To liven up the fall debates, Congress decided to have a contest for the silliest way to stimulate the economy. It doesn't look to be much of a contest. The homebuyers tax credit looks sure to be a big winner.

In the most extreme version of this boondoggle, the government will give a $15,000 handout to anyone who buys a home. That one really runs right to the top of the silliness meter. It's not cleat why we want people to buy homes. If the intent is to boost the housing market, this one falls short, since the vast majority of homebuyers will also be sellers, so their purchase does not on net boost demand.

The tax credit does create wonderful opportunities for gaming. I can "sell" my house to my brother and vice-versa, and we both get to pocket $15,000 (enough to buy health insurance for 5 kids for a year) at the taxpayers' expense.

But Congress may not be persuaded to get this silly even on Halloween, so they may settle for extending the first-time buyers tax credit. The current credit expires at the end of November.

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Joseph Cirincione has a tremendously useful piece in this week's Washington Post Outlook section (paper version on the stands tomorrow, Sunday) on "Five Myths About Iran's Nuclear Program."

There's no point in giving a blow-by-blow account of the piece -- you should read it for yourself -- but my short take on the argument is as follows:

1) Best estimates suggest that at a minimum it would take Iran 6 to 8 years to develop a usable bomb. This means there is plenty of time to engage in smart diplomacy aimed at heading off this possibility. And since there's no evidence that Iran is currently going full speed ahead towards a bomb, this timeline may be extended.

2) As Secretary of Defense Robert Gates has noted, a military strike would not end Iran's nuclear program. The most likely result would be strengthened resolve among Iran's leaders and its population to get one.

3) Persuasion beats coercion as a means of stopping a nuclear weapons program. This is what worked in Brazil, Argentina, Ukraine, Belarus, Kazakhstan, South Africa, Iraq, and Brazil, and it is what is most likely to work in Iran. Sanctions may have a role, but striking a political deal that addresses Iran's security concerns and acknowledges its role as a regional power is the best way forward.

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I love it.

All these years working in the pro-peace, pro-Israel camp and we could never dream of scaring the "Israel firsters" the way J Street has. The bad guys were able to just ignore us.

No more. They are terrified.

Here's the evidence.

160 Senate and House members signed up for J Street's host committee and now Michael Goldfarb is contacting each one to urge them to take their names off the host committee. A half dozen or so have agreed.

That is no surprise. Being on a host committee doesn't mean much, if anything. So when a loud neocon from an ideological journal with significant readership calls to complain, the staffer thinks, "uh oh, this may be controversial."

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Ben Smith of Politico reports that New York's Senators, Chuck Schumer and Kirsten Gillibrand, have withdrawn their names from the host committee for J Street's upcoming first-ever conference. Schumer departed first, before the Congressional sponsor list was published; Gillibrand was listed, then followed Schumer out the door.*

This disgraceful bow-out is undoubtedly a cave-in to pressure from the usual suspects--organizational Jews who cohabited comfortably with Bush's 8-year stonewall in the Middle East; who have the gall to claim that being "pro-Israel" means slavishly following the Right; who do not represent (who precisely counter-represent) the 78 percent of American Jews who voted for Obama.

For the first time in living memory, a respectable pro-peace, pro-two-state Jewish organization is pulling itself together; and New York's liberal lights have gone dark.

The Jewish organizational establishment these days bemoans the fact that young Jews are drifting away. By advertising their belligerent pettiness, these groups are only guaranteeing that the young will stay largely turned off. The days of enforced uniformity are over. Schumer and Gillibrand have their eyes fixed firmly on the rear-view mirror.

* Update: Smith has revised his piece to say that Gillibrand "was 'unaware' she had been included on the group's list of supporters," according to her spokesman, Matt Canter.

The United Nations Human Rights Council today voted for a resolution that finds that Israel a committed war crimes during the Israeli invasion last December.

According to the New York Times, "On breaches of the Geneva Conventions as grave as those alleged in the report --including its finding that Israeli soldiers deliberately targeted civilians -- any nation that has agreed to the conventions has jurisdiction to investigate the crimes in their national courts. The Goldstone report recommends that those nations do so, setting up a possible situation of cases being brought against Israeli officials elsewhere." (I wish the UN would pass something like this on Iraq. That would mean that Cheney, Libby, Feith, Cheney, Bolton and company could be snatched up in Europe and dragged in chains off to The Hague).

Twenty-five members voted in favor of the resolution that singled out Israel for refusing to cooperate with the UN mission led by South African jurist Richard Goldstone. The United States voted no.

This is a significant blow to the Netanyahu government. It has attacked both the Goldstone report and Goldstone himself with unusual virulence, even threatening to terminate the peace process if the resolution passes.

Its approach - and that of the United States (which has stood with Israel on the war crimes issue) - falls into the "shoot the messenger" category. Some 1,400 Palestinians (including 320 children) were killed in Gaza while only nine Israeli soldiers died (three by friendly fire). Israeli soldiers themselves testified that they were ordered to keep Israeli casualties down at all costs, which they interpreted as meaning that they did not have to take care to avoid civilian casualties. The Goldstone report says that they didn't.

Israel now needs to investigate its army's behavior itself.

The UN vote demonstrates that it can no longer operate in the Palestinian areas with impunity. As the old phrase goes, "the whole world is watching."

Unfortunately, the United States has chosen not to.

Meanwhile, Israel is defying Obama and going on a settlement spree.

crossposted Media Matters Action Network

From The Hill.

The Pentagon pays an average of $400 to put a gallon of fuel into a combat vehicle or aircraft in Afghanistan.

The statistic is likely to play into the escalating debate in Congress over the cost of a war that entered its ninth year last week.Pentagon officials have told the House Appropriations Defense Subcommittee a gallon of fuel costs the military about $400 by the time it arrives in the remote locations in Afghanistan where U.S. troops operate.

I wonder how much of the $400 winds up in the pocket of Halliburton or some other contractor?

Josh Marshall writes that Israel might want to consider recalling Ambassador Michael Oren after the embassy launched harsh (and unusual) criticism of J Street, the new pro-Israel, pro-peace organization.

Josh writes that Oren is "pretty clearly defining a whole slice of American Jewish opinion (probably a substantially larger slice than he and his government realizes) as anti-Israel, which is not only wrong on the facts but extremely shortsighted given the demographic trends within American Jewry." Accordingly, he may be the wrong guy for the ambassador's post.

Josh writes: "I don't expect him to be departing any time soon unless and until the Netanyahu government falls. But Oren should quickly rethink the J Street decision [not attending its conference]. And even if he does, the Israeli Minister of Foreign Affairs should recall Oren and replace him with someone who represents the current government's views without interfering in American domestic politics or damaging Israel's standing among American Jews."

I don't know if Oren should be replaced. But I do know that he would learn a lot more about the American Jewish community (especially about the younger, smarter and more politically and culturally influential part of the community) by sitting down with Josh Marshall, and other Jews of his generation (and those even younger) than by listening to the old guard leaders of AIPAC, the American Jewish Committee and the Conference of Presidents.

Josh Marshall is at home in America and at home with his Jewishness. In short, he is like most American Jews. He is worth hearing. Listening to the "it's always 1942 crowd" is a waste of time. An ambassador needs to understand that the New York-based Jewish organizations (and AIPAC, which is in DC) represent a tiny segment of American Jews (only 28% of Jews are members of all the Jewish organizations put together). Manhattan is not America and American Jews are...Jewish Americans.

Nation cover story: "American Jews Re-Think Israel"
And Nation story on the evolution of AIPAC's most successful leader, Tom Dine, from hawk to dove.

When Sergeant Cara Hammer returned from her deployment in Iraq in 2005, she thought her days of fighting were over. But she quickly discovered that she had more battles ahead of her.

After surviving roadside bombs and mortar rounds in Iraq, Cara came home and realized that she was suffering from an invisible wound, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). Determined to seek help for her mental health injury, Cara turned to the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) for care.

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Lou Dobbs, Sean Hannity, Rush, and the right-wing blogosphere seem interested in a talk I gave in September, 2007 to students in a political science class here at Berkeley, in which I played the role of a presidential candidate so politically incorrect and tone-deaf as to pummel every sacred cow in sight -- including the notion that our society could afford and would continue forever to pay whatever amount of money was required to keep everyone alive forever. The whole point of the mock exercise was to show that presidential candidates can't state what everyone knows to be the truth because they'll be taken apart by the Right or the Left. I slew many other sacred cows in that mock exercise, some of which are held dearly by the Left. Nonetheless, two years later the Right has exhumed the lecture and taken my words completely out of context purportedly to show that Obama and the Democrats plan death panels.

If their desperation weren't so pathetic it would be funny. After all, they have proven the whole point of my lecture. UC Berkeley maintains an archive of webcasts and my speech is available there verbatim, should you wish to listen to it in its entirety.

How did the Dow break 10,000 when the rest of the economy is in the toilet?

1. Corporate earnings are up -- mainly because companies have been cutting costs. Payrolls comprise 70 percent of most companies' costs, which means companies have been slashing jobs. In the end, this is a self-defeating strategy. If workers don't have jobs or are afraid of losing them, they won't buy, and company profits will disappear.

2. Federal borrowing has filled the gap that consumers and businesses created when the latter began to reduce their debt. Federal debt, in other words, has kept the economy from tanking. Can't keep up forever, though.

3. With such horrid employment numbers, Wall Street figures the Fed will keep interest rates low for some time, and continue to flood the economy with money. That's good news for the Street because it means money stays cheap -- and with cheap money the Street can make lots of bets on almost everything under the sun and moon. As a result, the Street's earnings are way up. But this, too, is temporary. At some point the Fed is going to worry about inflation and a falling dollar.

4. Investors of all stripes want to get in early and ride the wave. Pension funds, mutual funds, and other institutional investors figure the bull market has more oomph in it because, well, other investors will jump in. Think Ponzi scheme. Nice for now, but watch out if you're one of the last in.

In other words, this is all temporary fluff, folks. Anyone who hasn't learned by now that there's almost no relationship between the Dow and the real economy deserves to lose his or her shirt in the Wall Street casino.

The neocons are ratcheting it up a few notches. All the way to nuclear war.

Here is what former ambassador to the United Nations, John Bolton, said in Chicago on Tuesday.

"Negotiations have failed, and so too have sanctions...So we're at a very unhappy point -- a very unhappy point -- where unless Israel is prepared to use nuclear weapons against Iran's program, Iran will have nuclear weapons in the very near future," he said.

In other words, the way to avert the danger of a nuclear attack is to launch a nuclear attack.

Read this from Daniel Luban at Inter Press Service.

And know this. John Bolton is no outlier. Like Feith, Perle, Kristol and Krauthammer, he is at the heart and soul of neoconservatism.

Give him credit. He says what neocons think. It's war they want, even nuclear. Anything to stop nuclear proliferation!

Will Bolton get his war? Not likely. But Luban explains what he's really up to. "It is nothing new for Bolton and his neoconservative allies to threaten an Israeli strike against Iran. But Bolton's use of the "n-word" is, I believe, new for him, and marks a significant rhetorical escalation from the hawks. An Israeli strike, nuclear or otherwise, without U.S. permission remains unlikely. But as it often the case, I suspect that Bolton's intention is less to give an accurate description of reality than it is to stake out positions extreme enough to shift the boundaries of debate as a whole to the right."

In other words, nuclear war is only Bolton's dream -- something to hope for but not really expect to get.

Crossposted at Media Matters Action Network

It is pretty impressive that 160 House members have signed on as hosts to the J Street conference. Here's the list. If your representatives are not on the host committee, you may want to ask them why not.

I am not surprised that Representative Chris Van Hollen is not on the host committee even though he personally shares the views of J Street (I heard him discuss the Middle East in great depth during his first campaign).

So why isn't Van Hollen doing what he should be doing? After all, he is a terrific, effective, energetic progressive.

Here's my guess. Back in 2006, during the Lebanon war, Van Hollen stated that he thought the United States should seek a cease-fire. The local Likudniks went crazy, led by the utterly unrepresentative Jewish Community Relations Council and its head, Ron Halber. It was ugly and Van Hollen apologized. Not only that, he was almost immediately taken on one of those lobbying trips to Israel for a come-to-Jesus experience.

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This is the most frightening economic chart I have seen in the last decade.

Net private investment, which includes spending on everything from machine tools to new houses, minus depreciation, fell to 0.1% of gross domestic product in the second quarter of 2009, according to the latest government data. That's the lowest level since at least 1947.

Capitalism's most vulnerable point is the death spiral of overcapacity. In the easy credit boom times we built too many malls, too many car factories, too may fast food joints, too many houses. Now the only way for businesses and consumers to survive is too cut back drastically.

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The Obama administration offered some mild criticism of Fox News the other day. It called its reporting opinion, and not news, and labelled it a de factor arm of the GOP. Now Glenn Beck has responded by likening this onslaught to the murder of Six Million Jews.

Beck said: "When they're done with Fox, and you decide to speak out on something. The old, 'first they came for the Jews, and I wasn't Jewish' {comes to mind}."

Here is the clip.

By now we should all be used to the right's use of the millions of Holocaust victims (Jews, gays, Gypsies, Poles, etc), as political footballs against Democrats, against health care reform, against taxes, against anything the right doesn't like. But, for some of us, getting used to it is hard.

My wife was born in a Displaced Persons camp in Germany after her Polish Jewish parents survived the Holocaust and made it to the American sector in Germany. My kids -- Americans in their early thirties -- are missing dozens if not hundreds of cousins because of the mass murder Beck trivializes And our family had it easy compared to most European Jews.

It is, frankly, disgusting that Beck likens this slaughter -- including 1.5 million children -- to criticism of his rolling-in-dough network. I don't care if he apologizes; who needs an apology from the likes of Glenn Beck. I just hope that Jewish and other anti-discrimination organizations condemn Fox and Beck for their use of hate speech against Jews and others. Because, in my book, trivializing the Holocaust, like denying it, is hate speech.

MJ Rosenberg is a Senior Fellow at Media Matters Action Network.

The health-insurance industry has finally revealed itself for what it is.

Background: The industry hates the idea that's emerged from the Senate Finance Committee of lowering penalties on younger and healthier people who don't buy insurance. Relying on an analysis by PricewaterhouseCoopers, insurers say this means new enrollees will be older and less healthy -- which will drive up costs. And, says the industry, these costs will be passed on to consumers in the form of higher premiums. Proposed taxes on high-priced "Cadillac" policies will also be passed on to consumers. As a result, premiums will rise faster and higher than the government projects.

It's an eleventh-hour bombshell.

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Israel's parliament, the Knesset, reopened today after a long break for the summer and the Jewish holidays. In line with protocol, Israel's president opened the winter session and Shimon Peres had this to say on the linkage between reaching peace with the Palestinians and addressing the Iran issue:

In my opinion, if we move forwards with peace and make peace with the Palestinians, and if we start negotiations with Syria and Lebanon, we will remove the main pretext for the Iranian madness - against us and against the other residents of this region. (President Peres, October 12th in the Israeli Knesset).

Now Mr. Peres is in reality not exactly the dove he is portrayed to be (he authorized many of the settlements, he supported Israel's recent wars with Lebanon and Gaza, and he never really earned his own Nobel peace prize), but this was nonetheless an interesting acknowledgement of the linkage from Israel's head of state--and it seems to directly contradict the messaging coming from Israel's ambassador to Washington D.C., Michael Oren.

Here's Michael Oren in an interview on October 3rd for Newsweek:

Q: Do you believe that the Arab states would make their support of action against Iran contingent on progress in the peace process?

A: No, there is no linkage whatsoever. The Arab states understand that the peace process is going to take a while, and we don't have a while with Iran. The peace clock and the Iranian nuclear clock are running at completely different speeds.

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On Friday, Denmark's climate and energy minister, Connie Hedegaard, who will be chairing U.N.-sponsored climate talks in December in Copenhagen, said President Obama needs to do more on climate. "It is hard to imagine that he will be receiving the Nobel Peace Prize in Oslo on Dec. 10 and then come empty-handed to Copenhagen a week later," she said.

But there's no way between now and then Obama can get a strong climate bill through Congress.

Over the next months, the White House needs to focus on health care if it's to have any hope of coming up with anything more than Big Pharma and the private insurance companies want.

This is the cost of trying to do so much so quickly. Initiatives revert to powerful industry lobbyists because there's no time to organize countervailing power. When he's trying to do everything at once, the President can't mobilize public opinion behind any one thing. Progressive voices (which have difficulty being heard even under the best of circumstances) drown each other out because they're hollering over one another.

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The elites hate to acknowledge it, but when large numbers of ordinary people are moved to action, it changes the narrow political world where the elites call the shots. Inside accounts reveal the extent to which Johnson and Nixon's conduct of the Vietnam War was constrained by the huge anti-war movement. It was the civil rights movement, not compelling arguments, that convinced members of Congress to end legal racial discrimination. More recently, the townhall meetings, dominated by people opposed to health care reform, have been a serious roadblock for those pushing reform.

Those disgusted by the bank bailouts, and the bankers who brought us this recession, will have a chance to make their views known when the American Bankers Association has its annual meeting in Chicago, October 25-27. A large coalition of labor, community, and consumer organizations are organizing a protest at this "Showdown in Chicago"

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I continue to be delighted that the President won the Nobel Peace Prize. Yes, it was, in part, given not in recognition of past achievements but prospectively. The Nobel Committee wants him to be the kind of President who earns a peace prize. So do I.

And that pretty much means that the Iran nuclear issue is going to be resolved diplomatically. Either diplomacy will convince Iran to drop plans for a bomb -- if it has such plans. Or else we will accept Iran's right to a bomb under the same terms and restrictions as the other nuclear armed signatories of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.

President Obama was not inclined to attack Iran's facilities or to allow Israel to do so before winning the Nobel Peace Prize. The early awarding of this prize will only strengthen him in that resolve. The "bomb Iran" option is off the table.

That is one reason the neocons are is beside themselves over the awarding of this prize. They understand its implications. Those on the left who are not celebrating Obama's selection do not.