Glenn Beck and all his wingnut media cronies have spent two months promoting today's March on Washington on both radio and Television. The Politico, financed by Reagan/Bush/Pinochet crony, Joe Allbritton, breathlessly asks the question, "is this a movement?"

Borrowing tactics more familiar to protestors on the left, they're pouring into the Washington area in hundreds of buses, newly engaged grassroots activists who plan to march down Pennsylvania Avenue and voice their mounting displeasure with their government.

Organizers predicted a crowd of up to 200,000 but the Washington Post reports that maybe 30,000 showed up. Maybe Kenneth Vogel of Politico is too young to know what a Movement of "protestors on the left looks like."

Norman Podhoretz is essentially the founder of neoconservatism and he just doesn't understand why a movement he started to lead the Jews out of the bankrupt desert of liberalism has essentially no Jewish followers. In fact he has just written a whole book about his deep disappointment with American Jews.

Of course, Norman is not all alone. He still has the big name Jewish neocons like Doug Feith, Elliot Abrams (his step-son-in-law), Bill Kristol, Charles Krauthammer, Scooter Libby, Jonah Goldberg and a dozen other Iraq war cheerleaders (now moved on to Iran).

But the Jewish populace has stayed as liberal as ever with 78% voting for Barack Obama. Plus, Jews -- after African-Americans --are the segment of the population that most opposed the Iraq war and now opposes war with Iran.

Why are Jews liberals? Because they understand, what Podhoretz once did, that racists and those who put the almighty dollar above the interests of the American people invariably turn on the Jews. Jews are liberals out of enlightened self-interest combined with a genuine interest in their fellow Americans.

So what happened to Podhoretz. It starts with Israel. Back in the late 1960's, the occasional liberal started thinking critically of the occupation. Podhoretz and company read the handwriting on the wall and realized that liberals(by which I mean the kind of people who venerate Eleanor Roosevelt) would ultimately let their concern for human rights stop them from full-throated support for everything Israel does.

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Michael Tomasky nails it: Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty's latest excursus into the Republican Dixie suck-up, as he "urged fellow governors on Thursday to more frequently assert state sovereignty over the federal government and suggested that the country may increasingly see states suing the federal government," has a fabulous lineage--the nullification movement of 1832, led (surprise!) by South Carolina, which set forth the doctrine that the states had the right to nullify Federal law. In the run-up to South Carolina's declaration that it was not bound by Federal tariffs, the state had in 1822 passed a Negro Seamen Act, requiring that sheriffs arrest all free black seamen while their ships were docked, lest they join slave rebellions.

This is the proud tradition that today's moderate, nonfanatical northern Republicans embrace.

It is the same tradition that the Roberts Court has been promoting in the sort-of United States of America--which is why the Wednesday night heckler Joe Wilson of South Carolina has to be taken seriously.

Who said Wilson's former boss Strom Thurmond was dead?

Update: The Wilson story keeps on giving. Courtesy Jack Bass of the College of Charleston:

Several years ago, [now-Rep. Wilson] loudly denounced the claim of Essie Mae Washington-Williams as being a daughter of Strom Thurmond. Mr. Wilson called her story "unseemly" and a "smear." Her name today is listed on the State House monument to her father, alongside those of his white children.

Actually, perhaps trending pretty rapidly toward the truly catastrophic?

Joshua Fost of Registan blogged earlier today that "Ghazni Province is falling to the Taliban." (Map and basic info on Ghazni are here.)

Later in Foust's post, seems to backtrack a bit, writing,

There's no way to know if that's what is going on in Ghazni. There is almost no media presence there... and non-essential [US/NATO] units are starting to avoid the area (one friend told me the special forces there are advising non-SOF groups to stay away because of the danger). Without more information, we don't know for certain how things are shaping up in the province as a whole, but given how many districts had zero voting during the elections (reportedly 11), it's pretty clear the Taliban are claiming the province bit by bit.

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Even though after the Wednesday speech approval of Obama's Health Care plan is back to robust levels, we ought to begin asking the question if we are not experiencing a return to one of the most disgraceful eras of American history--the McCarthy reign of terror in the early 1950's. As you can see from Herblock's classic cartoon, the Republican Party was a willing co-conspirator with Senator McCarthy. The scary part about our current witch hunt is that Joe McCarthy, unlike Glenn Beck, never had a billionaire media partner like Rupert Murdoch.

Beck, after successfully waving the scalps of supposed radicals Van Jones and Yosi Sergant has now turned his witch hunt on Mark Lloyd, associate General Council of the FCC; Cass Sunstein, head of the Office of Information and Regulatory Policy; and Carol Browner, a White House Advisor on Climate Policy. I Assume Beck has his boss Rupert's full permission to pursue the blacklisting and defamation of Lloyd, Sunstein and Browner. Both Fox News and Murdoch's Wall Street Journal are pushing this story so it would be a mistake to dismiss this as a single whack-job TV commentator.

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Do you remember where you were during our generation's defining hour? When the towers fell and the Pentagon was ablaze, our nation took pause. Now eight years later, it seems that we are still standing still, frozen in time, and as a country, still waiting for the healing to begin.

On September 11, 2001, I stood on the pile of burning rubble at the south end of Manhattan with thousands of other Americans who did what we could to make a difference. Firefighters, doctors, soldiers, cops, steelworkers, and nurses--we all came together to serve our country in a time of exceptional need. I will never forget the courage and the expressions of sorrow, the sight of the bodies and the smell of the smoke. And I will never forget the bold promises of our leaders, uttered loudly before the smoke cleared.

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I had thought the attacks on the bias of Human Rights Watch were invariably politically motivated. In fact, most of it is. The lobby opposes any and all mention of Israel's violations of human rights, whether it comes from HRW or Israeli patriots.

Nonetheless, this is disturbing. HRW's top critic of Israel's military is a collector of Nazi junk. He loves the stuff and even wrote a book celebrating his hobby.

Here is what Helena Cobban has to say about it. She is a long-time critic of Israel, deemed "no friend of Israel" by the lobby types. (Of course, she is. She just hates the occupation).

Helena does a brave thing in this column. She tells her friends what they do not want to hear. It is so much easier calling out one's enemies.

This is one spooky story. Human Rights Watch has some serious decisions too make.

A major reason why a sensible health system has been throttled for decades: insurance companies, which thrive best when they deny care; insurance companies, which unlike hospitals, doctors, nurses, and other health workers, contribute nothing of value to national health; insurance companies, which line the pockets of the people's legislators.

Here are some numbers to bear in mind, and inscribe on signs, and pass out on flyers, and send to your friends, doctors, uncertains, Blue Dogs, Black Cats, whatever, during this fall's home stretch:

Total expenditure by private insurance companies, 2007: $680 billion*
Total expenditure on administrative costs + profits, 2007: $95 billion

Percentage of total expenditure spent on administrative costs + profits = 14%.

In other words, one in seven dollars Americans pay insurance companies stays with them.

By contrast, here are 2007 figures for Social Security and Medicare administrative costs:

Social Security = 0.9%

Medicare = 3%*

The people who run these companies may not be "bad people," but their institutional interest is not the public's interest. Not. The. Public's. Interest.

* The $680 billion does not include our co-pays and other out-of-pocket expenses.

** The Right disputes the Medicare figure. But nobody, nobody, claims that Medicare's true administrative costs are anything like 14%.

Update 12:51 pm. I apologize for earlier figures--my haste and sloppiness were to blame. Thanks to Harold Pollack of the University of Chicago for helping to set me straight.

Okay- it's an ideosyncracy but I am a big defender of President Ulysses Grant, but then the only President in the 19th century to indict Klan leaders and actually work to give African-Americans the chance to vote deserves far more credit than he usually receives. So I'll take some issue with M.J. Rosenberg's political history, at least as far as reducing Grant's Presidency to mere grant-- a standard historical trope that was part of rightwing historical attacks on the Reconstruction era. Politics was hardly pure then, but I'm not sure in the present period where corporate money has such free rein, it's hard to make too broad condemnation.

Garfield was a decent Congressman on racial issues but he readily embraced withdrawing federal troops from the South after 1877 and he was allied with the rightwing economic wing of the Republicans, a "hard money" man who called regulations of railroads "Communism in disguise." This was the era when Rutherford Hayes began the new tradition of using federal troops redeployed from the South to break strikes in the North. Former President Grant acidly remarked at the time that this anti-labor wing of the Republicans were the same people who had resisted using federal troops "to protect the lives of negroes. Now, however, there is no hesitation about exhausting the whole power of the government to suppress a strike on the slightest intimation that danger threatens."

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Sorry to chime in late on this. Andrea, I enjoyed the book, and read with particular interest the sections on financial literacy. I've observed and participated in some of these efforts over the years, and had a somewhat similar reaction. As you note, most of the efforts to promote financial literacy in primary and secondary education are sponsored/underwritten by financial services companies, who, as a group, have proven themselves to be unfamiliar with the basics of financial literacy. And their goal is not so much to teach kids how to be really smart consumers of financial products as to just be consumers. For example, it's doubtful volunteers from a mutual fund company would be telling high school kids that actively managed mutual funds are pretty much a waste and that the best way to invest in stocks is through low-cost index funds offered by the likes of Vanguard.

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With all the focus on the public option debate, there has been far less on the importance of maintaining a strong mandate for employers to provide health care -- another feature of the House bill that conservatives have vigorously opposed.

And the reason it's important is, at least partly, because Obama did not lie-- despite Congressman Wilson's shout, all the public options as designed will not be available to undocumented immigrants, so for millions of undocumented Americans, employer-provided health care will likely remain the only source of health services outside of emergency rooms.

Similarly, given rightwing pressure, the public option will likely severely restrict funding for abortion services and I've seen few details on whether domestic partners will have the same access to health care under the public option as many do under employer-provided plans.

Like many folks, I've done quite a bit of organizing on behalf of the public option, but given some of the restrictions being put on it, I end up agreeing with Obama that it's only part of the solution. And I hope advocates keep their eye on maintaining strong employer mandates which will likely be crucial to delivering more health care to more people that even the public option.

The real political race for health care has just begun. The significance of the President's speech to Washington insiders was its signal about where the White House is placing its bets and its support. More on this in a moment. First, let's be clear about who's racing and why. Think of the speech as the starting gate of a two-month sprint between two competitors -- and they're not Democrats and Republicans.

On one side are America's biggest private insurers and Big Pharma. They're drooling over the prospect of tens of millions more Americans buying insurance and drugs because the pending legislation will require them to, or require employers to cover them. The pending expansion of Medicaid will also be a bonanza. Amerigroup Corp., UnitedHealth Group Inc. and other companies that administer Medicaid are looking at 10 million more customers. Healthcare Inc.’s Medicaid enrollment is expected to jump by 43 percent, according to its CEO. WellPoint Inc., the largest U.S. insurer, is also looking at big gains.

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Check out this press release announcing Iran Advocacy Day. It's today and it marks the start of the fall push on Iran

The United Jewish Communities (formerly called UJA) is about as mainstream a Jewish organization as exists in this country. It reprents the Jewish grassroots and is not thought of as politically controversial.

No doubt its Iran policy comes from AIPAC, with which it is closely associated.

An excerpt from the press release. "Reflecting support for President Obama's position that Iran's acquisition of nuclear arms capacity is 'unacceptable,' this Advocacy Day is intended to urge implementation of strong economic and diplomatic measures directed at the Iranian regime and the expeditious adoption of key legislative initiatives now before Congress, including the Iran Refined Petroleum Sanctions Act.

National and community leaders are meeting with members of Congress because of the grave threat that a nuclear-armed Iran would pose to fundamental U.S. national security interests and to world peace. They will encourage the Administration to take full advantage of the tools provided by the proposed legislation in order to advance the international effort to prevent Iran from gaining a nuclear arms capability."

Note the Congressional leaders they are meeting with. The Iran push will be bipartisan with Steny Hoyer and Eric Cantor leading the charge. Bipartisanship at last.

Get ready. Iraq redux. Here's more. And more.

I did something embarrassing this past summer. I bought and read the (then) #1 non-fiction best seller: Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers. I expected the usual Gladwell, smart, off-beat, the distiller of academic psychological data for people responsible for judging (and perhaps marketing to) the rest of us. What I found was a profoundly humane grasp of ordinary fate. Consider reading Outliers in the silence induced by President Obama's closing words to Congress last night.

Gladwell purports to write about what makes unusual people successful. But it's the negative space that stays with you: the things we all need to catch a break. I mean the luck to be born at the right time and place. The luck to have local ways to develop ones' talents. The luck to be born to a family that assumes you will indeed have talents to develop and then demands the rigor to master difficult tasks. The luck to be born to a culture that allows you to fail and continue learning, or (what is often the same thing) to speak your mind without undue discouragement from hierarchy.

The luck, in short, to be born, if not a Kennedy, then (as Gladwell and I were ) a Canadian. For you add up the lucks and what you have is really something quite predictable: the benefits of a welfare state--or what I like to call (since this is a knowledge economy) a mentor state.

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I'm glad Congressman Wilson apologized and I am pleased that he looked so scared and teary eyed today. That means the GOP leadership took him to the woodshed and are not following the lead of the radio and internet crazies who are celebrating his appalling behavior.

I just re-read a book that brings home why we need to take this political ugliness seriously. The book by a Washington attorney (and Republican activist) is called "Dark Horse: The Surprise Election and Political Murder of President James A. Garfield."

The book is fascinating and reads like a heart-breaking thriller.

Ackerman shows that the 20th President was murdered not by some lone lunatic gone postal, but by a lunatic (yes, he was that) inspired by the non-stop venom directed at Garfield. The vitriol, starting from the moment of his surprise nomination, came from Republican operatives, office holders, editors and Congressional extremists.

No, Garfield wasn't African-American. But he was, by the standards of 1880, an insurgent. The frontrunner that year was former President Grant who was backed by powerful GOP interests planning on more graft income should there be a third corrupt Grant term.

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I love Chipotle. I'm not actually the biggest organic, fresh food advocate but they almost make me a believer. So I was not happy a month or two ago when it came out that they were buying tomotoes from super low-wage pickers.

But under pressure of boycott by the Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW), a community-based organization that has led a campaign to improve wages and working conditions for Florida farm workers, Chipotle agreed to pay an additional penny per pound, a wage increase of 64 percent for workers picking tomatoes for Chipotle.

One of the reasons I ignore the constant drumbeat of negative speculation about the future of unions (which has lasted pretty much non-stop for well over a century or more) is that workers keep standing up and organizing and winning, yes suffering setbacks on occasion, but then moving forward as well.

I wonder how many Americans know that a Democrat. FDR, created Social Security over the objections of Republicans. Or that LBJ created Medicare over the objection of Republicans, with the 1964 Presidential nominee, Barry Goldwater, calling it "socialized medicine."

But Obama rarely mentions it.

Yes, he alludes to previous efforts to enact health reform but obliquely, without driving home the point that today's battle between Democrats and rightwing Republicans is part of an old struggle. .

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Others more knowledgeable than I about the mechanics of health care reform, like TNR's Jonathan Cohn, have already begun commenting on the details that Obama elevated in his Wednesday night speech. I want to say only a small thing about a very large thing: his spirit.

He sounded like a winner. Like all great preachers, he started methodically and built to crescendos. The Republican responder, Charles Boustany of Louisiana, sounded like a whiner, crying, Deficit, deficit, and government-run, government-run, and built toward nothing. Obama charged the Republicans with specific lies. He made the obligatory gestures toward bipartisanship, including the unexpected shout-out to John McCain, who had campaigned in favor of mandatory catastrophic insurance--and I don't want to be cynical about those gestures, even though I think he's naive about the other party's intentions--but that's not where his stresses fell. He was reminding the majority who voted for him why they did that. He was reminding independents that the reason why no progress has been made toward universality, mandates, and affordabiity is Republicans--as with 1935's Social Security and 1965's Medicare laws. He was reminding them, as well as the few rational Republicans left, that the insurance companies are not the glories of American value.

He did not sound like a patsy. He offered specific programs but the peroration was clear: he stood for values and national character. If he went too easy on the insurance companies for my taste--his audience could have used the information that Americans pay insurance companies twice as much as they pay doctors--he took a proper jab at Republicans (they know who they are) who make up the party of fear. You can say that he's still not willing to talk to Americans straight about the need to limit high-tech medicine for the very old and very frail. Presidents won't do that.

But he bet on the strength of the American character. It was his finest public moment since the Inaugural. I'm betting national decency wins.

Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) is on Countdown saying it's the best speech to a joint session he's seen in 18 years in Congress. It certainly was the best I've ever seen. He bitch slapped the right wing Repubs, Beck, Limbaugh and the Insurance companies all in the period of a three minute section on "misinformation". He used the word "lie" which Presidents never use.

This is the fighting spirit that was called for.

It was a great speech, the most effective and moving speech Obama has given.as President.

Will it do the job? Will it produce a bill?

Yes, it will. But not because he won over the Republicans. The ridiculous Eric Cantor was typical of his GOP colleagues. He sat up there, right in front of the President of the United States, tweeting on his Blackberry. He at least looked like a living adolescent. Most of his colleagues looked like the jury at the Salem witch trials, with an occasional madman screaming epithets at the President whose very countenance offends so many rightwingers.

But this speech worked because it will galvanize Democratic support. The President's passion -- the first time we've seen it in a year -- will bring straying Democrats back. And the Republicans now know that there will be a bill with them or without them. The implied threat of going the reconciliation route was just below the surface.

That is why the Republicans looked so miserable. They either work with Obama to produce a bill or Democrats pass a bill without them.

Am I sure about all this? No, not completely. The haters and racists who fought against a Presidential speech to school kids are still out there. I hope, but do not know if their force is spent. However, without the phony town meetings and the media hype surrounding them, they will very likely be relegated to the dank and stinking spot in the national cellar where the racists and nativists have always dwelled.

We'll see. My prediction is that Obama turned it around tonight. At last, he channeled FDR, JFK, LBJ and Clinton. He can do this. And we have to figure out the best way to help.

As I listened today - and as you can right now --to Supreme Court justices questioning the proponents and opponents of a suit to overturn campaign-finance regulations, the main point of contention was whether the McCain-Feingold law and previous rulings violate the free-speech "rights" of those non-citizens and non-persons we call corporations. Listening in made me an enthusiast for audio (and, someday, video) coverage of the Court's public sessions.

For one thing, it was downright inspiring -- at least to me as a civic republican -- to find the formidable conservative Justices Antonin Scalia and John Roberts so willfully ignorant of political and corporate life. Justice is properly blind, but not as small-minded as the justices, who sounded as if they had no understanding of what it takes to run for office or to run a corporation.

Liberals on the court are inexperienced at this, too (although Justice Sonia Sotomayor knows the corporate world firsthand). But it was conservatives who fastidiously lifted their hems above the muck of real political and economic life to justify sweeping away regulations that keep big-corporate money from overwhelming the democratic electoral and legislative process. They also all-but dismissed legal principles and doctrines as different as stare decisis and "original intent.

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As I read Andrea's post yesterday, I was struck by the timing. Just hours before, President Obama delivered a speech to students in which he exhorted them to ask questions, get help, work hard, and most of all, find success against odds. I listened to the speech and thought it was pretty good. If I had been a school kid, I think I would have been impressed. It's not every day that the President gives a speech just for kids.

So a few weeks ago when I heard about the coming speech, I didn't think much of it. The next day, however, I was surprised to see how some people across the country were angry about the speech - they felt that it was wrong for the President to speak to kids about staying in school. They were concerned that kids would be unduly influenced by the President's address. That to me seemed outrageous. I can understand not liking a President. Heck, I just lived through 8 years of that. But to say you don't want your kid to listen to a speech because you're concerned that they'll be unduly influenced by it? That's not saying much for your kid. In fact, it's not saying much for any of us. Are we really so concerned that a President's speech to school kids about staying in school could have a negative impact on our kids that we'll TAKE THEM OUT OF SCHOOL? Really?

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Andrea's book, The Death of Why, could not come out at a more appropriate time. It's premise has unfortunately become a truism - in the American Idiocracy, we have stopped asking even the simplest questions, much less the tough ones like "why."

Instead of offering up examples that prove Andrea's thesis, let's just take a moment and ask a meta question - why the death of why? In other words, why have we stopped asking questions in a democracy that gives citizens the historically rare chance to inquire?

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Back in the early 1980's -- before I recovered my senses -- I worked at AIPAC. At that time, twenty-five years after its founding, it would have killed to have a story about it in the Sunday New York Times magazine.

In fact, I don't think AIPAC has gotten this kind of coverage to this day.

J Street deserves this. And Jeremy Ben Ami puts Don Draper to shame. He knows how to sell.. But, as Don Draper would tell you, "you have to have a product." (AIPAC has a very effective and talented spokesperson; but he is selling last year's -- no, the last century's -- line).

Supporting the peace process and opposing the occupation sells. Supporting the status quo? That is like selling a Hummer.

Time is on the side of the good guys. This article heralds a new day.

Those of us at Israel Policy Forum, Americans for Peace Now, Brit Tsedek v' Shalom and our non-Jewish allies (Churches For Middle East Peace, The American Task Force on Palestine and the Arab-American Institute) all share in this moment. But the moment is J Street's.

PS Read an article by J Street's latest hire an IDF combat vet I look forward to the day one of AIPAC's armchair warriors calls out this guy for being a coward and a self-hating Jew!

Perhaps I am too immersed these days in the novelties of the electric car's "ecosystem," or just cranky contemplating returning to Israel and trading Obama for Bibi, but I am finding various threats to the president from Democratic progressives about the public option shrill and unpersuasive. A progressive seems to be somebody who brings to analysis of public policy none of the astounding progress we've made in commercial information and social networking technology during the past generation--except, of course, when talking about the virtues of blogosphere. (Just watch this short interview with the Daily Kos' Markos Moulitsas on MSNBC and you'll get the idea.)

For God's sake, you no longer need a single, Medicare-style insurer to get efficiencies in claims processing, or buying leverage with pharmaceutical companies, or the sharing of best practices. If you did, you'd still need General Motors to tell suppliers exactly how to make every part, or one big blog to keep the cost of bandwidth low. If, as seems likely, key Senate committees will insist that the public option be delivered through non-profit cooperatives, that may not only be "good enough," it may--with certain collateral regulations--be better than any Medicare-style insurer.

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Miami-Dade State Attorney's Office has issued arrest warrants for 11 suspects accused of falsifying hundreds of voter registration cards. Miami-Dade State Attorney Katherine Fernández Rundle praised ACORN for its work exposing the fraudulent acts by some former employees. ``We've been very aggressive about a lot of these cases,'' she said. ``But we would not have known about these workers unless ACORN brought it to us.

ACORN quality control staff had spotted the fake registration cards and contacted the authorities in June of 2008. "It could not have impacted the voting process whatsoever. Nonetheless, we cannot turn a blind eye to this,'' Rundle added.

Of course-- that's not how the rightwing will frame the story. Expect them to ignore the prosecutor praise of ACORN and the fact that the problems were identified by ACORN months before the November election. Instead-- expect things like this at Freerepublic.com-- Breaking FOX news banner 11 ACORN arrests for voter fraud.

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The Obama administration has made a major mistake in allowing a sleight-of-hand shift in its overall framing of challenges in Afghanistan.

Rather than focusing on al Qaeda and Arab jihadists as "the threat" the US is trying to quash, the "Taliban" now seems to be the overwhelming focus.

The Taliban and al Qaeda are now used interchangeably -- and frankly, we are hearing the words "al Qaeda" less and less. We now seem to be fully at war with the Taliban -- a now huge indigenous group embedded in Afghan society.

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David Weigel writes in the Washington Independent that Republican Whip Eric Cantor is up in arms about the prospect of such radicals as Cass Sunstein joining what he calls Obama's "virtual army of 'czars'--each wholly unaccountable to Congress yet tasked with spearheading major policy efforts for the White House." Specifically, Obama has named his vastly learned former University of Chicago colleague to head the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, and Glenn Beck and the rest of his tag-team of McCarthyites are collectively beside themselves about their fantasy of Operation Radical Trojan Horsemen, the most audacious Obama power grab since Death Panels.

Senators John Cornyn and Saxby Chambliss have placed holds on Sunstein's appointment because they find him insufficiently enthusiastic about hunting. Another, yet unnamed member of the World's Most Overrated Legislative Body has joined them.

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Robert Rubin's reputation has taken a serious hit in the last couple of years. After getting glowing reviews for his stint as treasury secretary in the Clinton administration, the world has now seen the fallout from the financial deregulation that he engineered and personally profited from to the tune of $110 million for his work at Citigroup. He now ranks only slightly ahead of Reverend Wright and Bill Ayers on the potential guest list at the White House.

In spite of his plunge, Robert Rubin is still overrated.

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I was just on the phone talking with a reporter for a national media outlet who referred to Senator Olympia Snowe's idea for a public option "trigger" as the "centrist position." Whoa. When the mainstream media start naming something as "centrist" the game is almost over because just about everyone with any authority in our nation's capital wants to be at the "center."

Let me back up a step. The public insurance option has become a lightening rod for Republicans, hate radio jocks, Fox News, the Wall Street Journal's editorial page, and lobbyists for the health-industrial complex who accuse the White House and Democrats of planning a "government takeover" of health care. Anything that has the word "public" in it is always an automatic target for their rants. But most Democrats understand that a public insurance option is essential to control healthcare costs and expand coverage -- both because private for-profit insurers now face so little competition in most markets that only the prod of a public option will force them to lower costs and extend coverage, and also because a nationwide public option would have the scale and authority to negotiate lower rates with drug companies and healthcare providers, thereby pushing private insurers to do the same.

The White House is looking for a way to be in favor of a public option but also get enough Blue Dog Democrats -- many of whom hail from swing districts and states, and therefore need some cover -- to vote for it. One such cover is a Republican Senator from Maine, named Olympia Snowe. If she votes for the bill, Blue Dogs can calm their constituents -- who have been worked up into a lather by the right -- by saying "you see? Even a prominent Republican senator is voting for this."

So will Snowe play ball? It depends.

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"Don't be afraid to ask questions." That's what the President of the United States told the schoolchildren of America. Sounds good. But is our public school system one in which students are encouraged to ask questions? In such an answer-obsessed culture -- and, in particular, school system -- do we actually value inquiry?

I wrote "The Death of Why" last year. You can probably get a sense from the title that I have a point of view. As an activist for social and economic justice, or perhaps despite this fact, I have increasingly come to believe that there is no hope for an enduring progressive agenda for this country unless we raise a population prepared to question. Most of the debates we encounter today, from health care to retirement security to the appropriate role of government in our lives, will not be solved tomorrow for forever. No matter how good we are. So the question that increasingly obsesses me is -- are we raising a population that is prepared to inquire?

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Hope you all enjoyed the holiday - we're ready to get back to business! This week at Cafe, Andrea Batista Schlesinger joins us for a discussion of her book The Death Of Why? The Decline Of Questioning And The Future Of Democracy.

Batista Schlesinger was executive director of the Drum Major Institute For Public Policy, a nonprofit progressive organization, for seven years before taking a leave of absence this February to work as a policy adviser for New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg's re-election campaign.

Joining the discussion are Dan Gross, senior editor at Newsweek and Slate columnist; Deborah Meier, Senior Scholar at New York University and author of In Schools We Trust and The Power Of Their Ideas; Kyrsten Sinema, Democratic state representative in Arizona and author of Unite and Conquer; and David Sirota, journalist and author of Hostile Takeover and The Uprising.

With Congress returning from recess to consider health care legislation and the President set to deliver a major address on the subject to both houses of Congress tomorrow, a bit of history may be in order. An excellent starting place David Blumenthal's and James Marone's "The Heart of Power," which I reviewed for the New York Times this past weekend. Here are the major points:

Universal health care has bedeviled, eluded or defeated every president for the last 75 years. Franklin Roosevelt left it out of Social Security because he was afraid it would be too complicated and attract fierce resistance. Harry Truman fought like hell for it but ultimately lost. Dwight Eisenhower reshaped the public debate over it. John Kennedy was passionate about it. Lyndon Johnson scored the first and last major victory on the road toward achieving it. Richard Nixon devised the essential elements of all future designs for it. Jimmy Carter tried in vain to re-engineer it. The first George Bush toyed with it. Bill Clinton lost it and then never mentioned it again. George W. expanded it significantly, but only for retirees.

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Afghanistan needs more sociologists, not more troops. Sociologists would point out that Americans tend to see this country as one nation, with a central government and national security forces. But it actually is a collection of tribes--(including Tajik, Uzbek and Hazara). The first loyalty of most members of these tribes is to their own kind, not to the national government. Most Afghans correctly perceive the national government as corrupt to the core, in cahoots with drug lords, promoted by foreign powers, and the beneficiary of fraudulent elections.

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I've been trying to ponder how we got to this absurd place where right wing Fat Cats like Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh can pose as populists on the side of "the people" opposing Barack Obama, who I suppose must represent established power in the eyes of the Tea-baggers. My conclusion is that Obama made one great mistake which was in not prosecuting the malfeasance on Wall Street. And I don't mean just Brenie Madoff. A fascinating column from Gillian Tett of the Financial Times outlines the stark contrast between the S & L scandal of the early 1990's and our current bailout of the Wall Street Oligarchs.

How many financiers do you think ended up in jail after America's Savings and Loans scandals? The answer can be found in a fascinating, old report from the US Department of Justice*.

According to some of its records, between 1990 and 1995 no less than 1,852 S&L officials were prosecuted, and 1,072 placed behind bars. Another 2,558 bankers were also jailed, often for offenses which were S&L-linked too.

Aside from Madoff, can you think of a single banker who has gone to jail for creating fraudulent securities far more poisonous than anything the S & L bankers ever could dream of? Instead of listening to Larry Summers and Tim Geithner who were bought and sold by Wall Street many years ago, Obama had a chance in January to set the tone of his administration by suing all the Investment banks to stop the bonus payouts. At the time Rush Limbaugh was on the side of the bankers who loaned him the money for his private jet, claiming it would be "class warfare" to stop the bonuses.

But Obama let his populist moment pass and all the guy on Main Street saw was the bankers getting bailed out, billions in bonuses getting paid out, and the rest of us getting treated like chumps.

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Amid all the nail-biting over Obama's health-care speech on Wednesday, a quieter but no less fateful challenge to the republic will unfold the same day as the Supreme Court hears new arguments that Citizens United -- a murky non-profit that made the swift-boating "Hillary: The Movie" -- was unfairly restrained in distributing it by campaign-finance laws curbing corporate "speech" in elections.

We're for free speech here, aren't we? So says the ACLU, which has joined with the National Rifle Association in this case to support Citizens United, a Trojan Horse for big, publicly traded, for-profit corporations that want to use the wealth we let them amass to "crash" public debate to enhance their own bottom lines and public subsidies protections.

That's not "free speech." It's bought, over-determined speech. Conservatives who profess loyalty to the Constitutional framers' "original intent" are being hypocritical in supporting Citizens United, which isn't remotely the kind of speaker the First Amendment's framers intended to protect. The Roberts court may turn such intentions upside down.

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Here is the first paragraph from a breaking New York Times story. No comment from me necessary. Except this: who in God's name do they think they are kidding?

JERUSALEM -- Israel's defense minister, Ehud Barak, authorized plans for 455 new housing units in Jewish settlements in the West Bank on Monday, in a move aimed at placating Israel's pro-settlement camp ahead of an expected construction freeze demanded by the Arab world and the United States.

President Obama is going to speak to Congress on Wednesday about Health Care Reform. He should start with this chart and simply ask, "Will everyone who thinks this system is working please stand up?"