Taken simply on the merits, the new Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty between the U.S. and Russia should have already been ratified by the Senate. It calls for a reduction of about one-third in U.S. and Russian nuclear arsenals, and establishes procedures so that each side can make sure the other is abiding by the agreement. It is an essential stepping stone to further reductions in nuclear weapons, since no other country will consider reducing its nuclear arms until the two countries that possess 95% of the world's nuclear weapons -- the United States and Russia -- move first.

Until now, the treaty has been tied up by partisan politics and old, Cold War thinking on the part of its (Republican) opponents. But there is hope for a change in that unfortunate set of circumstances. Today, the treaty was voted out of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and can now be considered by the Senate as a whole. The vote was 14 to 4, including three Republicans: Senators Richard Lugar of Indiana, Bob Corker of Tennessee, and Johnny Isakson of Georgia. To reach the two-thirds vote needed to ratify the treaty, eight Republicans will be needed. Other possibilities include Scott Brown of Massachusetts, Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins of Maine, George Voinovich of Ohio, Robert Bennett of Utah, and a number of others who have yet to declare their final opinions on the agreement.

Time is of the essence. It is imperative that the treaty be ratified this year, and with Congress going out of session on October 8th, it is possible that the agreement will need to be considered during the "lame duck" session after the November elections. Senators need to hear from their constituents now, both about the need to vote for the treaty and about the need to consider it as soon as possible.. Organizations that are working toward that end include the Arms Control Association, the Center for Arms Control and Nonproliferation, the Friends Committee on National Legislation, Physicians for Social Responsibility, the Two Futures project, the Union of Concerned Scientists, and Women's Action for New Directions. They are to be congratulated on today's successful vote, and supported in whatever way we can as they help move the treaty towards ratification.

Readers of my posts know the importance of Israel cultivating, or at least getting out of the way of, the Palestinian private sector. Without an evolved civil society, subtended by sustainable businesses, the prospect of a Palestinian state at peace with Israel and itself is purely hypothetical.

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Here is the latest from Harvard on Peretz. He is considered greatest embarrassment in 374 years although one Harvard grad said, "He didn't go to Harvard and he was never more than a TA there. My kid lives in Holworthy Hall and gets drunk and throws up all over himself every Saturday. Is that Harvard's fault? And my kid actually is a student there. Why is Peretz Harvard's shame?"

My answer: the scholarship being set up to honor racist Peretz is at Harvard.

***

Here is Jeff Goldberg citing with approval a defense of Martin Peretz by Andrew Sullivan. Sullivan basically argues that Peretz is a well-intentioned man who is nuts on the subject of Arabs and Muslims but is decent nonetheless.

Sullivan writes, "Marty is a man of deep passion and such passion, especially on a subject like the Middle East, sometimes leads to irrationality."

And, for writing that, Goldberg calls Sullivan "big-hearted" (Sullivan seems "big-hearted" to me too, but I don't know him).

But here's the thing. Peretz didn't slip up once or twice and spout bigotry against Muslims and Arabs. He does it several times a week. Hating Arabs and Muslims is primarily what he is about. How can that be forgivable?

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You may have noticed that we just closed access to reader blogs at TPMCafe. If you'd like to move your reader blog to another platform, we're providing an export tool that coverts your blog to a format called WXR. Short for WordPress eXtended RSS, WXR is the de-facto blog interchange format and is supported by most blogging services and platforms including Movable Type, Typepad and WordPress. The WXR files we're generating will capture up to 500 latest entries (and all the comments on those entries) from your reader blog.

To grab your WXR, you don't need to log in anywhere, just go to the address following this URL pattern:

http://tpmcafe.talkingpointsmemo.com/talk/blogs/yourusername/export.wxr

That should download the file to your hard drive. In your new blogging platform of choice, simply upload that file where it asks for an import, and your blog should be restored on that platform! Enjoy!

Update: It seems like people are having trouble downloading the file, since it's only a URL pattern not a link. Here's a little tool called ExportFile Instant that should generate a link that you can right-click and download. Just type your username in the input box below. A link will appear under the box. Just right-click and download from that link. Don't save as a .doc or any other format. WXR is a form of XML that can be uploaded to various services as is.

Additionally, I see the 10-posts limit, and will be working to fix that. I'll update this post when we've pushed the fix.

Update 2: We just kicked off a rebuild of all the export files that should contain full blogs and comments (up to 500 entries). If yours isn't up yet, it will be within the next few hours. Thanks for your patience!

Update 3: Genghis has asked me to post this link to his instructions for importing your TPMCafe blog to dagblog.

Newt Gingrich is saying if Republicans win back control of Congress and reach a budget impasse with the President, they should shut down the government again. GOP pollster Dick Morris is echoing those sentiments, as is Rep. Lynn Westmoreland (R. Ga), and Alaska GOP Senate candidate Joe Miller.

I am continuously amazed at the GOP's ability to snatch defeat out of the jaws of potential victory. It is the gift that keeps giving.

I was there November 14, 1995 when Newt Gingrich pulled the plug on the federal government the first time. It proved to be the stupidest political move in recent history. Not only did it help Bill Clinton win reelection but it was a boon to almost all other Democrats in 1996 (Gingrich's photo was widely used in negative ads), and the move damaged Republicans for years.

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In case there was any doubt that Republicans are campaigning on arguments that are impervious to the passage of time or even the facts, we have an ugly foreign policy snit today from the nominee for PA-Sen, Pat Toomey. Toomey must be getting his foreign policy advice from John Bolton and Dick Cheney, since his message today tried to portray international cooperation as a radical left cause.

As pretext for his gutter-scraping smear against opponent Joe Sestak, the Toomey campaign used Sestak-supporting Citizens for Global Solutions (CGS) as a foil. Disclosure time, I serve on the political action committee for CGS that makes these decisions on donations. Disclaimer time, I bear sole and personal responsibility for this post / rant.

Seriously, you'd have to have a gaping hole in your memory to think that America can promote its interests by giving the rest of the world a big kiss-off. Just as a gentle reminder: Iraq War, detainee torture, climate change denial, "un-signing" a bunch of treaties, bloviating about North Korea instead of really working to halt their nuke program, refusing to press the Israeli government... (Remind me why the gap in liberal enthusiasm?) I guess the only good news is that the Toomey campaign had to make **** up in order to make Sestak (a former Navy admiral, by the way) sound really bad and scary.

Some giant American corporations depend on a buoyant American economy and a world-class industrial base in the United States. Others are far less dependent. What comes out of Washington in the next few years will reflect which group has most political clout -- especially if Republicans take over the House and capture more of the Senate this November.

The first group includes national telecoms like Verizon and AT&T that need a prosperous America because most of their sales are here. Same with finance companies like Bank of America and Travelers Insurance whose business strategy has been built around U.S. consumers. Ditto certain giant chains like Home Depot. Naturally, all these companies were especially hard hit by the Great Depression and its devastating impact on American consumers.

The second group includes companies like Coca Cola, Exxon-Mobil, Hewlett-Packard, Intel, and McDonalds, that get substantial revenues from their overseas operations. Increasingly this means China, India, and Brazil. Ford and GM are still largely dependent on US sales but becoming less so. GM sold more cars in China last year than in the US. Not surprisingly, American companies that are less dependent on American consumers have been showing the biggest profits.

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One can't help but think that the Republican party is elevating ignorance and hate for some kind of reason. Maybe the Diesel Jeans campaign has inspired them. How else to explain Newt Gingrich playing the Obama as Tribal Boogie Man card?

With Newt Gingrich now claiming that President Obama owes his allegiance to a "Kenyan, anti-colonial" worldview and agreeing that the United States is now being "ruled according to the dreams of a Luo tribesman of the 1950s ... [a] philandering, inebriated African socialist, who raged against the world for denying him the realization of his anticolonial ambitions," how long do you figure it is before he gets caught circulating the email photoshops of Obama dressed as a witch doctor wearing a loin cloth?

Perhaps we should recall the historian Richard Hofstadter's description of the The Paranoid Style in American Politics

As a member of the avant-garde who is capable of perceiving the conspiracy before it is fully obvious to an as yet unaroused public, the paranoid is a militant leader. He does not see social conflict as something to be mediated and compromised, in the manner of the working politician. Since what is at stake is always a conflict between absolute good and absolute evil, what is necessary is not compromise but the will to fight things out to a finish. Since the enemy is thought of as being totally evil and totally unappeasable, he must be totally eliminated--if not from the world, at least from the theatre of operations to which the paranoid directs his attention.

So if the supposed "Intellectual" of the Republican party, Gingrich has turned into a lunatic paranoid, what does that say about who is about to take over the Congressional branch of the government? Our Congress is about to be run by a bunch of of flat earth schizoid fear mongers. We have had these Nativist proto-fascist moments before in our history: The Know-Nothing Movement of the 1840's, The Palmer Raids of the 1920's, and the McCarthy Era of the 1950's. All three were driven by the paranoia Hofstadter chronicles.

Libertarians and Independents who think its just Dandy that government will be tied up in knots, should consider the consequences of the Congress being run by a bunch of Nativist head cases anxious to fight a clash of civilizations between us and Islam.

After years of writing racist screeds, Martin Peretz of the New Republic finally had to apologize.

He is writing in response to the brilliant and, in my opinion, wonderful Nick Kristof who wrote a column excoriating Peretz yesterday. Kristof, to his credit, wrote in his New York Times blog that I (along with my friend, Emily Hauser) was the one who brought the Peretz piece to his attention.

This is for me the beauty of the internet and of my job with Media Matters Action Network. Thanks to the blogosphere (which I was introduced to by Josh Marshall who invited me to blog here) and Media Matters Action (which moved me from working within the confines of the "Jewish world" to the rest of it!), I can make my own small difference in the battle against racial and religious prejudice like that which is consuming America right now.

So this column is my first, and hopefully not last, tooting my own horn. As for Peretz, I'm glad he apologized for this one column. By my count, he needs to do a few hundred more, plus sell TNR to Spencer Ackerman for $1 to get on my good side -- where I know he desperately wants to be.

When John Bolton, who now said he is considering a run for the US presidency, was set to testify in July 2006 before the US Senate Foreign Relations Committee during his failed effort to get the Senate to confirm his nomination as US Ambassador to the United Nations, I got an early copy of his "prepared remarks" for the hearing. These remarks were handed to me as I walked in to the meeting.

Then as Bolton walked in, we were hurriedly given an updated set of remarks. I knew something must have changed -- and I went through the material page by page until I realized that what had been struck was a zinger that Bolton had been saying in the press frequently with regard to the Israel-Lebanon War.

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As newspapers have reported, Israeli actors have refused to perform with their national theater companies in the new cultural center in Ariel, a West Bank settlement that juts far into the West Bank (12 kilometers from Israel's recognized border). No one has stated the issue better than A. B. Yehoshua, the Israeli novelist, in today's Yediot Ahranot newspaper. Here is his article, translated by the news service, Israel News Today.

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He's a little old to lose his BA from Brandeis. Nonetheless, it is still good that Brandeis students are organizing against the most prominent Brandeis-associated racist.

Brandeis, where Eleanor Roosevelt was both a trustee and a faculty member and which was the national headquarters for the 1970 student mobilization against the Viet war is a Jewish-sponsored university, proud of is liberalism and its Jewish values (you know real Jewish values, the ones from the Prophets not the neocons).

In lining up against Peretz, Brandeis students of today indicate that they are at one with their traditions.

Too bad Brandeis grad, Abbie Hoffmann, is not around. He would both do a great job organizing this effort and smearing Peretz with an ephitet Peretz has earned a hundred times over: shanda fur de goyim.

That is what Hoffman shouted from the defendants' dock at the judge conducting the trial of the Chicago 7 antiwar protesters. The phrase refers to a Jew who makes other Jews cringe and delights anti-Semites everywhere.

That's Peretz.

Text of Brandeis response follows:

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Kim Dixon at Reuters writes.

Democrats in Congress are distancing themselves from President Barack Obama's push to let taxes rise for the wealthiest Americans, fearing it will further harm them in November's mid-term elections.

Obama needs to say that he will veto any bill that keeps taxes the same for people making more than $250,000 per year. If the Democrats aren't even for bringing taxes back to the rates that fueled the growth boom of the Clinton era, then what the hell does the party stand for?

Obama just said this, apropos a question about Guantanamo prisoners:

"We can't be frightened by a small number of people who wish to do us harm."

He went on to repeat the point at much greater length, faster than I can type.

This is actually a huge statement if you follow out the logic. The implication is that we have not been attacked by the entire Muslim world.

D'oh. But it's a very big deal in a panic-prone country.

Update: His answer to the question about the mosque--again emphasizing that our enemies are a "handful" of people"--is his finest hour.

This morning it really hit me how strange it is to ask people whether they view Islam favorably or unfavorably. Popularity ratings for 1400-year old religious traditions? Really? As far as I know, Islam isn't a proposition for the American people to decide. Among the vital issues confronting the country, the faith of a billion and a half people is not one of them. The very idea of an American position on Islam is bizarre.

Which leads me to a related thought: the difference between tolerance and tolerance. In other words, non-Muslim Americans' acceptance of our Muslim neighbors likewise should not be up for discussion, but apparently is. In this nation of immigrants -- proud of being based on an idea rather than an ethnic group or culture -- tolerance is supposed to mean everyone is equally American. There are no provisional Americans, waiting for us to decide if we view them favorably. Somebody please tell me: when did tolerance start meaning that we merely put up with segments of our population based on their approval rating? Sadly, examples from our hisory show where that leads.