I remember when candidate Barack Obama gave his speech to AIPAC in 2008. It was pretty much the usual rhetoric.

Some of my friends, knowing that I had supported Obama for President from the day he was elected Senator, chided me. "So he's just another politician," they said. "Typical lobby speech."

I said, no, I don't care what he says to AIPAC. Let him say whatever it takes to win, but I know he'll push hard for an agreement. Don't read his lips; watch what he does after he's inaugurated.

He's doing it. And he's not backing down.

Read this from Ha'aretz. Barack Obama is the first good thing to happen to the Israeli left since Rabin was murdered. He's the honest broker the Palestinians and Israelis both need -- and have never had.

Meanwhile, the Jewish right excoriates Obama for opposing the occupation while Republicans only oppose....Israel. The foreign aid bill passed this week. Its largest component is the $2.2 aid package for Israel. 106 House members opposed it, 97 were Republicans. Paging Eric Cantor, the fierce lion of Judah.

Rep. Cantor, May 4, 2009: "Because many men are pointing guns at Israel. Indeed at Jews everywhere, promising to kill us." Thank God Eric is still among the living. So why didn't he get the caucus he leads to support the Israel aid package?

Peggy Noonan on an about-to-be-former governor of Alaska, whose sublime readiness to lead the United States of America was vouched for by the distinguished senior Senator from Arizona and his bedazzled party:

In television interviews she was out of her depth in a shallow pool. She was limited in her ability to explain and defend her positions, and sometimes in knowing them. She couldn't say what she read because she didn't read anything. She was utterly unconcerned by all this and seemed in fact rather proud of it: It was evidence of her authenticity. She experienced criticism as both partisan and cruel because she could see no truth in any of it. She wasn't thoughtful enough to know she wasn't thoughtful enough. Her presentation up to the end has been scattered, illogical, manipulative and self-referential to the point of self-reverence. 'I'm not wired that way," "I'm not a quitter," "I'm standing up for our values." I'm, I'm, I'm.

This badly needed saying by an honest conservative:

she continues to poll high among some members of the Republican base, some of whom have taken to telling themselves Palin myths. To wit, "I love her because she's so working-class." This is a favorite of some party intellectuals. She is not working class, never was, and even she, avid claimer of advantage that she is, never claimed to be and just lets others say it. Her father was a teacher and school track coach, her mother the school secretary. They were middle-class figures of respect, stability and local status. I think intellectuals call her working-class because they see the makeup, the hair, the heels and the sleds and think they're working class "tropes."

It's the height, or depth, of condescension, in the guise of populism, to attribute working-classness to a person who parades her ignorance as a proof of authenticity. The only thing wrong with Noonan's column: She's whited out her party's willingness to enthuse for this dope less than twelve months ago.

I've often insisted here that New York Times columnist David Brooks has a lot of American blood on his hands and a lot of economic suffering to answer for, not to mention a lot of egg on his face now that his long, over-rich record of neo-con/Republican liberal baiting has embarrassed even Brooks himself.

"Let me have my moment," he pleaded in a column when Obama won in 2008, and, for a couple of months, I granted it to him as he kept trying to tack back to the center. But his tacking is getting increasingly tacky, and earlier this week, his column on "dignity" looked a bit silly next to one by Bob Herbert that radiated the real thing.

And now comes this YouTube video of Brooks expatiating on -- and exhibiting -- his understanding of dignity. Here we see him coming on to a camera pretty much the way he tells us that "drooling," affection-starved pols come on to their interns. What Brooks really needs now is a gentle nudge to stretch his "moment" into a long sabbatical.

There have been several reports in both the Arab and Israeli media in recent days that Egypt's aging, 28-year president Hosni Mubarak may be weakening his long-clenched hold on power.

Given Egypt's pivotal role in all the current diplomacy-- over Fateh-Hamas reconciliation; Israeli-Palestinian prisoner exchange; and consolidation of the Gaza ceasefire-- a weakening of Mubarak's grip could have serious consequences.

At the very least, if these reports are widely believed within Egypt's often delphically closed political elite, they could easily be sharpening the struggle to succeed the 81-year-old Mubarak.

This struggle is generally judged to pit his son Gamal against the security boss, Omar Suleiman... Who also (not coincidentally) happens to be the chief point-man on all those negotiations defined above.

So what is the status of these latest reports?

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Wilmot, New Hampshire. It is hard to think of a more wrong-headed take on the new GM than today's Times report on how a new muscle car will save the company. Imagine someone writing that a new Bee Gees will save Warner Music; imagine a government stupid enough to be 2/3 owner in such a venture, especially a government committed to reducing global warming and greening the economy.

In fact, the government gets one real prize with the new GM and that's Voltec, the working name for the electric power-train that is being integrated into the Chevy Volt, Cadillac Converj, and other vehicles scheduled for release over the next couple of years; a power-train whose 40-mile range will be extended by a 1.4 liter engine, acting as a dynamo when the battery pack runs down. (The tough little engine, by the way, was snared from Opel before its sale, a good example of finding components from within the global GM group, something the company will have to be great at in the future.

I'll be saying a lot more about this electric vehicle and its commercial "ecosystem" in the weeks ahead (I'm writing a feature for Inc., and will be blogging about it with the magazine's permission). Suffice it to say for now that Voltec has a fighting chance to remake GM the way cell phones remade Motorola in the 1980s (a failing consumer electronics company in the early 1970s). Indeed, GM has a chance to be the first to reconceive the car as a the ultimate mobile device, embedded in both a rich information network and a smart electric grid; the first, that is, to set standards for the operating system that will manage the battery pack, and the communications protocols that will allow millions of electric vehicles to syndicate information and communicate their requirements to smarter (hence, greener) public utilities.

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The stolen Iranian election, and the ugly events that followed it, cannot help but raise new fears about the possibility that Iran will soon join the list of nuclear armed states that includes the United States, United Kingdom, Israel, France, Russia, China, India, and Pakistan.

These fears are nothing new for the neoconservatives who have beaten the drums for war with Iran for years. They are gung ho for war with Iran just as they were gung ho for war with Iraq; they have little regard for the internal situation within the country or for whether Iran is actually seeking nuclear weapons rather than industrial nuclear power. Their ardor for war is visceral.

In fact, virtually all of them expressed support for Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in the June election because they openly feared that his defeat would legitimize a diplomatic approach to Iran. But that does not stop them from using their favored candidate's unholy triumph as justification for a war they would champion regardless of who won the election.

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Last night we did a post on the Israel Project's adoption of the term "ethnic cleansing" as a talking point for American Jews in opposing the removal of settlements from the West Bank. Repulsive. Well Newsweek yesterday published the Israel Project's "2009 Global Language Dictionary" that includes, on page 62, "The Best Settlement Argument," containing the claim, Why should peace require the ethnic cleansing of Jews from the West Bank?

Newsweek calls the pdf's publication a "web exclusive." Does this mean that the Mainstream Media are going to start reporting on the Israel lobby in an aggressive, even adversarial manner, which after all is a great American tradition with respect to corruption?

Thanks to Martin Wales for the fossicking here. The pdf after the jump.

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The morning news carries a story, the essence of which, is a sadly recurring piece of American life. A summer day camp in Philadelphia paid almost $2,000 so that its black and Latino children could go swimming one day a week at a privately-owned (white) pool club in the suburbs. After one visit, the children were met with a hostile reception by the pool's white patrons, the day camp's money was quickly refunded and the children told not to come back.

Incredibly, the pool club president told the Associated Press that the members of the club were not motivated by race when denying the children entrance after their camp had paid the requisite fee, but that "a lot of kids would change the complexion--and the atmosphere of the club."

Huntington Valley is an upper-middle class overwhelmingly white community with a total population of 20,917. Of those numbers, 158 are black, another 242 are Hispanic and 804 are Asian-American. There are many such residential enclaves in the United States of America. And they form the hard pit of reality inside the white nationalist phantasmagoria. At the end of my book, Blood and Politics: The History of the White Nationalist Movement from the Margins to the Mainstream, you will read the words of one of the recurring characters: white people will "pay $300,000 for a $75,000 home, just so they can live with other white people."

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Every once in awhile--heck, make that at least once a week--Charles Krauthammer writes something about President Obama that sets a new record for outlandish commentary. The former speechwriter for Walter Mondale turned neocon has become convulsed, more than almost any other columnist, by Obama hatred. Today's Washington Post column announces that Obama, in seeking better ties with Russia, is, in essence, destroying American national security for decades to come. Obama, Krauthammer alleges, is on the verge of selling out ballistic missile defense.

But Krauthammer's argument rests on a number of unpersuasive assumptions. For one thing, he states that "we can reliably shoot down an intercontinental ballistic missile," while Russia cannot. Actually, we can't. The tests have been iffy at best and there's no sound reason to believe that America can "reliably" shoot down an incoming missile, as nice as that might be. Krauthammer also alleges that Mikhail Gorbachev tried to "swindle" Ronald Reagan out of a missile defense system during negotiations at Reykjavik in 1986.

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The Israel Project, about as official a part of the lobby as you can find, is advising its members to ignore questions about the settlement issue with the charge that opposing settlements is "ethnic cleansing."

It is, in much of the same way that it would be ethnic cleansing if a bunch of Norwegians moved into my house, without my permission, and I called the cops to throw them out.

And in another sign of how unhinged the right is about President Obama's settlement freeze, Netanyahu publicly told the German Foreign Minister that the West Bank will never be "judenrein." That was the Nazi term meaning free of Jews.

I'm no Netanyahu fan but there is no way he would invoke Nazism to a German leader unless he was flipping out. Germany, for obvious reasons, is Israel's staunchest ally and -- even though Berlin knows the occupation is wrong -- backs Israel's position because of the actions of the Third Reich.

Even Bibi would not insult the Germans this way. Unless he's losing it.

Attacks on opponents of settlements as supporting ethnic cleansing or making the West Bank judenrein is real projection. It's like when Nixon, in his farewell address, said "always remember others may hate you, but those who hate you don't win unless you hate them, and then you destroy yourself."

He didn't know he was talking about himself.

The so-called "green shoots" of recovery are turning brown in the scorching summer sun. In fact, the whole debate about when and how a recovery will begin is wrongly framed. On one side are the V-shapers who look back at prior recessions and conclude that the faster an economy drops, the faster it gets back on track. And because this economy fell off a cliff late last fall, they expect it to roar to life early next year. Hence the V shape.

Unfortunately, V-shapers are looking back at the wrong recessions. Focus on those that started with the bursting of a giant speculative bubble and you see slow recoveries. The reason is asset values at bottom are so low that investor confidence returns only gradually.

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www.KatieHalper.com

In its response to the events of Honduras, the Obama Administration is acting like a CT (Coup-tease), whose commitment phobia and"joint military operations. " intimacy issues render it paralyzed and unable to engage in a healthy relationship with Latin America. The Administration flirts with the idea that the coup is really a coup, and it has coquettishly suspended

Ultimately, however, Obama has refrained from doing the deed, which would mean cutting off aid to Honduras until Zelaya is reinstated. Obama promised he wasn't like all the other guys, but he is repeating some of the behavior and habits displayed by former presidents.

1. At the end of the day, the coup is just not as tweetable as Iran. 

2. Treating it as a coup is waaaay too trendy. Everybody is doing it.

3. We kinda sorta trained the coup leaders at the School of the Americas so it's like kinda awkward. Both Honduran coup leader Gen. Romeo Orlando Vásquez Velásquez and Air Force General and coup participant Luis Javier Prince Suazo attended the SOA in 1976 and 1984.

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From today's Ha'aretz: "Netanyahu appears to be suffering from confusion and paranoia. He is convinced that the media are after him, that his aides are leaking information against him and that the American administration wants him out of office. Two months after his visit to Washington, he is still finding it difficult to communicate normally with the White House. To appreciate the depth of his paranoia, it is enough to hear how he refers to Rahm Emanuel and David Axelrod, Obama's senior aides: as "self-hating Jews."

Apparently, the pressure from the United States is getting to Bibi. I guess he got used to the idea of an Elliot Abrams who, while working in the White House, sabotaged every Bush policy he could on behalf of the Greater Israel concept. He literally called the Israelis and told them not to pay attention to Secretary of State Colin Powell when the General went to the region to promote an Israeli-Palestinian agreement.

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I've been in Israel for a week now and as always, when I arrive, I'm trying to assess the mood in the street. Unlike most other American Jews who come to Israel, I also spend a lot of time with friends and colleagues in East Jerusalem and the Palestinian West Bank to assess both the Israeli and Palestinian temperature.

Everyone is asking the same question: is President Obama serious about pushing for a solid, negotiated peace? Does he mean business and how quickly will he get us there? This question is asked with more or less anticipation depending on where you fall in the political spectrum.

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All politics is about the art of compromise. But when is a compromise a victory and when is it a sell out?

A good compromise is one that improves people's lives, upholds basic principles, changes power relations, and lays the groundwork for further reform.

There's lots of talk about "compromise" in the current debate over health care reform. But it isn't clear what standards pundits, politicians, lobbyists, and activists are using in determining what is and isn't a reasonable compromise.

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This just makes me ill (almost literally).

I am posting this video because those of us who cannot imagine such things need to know they still exist. The faces of those kids....

GOOD NEWS: Sen. Arlen Specter (D-PA) has stepped up to confront the club and the ugly racism demonstrated by its actions. Go, Arlen!

In November 2007, on the weekend after a $5 million one day "moneybomb" for Rep. Ron Paul's presidential bid, I covered a rally for the candidate in Philadelphia and met a student who had come to pass out fliers attacking him. "He's got truly radical views that are being mainstreamed at events like this," said Matt Sullivan, a liberal who was attending Temple University. A largely white crowd brushed him aside; his fliers, which reprinted racist statements about blacks that ran in an old Paul newsletter, were crumpled up.

Two months later, everyone who followed the race learned that Paul's connections to racists had been hidden in plain sight, in many more newsletters and in speaking engagements. In October 2008, Paul spoke at the 50th Anniversary of the John Birch Society.

All of this has been forgotten in the mainstream press, in which Paul is covered as a compelling political eccentric, but I thought of all it while reading Blood and Politics. At one point, Leonard Zeskind recreates a 1983 meeting of "tax protesters" and "Identity Christians" in Kansas who pass around a flier that can inform their neighbors of why their farms are worth ever less and less. It excoriates "Jewish bankers" and names "the real owners" of the Federal Reserve, including the Rothschilds, the Rockefellers, Lehman Brothers, and Goldman Sachs.

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When I was just beginning to do the research and writing on this subject matter, in 1981, reporter Dean Calbreath wrote an article for the Columbia Journalism Review describing how he and other reporters had inadvertently become the dupes of white supremacists who regularly and purposefully lied to the press. The moral of that story was simple to me: if you don't trust your source, don't believe anything that you can not independently confirm. During that same period of time, Nashville Tennessean reporter Jerry Thompson infiltrated the Klan and uncovered some startling new information that otherwise would never have come to light. Those messages were not lost on me while writing Blood and Politics: find out as much as you can either first hand or from completely reliable sources.

Several events took place which enabled me to do just that, and write a better book in the process.

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In my book The Accidental American, I write about the immigration debate, which has been so influenced by nativists that we've been unable to pass a fair national policy, much less a modern one that takes globalization and cultural change into full account. Despite endless data about the many benefits immigrants bring, Americans who know better cannot get past their image of brown-skinned immigrants being evil.

My friend Leeann Hall told me this story a couple of years ago. LeeAnn is the director of a federation of community organizations in the largely white northwestern states. In 2006, her responsibilities included reaching put to their members in Weippe, Idaho (population 383) to get their support for comprehensive immigration reform. She arrived to find the townspeople full of the day's big news; after months of searching, federal officials had caught the white supremacist who had been shooting up the local lumber mill. It was widely believed that the terrorist had been living on the white supremacist "Almost Heaven" compound where Colonel Bo Gritz teaches paramilitary and survivalist skills.

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It's taken me a while to unpack my trip to Gaza last month. Part of this is technical (I only just learned to upload videos to Youtube) but mostly it is emotional. I have a lot to sort out. Today in my notebooks from Gaza I find a scrawled message I left for myself while we were sitting in one meeting or another. "Annals of Tyranny." That is what we experienced in Gaza: we saw tyranny at every hand. Control over virtually every aspect of other people's lives--Arab people's lives.

We left Gaza with a tremendous responsibility to convey our understanding to the world. Today I'm going to try and execute part of my responsibility by posting videos of two students who have tried to leave Gaza on scholarships but have been prevented from doing so.

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Due to some scheduling changes, Rep. Henry Waxman and Josh Green will not be joining us this week for a Book Club discussion of The Waxman Report. They will be at TPMCafe later this summer instead!

In the meantime, we're extending the great discussion of Leonard Zeskind's Blood and Politics: The History of the White Nationalist Movement from the Margins to the Mainstream into this week. Given recent incidents of violence that have shaped the national debate, this discussion is particularly relevant, and well-served by a panel of experts. Joining Leonard in the discussion are Rinku Sen, President and Executive Director of the Applied Research Center and Publisher of ColorLines magazine; David Weigel, an associate editor of Reason magazine and Reason.com and contributor for The Washington Independent; Michelle Goldberg, journalist and author of Kingdom Coming: The Rise of Christian Nationalism; James Ridgeway, Senior Washington Correspondent for Mother Jones and author of Blood in the Face: The Ku Klux Klan, Aryan Nations, Nazi Skinheads, and the Rise of a New White Culture; and Devin Burghart of the Institute for Research & Education on Human Rights and Center for New Community.

Catch up on the discussion here - be sure to read the comments, as Leonard and others have actively participated in certain threads - and keep an eye out for new posts today from the participants.

I yield to no one in my delight that President Obama is bringing a whole new attitude to international relations, and I salute his consistent efforts to restore the good name of the United States across the world. The new goodwill was supposed to make it easier for the US and other nations to work together. What is happening instead, at least in dealing with Russia, is that the Obama administration is making major concessions--in order to make it seem that the new spin is working.

The Russians are very excited about the Bush-designed plan to position a missile defense system in the Czech Republic and Poland. The Obama administration is moving toward an agreement to place the missile defense some other place, one the Russians approve of, and to make it into a joint defense project. Thus, the US satisfies in full a major Russian demand--getting what in exchange? A temporary pause to Russia cussing us out?

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I can't say that I'm surprised that Russians don't share the global excitement about President Obama. As anyone at all familiar with Russia knows, it is a pretty racist place. The Times today quotes a Russian about why the average Russian is unimpressed with Obama. He's black.

"Many young Russians, like David Zokhrabian, 21, who recently received a graduate degree in international relations from Moscow State University, said Mr. Obama's race cut both ways. "Students in Moscow, they are pretty positive about this," he said.....But the same cannot be said for average Russians, he said, adding: 'It looks weird to them. They just think that America has gone crazy.' "

Israel is now the home to a million recently arrived Russian Jews and they are, to put it mildly, obsessed with Obama's race (not in a good way). Check out this Ha'aretz article about how the mainstream Russian media in Israel is convening television panels on whether or not Obama can overcome the "curse" God put on those with black skins. Bottom line: blacks are meant to be slaves. Why doesn't Obama know that?

None of this should be a big surprise. Just as we'd expect the EU and (all but one) Middle Eastern countries to be excited by what Obama signifies, we should expect others to be repelled. Fortunately, it doesn't matter. It is just ugly.

I was surprised to read the Washington Post quote economist Mark Zandi this morning: "'the economy has been measurably worse than anyone expected,' with a surprisingly sharp 'collapse in employment and surge in unemployment.'"

This is surprising, because the economy has absolutely not been "measurably worse than anyone expected." It has been pretty much following exactly the course that some of us predicted. In addition to myself, I can think of Paul Krugman, Joe Stiglitiz and Jamie Galbraith as economists who said that the economy was sinking faster than the projections used by President Obama implied. Here is an example and here, and here.

It would be nice if some of these folks could acknowledge being wrong rather than falling back on the no one could have known story. The great thing about doing economic policy in this country is that you can be wrong every single day on everything you say and it doesn't affect your credibility one iota.

Sometimes the smartest thing for news-media revolutionaries to do is pause and admire what the New York Times does wonderfully well, when it does do it.

I've excoriated the blunderbuss of Eighth Avenue often enough to say credibly, I hope, that sometimes it reminds us that serious journalism requires more than instant videos, twitter alerts, reader feeds, and bolt-of-lightning insights. It demands climbing a tenement's stairs the second time to be sure of what's there, or making that last call to an elusive or forgotten source on one's list, or seeing the look on a campaign manager's face as you pop your question.

At times, in other words, there's no substitute for an experienced reporter's going there and bringing both public memory and professional skill to the job -- especially when the story seems obvious and familiar. Telling the truth always takes time and resources.

Corporate bottom-lining now cuts against giving reporters what they need, and it's maddening that so many serious journalists at other newspapers are being starved or corrupted. New media like TPM are striving to fill the breach and often succeeding.

But three pieces in yesterday's Times show what it is we all need to achieve. If you missed them, here they are, and here's why they matter.

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The Obama administration is now decisively shifting the focus of US military activities from Iraq to Afghanistan. That war effort has now significantly affected US-Russian relations: In response to sustained US-NATO pleadings, Russia has now given permission for 4,500 overflights of Russia by US military aircraft every year, in an attempt to maintain US supply lines into Afghanistan that have been severely curtailed by anti-US activities along the road route in Pakistan.

The US military effort in Afghanistan has not been going well. Indeed, it is very clear by now that the gross mis-match between the US-NATO's over-militarized tools and methods and the real requirements of the Afghan people for peace and stability, the cultural mis-match between NATO powers and Afghanistan's people, and the sheer length of the US-NATO supply lines into land-locked Afghanistan, between them guarantee that there will be no US military victory there.

And it's very hard to see the US and NATO as being capable of any other kind of victory, either.

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Robert McNamara's passing reminds us that "the best and brightest" often are the most tragic characters in the Shakespearean world of politics. To read Tim Weiner's magnificent obituary is to understand the depth of that tragedy.

The war became his personal nightmare. Nothing he did, none of the tools at his command -- the power of American weapons, the forces of technology and logic, or the strength of American soldiers -- could stop the armies of North Vietnam and their South Vietnamese allies, the Vietcong. He concluded well before leaving the Pentagon that the war was futile, but he did not share that insight with the public until late in life.

McNamara had gotten his reputation for a "right-sizing" turnaround at the Ford Motor Company. I am sure that when Jack Kennedy brought him into the Pentagon, he was thinking the same techniques could be applied to the bloated bureaucracy of the Defense Department. But like the Soviet Nomenklatura, the beast could not be tamed and then the senseless War in Vietnam made cutting budgets impossible. By the end of his term, defense budgets had doubled. The Cost of Empire was never to come down again.

Will the tragedy of the Military Industrial Complex bloated influence continue to haunt us and our children for another generation?

The Obama administration's preliminary agreement with Russia to reduce each nation's nuclear arsenal is a small step towards carrying out the president's pledge to seek a "world free of nuclear weapons." The question is, why was it so small?

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Kate Snow of ABC News scores the Big Get with Sarah Palin, and elicits this amazing quotation:

as for whether another pursuit of national office...would result in the same political blood sport, Palin said there is a difference between the White House and what she has experienced in Alaska. If she were in the White House, she said, the "department of law" would protect her from baseless ethical allegations.

"I think on a national level, your department of law there in the White House would look at some of the things that we've been charged with and automatically throw them out," she said.

Snow's droll, too-true follow-up line:

There is no "Department of Law" at the White House.

What there is is a legal counsel. He or she counsels but does not "throw" anything "out."

Ten years ago, it was de rigueur for news organizations to go to every Democrat under the sun and press them on their views of Bill Clinton's carrying on with Monica Lewinsky. May we expect the same full-court press on every Republican, to see how they feel about having campaigned, not so long ago, to put this woman one 73-year-old heartbeat away from the Oval Office?

Shall we hear more from Bill Kristol, he who granted his imprimatur to the Governor way back when she was peaceably ensconced in Juneau?

Or Ross Douthat, who on Monday informed his NYT readers that "Sarah Palin represents the democratic ideal -- that anyone can grow up to be a great success story without graduating from Columbia and Harvard." And that: "Sarah Palin is beloved by millions because her rise suggested, however temporarily, that the old American aphorism about how anyone can grow up to be president might actually be true."

Greg Marx at CJR refutes Douthat's faux populism. Sarah Palin is beloved by the Republican base, period. There's no evidence that anyone else loves her (besides Tina Fey and comedy-lovers everywhere).

Truth is, anyone can be a great success story on the op-ed page of the NYT even if he's been to Harvard.

So much for that.

The President said today that he has "absolutely not" given Israel a "green light" to attack Iran.

So Biden either misspoke, was misinterpreted, or has just been corrected by his boss. Israel will get no green light to attack. We will, as Obama said all along, rely on diplomacy to solve the Iran problem.

Good. But we need to do something. I think the mullahs have demonstrated that they are capable of absolutely anything -- including nuking Israel despite the cost to their own people (about whom they care not at all).

But an Israeli attack would not solve anything; on the contrary it would create the havoc in the Middle East like nothing we've experienced yet (and jeopardize the lives of 120,000 American troops next door).

Obama knows that. And if anyone can unravel this knot, it's him.

Poor Carolyn Maloney. She thinks she has the right to challenge New York's appointed senator, Kristin Gillibrand, in a primary because she dislikes Gillibrand's record and thinks she, Maloney, would be a better senator.

Well, as the Beatles song goes, she "didn't notice that the lights had changed." And the light is bright red when it comes to challenging Congressional incumbents in primaries unless the incumbent is caught up in a major scandal or egregiously disses the party (i.e., Joe Lieberman). Democrats no longer believe in challenging incumbents over issues.

It wasn't that way when I was a kid. In New York, the best House Members in the delegation had knocked off fellow liberal Democrats in primaries. Jonathan Bingham, Liz Holtzman, Steve Solarz, Jim Scheuer and Bella Abzug all knocked off long time Democratic incumbents (mostly over the issue of the Vietnam war). Holtzman defeated the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee. On the Republican side Alfonse D'Amato beat Senator Jacob Javits (that one was no improvement, obviously).

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this is a very instructive Israeli TV tape, from Channel two in Israel, documenting Peace Now's "settlement watch" activity and a violent attack by a settler on a televsion crew and Peace Now activists. Worth watching.

If anyone abetted Iranians' brave, breathtaking defiance of the anti-republican rot in the "Islamic Republic" of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei last month, it was Barack Obama. George W. Bush had strengthened that regime by offending Iranians' national pride. Obama weakened it with his March 19 Persian New Year address and his June 4 Cairo speech, eight days before Iran's elections.

"The United States wants the Islamic Republic of Iran to take its rightful place in the community of nations," he said on March 19, "but it comes with real responsibilities, and that place cannot be reached through terror or arms, but rather through peaceful actions that demonstrate the true greatness of the Iranian people and civilization."

Enough Iranians took him up on this to remind the world that sometimes America's strength lies more in its civic depth than in its armed might. As Turkish scholar Ibrahim Kalin put it, "People see in [Obama - and, I'd add, in our 2008 election] something they would like to see in their own leaders, and that, in itself, creates huge expectations." Those expectations are still rising: Yesterday, major Iranian clerics called the election and the regime "illegitimate."

But now comes Joe Biden, raising different expectations.

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