolution. The odds are always with whoever has control of the army and airwaves. People can be forgiven for already assuming that the hundreds of thousands of people demonstrating today in Tehran will fail in contesting the election results. Perhaps they will. But then again, perhaps they won't. Mir-Hossein Mousavi has a lot of people on his side and we don't just mean the throngs in the street. He was accompanied today in his appearance in Tehran in front of his supporters with former President Mohamed Khatami and the other rival presidential candidate Mehdi Karroubi. Even the right wing candidate (to the right of Ahmadinejad), Mohsen Razaee (a former leader of the Revolutionary Guard), has contested the election results. And these aren't necessarily soft touches.... Each was involved in the revolution that brought down the US supported monarchy and still remembers how that went.

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In the introduction of my book, Bloggers on the Bus: How the Internet Changed Politics and the Press, I highlighted a YouTube clip from 2006, right after the mid-term elections, when blogger Chris Bowers is talking into the camera (I think) of Matt Stoller and Bowers answers the question: What does it take to be a liberal blogger? He starts listing all the requirements: "If you have no children, no one to support, and no career ambitions, then you too can become a full-time progressive blogger, as long as you're wiling to do nothing else in your entire life."

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This week at Cafe, Eric Boehlert joins us for a discussion about his book Bloggers on the Bus: How the Internet Changed Politics and the Press. Boehlert, a senior fellow at Media Matters for America, looks back at the 2008 presidential campaign and how key players in the liberal blogosphere shaped important events.

Joining the discussion are Jay Rosen, professor of journalism at NYU and author of PressThink; Amanda Marcotte, Pandagon blogger and blogmaster for John Edwards' 2008 presidential campaign for a time; Greg Mitchell, editor of Editor & Publisher and author of Why Obama Won; Duncan Black, also known as Atrios of Eschaton Blog; Armando Llorens, who posts as Big Tent Democrat at Talk Left; and Ari Melber, correspondent for The Nation and columnist for Politico.

I would like to offer a few thoughts on Geof Stone's question about how best to express disagreement with a policy decision. When you are on the inside of government, you argue your case privately as best you can. But if you do not prevail, you support publicly what is decided. That is the bargain of serving in government. When you are on the outside, you have the freedom to disagree publicly, which is what I have done. Hence War of Necessity, War of Choice and the other work I have produced on this subject.

As I noted in my earlier post and in the book, I argued against the decision to go to war with Iraq in 2002 and 2003. I did not, however, resign. Many people, both at the time and since, have asked why. There are two reasons for leaving. The first is when you disagree with a major decision so fundamentally that you cannot live with the outcome. The Iraq War certainly qualifies as a major decision, but I did not resign because my disagreement was not fundamental. It was, as I explained earlier, 60/40, given my assumption from the available intelligence that Iraq possessed biological and chemical weapons. Had I known then what is now known, i.e., that Iraq possessed no weapons of mass destruction, I would have resigned had President Bush proceeded with the war. However, that was not the situation as I understood it at the time.

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"Palestinians must clearly and unambiguously recognize Israel as the state of the Jewish people."

"Palestinians will not be able to import missiles into their territory, to field an army, to close their airspace to us, or to make pacts with the likes of Hizbullah and Iran. It is impossible to expect us to agree in advance to the principle of a Palestinian state without assurances that this state will be demilitarized. On a matter so critical to the existence of Israel, we must first have our security needs addressed."

"Clear commitments that in a future peace agreement, the territory controlled by the Palestinians will be demilitarized: namely, without an army, without control of its airspace, and with effective security measures to prevent weapons smuggling into the territory - real monitoring, and not what occurs in Gaza today. And obviously, the Palestinians will not be able to forge military pacts."

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video from Iran News blogspot

Iranian-Canadian Amir Safavi-Naeini writes re Iran:

Just thought I'd let you in quickly on what has happened in the last 24 hours.

Some of these reports are still in Farsi, and I'll translate. Basically, last night, according to phone call to Voice of America from one of the people inside Mousavi's election committee, Mohsen Makhmalbaf, the following happened:
The Interior Ministry called Mousavi, told him... he'd won. Told the progressive newspapers to avoid printing the word "victory" in publications. Then it seems like "they" essentially changed their minds. All mobiles in Tehran are shut off. The power in the city is shut off. Armed and plain clothes officers are sent to main streets and intersections. Rafsanjani, Noori and Mousavi attempted to contact the leader regarding this, and most of the night is spent with them in meetings, trying to figure out how suddenly AN [Ahmadinejad] is winning exactly 66% regardless of location.

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3000 words of "NO."

I'm not going over the Netanyahu speech piece by piece because it does not merit that kind of scrutiny: The President asked for one thing above all, a settlement freeze, and Netanyahu just ignored the request.

The mainstream media is touting Netanyahu's support for a Palestinian state. He didn't offer it. He endorsed alternately a "state" and an "entity" without any of the trappings of statehood except an anthem. He even referred to the land where that entity thing would be located as "Judea and Samaria," a term no one except the Israeli right uses for the West Bank. In fact, the Israeli government only began using it when Menachem Begin came to power to send a clear signal to the world that there is no Palestine. It is "Judea and Samaria." It's the Biblical heartland and it is all ours.

The demand to recognize Israel "as a Jewish state" is something that didn't even occur to Begin. He, like all previous prime ministers, only demanded "recognition of Israel." He understood that countries don't recognize other countries "as" anything. The United State recognizes Latvia as Latvia, not as a "Latvian state." Same with every other country in the world. This new demand was devised because Netanyahu understands that Palestinians will never accept it because it negates their standing in a land they have inhabited from time immemorial.

In short, Netanyahu knows that no Palestinian with an ounce of self-respect could possibly accept his terms. That's the point. Getting them to "no," where he already is.

The ball is in Obama's court. As we 60's kids used to say, "the whole world is watching."

Iran's Crossroads - Nicholas D. Kristof Blog - NYTimes.com

In his blog, NYT columnist Nick Kristoff has a word of warning for those cheering on the Iranian people from the comfort of their arm chairs far away:

It will be fascinating to see how forcefully the government is challenged by students, the losing candidates and prominent figures like Rafsanjani... . But at the end of the day, as I saw at Tiananmen 20 years ago, when Might and Right do battle, it's often prudent to bet on Might, at least in the short run.

Tehran street clashes -- a policeman is taken by the crowd and his motorcycle burnt. In Italian.

Benjamin Netanyahu's speech this afternoon was a confusing jumble even for the most astute students of Israeli politics. Could that have been the much-touted policy speech? Surely, some things must have been lost on our daft ears. Here, then, is my best effort at a translation from Bibi to English:

"I turn to you, our Palestinian neighbors, led by the Palestinian Authority, and I say: Let's begin negotiations immediately without preconditions": Some restrictions may apply. You know, like forgoing the right for an army. Or controlling your own airspace.

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Haven't seen the speech transcript yet. AP says that Netanyahu broke new ground by offering a limited Palestinian state. A flag and currency-- sounds like. A friend who has seen it writes that the speech was red meat to the right wing:

Netanyahu opted to pander to the consensus, most especially to the settler base, which was his audience at Bar Ilan University. He made them very happy.

Mean-spirited in the extreme, he emphasized on Israel's god-given right to the "Land of Israel" (euphemism for Israel Plus--plus Judea and Samaria, i.e., the West Bank, aka Palestine). And on Israel's right to all of Jerusalem. There was not a generous word about the Palestinians. Only the usual tone of threat. There was no surprise in this, of course, but the nasty, supercilious, and hypernationalist tone even took my breath away.

Lest you think it was all negative, he did offer to cooperate with the Palestinians on solar panels.

**
Read more at Mondoweiss.

The American media, that herd of independent minds, give Netanyahu the headlines he wanted: "For the first time, Netanyahu accepts limited Palestinian state" (LAT); "Netanyahu Backs Unarmed Palestinian State" (WSJ); "Israeli Prime Minister Backs Palestinian State" (WP); "Israel PM calls for demilitarized Palestinian state" (CNN); and better, "Israeli Premier Backs State for Palestinians, With Caveats" (NYT).

Further down, you may read about his no to a settlement freeze, no to twin-capital Jerusalem, and the other bricks in the wall he put up.

But the metaphor of the day comes from PA negotiator Saeb Erekat:

Saeb Erekat, the Palestinians' senior negotiator, called on Obama to intervene to force Israel to abide by previous interim agreements that include freezing settlement activity in the West Bank.

"The peace process has been moving at the speed of a tortoise. Tonight, Netanyahu has flipped it over on its back," he said.

What a dreadful weekend! For all the thrill of Obama in Cairo, Ahmadinejad and Netanyahu are not so impressed.

P. S. Some European headlines are graver and less gullible. The Times of London: "Netanyahu defies Obama with hardline speech"; Le Monde: "Netanyahu poses his conditions for the existence of a Palestinian state"; but the Telegraph lines up with American coverage: "Netanyahu backs creation of Palestinian 'state.'"

P. P. S. Martin Fletcher on NBC last night did this right: "It was billed as a major policy speech, Israel's answer to President Obama's demand for progress towards peace. And tonight Israel's prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, finally did say yes to a Palestinian state, but with conditions. No military. It must recognize Israel as a Jewish state. Jerusalem will remain the undivided capital of Israel. For many in his own government, Netanyahu went too far. For Palestinians, he didn't go far enough. But tonight, Netanyahu just repeated his traditional line, no new settlements but natural growth must be permitted." He interviewed both Erekat and a Palestinian farmer. Imagine! [H/t: Herbert Gans]

In a brief and shallow policy address at one of the most right-wing Israeli universities, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was visibly nervous and edgy as he reverted to sloganeering instead of accepting Israel's historic responsibility toward regional peace. Clearly aiming to appease President Obama's new thrust to end the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Netanyahu uttered some of the words that all were seeking--like peace and statehood--but stripped them of substance.

Netanyahu and his coalition still refuse to acknowledge that Israel is an occupying power responsible for daily war crimes and the bearer of a sophisticated ethnic cleansing campaign against Palestinians. The speech clearly slapped President Obama and the international community in the face and should motivate the US to finally act to bring Israel in line with international law; otherwise, the future will offer only more of the past.

Perhaps the most depressing thing about it is how much it reminds one of Menachem Begin's response to Anwar Sadat in 1977. You get the feeling that the words are not simply tactical but come from Netanyahu's deepest convictions. Yes, he has declared a willingness to entertain the idea of a Palestinian state, so long as it is demilitarized. (For the record, Palestinian leaders in Fatah and the West Bank have never made an issue about having an army big enough to pose a threat to Israel--again, read the Geneva Initiative--and have often called for international forces to replace the IDF.) But he couched the point in Revisionist historical rhetoric that seems more an effort to wrest key Congresspeople from Obama than address the Arab world. My friend Sam Bahour in Ramallah told me he thought perhaps Hamas had written the speech, for all the good it would do Abbas.

Netanyahu has put, as Begin put, so many conditions on getting to a Palestinian state that one can understand the reluctance of Palestinian negotiators to get back in the room: recognition of Israel as the state of the Jewish people (readers of this blog do not require me to elaborate on why, as stated, this is impossible), Jerusalem, united, as the capital of Israel, natural growth of settlements, and so forth. Television commentators here immediately pronounced the speech a concession to Washington, at the same time as wondering if Washington will buy it. My unsolicited advise to Obama and Mitchell: put the speech in your pocket, declare it a breakthrough, and (as I said earlier today) start presenting details of a deal without imagining that negotiations will produce one.

Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu had a choice: President Obama or Benny Begin. He chose Benny Begin, the right wing member of Bibi's Likud Party. Rather than joining the international consensus and leading Israel to peace, the Israeli PM chose to stay trapped in his old ideology, treading water. The timid acknowledgement that he gave to a two-state solution is useless. It is a non-starter and he knows it. The question is, what next?

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Anticipating Bibi's speech, his coalition partners and Likud officials are flooding Israeli radio with interviews, insisting that settlements are not an obstacle to peace; that "natural growth" is, well, natural ("should parents tell their children they have to live elsewhere?"). Their claims will strike the ears of informed Americans the way old cigarette commercials do. You blush for people who think others this gullible, or wishful, or hooked. For my part, I have been waiting for an American government to insist on a total settlements freeze for over 30 years. One didn't have to be a genius to see the danger.

Still, there is something about the anticipated stand-off between Netanyahu and the Obama administration that makes me queasy. Had Ronald Reagan, following Jimmy Carter's lead, demanded a total freeze in 1980, then we would have had something. Today the demand reminds me of the Steve Martin bit about the implacable customer at a restaurant who, having waited too long for his dinner, complains to the maître d' that he can be appeased only by being served his steak "15 minutes ago."

Sure, Obama needs to make a clear break with the past, indeed, to make a show of force to Israeli rightists. But insisting on a total freeze today, when settlements have turned into substantial towns full of mobilized youth--towns whose residents should be understood as on a scale somewhere between Pat Robertson and David Koresh--seems false. The real goal is a fair, recognized border between two states as soon as possible, so that both sides will know how to plan. Focusing on a total freeze means insisting on the symbol, which cannot seriously be delivered, and deferring the fight over what is symbolized, which will require a hard line from America and the world anyway.

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