I'll never forget the moment, ten years ago this weekend, when I first heard the news. I was winding down after a long week of work, my thoughts drifting to Independence Day holiday festivities, when my cell phone rang with word that a young white man driving a blue Ford Taurus shot up a crowd of Orthodox Jews as they were leaving Sabbath services. Six people lay seriously injured on the sidewalk outside Congregation Adas Yeshurun, not far from my Chicago apartment.

After years of researching white nationalist groups, my instincts told me that this wasn't some random shooting. Minutes later, I received a call alerting me to another shooting just north in Evanston. Those blasts left Ricky Byrdsong, an African-American family man and basketball coach, lying dead in front of his children.

As I raced back across town through rush hour traffic in the sweltering summer heat, I got another call that more shots were fired in another suburb. Thankfully, this time the perpetrator missed the young Asian-American couple. The identity of the shooter was still a mystery, and he was still at large.

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In recent weeks, Americans struggled to make sense of tragic shootings that seemed disconnected at first glance. Anti-Semite James Von Brunn killed Stephen T. Johns, a black security guard at the Holocaust Museum. George Tiller's murder a few days earlier seemed to be about abortion, yet his shooter, Scott Roeder, also had roots in the racial purity movement. Two weeks ago, it was reported that the murders of Raul Flores and his daughter in Arizona were charged to three people with white supremacist ambitions.

There's been lots of discussion about why hate crimes are rising and how to prevent future tragedies, yet we've largely missed the relationship between extremist racism and the less obvious version that plays out in our political debates. These shooters all felt that people of color (along with women and Jews) have stolen the birthright of white men. In his book "Kill the Best Gentiles," Von Brunn rails against "the calculated destruction of the White Race." Roeder was a member of the Montana Freemen; commenters on white supremacist websites praised him for ensuring that Tiller would never "kill another White baby." Flores' alleged murderers appear to have been preparing for a white uprising.

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Adding my thanks to Leonard for producing this timely and thorough book. I think mostly about how explicit, violent white supremacy relates to the more subtle ways in which racism works, as seemingly race-neutral policies like deregulation of the mortgage industry or immigration raids produce never-ending racial disparities. Those disparities segregate Americans and create the conditions for a racial divide into which white supremacists easily step.

In a piece called The White Supremacist in Us, which I wrote after the shootings of Dr. George Tiller and Stephen T. Johns, I note that our solutions to racist violence tend to focus on the individual - either punishment or education depending on how far gone the person is. But the policies that aren't obviously about hate crimes have the greatest potential to stop the perpetuation of racist ideas. Racial hierarchies show up in our policy debates every time we ask the question who deserves education/healthcare/legal status/prison. These are the policies that the Obama Administration will work to change, drawing even more ire from the white supremacist crowd.

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First of all, I want to thank Leonard Zeskind not just for Blood and Politics, but for all the work he's done over the years tracking the White Nationalist movement. While writing my first book, Kingdom Coming: The Rise of Christian Nationalism, I learned how psychologically grueling - not to mention tedious - it can be to spend lots of time in milieus whose values are radically opposed to one's own. Leonard, you've persisted in this crucial work much longer than I ever could have, and I'd be curious to know how you manage it.

Though of course, that's not the most pertinent question here. For me, the one looming issue raised by your book is what Obama means for this movement. I suspect the election of any Democratic president would have resulted in an increase in right-wing terrorism; as I've written many times before, it was no accident that right-wing domestic violence peaked amid all the febrile conspiracy-theorizing of the Clinton years and then fell off under Bush. But obviously Obama takes it to a whole new level - he's pretty much the embodiment of the white nationalist movement's nightmares. There are plenty of disturbing signs out there suggesting growing activity among violent, far-right groups. What are you seeing? And what do you predict?

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The string of recent attacks by racists and anti-Semites, including the point-blank murder of a Latino man and his nine-year old daughter in Arivaca, Arizona, by members of a Minuteman splinter group from Washington state, has riveted the public eye on the violent wing of the white nationalist movement. Less well noticed, by contrast, has been the "mainstreaming" wing as it seeks to find new adherents. Just this past weekend, for example, the Council of Conservative Citizens met in Jackson, Mississippi for one of its bi-annual conferences. The organization is the lineal descendant of the white Citizens Councils, known in the 1950s and 1960s as the "downtown Klan." And the Council and other white nationalist groups are preparing to use the July 4 weekend Tea Party events coming up as a place to find new recruits.

Let me proffer Blood and Politics: The History of the White Nationalist Movement from the Margins to the Mainstream as the essential background reading necessary to understand the context and meaning of these latest events. One of the lessons of this book is that murders and politicking both have been part of the white-ist movement since it resurfaced after the defeat of old-style segregationists by the black freedom movement in the 1960s.

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I had a very weird initial experience with Busted: When I got the galley a couple of months ago, I for some reason started reading in the middle. Before long I was sincerely puzzled: Did the New York Times really pay so poorly that Ed and his also-gainfully-employed wife couldn't make the mortgage payments on a $450,000 house? Then I leafed back a few chapters and saw the reasons: divorce, alimony, child support.

This time around I started at the beginning, but was soon confronted with Ed's decision to volunteer for duty in the Times's Baghdad bureau and its dire consequences for his first marriage. If I tried something like that without months and months and months of spousal consultation, banishment to the basement would be about the mildest punishment I might expect. (And I live in a Manhattan apartment building, where moving to the basement means moving in with the super.)

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Actually I did. Ed didn't tell me that he was thinking of taking out an Alt-A loan, but I did try to warn Ed and everyone else in sight about the housing bubble. We even ran an essay contest offering $1,000 for the best essay arguing that there was no housing bubble which got written up in Ed's newspaper (twice). Needless to say, Ed didn't listen, but more importantly Alan Greenspan and the other great minds in the economics profession didn't listen.

Ed will have to deal with his loan officer, but what about all the other folks who somehow could not see an $8 trillion housing bubble expanding in front of their face? What sort of economic system do we have when you can drive your bank into the ground peddling these garbage loans and still have a job the next day?

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Thanks for the invitation to discuss Ed Andrews' Busted. By way of introduction, I'm an editor at Newsweek, where I've covered the housing boom and bust, and I wrote a book called House Lust that chronicled the irrational exuberance over real estate during the first half of the decade.

I read Busted a few weeks ago in a single sitting. The author's personal story is really gripping and drives it along. Unlike most of what's been written about the housing meltdown, there's a story to Busted, and I stayed up ridiculously late because I wanted to find out how it ended. While Andrews' disintegrating finances (and, notably, its effect on his new marriage) form the heart of the book, he's filled out the story by exploring the supply chain of his loan. (This is the other two-thirds of the book he mentions in his introduction.) While these sections are less compelling than his personal story, I admired the imaginative way he managed to take what is essentially a really good magazine story (ie the excerpt that ran in the Times Magazine) and fill it out to create a book.

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Thank you so much for inviting me to the Cafe. I've had a wild ride over the past month, ever since the New York Times Magazine published an excerpt of Busted, in which I recount my own outrageous nightmare with junk mortgages. This book has been the ultimate hot-and-cold experience. Hundreds of people have written to thank me for laying out my own mistakes, with many expressing relief that they weren't alone and that they didn't feel quite as ashamed of the mistakes they had made. I've never experienced such an outpouring of anguish and sympathy. Most came across as sincere and hardworking family people, not me-too gimmie-gimmies. Most acknowledged they had made mistakes and just wanted to get back to a sound footing -- with or without their houses.

But obviously, I've also been on the target of much righteous wrath and vitriol. I've been called a loser, a liar, a fraud, and an example of what's wrong with America. Among many other epithets. That was to be expected. When you're a lead economics reporter for the Times and you admit to bungling your finances so badly, you waive any claims to mercy. What I didn't expect was to be accused of not falling on my sword enough and for leaving out "crucial'' information about my wife Patty's prior financial problems. This kicked off a mud-storm in the blogosphere, though book reviewers and interviewers have generally viewed it as a sideshow. But it's all fair game, and I invite people to weigh in or ask questions.

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Edmund Andrews, economics reporter for The New York Times, joins us at TPMCafe Book Club this week to discuss his book Busted: Life Inside the Great Mortgage Meltdown.

From Ed's introductory post:

Although the narrative is anchored on my own personal experience, the goal is to explore in intimate detail the broader corruption and cynical recklessness that infected players at each level of the financial food chain. Two-thirds of the book is not about me but about the people who helped deliver all that money to my door: my lenders, the Wall Street guys behind them and the Washington policymakers like Alan Greenspan.

Joining the discussion are Dean Baker, Cafe regular, of the Center for Economic and Policy Research; Justin Fox, TIME's economics and business reporter and author of The Myth of the Rational Market; Daniel Gross, senior editor at Newsweek and author of Dumb Money: How our Greatest Financial Minds Bankrupted the Nation; Daniel McGinn, national correspondent for Newsweek and author of House Lust: America's Obsession With Our Homes; and Nathan Newman, Policy Director for the Progressive Legislative Action Network.

In Bloggers On The Bus Eric Boehlert, despite being a big fan of the netroots, doesn't pull his punches when talking about some of the sorrier episodes of the 2008 election season, including the way the Obama/Clinton primary got ugly and the rumors that flew about the blogosphere regarding Sarah Palin's last pregnancy and whether or not she faked it. The former is too big a topic for one blog post, but the latter raises some interesting questions.

The problem for liberal bloggers is that while we automatically have better ethical standards than the mainstream cable news media by virtue of not using Matt Drudge as our guiding light, we don't get the benefit of the doubt the way they do, because we're not as shiny or expensive. But a lot of bloggers, particularly smaller ones trying to make a name for themselves, feel the same pressure that the cable news networks do to scoop everyone else. The cable news can afford to take the risk of being wrong in order to get to a story first, but since establishment media and politicians are eager to discredit the bloggers, we can't afford goof-ups like promoting the false story about Palin's pregnancy.

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The future of liberal blogging is an issue I've been perhaps surprisingly unconcerned with. It's something that arose organically, and as Eric documents it evolved from venting, to community, to media influence, to fundraising and activism, to, in some sense, a networked interest group and coalition. While one shouldn't discount the contributions and efforts of individuals in all of this, I think it's fair to say that no one blogger has been critical to the strength of the blogosphere. And while its role and influence will continue to evolve, as it has since the beginning, it's difficult to imagine its key features and strengths fading away.

To me, since the beginning, the blogosphere's key feature has been to provide a sustained and cohesive unapologetic liberal narrative not found elsewhere. While I certainly hope that the Obama administration moves the country in a more progressive direction, and I will continue to push for this, like Amanda I don't have any sense bloggers are owed some sort of seat at the table.

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Perhaps like some others, I've run short of time this week, trying to keep up (at Editor & Publisher, and via Twitter etc.) with what's going on in Iran, including the media crackdown. So just a few words for now.

First, I've read Eric's book and can certainly recommend it. I was especially keen to read it as my own recent book, Why Obama Won, highlights Web/blog influence and claims it one of the real keys to his victory. So rather than take a broader look at the future of liberal blogging, as some have done here, let me briefly return to the campaign and try to guess what will happen in future elections.

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I think the 'now what?' question for the blogosphere remains paramount, as it faces a real two-fer. The first was the completely expected exit of W. Bush from the national political stage and what that would mean to an online movement that was essentially created to oppose him.

The second is more unexpected: the rise of Twitter and other more immediate communications. For context, I finished writing/reporting the Bloggers book back in December and at the time very few people (relatively speaking) were talking about Twitter. This week it's on the cover of Time.

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First, a word of praise for "Bloggers On The Bus"---I'm so used to reading hostile reactions to liberal bloggers from the mainstream media and so many instances of exploiting some of the worst episodes or worst blog comments to smear us all that I'm slobberingly grateful to read an account of liberal blogging that's accurate and respectful (while not shying away from talking about some of our uglier issues). There's a lot to address that he covers in the book: the Clinton/Obama blog wars, policing liberal bloggers who want to make like wingnuts and trade in conspiracy theories, pushing back against the Dirty Hippie stereotype, and the "where do we go from here?" question.

But I want to address the question Eric raised about how the Obama campaign and administration has, while using the larger netroots and social networking structures already in place, put the bloggers themselves at a distance. As he details in the book, this upset a lot of bloggers, especially since the blogs themselves mostly broke for Obama and had a lot to do with raising his profile above Clinton's. Despite this, while Edwards and Clinton had blogger outreach, Obama didn't.

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Eric lucked out. This is an auspicious time to discuss his book on networked politics -- you can't scan Google News without coming across reports of how blogs, Twitter and cell phones are channeling political protest in Iran. Tuesday's New York Times, for example, reports on how the Iranian government's repression has focused on technology.

The crackdown on communications began on election day, when text-messaging services were shut down in what opposition supporters said was an attempt to block one of their most important organizing tools. Over the weekend, cellphone transmissions and access to Facebook and some other Web sites were also blocked. Iranians continued to report on Monday that they could not send text messages.

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In his post kicking off the discussion of his book, "Bloggers on The Bus: How The Internet Changed Politics and The Press, Eric Boehlert writes:

I wrote Bloggers on the Bus because I wanted to help tell the story of the rise of the liberal blogosphere. . . .I thought the liberal blogosphere deserved respect and I felt it was important to document its rise.

Eric performs an admirable job in the telling of that story. If you care at all about political blogging, you must read Eric's book. At the end of his book (and in his post), Eric basically poses the question what now? I would hope that the question is answered by remembering why it came to be at all. It was not just a question of available technology. It was issues that spurred the birth of political blogging. No political party invented it. No political party owned it. It truly was bottom up - driven by concerns about issues - not the fortunes of political parties or individuals.

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In the introduction of my book, Bloggers on the Bus: How the Internet Changed Politics and the Press, I highlighted a YouTube clip from 2006, right after the mid-term elections, when blogger Chris Bowers is talking into the camera (I think) of Matt Stoller and Bowers answers the question: What does it take to be a liberal blogger? He starts listing all the requirements: "If you have no children, no one to support, and no career ambitions, then you too can become a full-time progressive blogger, as long as you're wiling to do nothing else in your entire life."

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This week at Cafe, Eric Boehlert joins us for a discussion about his book Bloggers on the Bus: How the Internet Changed Politics and the Press. Boehlert, a senior fellow at Media Matters for America, looks back at the 2008 presidential campaign and how key players in the liberal blogosphere shaped important events.

Joining the discussion are Jay Rosen, professor of journalism at NYU and author of PressThink; Amanda Marcotte, Pandagon blogger and blogmaster for John Edwards' 2008 presidential campaign for a time; Greg Mitchell, editor of Editor & Publisher and author of Why Obama Won; Duncan Black, also known as Atrios of Eschaton Blog; Armando Llorens, who posts as Big Tent Democrat at Talk Left; and Ari Melber, correspondent for The Nation and columnist for Politico.

I would like to offer a few thoughts on Geof Stone's question about how best to express disagreement with a policy decision. When you are on the inside of government, you argue your case privately as best you can. But if you do not prevail, you support publicly what is decided. That is the bargain of serving in government. When you are on the outside, you have the freedom to disagree publicly, which is what I have done. Hence War of Necessity, War of Choice and the other work I have produced on this subject.

As I noted in my earlier post and in the book, I argued against the decision to go to war with Iraq in 2002 and 2003. I did not, however, resign. Many people, both at the time and since, have asked why. There are two reasons for leaving. The first is when you disagree with a major decision so fundamentally that you cannot live with the outcome. The Iraq War certainly qualifies as a major decision, but I did not resign because my disagreement was not fundamental. It was, as I explained earlier, 60/40, given my assumption from the available intelligence that Iraq possessed biological and chemical weapons. Had I known then what is now known, i.e., that Iraq possessed no weapons of mass destruction, I would have resigned had President Bush proceeded with the war. However, that was not the situation as I understood it at the time.

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Thanks to everyone for your posts so far on the themes raised in my book. I would like to pick up on some of the comments and questions.

First, I draw the distinction between wars of necessity and wars of choice based on the nature and scale of the interests at stake and the presence or absence of promising alternative policies that could protect these interests. As a literal matter, yes, countries and leaders always have a choice. Colonists could have chosen to continue living under what they considered British tyranny rather than declare independence. The United States could have allowed Japan to dominate the Pacific and Nazi Germany to rule Europe. But American leaders in those situations believed - correctly - that going to war was the only way to protect the country's vital interests. There was no real choice. By this standard, entering World War II was a necessary step, as were the decisions to resist North Korean aggression in 1950 and Iraqi aggression in 1990. I write in the book that "The distinction between wars of necessity and wars of choice is obviously heavily subjective, inevitably reflecting an individual's analysis and politics." So I am certainly prepared for disagreements over whether a given war is one of necessity or choice. But I believe that the difference exists and that the process of thinking through the distinction is highly useful for policy makers and citizens alike.

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I was against this war, believing that it would be much more difficult than its advocates predicted and that it would take a large toll on U.S. foreign policy at a moment in history when the United States had a tremendous opportunity to shape the international order. (R. Haass, TPM, June 9)

Beyond the "toll on U.S. foreign policy": When the pursuit of national security produces urban insecurity.

Yes, I agree the Iraq war took "a large toll on US foreign policy." But at no point in your post do you mention the toll of the Iraq war on civilian populations once the 6 week aerial bombing was completed. Asymmetric war (conventional army against armed insurgents) puts the national security paradigm on its head: pursuing national security now becomes the making of urban insecurity. We already knew this from the Vietnam war. Did this at all enter into the picture when evaluating the Iraq invasion, or for that matter the current escalation in Afghanistan-Pakistan? After Vietnam and a few other wars since then, did the US military forces really think that aerial bombing would do the job and no major civilian losses would ensue from asymmetric warfare in the cities of Iraq?

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Two questions for Richard (and for this group, of which I'm grateful to be a part), building off of Geof and Todd's posts.

First, I'm interested to read how you portray the 1991 Gulf War as a "war of necessity" in a meaningful way. (I'm still reading your book, so my apologies in advance for going over ground you may be covering.) The argument advanced in your post for why the 2003 Iraq invasion was a war of choice -- "the United States had options besides force to deal with the threat posed by Saddam Hussein" -- could be fairly applied to the 1991 conflict as well. In that earlier war, the calculations of interest, the cost to the U.S. and the ultimate outcome make it appear a justified choice, but it's hardly the case that the U.S. had no option in 1991 but to oust Saddam from Kuwait. What's more, I see from skipping around (mea culpa) that you conclude the book by contending the U.S. shouldn't "rule out all wars of choice." If not, then isn't your argument really about the relationship between wars and the national interest, not about choice or necessity?

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