Obama will lay out a careful explanation and firm defense of the public option.  He will explain what the public option accomplishes, and why the approaches offered so far that fail to include a public option are deficient.  He will present a checklist of necessary elements of reform, and explain how the public option works to accomplish the elements on the checklist.

He will express strong skepticism, but not outright rejection, of public option "triggers".

He will express strong skepticism, though not outright rejection, of the "cooperatives" alternatives.

He will lay down a challenge to the opponents of the public option.  If you're so smart, what are your alternatives?  Put up or shut up.

By issuing this challenge, Obama will give all the needed ammunition to the defenders of the public option, while at the same time not appearing to take a doctrinairre stance. It is unlikely that opponents of the public option will be able to come up with anything that plausibly meets the necessary conditions for reform on the checklist.  Henceforth, supporters of the public option will be able to reject alternatives by saying, "This proposal fails to meet the president's challenge."

On the other hand, perhaps some genius will be able to come up with an alternative that does all the jobs the public option does, and does them better.  Great.  Have at it.   However, I expect that it will become quickly apparent to most just how difficult and unlikely this is.

By defining the principles of successful reform as the achievement of certain goals, goals that in fact only the public option achieves, Obama can create a political situation in which the public option wins the day, not as as a piece of ideological dogma, but as the only available practical means for achieving necessary reforms.   

It is Labor Day weekend.

We are fortunate to live in historic times: the climactic moments when we finally achieved the progressive changes in American health care long sought by Roosevelt, Kennedy and generations of progressive activists, including deep ranks of departed miners, nurses, truckers, waitresses, janitors and school teachers with no names; with beaten, unhealed bodies; with stout hearts.

And at this very moment in history, Barack Obama and the progressive majority of the Democratic Party need to realize that a principled and dignified defeat in the health care struggle might be even better for the long term prospects of progressive change than a victory, so we should roll the dice on the full progressive plan with a robust public option.  Let the Blue Dogs make good on their threat to vote against the bill, if they dare.  Let it go down if it must.  Then let Nelson, Bayh, Conrad, Lincoln and Landrieu spend a year out in the cold and under the media microscope as the friendless Democratic traitors who killed health reform in America. Let them be forced to confront the the massive influx of out-of-state money and national partisan activism on behalf of their new primary challengers. Let us keep a list of every uninsured child who dies from inadequate care, and call them the Blue Dogged Kids. Let us make up bumper stickers and tee shirts for uninsured, inadequately insured and exorbitantly insured Americans that say "Bark, if your livin' in the Blue Dog house."

It's time to get serious about party discipline. These Blue Dog Dems have way more bark than bite. President Obama has to realize that he has a winning hand here, if only he calls the bluff.  Obama might regret the fact that he has to choose a defined side in this fight, and abandon his wonted approach of bringing people together on the sensible middle ground of common sense and progress.  But the millions of Americans who need robust health care reform can tell him the same thing he says his mother used to tell him: "This is no fun for us either, buster."

The middle in this case lacks common sense, and is the enemy of progress.  They stand ignorantly for power and backwardness.  They don't serve the many and the common good; they serve other masters.  And standing up and fighting in this situation will actually enhance Obama's ability to achieve consensus later.  Both his friends and enemies will be forced to respect his determination and leadership, understand the location of his heart and principles, and recognize that they cannot always get what they want if they just push hard enough; if they just threaten him; if they just demean him.

We know what his enemies think.  They treat him like an illegitimate bastard president, a mixed-race mongrel too unclean even to address Americans' schoolchldren.   They openly challenge his birthright, demean his ancestry and insult his religious convictions.  They dishonor the mother who raised a boy to become President of the United States.

They buy guns and show sniveling, hostile contempt for the democratic rights of every American who voted for him.  But it's Labor Day weekend, the time for workers.  And we are still working, with no fear.

Now is the perfect opportunity to go for the vigorous progressive change on health care we have been working for these many years.   We have the president; we have the large Democratic majorities in both houses of Congress.  How long can those be expected to last?   I believe it is a mistake to think that if the reform effort fails this year that will sacrifice or weaken the chance for reform in the future. Reform is overwhelmingly popular. If it loses, the blame will fall very heavily on those who killed it. The bills will come right back again next year, if not sooner, maybe even more strongly progressive ones. And the obstructionists will have spent months going through the political wringer, and will by then be begging to vote for robust reform.

For Obama's sake, he needs to get on the right side of this movement, with vigor and fighting spirit, so that win or lose this session he is seen as the people's champion of progress and not just part of the Washington problem.  He needs to put his opponents on notice:  If he loses this time, he will bring this reform effort back again and again and again, until he wins.  And each time he brings it back, the political situation will get more dire for those opponents, and for the powerful interests they serve.

The very worst thing he can do is communicate to the opposition that he is desperate for a bill. If he does that, they have him.  His message to the centrists should instead be, "Make my day."

This is one of those defining moments for Barack Obama, the kind of moment we all face. He needs to choose a side, cast the die, and then throw his heart into the cause he has chosen. The tumblers are all lined up. He only needs to throw open the door. He needs to ride up to Congress next week, cast off the gloom of this recession-ridden and compromise-riddled first year, raise his voice and shake a chamber still hissing with the cowardly smears and threats of militant reaction and bigotry, and seize the leadership of a new era of resolute progressive change. If he does that, he will find a powerful army behind him, one that is just waiting for its leader to arrive.

He might also ask himself this Labor Day weekend: what would his mother have wanted him to do?

[Surgeon General's warning: the following post is blunt, rude and abrasive, and could be considered hurtful to those with tender feelings.]

Once again, an argument has been started in the TPM Cafe Reader Posts section over a post from a relatively unknown contributor shooting to the top of the Recommended Posts list.  I don't know what is responsible for these strange leaps to the top of the list. Perhaps some of these writers have signed up with publicists or blog promoters who employ spamming and recommendation techniques that the authors themselves might not realize are being employed on their behalf. On the other hand, there are many, many users at TPM Cafe, and most of them don't post here frequently, if ever, or follow the dominant cliques around. So maybe they comprise a silent majority whose tastes, and occasional presses of the "recommend" button, diverge from those of the more prominent regulars.

Anyway, the relatively few cases of a random post here or there rising to the top of the Recommended Posts list through recommendations-gaming, if that's what it is, are <i>not at all</i> the most pressing problem with the Reader Posts section. Most of the posts that rise to the top at this site are instead from a relatively small clique of posters who are all apparently either unemployed or retired, who have formed a self-selected community of group huggers, and who appear to have mountains of time to spend hanging out here and recommending each other's posts reflexively, no matter how trivial, inconsequential, mawkish or self-indulgent the posts might be. The site is now cluttered with these soft, rambling and introspective finger-paintings and exercises in mutual flattery and banal sentimentality.  And the recommendations system offers no way to discourage these kinds of posts in a gentle way, and that unfortunately necessitates a more overtly critical post such as this one.

TPM Cafe's reader post section is now very word-rich but information-poor. People whose chief concern is the exchange of information and informed debate on public policy questions, and who might hope to find serious contributions here from well-informed people, are now faced with a mountain of clutter. The level of policy discussion is even worse than what one finds on the cable news, and dramatically lower than what one finds in the other, hypocritically despised print and broadcast sources of the MSM.

In addition to the indiscriminate recommending of everything written by their friends, the members of the maudlin ruling clique stuff the comments sections with long stings of fatuous "way to go!"'s and "great jobs!"'s of the kind mothers typically hand out to their infant children when the latter make a nice poo-poo in the potty chair. They decline to engage in any serious critical examination of the content whatsoever. I guess critical thinking and vigorous intellectual challenge are considered too mean and threatening to be tolerated. When criticism does occur, it generally occasions little but hypersensitive temper-tantrums and flaming. I have personally sometimes refrained from posting things here because I can no longer stand to be treated like a child with silly little pats on the back.

The posts on political issues that prove most popular generally steer clear of informed discussion of policy debates, and are instead repetitive meta-discussions on such immortal themes as:

Why are Republicans so stupid and crazy when they talk about so-and-so?

Glenn Beck is crazy.

Michael Savage is crazy.

Republicans make me depressed.

Bernie Madoff is evil and still in jail.

Follow this link to read this crazy Republican saying stupid and scary things!

I watch FOX all the time and then come here to talk about how crazy they are.

Where have all the flowers gone?

Republicans are a minority but they dominate my life.

My daddy was a Republican but I still love him.

Simultaneously wallowing in and complaining about ignorant Republican rants helps me feel better about how little I know and how intellectually lazy I am.

Why do some of these other posters say so many things I disagree with? The trolls are harshing my buzz!

... and other topics of this exhausted and well-mined genre. They typically offer little to the substantive part of the national discussion of policy.

For many months this dumbing-down, sentimentalization and debasement of the discussion in the reader section has marginalized more serious discussion on the site, discouraged the vigorous exercise of critical thinking, and created a culture of indulgence and emotionalism that is something like a cross between a kindergarten class, a support group and a lonely hearts internet chat room. But these watery and moonstruck weepers stamp their little feet tyrannically and squawk the loudest when some interloper barges in on their territory and rises to the top of the recommended list without their permission.

It's not that there aren't many smart and interesting people contributing to the Cafe on occasion.  But the reigning culture of sentiment, confession, raillery and subjectivity discourages them from producing their best stuff.   Why do a few days worth of homework, get one's facts and numbers and arguments straight, and then post a sober, no-nonsense post on regulatory reform of the financial industry, or trade relations with China, or the structure of the defense budget, or tax policy as it relates to health care, or military operations in Afghanistan and Pakistan, only to see that kind of content sink quickly to the bottom?  Since such posts are rarely rewarded by the people who rule the roost, and who are in love with the recommend button and each other, many of the best thinkers here probably ask, "Why bother?"

I am dismayed that the management has implemented neglectful policies that have allowed the site to degenerate in this embarrassing fashion, and have prevented it from achieving anything close to the public service potential it once appeared to have. TPM Cafe has become part of the problem, not part of the solution. It is filled with self-indulgent writers spinning their wheels without going anywhere, complaining about their enemies' ignorance without contributing anything of substance themselves, and getting lost in unproductive and hyper-reflexive navel gazing. TPM Cafe's readers section has lately contributed very little of substance to the advancement of progress and genuine understanding in health care policy, financial regulation policy, national security policy, education policy, budget policy, industrial policy, energy policy or other policy areas. If the substance is there, it is buried and hard to find, like a good book buried beneath a pile of tchotchkes and gee-gaws at a yard sale. There are a few writers on the left-hand side of the screen who are contributing real knowledge and advancing understanding of hard issues, but the right-hand side of the screen is a can't-do ghetto of mopey whiners and ill-informed ranters, and the two halves are working against each other: one half tries to smarten people up and empower them with knowledge, the other half works to dumb them down and cripple them with indulgent encouragement of weakness and self-preoccupation.

Now I know some people must think I am terribly mean and arrogant to say these things.  Maybe I am mean and maybe I am arrogant, and maybe I am all alone in my perceptions. But I suspect not. I also suspect that many others who visit this site think the same things, but are reluctant to challenge the status quo of majority-approved bed-wetting and "I LOVE you man!" stroking and fondling.  Since the writers in the back-patting clique present themselves as a bunch of sensitive and depressed sad sacks, maybe others are afraid to criticize them lest they send these writers off into a spiral of over-drinking, over-eating or binge blubbering. Yet I have a feeling that if management employed a different sort of system for recommending, discouraging and editorially approving posts, they might find that there is a large untapped audience of people craving knowledge and eager to discuss policy nuts and bolts at a higher level. The editorial tolerance for the ascendancy of bawling esteem-cravers and their self-indulgent antics is disempowering and enfeebling the "progressive" movement - at least the corner of it that appears here.

Frankly, I believe this reckless lack of editorial direction by the TPM management is a cynical attempt to attract eyeballs to the advertising on the site by permitting whatever forms of mutually titillating gibberish the readers want to distract each other with.  The sell-out is apparent all over.  Personally, I find TPM Café to have the slowest page-load of any site I visit on the internet, <i>bar none</i>, and I suspect that's mainly due to the barrage of flashing, popping and scrolling advertising crap one has to swim through to visit this site.

The upshot is an irresponsible failure of civic and public responsibility.  Josh and company should be truly ashamed of what they have done here, whether the sad outcome is a result of sins of commission or omission.  I understand that Josh actually has a PhD in history from Brown University. How can he associate himself with this rot?  Like it or not, Josh is now Citizen Marshall, and he has a civic responsibility to use the influence he has acquired to raise the level of public discourse, not pimp for infotainment and mediocrity.

If I'm wrong, let me have it.  But if you agree with me, please speak up in support.

Fred Moolton decries one-sidedness and calls for balance.

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is approximately a century old.   What does it mean to view this conflict objectively?  What constitutes a balanced perspective on what is happening in the land of which Great Britain took paternal charge under the Palestine Mandate, and which now contains the state of Israel and its ever-expanding colonies?

One may choose to focus on the many battles in this war, and on the conduct of the different sides and parties in the battles.  On both sides, we have seen many clear violations of norms regarding the acceptable use of force and legitimate behavior in the conduct of war, norms on which both international legal canons and the moral traditions of most nations would concur.  We all know how to evoke the litanies of atrocious acts that have occurred by the hands of both Israelis and Palestinians, and their various sponsors, over the long decades of the conflict.

But what must not be missed in these rehearsals of the many wrongs pertaining to the battles comprising the conflict over Palestine is the broad nature of the conflict itself, the whole of which the battles are parts, and which is by no means a tale of tragic and counterbalanced moral parity.  When we step back several lengths from the up-close contemplation of the morally gnarled and ambiguous instances, and contemplate in broad generality the sweep of the entire conflict, we see a smooth and unambiguous progress of blatant, aggressive dispossession.

On one side you have a people who are taking the land upon which others have long lived, plied their livelihoods and made their homes; on the other side you have the people who are fighting, with increasing desperation and little prospect of ultimate success, to prevent that land and those possessions from being taken from them.  This is not ambiguous: it is manifest criminality confronted with manifest resistance to criminality.  We see across the century a long violent tidal movement that has scoured homes, farms, villages, and people from the land, and even abraded away the centuries-old names of places, and deposited in the place of what once existed an invading people and their works, and a new language with new names.   The movement is not some subtle and natural effect of gradual migrations and political evolution.  The conquest is forceful.  It has been carried out deliberately by it perpetrators and suffered unwillingly and with resistance by its victims.

The movement to take this land was begun long ago, by 19th-century European nationalists living in distant European cantons, most of whom had never once stepped foot upon the land in question, yet who dreamt strange, chauvinistic fantasies of redeeming the land of their dreamscape from its presumed captivity.  The dreamers were utterly neglectful and often contemptuous of the real inhabitants of the real land.  Their dream was given unfortunate life by European imperial powers whose habituated, racist arrogance made them feel entirely at liberty to promise and deliver land which did not belong to them to other people to whom the land also didn't belong.  From the beginning the project was concocted of a mixture of bigoted presumption and mercenary reasons of state, sprinkled with daubs of irrational religious legends and fanaticism, or with metaphysically dreamy secular political doctrines that were the superstitious descendants of the older religious doctrines.

Eventually the barbarity of the Nazi holocaust, and the worthy instinct among the people of the western powers to atone for their collective guilt in that holocaust, gave to the project of conquest and colonialism in Palestine the radiant allure of a noble cause.   But it is barely necessary now to point out how morally dubious and comically unsatisfactory were the means taken for the atonement.   For one person to make amends for his crimes against a second person by awarding damages out of the property of a third person is transparently perverse.

This chauvinistic movement of conquest has been spectacularly successful, although it required the mid-century handoff from one western imperial power to another, and the conquest continues to this day, dunam by dunam, with each new Israeli settler domicile erected on the West Bank and with each act of military intimidation, subjugation and humiliation.  The conquest has been accomplished predominantly through the use of sheer force, with the occasional and timely diplomatic intervention of those same western imperial powers.  At each stage in the conflict, the colonial settlers now known as Israelis have worked energetically, through governments of the left and the right, in peace and in war, to fill the foreground of debate with extensive and diversionary talk: with endless excuses, rationalizations, importunings, complaints, sophistries, fulminations, menaces, pulings and bellyaches, while in the background they worked incessantly to press, push, kick, bomb and shoot the Palestinian Arabs off the lands still coveted by Israelis.   The bad faith has been rank and impenetrable.   It is hard to summon any more patience for this behavior, or to care any longer about how criticism will be received by Israelis.  Anyone who has paid attention to the conflict for any length of time is already quite aware of the fact that Israelis will certainly and always continue to regard both the claim that they are the aggressors in the long war, and the disposition to deliver more criticism to the aggressors than to those aggressed against, as evidence of gross unfairness.  So, alas, responding intelligently to the conflict cannot depend on being overly-concerned to frame messages that are appealing to Israelis.

There have been unjust, aggressive and brutal movements all over the world during the past century, some substantially more brutal than the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and yes, Americans manage to ignore most of them.  But Americans can't ignore this conflict because they are deeply implicated in it.  Unlike almost all of those other wars of aggression, America contains many people today who send money, resources and people to Israel to fuel the conflict and drive the ongoing aggressive seizure of land   Some Americans agitate incessantly on behalf of the aggressive party in the conflict, and have very successfully enlisted the American government as an ally in the conquest, to the extent that neither Americans nor others around the world can any longer tell where American action ends and Israeli action begins.  As a result, the security of all Americans has been put at extreme hazard.  There are many conceivable and plausible contingencies that, should they occur, might easily spark the expansion of the conflict beyond Israel and Palestine.  Such an expansion would likely draw the United States into a major war in a vital region, and draw in others as well.  There is a depressing sense of inevitability hanging over America's obsessive and confused march toward the edge of  the precipice.  Many Americans will lose their lives though a fatally misguided alliance and sentimental attachment to a rogue, expansionist state, the bastard offspring of racist colonialism of the past and the vestigial organ of racist colonialism in the present.

President Obama's approach to the crisis in Iran is courageous.   He deserves credit for it, and needs our vociferous support.

The temptation to leap into the Iranian fray with both feet must be great.  But as president, Obama has to keep his eyes on the long-term security interests of the American people, and is not permitted the luxury of issuing idle statements of support just because they feel good.  Obama has a complex set of interrelated challenges on his Middle East agenda, and needs to remain focused on the ultimate goals, even if that means exercising frustrating restraint at this juncture.  His willingness to endure the incoming taunts and attacks from irresponsible Republicans is brave, and he deserves credit for it.

What some of the Republicans are doing with this issue is beneath contempt.  They are playing games with the lives of Iranians and the lives of Americans, for the sake of their own short-term political fortunes.

And the more radical Republican lovers of violence and creative destruction are doing something even worse: going for a chaotic Persian train wreck, by means of which they can maneuver Obama into an unavoidable military intervention and escalation in the region.  That's what they do.  They engineered an Iraq train wreck to tie the US military into the Middle East for good, and a fiscal and financial train wreck to sink what was left of the US social welfare system.  But right now they are threatening the very lives and security of the next generation of Americans.   They need to be stopped.

I firmly believe President Obama is looking out for the security of me and my family, and I'm grateful to him for it.   This is the job he was elected to do.

Polls have closed in Lebanon, with turnout breaking the previous record.  Meanwhile, the presidential election campaign in Iran is really heating up.

Since Amitai Etzioni disabled the comments on his post today, I will respond here.

I sincerely hope President Obama stays away from the topic Etzioni raises in his first paragraph.  It is not the role of the President of the United States to offer any kind of general assessment of Islam, either the optimistic assessment (a), the pessimistic assessment (b) or the neutral assessment (c).  Our president is not a theologian or a professor of comparative religion.  He is also not empowered to speak for the United States as a whole on matters about which there is a broad diversity of opinion in this country.  Making some sort of declaration about what the United States, as such, thinks of Islam would be presumptuous and beyond the legitimate purview of civil government.

Obama is also not legitimately entitled to identify the people of the United States corporately as "people of faith".  Some of us are and some of us aren't.

The president is head of the executive branch of the US government, and thus speaks to the world in that role.   What Obama can say is that America welcomes people of all religious traditions, and guarantees the free exercise of religion.  He could also acknowledge that Jews, Christians and Muslims share a common body of tradition and geographical origins, and that since many - but by no means all - Americans are Jews, Christians or Muslims, there is some basis for common ground there.  He can also convey, as Etzioni says, the US position that we are prepared to work with any people anywhere who eschew violence.

He might then try apologizing for a few things, but I wouldn't hold my breath waiting for that.

The idea of doing more to promote curltural exchanges is an excellent one.   But I think this should go beyond translating a few books.  Expanding study abroad opportunities for Muslims in the US and Americans at Muslim universities would be useful.  That should include exchanges with American universities.  Obama could also announce a program to dramatically increase the teaching of Middle Eastern and other Muslim world languages in the United States, and to grow programs of Middle Eastern studies.  But he should show that he understands the difference between respectful culural exchanges and obnoxious, laissez faire cultural imperialism.

Obama must resist efforts by Saudi Arabi and Egypt to co-opt this entire trip and message.  The "Muslim world" is not just the Sunni Muslim world, and it should be no part of US policy to play favorites among competing Muslim denominations or practices.

Obama's speech today was defensive and whiny.  He has let the right crawl inside his head and set up camp there.  And he has now taken one of the least popular men in America, Dick Cheney, and breathed new life into him and his party.  Nice move!

Obama's policies on the "war on terror"are now barely discernible now from those of George Bush.  Hint to Barack: if you fully endorse the Bush narrative, you are going to leave yourself wide open to those who criticize you for changing Bush policies.

It's 2002 all over again.  Obama is moving us backward.

And no matter what he does to alienate and offend the left, Obama still seems to wake up every day and ask himself, "What can I do to get more Republicans to like me?"  This guy needs to be sent some sort of firm message from his left flank, quickly.

Fortunately, progress on the manifesto for the new Global Internationalist Party continues apace.  More to come.  But what practical steps can be taken to increase the left's leverage?   I'm sick of the uninspiring, kneejerk centrism coming out of Washington.

Well, I've pretty much had it with being a Democrat.  I have no big speeches to make, but I just can't take it anymore.

I have looked in the past at some of the third party options available, and nothing much appealed to me.  So how does one go about creating and registering for a new third party in this country?

I'm not really interested in creating any kind of movement, or running any actual candidates.  I don't mind if I am the only member of the party.  I just don't want to have the nauseating label "Democrat" next to my name anymore, but would prefer to identify myself in some way other than the lame "independent".

I would like to write some sort of manifesto or platform, sign up for my own party, and then move on with life.  Perhaps the party will be more of an "apolitical party" than a political party, just a personal means of expressing my sense of utter alienation from the culture and political life of the United States.

Thera P wrote an excellent piece yesterday entitled "Vision Quest".  I wrote an extended comment on that piece today, but by the time I posted it, Thera's original post had disappeared from the recent posts list.   So I would like to post my comment again here.

As I said in my comment, I appreciate the thought and earnest moral searching that went into Thera's piece. But I would like to play a few dissonant notes.

Thera says we are experiencing "a meltdown precipitated by the deceit and selfishness and greed of unscrupulous financiers, whose only allegiance was to the almighty dollar and their cronies in crime." This puts far too much emphasis, I believe, on the individual moral failures of certain capitalists, and not enough on the structural problems, legal inadequacies and institutional deformities of the American capitalist order. So long as we stay focused on the trees of the alleged moral depravity of individuals, and respond on that individual plane, whether with outrage or compassion, to the moral or spiritual failure of other individuals, we will miss the social forest. The chief problem is not immoral or amoral individuals. Rather, we have a legal-economic system in the United States that is bound to produce the kinds of outcomes we are seeing now.

Thera's analysis suggests that our chief response to the challenge should be to work on the moral and spiritual improvement of individuals. This is the "bad apples" theory of social problems. It suggests we have a system of laws and institutions that are capable of working fine, and will advance humane values, so long as we have humane individuals manning the positions of this system. I don't believe that is the right diagnosis of the central problem we are facing. We have a bad system. That system hones and fashions the mores of the people who are constrained to work within it. It establishes the basic framework of rules and constraints, of incentives and norms, of what is required and what is permitted, and the outcomes we get are pretty much those that we should expect when ordinary human nature is combined with these flawed structural design features of the social and legal order. If we want better outcomes, we need to act politically to change that order.

I worry that the kind of psychological and spiritual discourse that Thera is engaging in, in response to a social problem like the one we face now, is another expression of Americans' extreme individualism, and consequent apolitical politics. In its own way, the discourse suggests "it's about me". It asks, what can I do to make myself a better person? But it's not about me. It's about us, collectively. The chief question is what can we do, working collectively, to improve the social order.

I don't believe the focus on individual spiritual improvement is either practical, or would achieve the desired results. That's because you can stuff self-actualized Ericksonian saints in the mouths at one end at the corporate system, in their personnel offices, and after passing through the goose of the corporate-based system, those saints are going to wind up in a few years time at the other end, hustling and scamming and running pyramid schemes. The system we have created is a bundle of inherently competitive and anti-social incentive structures, and it produces people who are driven by those incentives.

We can't wait for a religious revolution, or a new Great Awakening. We can't wait for everyone to become self-actualized or to achieve enlightenment, or to experience their truest inward vision. We need politics and wide-ranging social reform.

The other day, somebody posted Obama's comment from 2008 about a reporter's question about "going green." Obama said that we're not going to solve climate change because "I changed a f-ing lightbulb." He said it was about something larger that we do collectively. Repairing American society, which is broken and defective, is not about changing your personal spiritual lightbulb. It's a different kind of project.

OK, now NBC is reporting that Dennis Ross is going to go to the State Department as a "strategic adviser" on the Middle East and Persian Gulf region.  This follows weeks in which it was first rumored he would  be named as the envoy for Israel-Palestine, and then rumored he would be tabbed as the envoy to Iran.  Lots of complaints all around on both suggestions.  So now he's going to get some more backstage position in Washington.

Why all the fuss about Dennis Ross?  It's as though there is someone in this administration who thinks it is absolutely essential that he be given some kind of job, and they are now inventing a job to give him.  What I'd like to know is why Ross and the Washington Institute for Near East Policy are getting any kind of seat at all at the table at all.  These are the same cats whose bad Middle East foreign policy advice f***ed up the last administration.  And Ross is also on the advisory board of that bipatisan group of hawkish agitators, United Against a Nuclear Iran, 2009s version of the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq and PNAC.  The Obama administration already gave a prominent job to one member of this outfit, Richard Holbrooke.  Do the really need another?

Honestly, I think the Republic will get by just fine without Dennis Ross.

Gush Shalom leader, Uri Avnery, weighs in on the purposes of the war in Gaza, and on the Spanish prosecution of Israeli leaders for war crimes stemming from an incident on 2002.  Please read

http://www.avnery-news.co.il/english/index.html

An amazing scene took place earlier today at the World Economic Forum in Davos.  Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Ergogan responds forcefully to a long harangue from Shimon Peres, and walks off after Wapo's David Ignatius tries to shut him up.  Many others in the audience then walk out following Edogan.  Read and watch.

Needless to say, this is an extraordinary departure form the usual civility and posh of Davos.  Obama's close adviser Valerie Jarrett was in the stunned audience.  Hopefully, she will report back to Obama on the incident, and he will finally get a clue.  Does he really want to begin his administration with silence, stonewalling and deflection of attention from the kind of butchery that took place in Gaza?

Gaza lies bleeding; a destitute prison camp ravaged by unspeakable savagery.  Our old president helped enable the slaughter.  Our new president dissembles, and falls silent.  How long can this depraved indifference continue?  Is this the vaunted "new way forward" with the Muslim world?   Our empire of death is truly a bipartisan endeavor.

"Yet, all the world helps after an earthquake," said a doctor at the Shifa hospital in Gaza. "We feel very frustrated," he continued.  "The West, Europe and the U.S., watched this killing go on for 22 days, as though they were watching a movie, watching the killing of women and children without doing anything to stop it.  I was expecting to die at any moment.  I held my babies and expected to die.  There was no safe place in Gaza."

Write the new president on behalf of the murdered children of Gaza.  Tell him there is no new way forward until we learn to see.  Tell his to see, here, and here, and here, and here and here.

This is the address for the White House contact form.

Here is a list of names of children killed in Gaza.  Use one of the names in your letter.  Stand as a child of Gaza for all the children killed in this hideous assault.  This was my letter:

Dear President Obama,

I write to you on behalf of Lama Talal Hamdan, a ten year old girl killed in the Israeli assault on Gaza.  Lama's death was a crime, and each day our nation stands silent in its toleration of this crime, Lama dies again.  I ask that you commit your administration, and our country, to the pursuit of justice for the spirit of Lama Talal Hamdan, and to the achievement of a just and lasting peace for the family of Lama, and for all the children of Palestine.

Yours sincerely, and in fellow American citizenship.

Dan Kervick
Bow, New Hampshire
A Child of Gaza

Obama needs to drop William Lynn, the Raytheon lobbyist and strategic planner whom Obama has nominated for Deputy Secretary of Defense.  If the famous Obama rule against lobbyists is canceled and granted an exception when it comes to the greatest government procurement program of them all, the Pentagon, then the rule doesn't mean anything.   This is a flat-out broken promise, but it is not too late for Obama to fix the problem.