In an interview in Sunday's Washington Post, Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu may go further than any of his predecessors in rejecting a settlement freeze -- this after President Obama went further than any of his predecessors in demanding one.

In the fifteen years since Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and PLO leader, Yasir Arafat signed the Oslo agreement, Israel has never, in principle, ruled out a settlement freeze. On occasion, it has, in fact, implemented a freeze while on several others, Israeli prime ministers said "yes" but with conditions.

There has been one constant. Israeli prime ministers tended to go along with the US and Palestinian view that freezing settlements was not a final status issue (i.e, one that would only be resolved in the context of comprehensive negotiations) but a precondition for negotiations like the PLO's cessation of violence, which has been in effect for years.

Israeli prime ministers understood that Palestinians viewed the expansion of settlements as something unacceptable during negotiations. As one Palestinian put it, "you can't discuss how you will divide the pizza while one guy is gobbling it up."

This all changed today with an interview in Sunday's Washington Post.

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This is worth looking at. It is Peggy Noonan in the Wall Street Journal arguing that supporters of the President can no longer argue that he inherited the mess (the wars, the economic collapse) because he's been President for 9 months.

She compares Obama's situation to that of his predecessor. "At a certain point, a president must own a presidency. For George W. Bush that point came eight months in, when 9/11 happened. From that point on, the presidency--all his decisions, all the credit and blame for them--was his. The American people didn't hold him responsible for what led up to 9/11, but they held him responsible for everything after it," she writes.

What balderdash. First, the American people should have held him responsible (at least partly) for 9/11 because he and his team ignored repeated warnings that Al Qaeda was planning precisely the kind of attack it, in fact, launched.

Second, it is hardly to anyone's credit that no one was held responsible for the fact that both Manhattan and the Pentagon (the Pentagon!) were naked and open to attack by our enemies. (Imagine if Al Gore had been President!)

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A couple of days ago, Jeffrey Goldberg explained why he was disinclined to associate with J Street, in spite of his sympathy for a two-state solution:

So I'm comfortable in many ways with J Street's basic worldview. On the other hand, I don't think the group has put forward a well-articulated vision of what a progressive Jewish democratic Israel should look like. This might be because, in addition to having progressive Zionists as members, it also has anti-Zionists (these are the types who are happy with Stephen Walt's tragic endorsement of the group) and it's obviously very hard to put forward a positive vision of a Jewish Israel when some of your important supporters -- Bernard Avishai comes to mind -- don't even believe in the idea of a Jewish state.

Now Goldberg denies that "anti-Zionists" like myself are actually keeping him away from J Street's conference. We would know this, presumably, if we had read a different one-line blog post, in which he says, with obvious sarcasm, "I'm sorry I'm going to miss this conference" (which, in context, if you follow his link, reads like "I'm sorry I'm going to miss this circus"). Then, en passant, Goldberg explains his evidence for "anti-Zionism."

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Since 2004, Rey Leal has been fighting. He's fought on the streets of Fallujah, for mental health care in south Texas, and in Washington, for a solution to years of late veterans' health care budgets.

Today, Rey, and millions of veterans, have won their fight.

When Rey returned home from Iraq after two combat tours, he sought mental health care at his nearest VA clinic, where there was just one psychologist, taking appointments only two days a week. The psychologist only works two days because that Texas clinic, like many VA clinics and hospitals, has to stretch its funding to make sure the money lasts the whole year. They don't know how much funding they'll have next year because the VA budget is routinely passed late.

In fact, 20 out of the last 23 years, the budget has not been passed on time. This year was no exception. As of today, the VA budget is 22 days late--and counting.

For veterans, these late budgets mean the VA is forced to ration care for the almost 6 million patients whose livelihoods depend on its services. This is why Rey took his fight to Washington. The good news for vets is that Congress finally listened.

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Progressives are always asking the question "Is Obama tough enough?" To listen to Rush Limbaugh, you would think that the White House political organization is so tough Limbaugh is in danger of being packed off to a Gulag in Northern Alaska with his buddy Glenn Beck

And these guys in the Obama administration... Look, folks, Alinsky Rules for Radicals: When faced with an opponent, get rid of the opponent. You don't debate the opponent. You don't consider the opponent's ideas. You say, "I won. Screw you. Get out of the way, and whatever I have to do to get you out of the way is right." It's happening right before our very eyes...But this is how these people operate! There won't be an opposition by the time they get through.

When the schoolyard bullies like Limbaugh and Beck start whining to the teacher, you know that Axelrod and Company are doing something right. The exquisite irony in hearing Limbaugh whine that Obama will not "consider the opponent's ideas", as if Limbaugh ever gave a moment's consideration of his opponents ideas. As Vandehei and Allen point out this morning, Limbaugh and the Brownshirts are an anchor around the neck of the Republican Party.

Many top Republicans are growing worried that the party's chances for reversing its electoral routs of 2006 and 2008 are being wounded by the flamboyant rhetoric and angry tone of conservative activists and media personalities, according to interviews with GOP officials and operatives.

The Washington Post poll was very clear. The Republicans are now defined as the far right party and it scares the bejesus out of most independents.

Kenneth Feinberg, President Obama's compensation czar for bailed out banks, appears to have taken some genuine steps to rein in excessive executive compensation at the basket case banks that received the most TARP money. He cut cash salaries by 90 percent in some cases and reduced overall compensation for the top executives at the seven institutions that received the most government money.

This is a good first step, but it is only a first step. The pay caps involve only a relatively small number of people in an industry where hugely bloated salaries are the norm. Even in these cases it is too early to know that the pay caps will actually prove to be binding. After all, Wall Street's main craft is evading regulations and taxes. It is entirely possible that those clever Wall Street boys will find a way to get around whatever pay restrictions Mr. Feinberg puts in place.

Whatever happens to the pay of this small group of executives the real problem goes much deeper. The Wall Street folks view the wreckage from last year as a minor distraction and are eager to get back to business as usual. This attitude was best expressed by "a person close to A.I.G.'s board," who said of plans to restrict pay at the AIG division that wrecked the company to $200,000: "that's insulting ... why wouldn't anybody quit?"

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There was a famous Harvard-Yale football game back in 1968. And it's results produced an even more famous headline on page one of the Harvard Crimson. "Harvard Beats Yale: 29-29."

The reason for the headline: Yale had a perfect season and had at least two major stars (Brian Dowling and Calvin Hill) who would go on to the NFL. The Harvard team was a bunch of scruffy (for Harvard, anyway) upstarts like Tommy Lee Jones. So when, in the last seconds of the game, Harvard tied the score, every student at both schools understood that the underdog, Harvard, had won.

That game is considered the best game in the hundred plus years of Harvard-Yale football rivalry and is known simply as "The Game."

Well, in much the same way, J Street has already won won the battle with the status quo lobby. For the underdog, tying is winning.

Like Harvard in 1968, J Street has already won.

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A couple of years ago The Nation's Eric Alterman published What Liberal Media?, shredding the familiar conservative charges. It may be too soon to ask, What liberal academy? -- although I've had fun exposing what I called "Wile E. Coyote conservatives" who were rushing off cliffs a couple of years ago blaming liberals for ousting Lawrence Summers from the presidency of Harvard (the high-capitalist Harvard Corporation did it, and not for politically correct reasons) and for enrolling a former Taliban rep as a special student at Yale (an older, more conservative Yale foreign-policy network blessed it).

Now comes a Chronicle of Higher Education debate on whether and why liberal academia still spurns conservative scholars. Never mind that the fiscal crises gripping public and private universities show them to have been far more captive to market riptides than to leftist doctrines; in the Chronicle, Columbia intellectual historian Mark Lilla writes that on many campuses a pervasive ideology still normalizes "liberal" views that are rather narrow and arbitrary. Boston College's Alan Wolfe agrees that colleges promote little true intellectual diversity, although he says conservatives are part of the problem.

Others add brief observations, mine noting that what's actually normalized by the typical campus mix of political correctness and corporatist discipline isn't very "liberal," as most Americans use the term. Baiters of tenured radicals -- the conservative humorist P.J. O'Rourke, the propagandist Roger Kimball, the provocateur David Horowitz -- can't so easily claim, as David Brooks claimed in 2002, that America "houses its radical lunatics ... in [academic] departments that operate as nunneries for the perpetually alienated." Not only do market forces rule; lavishly funded nunneries for failed, aging neo-cons are sprouting or entrenching themselves at Yale, Duke, George Mason, Claremont- McKenna-Pomona, Chicago, and elsewhere.

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MEDIA MATTERS TAKES DOWN LENNY BEN DAVID HERE. Read all about the former American, now Israeli settler, who has made destroying J Street his life's work.

Now Lenny has joined forces with the ZOA.

The Zionist Organization of America is a right-wing fringe group, which regularly engages in Arab and Muslim baiting. (Check out the poster on the ZOA home page).

In my opinion, ZOA is an anti-Arab and Muslim hate group. So, naturally, it is terrified by J Street which has as its goal promoting US diplomacy to end the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

And, just as naturally, ZOA is promoting the screed against J Street by Israeli settler, Lenny Ben David.

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At a conference in London, a Goldman Sachs international adviser, Brian Griffiths, praised inequality. As his company was putting aside $16.7 billion for compensation and benefits in the first nine months of 2009, up 46 percent from a year earlier, Griffiths told us not to worry. “We have to tolerate the inequality as a way to achieve greater prosperity and opportunity for all,” he said.

Eight months ago it looked as if Wall Street was in store for strong financial regulation -- oversight of derivative trading, pay linked to long-term performance, much higher capital requirements, an end to conflicts of interest (i.e. credit rating agencies being paid by the very companies whose securities they're rating), and even resurrection of the Glass-Steagall Act separating commercial from investment banking.

Today, Congress is struggling to produce the tiniest shards of regulation that would at least give the appearance of doing something to rein in the Street.

What happened in the intervening months? Two things. First, America's attention wandered. We're now focusing on health care, Letterman's frolics, and little boys who hide in attics rather than balloons. And, hey, the Dow is up again. The politicians who put off Wall Street regulation for ten months knew that the public would probably lose interest by now.

Second, the banks keep paying off Congress. The big guns on Wall Street increased their political donations last month after increasing their lobbying muscle. Morgan Stanley's Political Action Committee donated $110,000 in September, for example, of which Democrats got $43,000.

Official Wall Street PAC donations are piddling compared to the tens of millions of dollars that Wall Street executives dole out to candidates on their own (or with a gentle nudge from their firms). Remember -- the Street is where the money is. Executives and traders on the Street have become the single biggest sources of money for Democrats as well as Republicans. And with mid-term elections looming next year, you can bet every member of Congress has a glint in his or her eye directed at the Street.

That's why the President went to Wall Street to raise money Tuesday night, gleaning about $2 million for the effort. He politely asked the crowd to cooperate with reform -- “If there are members of the financial industry in the audience today, I would ask that you join us in passing necessary reforms" -- but those were hardly fighting words. It's hard to fight people you're trying to squeeze money out of.

Which is the essential problem.

Ken Feinberg, the President's "pay czar" came down hard on executive pay yesterday, for those banks still collecting money under TARP, as well he should. But Feinberg isn't trying to pass new financial reform legislation, and TARP no longer covers several of the biggest banks with the highest pay and bonuses -- although they're still getting subsidized by the government with low-interest loans.

Wall Street and the Treasury want us to believe that the TARP money will be repaid to taxpayers, but Neil Barofsky, the special inspector general keeping watch over TARP, said yesterday that just 17 percent of the TARP money has been repaid, and “[i]t’s extremely unlikely that taxpayers will see a full return on their investment." Later he told a reporter that it's unlikely "we'll get a lot of our money back at all."

Brian Griffiths, the Goldman international adviser who told us inequality is good for us, doesn't know what he's talking about. America is lurching toward inequality once again, led by the financial industry. The Street is back to where it was in 2007, but most of the rest of us are poorer than we were then -- largely due to the meltdown that occurred because Wall Street overreached. The oddity is that we bailed out the Street, including Griffiths and his colleagues, but apparently won't even be repaid.
And now that Griffiths et al knows his firm and the other big ones on the Street are too big to fail, he and his colleagues will make even bigger gambles in the future with our money.

E-mail I just got on Ben David. It came from a big Washington lobbyist. "I hope your friend, Lenny, is retired because controversial consultants don't get hired. Len is now shown himself to be an anti-Muslim racist. That could make him an untouchable."

I wrote back: "Lenny is retired which frees him to indulge his inner racist."

START with Media Matters Action Network's explosive expose on Lenny Ben David. And here is the Jerusalem Post on Lenny Ben David and the rightwing cabal out to get J Street.

Then everyone should read Spencer Ackerman's powerful piece about his friend, Rebecca Abou-Chedid, a young law student in Washington who is Arab-American.

Why a piece about Rebecca? Because Rebecca was the target of a drive-by hit directed at J Street by an Israeli settler, Lenny Ben David. Lenny is the quarterback of the smear campaign against J Street and attacked Rebecca in passing. She's Arab-American. She worked for an Arab American civil rights group. She supports J Street. Hence, J Street is consorting with the enemy because everyone with Arab blood in their veins is THE ENEMY.

I know Rebecca well and she is about as anti-Israel as Yitzhak Rabin was. I choose the analogy carefully. Ben David (Lenny Davis) is a settler, an enemy of peace and of everything Rabin represented. Naturally he hates J Street. Read his screed. It's a combination of Joe McCarthy and J. Edgar Hoover, one lie after another. And racist on top of it. (Lenny has a pathological hatred of Arabs)

So who is Lenny?

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We have recently done some work on the TPM backend to improve the login and email delivery systems. You should always receive confirmation emails from us when you sign up for an account or change your password, and you shouldn't be logged out when browsing the site, leaving comments and posting to Reader Blogs within one session. Though we've tried to squash as many of these bugs as we can find, I'd like to know what your experience has been in the past few weeks. Please leave a comment here if you're still seeing either of these issues.

I am just about to board a plane for the US, so I am unable to answer this remarkably ill-informed (and, under the circumstances, vicious) shot from Jefferey Goldberg: the idea that he cannot go to the J Street conference because "some of [its] most important supporters -- Bernard Avishai comes to mind -- don't even believe in the idea of a Jewish state." I would simply ask readers to consider this post, or this, or this interview. Or just watch this lecture on You Tube. Goldberg has, alas, started to speak about "the idea of a Jewish state" a little like the way FOX News celebs talk about "America." Complexity is for sissies. Very sad. When he was at the New Yorker, his work on the settlers was the best there was.

In August, at the height of the Tea Party Movement, I counseled that the temporary gains of Republican's would turn out to be ephemeral. The new Washington Post/ABC News Poll proves my point.

Less than one in five voters (19 percent) expressed confidence in Republicans' ability to make the right decisions for America's future while a whopping 79 percent lacked that confidence.

Among independent voters, who went heavily for Obama in 2008 and congressional Democrats in 2006, the numbers for Republicans on the confidence questions were even more worse. Just 17 percent of independents expressed confidence in Republicans' ability to make the right decision while 83 percent said they did not have that confidence.On the generic ballot question, 51 percent of the sample said they would cast a vote for a Democratic candidate in their congressional district next fall while just 39 percent said they would opt for a GOP candidate.

The Know-Nothing Party known as Republican is not a credible alternative. Obama's comment to the Republicans, "Why don't you grab a mop? Why don't you help clean up? ... Grab a mop -- let's get to work!" is exactly on point.

Another Israeli spy scandal is making news. Of course, at this point, we don't know much only that like other recent spy scandals, it is an ugly episode that will reverberate negatively on the "Israel, right or wrong" crowd. ITALICIZED MATERIAL IS NEW.

The Israel-first crowd is screaming that this spy case doesn't involve the government of Israel.

Not true. The US government charges that the spy took over $200,000 from Israel Aircraft -- an Israeli government entity -- in exchange for top secret information. Obviously, the case involves the government of Israel. This is not to say the accused spy is guilty. A trial will determine that. However, the State of Israel is deeply implicated in the charges.

It is also worth noting how quickly the Israel firsters defend accused spies. Why? It is as if Arab-Americans immediately rushed to defend those charged with terrorism based on ethnic solidarity?

Can you imagine the brouhaha if Arab Americans rushed to knee-jerk defense of the guy charged with those thwarted New York terror attacks scheduled for this September 11? They don't do that. The Israel-first do, over and over again. Any Israeli, any Jew, is always, by definition, unjustly accused. It is exactly the opposite with Arabs and Arab Americans. Fortunately, the Israel firsters constitute exactly .000003% of the American Jewish community (slighly higher here at the Cafe).

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Most of the economists and pundits who could not see an $8 trillion housing bubble are telling us that the United States desperately needs for the Chinese government to keep buying its debt. This crew of failed analysts argues that without the support of the Chinese government, interest rates in the United States will rise, choking off the recovery. In reality, the decision by China to stop buying U.S. government debt may not harm the economy's recovery, but it could be devastating to the recovery efforts at Citigroup and other basket case banks.

The basic logic is simple. China's central bank has been buying up huge amounts of dollar-based assets for the last decade. Their purchases include short and long-term government debt, mortgage backed securities and to a lesser extent private assets.

The Chinese central bank's purchases have two effects. First, they help to keep interest rates low. This supports economic growth by keeping down the interest rate on mortgages, car loans and other borrowing that boosts demand.

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The piece this morning on the Taliban's financial network reminds me of Napoleon's famous quote, "an army marches on its stomach". Without the up to $400 million from the opium trade, that is used to pay the fighters, the Taliban would be a far less serious threat. Although Richard Holbrooke tries to talk down the importance of the drug trade, he is really talking through his hat.

So here is a notion that might give the Afghanistan government (when there is one) some sway with the rural populace and take away the Taliban funding--make Afghanistan the center of the legal opioid industry. Since 1916 pharmaceutical firms have been manufacturing synthetic opioids for pain management. Over 200 million opioid prescriptions are filled in the U.S. annually with worldwide sales of opioids reaching $7.5 billion in 2007. Drugs like Rush Limbaugh's favorite Oxycodone are a synthesized form of one ingredient of opium. Why not form a Opium Cartel with the world's major pharmaceutical companies, use some of the billions they get from manufacturing and selling the synthetic opium and just buy up all the real stuff from the Afghani farmers? It would bind them to the central government and if the operation was supervised by the World Health Organization we could hopefully prevent "leakage" from a corrupt government , allow Afghanistan to take a tax off the top of the legitimate sales and still supply the worldwide pain management market.

J Street calls itself "pro-Israel, pro-peace"; the "therefore" is implied. And the priority given to "pro-Israel" in the branding suggests, what most commentators reasonably assume, that J Street aims to give a home to American Jews who, comfortable with identity politics, suppose their anxiety about Israel constitutes a kind of secular Jewish identity; but Jews who also think that successive Israeli governments have hurt Israelis (and, by association, Jews everywhere) with settlements and a repressive occupation--you know, Jews who poll as "progressives" and have felt that Jewish leaders in Washington do not speak for them. (I have assumed something like this case myself.)

Though he downplays this gracefully in various public appearances, J Street's extraordinary Jeremy Ben-Ami obviously means "pro-Israel, pro-peace" to compare favorably with the stance of AIPAC supporters: increasingly rightist American Jews who will favor attacks on Iran if necessary, continued occupation if necessary, and who look to the Israeli government to say what's necessary. These AIPAC Jews, Ben-Ami reminds us, are only a quarter of American Jews; but they've captured the high ground on Capitol Hill for a generation.

Yet putting things this way--"pro-Israel, (therefore) pro-peace"--may be underestimating both AIPAC's achievement and J Street's opportunity.

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This is the moment when Senators Max Baucus and Majority Leader Harry Reid (and President Obama) should make history by producing a Senate health reform bill that  

·                       makes health insurance truly affordable for all Americans,

·                       creates a strong public option to give private insurers real competition,

·                       and doesn't destroy Democratic re-election hopes by taxing hard-won middle class health benefits. 

 

Last week the Senate Finance Committee became the last of five Congressional committees to pass a health reform bill - this one by far the weakest of all the bills.  Almost immediately a small group of Senators - Majority Leader Harry Reid, Finance Chair Max Baucus, and acting HELP Committee Chair Chris Dodd - huddled with a White House team led by Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel to begin the mysterious process by which the more progressive HELP committee bill will be melded with the product of Baucus's mostly fruitless negotiation with Senate Republicans, only one of whom, Maine Senator Olympia Snowe, deigned to vote for the final Finance bill.   

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Last January, as I understand it, the White House promised Big Pharma, big insurance, and the American Medical Association the moral equivalent of what Joel Halderman allegedly demanded of David Letterman: hush money. The groups agreed to stay silent or even be supportive of healthcare reform, as long as they were paid off.

But now that it's time to collect, the bill is larger than the White House expected, and it's going to fall like an avalanche on middle class Americans in coming years. That could mean an ugly 2012 election (read Sarah Palin).

So the President has to do what Letterman did: Refuse to pay.

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You have to read this. It is featured in today's Washington Post and is written by Joseph Cirincione, an expert adviser of nuclear proliferation for the the Congressional Commission on the Strategic Posture of the United States.

The five myths:

1) Iran is on the verge of developing nuclear weapons.
2) A military strike would knock out Iran's program.
3) We can cripple Iran with sanctions.
4) A new government in Iran would abandon the nuclear program.
5) Iran is the main nuclear threat in the Middle East.

Cirincione's piece should deliver a knockout blow to the Iran hawks, assuming neocons care about facts -- which they don't. Iran, not Iraq, is the war they really want!