TPMCafe

What Tea Partiers See-- and What They Don't

2010-02-09T20:58:27Z

I don't see why Tea Party Patriots in Nashville paid Sarah Palin $100,000 for a keynote last week when, for no more than the love of country, they could have honored me, a living witness to the Boston Tea Party of December 16,1973.

I would have told them how I stood boldly that day on Boston's old Congress Street Bridge as the American Revolution Bicentennial Commission and Boston 200, a consortium of corporations including the Salada Tea Company, sent costumed National Guardsmen to dump imitation tea chests from a replica of the Beaver, one of three ships that colonial rebels had relieved of their cargo 200 years before.

The chests of 1973 were empty, but demonstrators organized by a "People's Bicentennial Commission" offset the lavish unreality of it all by dumping metal drums from the Beaver to protest big oil companies' complicity in the fuel crisis of that year, whose long gas-station lines I also joined, albeit involuntarily.

That counter-demonstration was choreographed, too. But so, actually, was the original one. And, honestly, now, who was closer in spirit of the tea partiers of 1773 -- the costumed guardsmen and the salespeople at Salada's on-site exhibit and gift shop that day, or the counter-demonstrators? I think that today's Tea Partiers know the answer, but that they talk about only half of it.

As Gordon Wood, the great historian of the American Revolution (he's mentioned by Matt Damon in "Good Will Hunting") told me this week, the original Tea Party was a rebellion not just against a tax but against government favoritism for a global corporation it considered too big to fail.

With 17 million pounds of unsold tea languishing in the East India Company's warehouses as other merchants' teas glutted the market, there were rumors that the British government might even revoke the company's charter and take over its management.

Instead, Parliament granted the company an exclusive license to sell tea; removed all duties; forfeited an annual payment the company had made to the government; and advanced a large loan.

Sound familiar? At least all these favors lowered the price of tea, underselling as well as barring Dutch tea smugglers and American tea merchants. "Poor Lord North [King George III's prime minister] thought he was doing the colonists a favor" by saving the company from bankruptcy and giving it a monopoly in America, Wood explains.

A modest tea tax remained, offending colonists' stand against taxation without representation. But Wood -- crediting Benjamin Woods Labaree, the authority on the Boston Tea Party -- notes that "Giving the monopoly was probably more important in arousing the anger of many small New England merchants than the tea tax."

Moreover, the few locals who were licensed to carry the company's tea included relatives of Massachusetts' royal governor, Thomas Hutchinson, who ordered ships not to accommodate populist pressure by leaving the harbor without unloading their tea.

"Samuel Adams and his radicals were looking for an issue to exploit," Wood notes, and Hutchinson's nepotism gave them and local merchants the hot button they needed to turn out the men who actually stormed the ships and dumped the tea.

Forgive me for asking, but had I been given the podium at Nashville instead of Sarah Palin, could I have admonished today's Tea Partiers to dump medicines sold by Big Pharma under the big Bush Administration prescription drug benefit plan that bars its providers from buying cheaper generic drugs in Canada?

Sure, that's awfully radical. Samuel Adams was too radical for his cousin John Adams, until the Tea Party made John exult, "This is the most magnificent movement of all. This destruction of the tea is so bold, so daring, ... and it must have so important consequences, and so lasting, that I cannot but consider it as an epoch in history."

Will today's Tea Partiers give us a new epoch of independence? Trolling the Tea Party Patriots' website, I do find scathing mentions of oil companies, bankers, Big Pharma, and their lobbyists - but mostly in comments posted by wonderfully sincere, impassioned citizens.

Do they have a Sam Adams in Sarah Palin? Is there a John Adams among their cheerleaders at Rupert Murdoch's global News Corporation?

Sarah Palin - Boston Tea Party - Tea - United States - Tea Partiers

Be Careful What You Wish For

2010-02-09T16:45:59Z

As I've said before the right wing of American Politics is a pretty fractious bunch. It now appears that the Pro-business wing is getting pretty worried about the anti-business rhetoric of the Tea Party Populists. Conventional wisdom is that Republican gridlock is good for big business but in the Wall Street Journal it was noted that the stock market's recent fall started the morning after Scott Brown's win in Massachusetts.

So why did stocks collapse the moment the vote was tallied in Massachusetts?
It's because the immediate reaction to the Brown election--in both parties--has been a dangerous lurch toward antibusiness populism. The Obama administration's strategy has been to latch onto something that both parties can agree on: lynching Wall Street.

Republicans have to be careful what they wish for. John McCain under attack from the right, is no longer the maverick.

Yet Mr. McCain now finds himself jammed, moving starkly -- and often awkwardly -- to the right, apparently in an effort to gain favor among the same voters whom Mr. Hayworth, a consistent voice for the far right, could pull toward him like taffy come summer.

Mr. McCain now sharply criticizes the bailout bill he voted for, pivoted from his earlier position that the Guantánamo Bay detention facility should be closed, offered only a muted response to the Supreme Court's decision undoing campaign finance laws and backed down from statements that gays in the military would be O.K. by him if the military brass were on board.

Crib-note reading Sarah Palin, clearly positioning herself to run in 2012, suggests that Obama's best strategy to run against her would be to invade Iran. Last night on Hardball Chris Matthews had Republican strategist Mark McKinnon and Newsweek's Richard Wolfe on discussing Palin's weekend of speeches.

MATTHEWS: You know, Budd Schulberg couldn`t write better than this. This -- you know what I mean, A Face in the Crowd? You know...

MCKINNON: Oh, yes, no...

MATTHEWS: ... coming out with somebody who has little hand things written on their palm, calling for revolution, calling for secession, calling for declaring war on third-world countries. And people are cheering!

MCKINNON: Yes. No, I was actually thinking as we were coming on the program about this would make a screenplay and people would probably reject it as being too...

MATTHEWS: You know, Huey Long wasn`t the most sane guy in the world, Richard, but he said that when fascism comes to America, it will call itself anti-fascism.

Some of you have taken me to task for worrying about the potential rise of fascism in this country. But to read the whole Gramsci quote about the Interregnum is to understand that anything can happen in this political vacuum: "The old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum there arises a great diversity of morbid symptoms." 25 million underemployed Americans can be a volatile mix. We like simple solutions in this country--Revolution, Secession, Invasion--then everything will be alright. The possibility that we are in the twilight of American Empire may be very hard for much of the right to accept. Rather than seeing the great possibilities in Life After Empire, they may want to return to our martial past--a fantasy world that Sarah Palin already inhabits.

Sarah Palin - United States - Politics of the United States - Right-wing politics - Politics

Inevitable: New Republic Calls Former Editor Andrew Sullivan An Anti-Semite

2010-02-09T15:20:21Z

I knew that Andrew Sullivan's abandonment of the hard right position on Israel was driving his old buds at the New Republic crazy.

Andrew was once TNR's wunderkind, the youngest editor in its history. Smart, cool, Oxford educated and a gentile Zionist. (Sullivan himself has written that he was pro-Israel long before he got to TNR).

Sullivan left TNR and its whacked out publisher, Marty Peretz, on good terms although Sullivan must have known that there was one condition for remaining on those good terms: he must never attack Israel's policies.

But, after Gaza, the increasingly liberal Sullivan could not take it anymore. He remains pro-Israel but was, and is, utterly disgusted by Israel's behavior in Gaza. Plus, he can't stand the neocons.

And so the break with TNR had to come. And here it is from Leon Wieseltier, the literary editor and bosom buddy of publisher Peretz.

Here's my summation. "Andrew Sullivan always had theological problems with Jews because they don't get the Trinity. For awhile he laid that aside. But now his virulent hatred of Israel and people like Krauthammer has caused him to revert to who he originally was. He is a Jew-hater."

The title of the piece is "Something Much Darker: Andrew Sullivan Has A Serious Problem."

It's a classic. I know most of you won't read the whole piece. Wieseltier's prose is impenetrable. But try.

I hope Sullivan is not bothered by the Wiesel's diatribe although I suspect he may be. No one likes being called an anti-semite or a racist. But consider the source: the TNR ghetto where every gentile is either a current Jew-hater or a future one.

God, it must drive Peretz and the Wiesel nuts that their once fair-haired (and now no-haired) boy is one of the most influential thinkers in America while they have been relegated to that microspace where Michael Goldfarb, Jonah Goldberg, and John Podhoretz reign supreme.

Israel - Andrew Sullivan - Zionism - Antisemitism - Middle East

Obamanomics One Year Out

2010-02-09T14:33:38Z

Obamanomics suffers from a misunderstanding of what the President is trying to achieve and what he's up against. Into the breach come Republicans, Tea Partiers, nay-sayers, deficit vultures, and Raging-Dog Democrats, all viewing Obamanomics as more taxes and more spending. That's nonsense. To see the big picture, keep your eye on three big things.

1. Government spending needed to offset the continued reluctance of consumers and businesses to spend. You don't have to be an orthodox Keynesian to understand that as long as the private sector is deleveraging, the public sector has to borrow and spend in order to keep the economy moving forward.

The current stimulus will peak in a few months. Add in unemployment insurance payments and outlays for the jobs bill, and the stimulus will be about $90 billion larger. But this sum is not likely to be enough to make up for the shortfall in private spending. Consider also that state and local governments are also slashing jobs and services - and raising taxes about $350 billion over this year and next - and Obama needs to spend more.

Just look at projected unemployment. Since the start of the recession in December 2007, the labor market has shed 8.4 million payroll jobs. Add to these the number of new jobs needed to keep up with population growth and we're about 11 million jobs behind the pre-recession unemployment rate. To fill the 11 million jobs gap, employment would have to increase by over 400,000 jobs every month for the next three years, starting now.

The Council of Economic Advisors foresees 10 percent unemployment through the rest of 2010, falling only to 9.2 percent in 2011. The result is a giant drag on the economy, not to mention pain for millions of American families. High unemployment also allows firms to keep wages low. That's good for corporate profits but not for their customers, who are someone else's employees. America can't have a vigorous recovery when consumers are this anxious about their jobs and wages.

The federal budget deficit is a huge problem, to be sure. But you need to distinguish between deficits occurring this year and next when the economy is still trying to climb out of a hole, and deficits five to ten years from now. If government doesn't spend enough in the short term to get jobs back, those out-year deficits will be even larger because tax revenues will be lower than otherwise and we'll be spending more on unemployment benefits. The public doesn't quite get this distinction, which is probably why the President thought it necessary to freeze discretionary nonmilitary spending.

2. The boomers now speeding toward retirement. Neither party wants to deal with the inevitable consequences for Medicare and Social Security. The President's idea for a bi-partisan congressional commission on the deficit was too large and amorphous to gain the support it needed. He'd do better to try for a bi-partisan commission that focused just on these two giant entitlement programs. Social Security is an easier fix than Medicare, but the growth of both have to be tamed. In the 1980s, Alan Greenspan chaired a commission to deal with Social Security's pending problems that came up with fixes Congress implemented.

Don't get confused by the size of the numbers at stake. Pay attention to the ratio of cumulative debt to the size of the national economy. That will tell you how easily we can manage the debt. The debt-to-GDP ratio right now is close to 53 percent - still in the manageable zone. But after the boomers hit retirement, it will soar. One of the most telling figures in the President's budget document is the Congressional Budget Office's projection that by 2020 the debt-to-GDP ratio will be 77 percent, assuming no entitlement reforms. That's bad news. The ratio is moving in the wrong direction. At some point, the dollar could tank and interest rates explode.

3. Mad-as hell politics. The economic stresses of continued high unemployment and low wages are contributing to the growth of the "I'm Mad As Hell" Party - a rag-tag collection of Tea Partiers furious at establishment Republicans, left-wing Democrats angry at what they consider lily-livered Democrats in Washington, and Independents disgusted with everybody inside the Beltway.

Mad-as-hellers on the right hate government; mad-as-hellers on the left hate big business. Both share a growing sense that the economic game is rigged against them. The two are also united by how much they detest Wall Street and its bailout, and their contempt for any cozy relationship between big business and government. They distrust the Fed, and have no particular fondness for international trade, either. Mad-as-hellers are likely to be a formidable force in the upcoming midterms and beyond.

Obama is responding. That's one way to view his newly-proposed crackdown on Wall Street - limiting the size and potential risks big banks can take on, and imposing new fees on the biggest banks designed to repay outlays for the bailout. It also explains why the President is making another attempt to increase taxes on the overseas earnings of multinational corporations, and reduce tax breaks for hedge-fund managers and oil and gas companies. And why he feels it's a good time to let the Bush tax cuts expire on higher-income individuals (whose propensity to spend is limited even absent higher taxes), although not on the middle class.

The mad-as-hellers' influence could also be seen in the Senate's initial resistance to confirm Ben Bernanke for another term as Fed Chair, and in continued congressional threats to the independence of the Fed. Trade agreements have also suffered. The President's single trade request during his first year of office - duty-free status on exports from Afghanistan and Pakistan, in order to boost employment in these troubled areas and thereby counter terrorist groups - was shot down by Congress. Pending trade agreements with South Korea and Columbia have been put on hold.

In sum: If you want to understand Obamanomics one year out, look at the demand-side hole we're still in, the gargantuan boomer deficit we're heading for, and the mad-as-hell party these bad times have spawned. How Obama deals with all three will be the real economic test of his presidency.

Republican - President of the United States - Economic - Social Security - Medicare

Why The Ethan Bronner Case Matters

2010-02-09T00:51:15Z

The story this far is that the New York Times is seriously on the defensive because the son of its Israel correspondent, Ethan Bronner, joined the Israeli army.

In the end, the Bronner story is not that significant. He will either remain in Israel or be reassigned. Other than for the Bronner family, life will go on as before.

But here's the real story. Suddenly the New York Times feels the need to deal with its critics who argue that an intense attachment to Israel obscures objective judgement on the Middle East.

This is new. Until very recently the assumption was that the Israeli position was, by definition, the neutral, disinterested position.

Read any Tom Friedman column on the Middle East. The underlying assumption of any Friedman column is that if it's good for Israel, it's good for America. It's right.

Friedman is classic. On any issue -- Thai economics, Chinese reform, or Macedonian separatism -- he will invariably find a friend, who happens to be an Israeli, to comment on it.

Until now, that was okay.

But no more.

Israel has become a foreign country. And if the New York Times' correspondent's son joins the Israeli army, it matters.

Imagine if Bronner was covering Latin America and his son joined the Columbian defense forces! And, no, this is not comparable to a reporter's son or daughter joining the American military. Americans who want to serve, can and do serve in their own army, Serving in a foreign army is extraordinary.

I do not accept the premise that a 20-year old makes the decision to serve in the Israeli army (and not the US army or no army at all) independent of the home environment. It is highly unlikely that young Bronner would be devoted to Israel if his parents were not. His devotion is a reflection of theirs. (Much as my kids' dovish liberalism is a reflection of their parents).

I am not happy with this turn of events. I too once believed it was appropriate for Americans to identify with Israel almost as if that identification did not conflict with identification with America.

But that was never true. Those who emigrate to Israel or whose children do (and/or join its army) have a vested interest in Israel that conflicts with the role of a journalist. And if their child is in the Israeli army, they have a vested interest in the success of that army and in its reputation.

This would apply to France, Japan, or even Canada. It always has.

The difference now is that the bloom is off the rose. Israel may be a foreign country many Americans love, but it is a foreign country. Those who quit the United States for Israel do not "make aliya," they emigrate.

All that is fine. But not if your job is to be objective.

New York Time - Middle East - Ethan Bronner - Israel Defense Forces - Israel

This Just in, on Earmarks and Public Paralysis

2010-02-08T21:59:04Z

"...[T]he delinquencies of the states have, step by step, matured themselves to an extreme which has at length arrested all the wheels of the national government... The [members of Congress] will consider the conformity of the thing proposed or required to their immediate interests or aims.... in a spirit of... suspicious scrutiny, without that knowledge of national circumstances and reasons of state which is essential to right judgment, and with that strong predilection in favor of local objects which can hardly fail to mislead the decision."

So warned Alexander Hamilton in 1787 in The Federalist, No.15, and Walter Lippmann cited this in 1922 in his Public Opinion, his now-classic remonstrance against democracy. Lippmann defended Hamilton's and Madison's desire to, as he put it, "restore government as against democracy" in order to secure "the power to make national decisions and enforce them throughout the nation; democracy [the Federalists] believed was the insistence of localities and classes upon self-determination in accordance with their immediate interests and aims." Were they wrong?

It's not a frivolous question. What Hamilton described is as important as is ideologically driven obstructionism in holding up Obama's nominees and legislative proposals. He gets paralysis from Democrats as well as Republicans who are subservient a) to local constituencies and b) to moneyed special interests that accelerate legislators' parochial pandering by promising to target investments (and, now, increasingly, political advertising) to those constituencies.

Lippmann understood Constitutional checks and balances as the Federalists' artful attempt "to substitute 'the mild influence of the magistracy'" for sectional and factional conflict "by devising an ingenious machine to neutralize local opinion." The framers of the Constitution "did not understand how to manipulate a large electorate [to endorse broader, higher goals], any more than they saw the possibility of common consent upon the basis of common information."

Well, now we have plenty of common information, easily accessible, and politicians as different as John McCain and Barack Obama propose to make earmarks still more transparent. But even Lippmann, who brought up the subject of "common information," doubted it would ever be enough. His chapter, "The Role of Force, Patronage, and Privilege" is still worth reading. Countering his pessimism would require depths of intelligent,long-haul organizing and education unseen, outside of the civil rights movement, since the 1940s.

Government - United States Congress - United States - Politics - Congress

The Sky is Falling -- on John Bolton

2010-02-08T20:44:27Z

John Bolton has made a cottage industry out of trying to scare people about nuclear weapons. Contrary to the subtitle of Dr. Strangelove - "how I learned to stop worrying and love the bomb" - Bolton's motto seems to be "why you need to start worrying and embrace the bomb." He reiterates this point at every opportunity, most recently in a piece published in the Washington Examiner. But does he really believe that the Obama administration's modest but essential first steps towards reducing global nuclear arsenals are putting us in grave danger? I seriously doubt it.

Bolton believes in maintaining the status quo, a world in which the United States and Russia possess 95% of the world's arsenal of 20,000-plus nuclear weapons and it's not worth even trying to use diplomacy to reduce those arsenals, much less those of other nuclear powers. In his most recent piece, he even appears to dismiss President Obama's pledge to secure "all vulnerable nuclear materials in four years, so that they never fall into the hands of terrorists." What's Bolton's logic here? Do we need to leave loose nukes and unsecured bomb-making materials lying around to show we're tough? Or is he just so intent on opposing anything that the Obama administration is for that he will oppose even the most effective policies available for reducing the nuclear danger?

What are Bolton's alternatives to diplomacy? Bombing Iran? He has implied as much, even though the effects of such an action would most likely be to undermine the Iranian opposition, accelerate Tehran's efforts to seek a nuclear weapon, and sow further chaos in a region that can ill afford it. Invading North Korea? Even he doesn't seem willing to go that far over the top.

Instead of quaking in our boots at the prospect of nuclear arms cuts, as Bolton would like us to do, we need to look at the real security benefits of a multi-faceted approach to achieving substantial reductions. These steps should include a new nuclear arms reduction agreement (START), followed shortly thereafter by negotiations for even deeper cuts in U.S. and Russian arsenals; a global ban on all nuclear weapons tests (the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty); accelerated investments in securing all nuclear weapons and bomb-making materials; increased investments in the inspection capabilities of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA); a concerted effort to solve the Kashmir problem and improve relations between India and Pakistan to the point that each nation will feel secure in reducing its nuclear arsenal; and a renewed global effort to get Iran and North Korea to curb and then reverse their nuclear weapons programs. Some of these steps are obviously harder - much harder - than others. But each of them is valuable in its own right, and we can't afford not to pursue them.

It's important to remember that there has been considerable success in reducing nuclear weapons over the past two decades. Since the end of the Cold War, more than twice as many countries have abandoned nuclear weapons or bomb-making programs as have initiated them. Total nuclear weapons stockpiles are down by over two-thirds since their peak in the mid-1960s. And programs like the Nunn-Lugar program - which invests in dismantling and securing Russian nuclear bombs and nuclear materials - have made impressive strides. There is no reason why we can't build on these successes to accomplish further reductions in nuclear weapons, making the world a far safer place in the process. We just need to make sure people don't buy into the scare talk of John Bolton and his cohorts.

John Bolton - Nuclear weapon - Strangelove - United States - John R. Bolton

Progressive Taxes Win Big In Oregon

2010-02-08T19:06:06Z

The political establishment continues to be obsessed with the victory of Scott Brown in the Massachusetts Senate race. In fact, they are so obsessed they managed to almost completely overlook the success of two important tax initiatives in Oregon the following week.

Oregon voters passed by a margin of 54 to 46 a tax measure that would raise the tax rate on taxpayers with an income of more than $250,000 a year. They also approved a measure that would raise the tax paid by corporations in Oregon. Together the two measures are projected to raise $750 million over the next two years, approximately 5 percent of the state's $14 billon budget.

This victory is striking because it shows that voters in Oregon were willing to support progressive taxation in order to avoid substantial cuts in public services. This is worth noting at time when there is a conventional wisdom taking shape in Washington that the public is increasingly hostile to the government and will oppose taxes in any form.

It is true that Oregon is somewhat more liberal than most states, but it is not far out of line with the rest of the country. Gore won a very narrow victory in Oregon in 2000, as he did in the popular vote nationwide. Kerry took 51.6 percent of the Oregon vote in 2004. This is better than his national total, but not indicative of a state hugely out of line with national sentiment.

It is also important to remember that this was a special election centered on tax issues. The electorate that shows up in off year elections is always skewed to the right and it is likely to be especially skewed when the topic is taxes. For these reasons, if anti-government anti-tax sentiment really has over-run the country, then we should have expected to see these Oregon tax measures going down by substantial margins, not coasting to victory.

So what is going on? First, to give credit where it is due, the groups that were fighting for the initiative did an outstanding job getting their message out. Voters in Oregon understood two things. First they understood that the tax increase would be relatively modest and that it would only apply to a small and affluent segment of the population.

Second, voters recognized that the alternative to the tax increases would be cuts in education and other services that they valued. There was no secret pile of waste, fraud and abuse that could be attacked in order to avoid cuts in social services.

The supporters of the initiatives also did the fieldwork necessary to get voters out to the polls, or actually the mailbox, since Oregon runs it elections with mail-in ballots. There was an especially large turnout from young voters who often stay home in off-year elections.

But this great legwork can only be successful if the electorate actually supports the measures at the polls, as they obviously did. The public was willing to trust that money put into the hands of the Oregon legislature will be mostly well used. Clearly Oregon voters were expressing a very different sentiment than the electorate that sent Scott Brown to the Senate in Massachusetts.

Some of the difference can undoubtedly be explained by the fact that the Massachusetts race featured a charismatic newcomer challenging a seemingly out of touch career politician. However, it is also clear that Massachusetts voters resented a political establishment that left the Wall Street banks more profitable than ever, while tens of millions of people are unemployed and/or facing the loss of their homes. Martha Coakley, the Democratic candidate, was identified with this establishment.

The political establishment likes to tell tales in which people are either for or against government. But, this does not fit most people's view of the world. The vast majority of the public value public schools, streets without potholes, and well-working police and fire departments. However, they hate to see their tax dollars go to make rich people even richer.

As a result of the bailout and the record profits and bonuses now being earned at Goldman Sachs and elsewhere, the Democrats are seen as being on the side of Wall Street. If the Obama administration cannot move beyond symbolic measures and actually change the way things work on Wall Street, then Democrats are likely to continue to pay a big price in future elections.

Oregon - Massachusetts - Scott Brown - United States - Politics

Casey's Story: War Was Half the Battle

2010-02-08T16:05:36Z

Former Army Specialist Casey Elder is trapped in a story without a conclusion. It began in 2004, the moment an IED struck her Humvee in Baghdad, slamming her hard enough to dislocate her shoulder and cause permanent joint and nerve damage.

After returning home, Casey began suffering from balance problems, short-term memory loss, and severe migraines. After a series of misdiagnoses, her local VA was finally able to pinpoint the source of her injuries: Casey had a Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI). She responded by filing a disability claim with the VA in January 2009, assuming that a diagnosis from a VA hospital would qualify her to receive compensation. But that assumption proved to be painfully wrong.

After waiting eight months, Casey was shocked to learn that her claim was rejected. Her only recourse was to appeal the VA's decision, an arduous, drawn-out process. Today, more than a year after she started this journey, Casey still waits for word on whether or not she will receive her hard-earned benefits.

Unfortunately, stories like Casey's could fill a stack of books at your local library. She is just one of the nearly 425,000 members of the nation's least envious club: injured veterans waiting for their disability benefits. And no, members of this club don't have their own jackets or 10% off at Walmart. They are stuck waiting. And waiting.

Why the backlog? Like all Iraq and Afghanistan veterans applying for disability benefits, Casey is essentially using the same paper-based system that Vietnam veterans used more than three decades ago. The current disability process was created before most Iraq and Afghanistan vets were even born. In the last thirty years, we've moved from DOS to Windows 7, from rotary phones to iPhones, from Beta-Max to Blu-Ray--but the VA is still operating with paper clips and printer paper. Now we know who is keeping Dunder Mifflin in business.

As detailed in our newest report, "Red Tape: Veterans Fight New Battles for Care and Benefits," the claims process is a picture of government inefficiency and bureaucracy at its worst.

Veterans wait on average 6 months to hear back from the VA on the status of their claim, with some forced to wait more than a year. The entire claims backlog borders on nearly one million, and because of an emphasis on processing quantity over quality, 17 percent of all claims are inaccurate. Veterans who contest a wrong decision face an appeals process that takes, on average, more than two years. And just last week, we heard from VA Secretary Shinseki that wait time is likely to rise until 2013. You know a situation is out of control when you have to use italics that often in a single paragraph.

But somebody is doing something about it. Next week, dozens of veterans like Casey and Sara Skinner (see the video below) will take this fight to our nation's Capitol as part of IAVA's annual Storm the Hill campaign. They will tell Congress and the White House that the VA must reform its disability system; that they refuse to allow the next generation of warriors to be left behind.

They are there to propose a few key fixes that will do more than just throw people or money at the problem: digitizing records and moving the claims process into the 21st century, holding processors accountable for the accuracy of their work, and removing unnecessary steps in the process. A new, innovative, cost-effective system will make the federal government more efficient, and save taxpayers' money at a critical time.

We need the VA to try a business approach that works for countless companies that you interact with every day. It's called customer service. If Zappos, USAA and Craigslist can do it, so can the VA. But these vets aren't ordering shoes or finding concert tickets, they are trying to get their rightly earned benefits.

And to get this done, we need bold leadership. Overhauling a system that dates back to the Nixon Administration won't happen without a fight, and it won't happen without a united coalition. Veterans of all generations and key leaders from both sides of the aisle will be taking it on, but we need all Americans to help. It doesn't matter who you voted for, how you feel about the war, or what party you are from, you can support our veterans fighting for disability reform.

Wounded warriors returning from battle shouldn't have to fight red tape once they get home. Working together, we can finally close the chapter on the outdated VA disability claims process that has plagued veterans for generations. We can show wounded warriors, like Casey Elder, that "we've got their back." Show Congress that you stand with our veterans now at www.StormTheHill.org. And tell them that our veterans have waited for long enough.

Paul Rieckhoff is the Executive Director and Founder of Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America, and the author of Chasing Ghosts.

Baghdad - Improvised explosive device - Casey Elder - United States - Military

Squeezing Intel Out of Terrorists

2010-02-08T01:00:51Z

As a companion piece to Matt Yglesias' ontology of Miranda rights, I want to look at the underlying first-order basis of the intelligence obtained from terrorists in custody. Very simple: they give it to us. Obviously they don't do so eagerly or enthusiastically; after all, being in custody isn't their original plan. Certainly there's intimidation, manipulation, and pressure involved. But whatever techniques are used, regardless of whether the interrogators are civilian or military, the detainee definitely has a say in the transaction.

Contrary to conservative (tough-)talking points, information doesn't come out of terrorists like toothpaste out of a tube. Again, the conservative side of the law-enforcement-versus-war debate is more about which looks tougher than which works better -- especially since the FBI has clearly been getting substantial information out of the underpants bomber, despite treating him like a criminal. Apparently this has a lot to do with his trying to earn whatever leniency is possible and the urging of his family. So how would hard-liners do better by using the military -- through shock and awe? Precision strikes?

Miranda warning - Miranda - Law - United States - Law Enforcement

Core Chicago Team Sinking Obama Presidency

2010-02-07T23:28:30Z

Financial Times Washington Bureau Chief Edward Luce has written a granularly informed insider account about those who hold the keys to the inner most sanctum of Obama Land -- Rahm Emanuel, Robert Gibbs, Valerie Jarrett and David Axelrod.

It's a vital article -- a brave one -- that includes "dozens of interviews with his closest allies and friends in Washington."

Most are unnamed because the consequences of retribution from this powerful foursome can be severe in an access-dependent town. John Podesta, president of the powerful, administration-tilting Center for American Progress, had the temerity and self-confidence to put his thoughts publicly on the record. But most others could not.

Mark Schmitt, executive editor of the liberal magazine the American Prospect, wrote that "Luce has written what seems to me the best and most succinct rundown of what's gone wrong in the White House, with particular attention to the role of Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel." But some of the big aggregators out there -- Mike Allen at Politico and ABC's The Note among others -- didn't give Luce's juicy and lengthy essay any love.

Why not? Allen is a good friend of mine and tries to keep a good balance between tough-hitting political stuff, but also goes out of his way to give strokes to those in the White House he can -- particularly "Axe" -- who is a regular in Mike's daily Playbook. I try to do the same, to be honest, and have a particular thing for Bill Burton's wit and was pleased to see Rahm Emanuel giving David Geffen rather than Rick Warren lots of hugs during the Inauguration eve fests.

But this Luce piece is unavoidably, accurately hard-hitting, and while many of the nation's top news anchors and editors are sending emails back and forth (I have been sent three such emails in confidence) on what a spot-on piece Luce wrought on the administration, they fear that the "four horsepersons of the Obama White House" will shut down and cut off access to those who give the essay 'legs.'

But in the too regularly vapid chatter about DC's political scene, serious critiques of the internal game around Obama not only deserve review on their own merits but have to be read -- because Obama is not winning. He is failing and people need to consider why.

Any serious survey of the Obama administration's accomplishments and setbacks over the last year has to conclude that the administration is deeply in the red.

If current trends continue, this once mesmerizing Camelot-ish operation will be be seen in the history books as the presidential administration that -- to distort slightly and inversely paraphrase Churchill -- never have so many talented people managed to achieve so little with so much.

The entire article needs to be read, but to set the stage, here is the beginning of Ed Luce's portal into the heart of today's Obama machine:

At a crucial stage in the Democratic primaries in late 2007, Barack Obama rejuvenated his campaign with a barnstorming speech, in which he ended on a promise of what his victory would produce: "A nation healed. A world repaired. An America that believes again."
Just over a year into his tenure, America's 44th president governs a bitterly divided nation, a world increasingly hard to manage and an America that seems more disillusioned than ever with Washington's ways. What went wrong?

Pundits, Democratic lawmakers and opinion pollsters offer a smorgasbord of reasons - from Mr Obama's decision to devote his first year in office to healthcare reform, to the president's inability to convince voters he can "feel their [economic] pain", to the apparent ungovernability of today's Washington. All may indeed have contributed to the quandary in which Mr Obama finds himself. But those around him have a more specific diagnosis - and one that is striking in its uniformity. The Obama White House is geared for campaigning rather than governing, they say.

In dozens of interviews with his closest allies and friends in Washington - most of them given unattributably in order to protect their access to the Oval Office - each observes that the president draws on the advice of a very tight circle. The inner core consists of just four people - Rahm Emanuel, the pugnacious chief of staff; David Axelrod and Valerie Jarrett, his senior advisers; and Robert Gibbs, his communications chief.

Two, Mr Emanuel and Mr Axelrod, have box-like offices within spitting distance of the Oval Office. The president, who is the first to keep a BlackBerry, rarely holds a meeting, including on national security, without some or all of them present.

With the exception of Mr Emanuel, who was a senior Democrat in the House of Representatives, all were an integral part of Mr Obama's brilliantly managed campaign. Apart from Mr Gibbs, who is from Alabama, all are Chicagoans - like the president. And barring Richard Nixon's White House, few can think of an administration that has been so dominated by such a small inner circle.

"It is a very tightly knit group," says a prominent Obama backer who has visited the White House more than 40 times in the past year. "This is a kind of 'we few' group ... that achieved the improbable in the most unlikely election victory anyone can remember and, unsurprisingly, their bond is very deep."

John Podesta, a former chief of staff to Bill Clinton and founder of the Center for American Progress, the most influential think-tank in Mr Obama's Washington, says that while he believes Mr Obama does hear a range of views, including dissenting advice, problems can arise from the narrow composition of the group itself.

To hit some of the later highlights, Luce speaks with political giants 'inside' the Obama tent who suggest that Rahm Emanuel lost track of the importance of communicating to the public about health care, despite some success in legislative deal-making. While Luce doesn't explicate this topic, I would also suggest that Rahm pulled the plug on shuttering GITMO, which had a good plan on paper, but was unwilling to move the political wheels to get that done -- not understanding that this was a key pillar of progressive political support for Obama.

The article goes on to document how people like Health Secretary and former Kansas Governor Kathleen Sebelius were kept off television -- along with others like Interior Secretary Ken Salazar and Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano. Add to this others that Luce does not name -- including important voices like Paul Volcker and Austan Goolsbee on Obama's economic team, who saw their public voices choked off by a media-dominating Lawrence Summers with support from Robert Gibbs and Rahm Emanuel.

In a particularly cutting depiction of Emanuel, Luce writes:

Administration insiders say the famously irascible Mr Emanuel treats cabinet principals like minions. "I am not sure the president realises how much he is humiliating some of the big figures he spent so much trouble recruiting into his cabinet," says the head of a presidential advisory board who visits the Oval Office frequently. "If you want people to trust you, you must first place trust in them."

I will never forget when Rahm Emanuel laughingly responded well within earshot of several national media (and this blogger/writer) at an Inaugural bash to an inquiry if Emanuel was enjoying putting Tom Daschle on the basement floor of the White House in a non-descript office pretty far from the president. Emanuel joked back glibly that Daschle had to be happy with any office in the White House because "any square inch of real estate inside the White House -- no matter where it is -- is more valuable than anything outside it."

Compare this flippant meanness and hubris to the tone of Obama campaign manager David Plouffe's depiction of the campaign in Audacity to Win: The Inside Story and Lessons of Barack Obama's Historic Victory and one couldn't imagine more different worlds. Plouffe describes a campaign with a "no assholes" rule -- one where good policy would be pursued -- not just what was a winning political hand.

Luce's brief paints a picture of even a well-meaning, policy-focused "Obama the man" being warped out of shape by "Obama the team." Recounting some of the antics during Obama's November China trip, Luce recounts:

The same [dismissal of his key policy advisers in lieu of his political entourage] can be observed in foreign policy. On Mr Obama's November trip to China, members of the cabinet such as the Nobel prizewinning Stephen Chu, energy secretary, were left cooling their heels while Mr Gibbs, Mr Axelrod and Ms Jarrett were constantly at the president's side.
The White House complained bitterly about what it saw as unfairly negative media coverage of a trip dubbed Mr Obama's "G2" visit to China. But, as journalists were keenly aware, none of Mr Obama's inner circle had any background in China. "We were about 40 vans down in the motorcade and got barely any time with the president," says a senior official with extensive knowledge of the region. "It was like the Obama campaign was visiting China."

One wonders why Valerie Jarrett was on the trip in any case. As head of public engagement for the White House, it would seem she should have a rather full plate meeting the demand of the many groups around the United States that want to feel like they are connecting with and being heard by the Obama White House.

I see Valerie Jarrett a lot -- often at Georgetown's power crowd restaurant, Cafe Milano.

In fact, one night when I was at the annual gala dinner of Jim Zogby's Arab American Institute -- an important evening for leading figures from the Arab-American community to connect with the Washington political establishment -- Jarrett was on the docket to be the major keynote speaker of the entire night.

Jarrett, however, had to modify her schedule because of what she said were "urgent duties that were calling her back to the White House right away" and so she gave a few minutes of laudatory comments toward the Arab American community before most people were in their seats between reception and sitting down for dinner. My hosts that evening said that they were mainly interested in hearing her and asked me if I wanted to depart with them for Cafe Milano. I said sure -- and wow -- there Ms. Jarrett was.

Maybe she did stop at the White House between the JW Marriott and the Georgetown hot spot. That was possible -- but it would have had to be a nano-second drop by.

Compare this to President Bill Clinton giving the major keynote remarks in March 1995 at the Nixon Center's opening conference in Washington at the Mayflower Hotel when Clinton came early for a VIP reception, stayed for the entire sit down dinner, gave a 90 minute long speech, and mingled with folks after.

People can tell when you are focused on them in a serious way -- and when you are giving them a cursory glance.

There are things that happen in politics -- and Valerie Jarrett does have important duties and a schedule that is probably always in constant flux -- so I don't want to take my critique too far.

But one thing essential to understand is that the kind of policy that smart strategists -- including by people like National Security Adviser Jim Jones, Defense Secretary Robert Gates and other advisers like Denis McDonough, Tom Donilon, James Steinberg, William Burns, (previously Gregory Craig) -- would be putting forward is getting twisted either in the rough-and-tumble of a a team of rivals operation that is not working, or is being distorted by the Chicago political gang's tactical advice that is seducing Obama towards a course that has not only violated deals he made with those who voted him into office but which is failing to hit any of the major strategic targets by which the administration will be historically measured.

President Obama needs to take stock quickly. Read the Luce piece. Be honest about what is happening. Read Plouffe's smart book again. Send Rahm Emanuel back to the House in a senior role. Make Valerie Jarrett an important Ambassador. Keep Axelrod -- but balance him with someone like Plouffe, and get back to putting good policy before short term politics.

Set up a Team B with diverse political and national security observers like Tom Daschle, John Podesta, Brent Scowcroft, Joshua Micah Marshall, G. John Ikenberry, Joseph Nye, Fareed Zakaria, Katrina vanden Heuvel, John Harris, Arianna Huffington, James Fallows, Chuck Hagel, Strobe Talbott, James Baker, Zbigniew Brzezinski, and others to give you a no-nonsense picture of what is going on.

And take action to fix the dysfunction of your office.

Otherwise, the Obama brand will be totally bust in the very near term.

-- Steve Clemons publishes the popular political blog, The Washington Note. Clemons can be followed on Twitter @SCClemons

Rahm Emanuel - Barack Obama - United States - Washington - White House

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2010-02-07T23:28:30Z

Stupid Question

2010-02-07T21:14:47Z

The Public Editor at the New York Times, Clark Hoyt, is doing the public a great disservice, not only by calling for Ethan Bronner's reassignment, but for asserting a reason, apparently supported by Harvard's Alex Jones, that makes a nonsense of reason itself.

Let me be clear: Ethan Bronner is a friend, and I have followed his writing about Israel and the Middle for 20 years, that is, since before I knew him. If you think my friendship with him means that everything I am about to say is not to be trusted, then you have pretty much bought in to the standard Hoyt is proposing, and you might as well not read on.

The (sublime) problem of truth is not just for journalists, of course. Every scholar, every judge, every scientist, struggles with it. The best answer we have is something like this: Ask a good question. Then hold yourself stringently to rules of evidence. To be sure, how you get to good questions is not a predictable matter: ask, say, Thomas Kuhn. And how you hold yourself to rules of evidence is not a simple matter: ask, say, Karl Popper. But if your question is stupid or you violate the rules of evidence, then you should not be trusted.

Which brings me back to Ethan Bronner. A good journalist knows questions most readers do not and then works diligently to answer them with data, witnesses, and obvious experts. A very good journalist knows questions most journalists do not, and then works tirelessly to answer them with unimpeachable data, by becoming an eye witnesses himself or herself, and finding experts who are not obvious. I have not agreed with the thrust of everything Bronner has written over the past couple of years, but he is very good journalist.

If Bronner had been found to be ignoring compelling questions, or cooking evidence in some sly way, you would have the right to explore his state of mind: whether some pay-off or family loyalty explains his lapses. But what if there are no obvious lapses? Why go ad hominem when there is no rationale for this? The sophomoric revelation that "we all have biases"--worse, that biases come from determined psychological states, explicable by families, or class, or tribe, etc.--is not enough to discredit arguments or the person who makes them. One son of a factory owner turns out Richard Arkwright; another turns out Fredrick Engels. I don't mean to be melodramatic, but transferring Bronner from Jerusalem for his son's decisions borrows from the same grotesque epistemology with which people were transferred to the Gulag for their son's decisions.

WHAT, IN THIS context, is Hoyt's specific claim? He writes:

E]ven the best and most honorable journalists can find themselves in awkward circumstances that can affect their credibility -- and the newspaper's -- with a public that has little trust in journalists. In this case, the guidelines stop far short of dictating what should be done. They say that if a family member's activities create even the appearance of a conflict of interest, it should be disclosed to editors, who must then decide whether the staffer should avoid certain stories or even be reassigned to a different beat.

In other words--or so we are to surmise--if Bronner's son is in the Israeli Army, most will assume his arguments are biased toward the Israeli Army, and the Times's integrity will suffer. After all, who trusts journalists to begin with? But if he took his job seriously, the Public Editor would not avoid the question of whether most should think this. He would educate, well, the public. I mean to the classical liberal assumptions about how we reasonably get at the truth, assumptions underlying the Constitution, and the freedom of newspapers, for that matter. Hell, the public might even trust journalists more if they actually stood for something this important, and held themselves to this standard. (Bill Keller's answer to Hoyt comes close.)

Instead, Hoyt is valorizing crude behaviorist ideas masquerading as liberal ones, that we are, really, nothing but bundles of "socialized preferences." What we think is the product of our "demographic." Our claims of fact (about history, society, etc.) are, by extension, an expression of our material "interests," or if we are deeply socialized, "values." The only truth, as Chuck Todd would say, is "the perception out there." The only game is "shaping the narrative." Perceptions, presumably, can be polled. How scientific of him.

I have written about this problem with the press before. It makes you weep with missing William Shirer and Edward R. Murrow and Alexander Kendrick and the generation of reporters who covered the war of liberal societies over European tyrannies and could smell totalitarian ideas a mile away. Bronner can. Anyway, just because this behaviorism is false doesn't mean it can't win. Moving Bronner would be a small victory. Sarah Palin's demographic--abetted not by a sympathetic press, but a hopelessly cynical one--is waiting in the wings.

New York Times - Clark Hoyt - Ethan Bronner - Alex Jones - Journalism

Out of Work and Pissed Off

2010-02-06T22:01:17Z

This chart shows that the number of working males has dropped back to 1996 levels when there were 30 million less citizens in the U.S. A lot of angry unemployed men in an interregnum is a recipe for social unrest and fascism. Any student of the rise of Hitler to power in 1933 understands that the depression unleashed a huge number of unemployed young and middle-aged German men onto the streets only to be organized by the Nazis. Here's Eric Hobsbawm from The Age of Extremes

"Fascism was triumphantly anti-liberal. It also provided the proof that man can, without difficulty, combine crack-brained beliefs about the world with a confident mastery of contemporary high technology.... Nevertheless, the combination of conservative values, the techniques of mass democracy, and an innovative ideology of irrationalist savagery, essentially centered in nationalism, must be explained"

At some point the Tea Party Movement could easily morph into a political machine that could combine "crack-brained beliefs" with "mastery of high technology". The "crack-brained" ideas are already out there: illegal immigrants are the root of our unemployment problem; the President is a socialist traitor born in Africa;women should return to their traditional roles of unpaid "homemakers"; the government is convening death panels to decide who gets to live. The mastery of high technology is also in place: Fox is building Sarah Palin a TV and Internet studio on her Alaska Compound; Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity already rule over talk radio, cable news and online right wing sites.

William Astore, a retired Air Force Lieutenant Colonel paints a picture of the election of 2016 when all the anger comes together.

Tapping the frustration of protesters -- including a renascent and mainstreamed "tea bag" movement -- the former captains and sergeants, the ex-CIA operatives and out-of-work private mercenaries of the War on Terror take action. Conflict and confrontation they seek; laws and orders they increasingly ignore. As riot police are deployed in the streets, they face a grim choice: where to point their guns? Not at veterans, they decide, not at America's erstwhile heroes.

A dwindling middle-class, still waving the flag and determined to keep its sliver-sized portion of the American dream, throws its support to the agitators. Wages shrinking, savings exhausted, bills rising, the sober middle can no longer hold. It vents its fear and rage by calling for a decisive leader and the overthrow of a can't-do Congress.

Unless we start reimagining America After Empire--a country where the serious work of rebuilding a broken infrastructure can be funded from the reductions in a cold war based military budget--the potential of a more violent right wing movement will exist. Bob Herbert suggests the alternative path.

Bruce Katz, the director of Brookings' Metropolitan Policy Program, discussed some of the steps that need to be taken to remake an economy that has been thrown completely out of whack by frantic, debt-driven consumption, speculative bubbles, exotic financial instruments, and so on.

A new, saner, more sustainable economy will have to be more export-oriented, powered by cleaner fuels, bolstered by innovation that comes from a renewed focus on research and development, and committed to delivering a better-educated, more highly skilled work force.

Mr. Katz believes this is doable, but by no means easy. The nation's infrastructure, he said, will have to "shift from 20th-century models of transport and energy transmission to rapid bus, ubiquitous broadband, congestion pricing, smart grid, high-speed rail and intelligent transport."

New ways of financing such transformative changes will have to be developed, linking public and private capital, preferably through the creation of a national infrastructure bank, among other things. The nation's political leaders and the public at large will have to grasp the difference between wasteful spending and crucial investments in the future.

Don't kid yourself into thinking that the alternative to taking up this challenge is political drift and "more of the same". Even the right wing political establishment realizes it cannot control the movement unleashed by Palin, Beck and Co, symbolized by Palin's endorsement of Rand Paul, Ron Paul's son

"I'm disappointed by her endorsement of Paul," said William Kristol, the editor of The Weekly Standard and one of the conservatives credited with "discovering" Ms. Palin in 2007. "But they always disappoint you."

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United States - Politics - Sarah Palin - Rand Paul - Alaska

Jerusalem the Golden

2010-02-06T22:00:32Z

The neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah in East Jerusalem has been in the news a lot lately--due to tensions between Jewish settlers and the Palestinians who live in houses that the settlers would like to inhabit. But, the neighborhood will also be central to any future resolution of a two state solution. Most American Jews don't know it and don't see it; it's part of the Jerusalem they never see and really don't know.

The neighborhood, home to an economic polyglot of Palestinians also includes some of the home/land of the very long time (thousands of years long time) well established Palestinian Jerusalem families. In its very character, it aims to the East. In fact, until the wall went up between Jerusalem and the outskirts of Ramallah, it was the economic and cultural center of the West Bank, a role that Ramallah has now taken on. Newspapers are different on the east side of the city from West Jerusalem, the price of water and milk is different at the corner store (it is less), and the bus transportation system is not integrated into the western side of the city, but rather caters to Arab East Jerusalem along with an informal mini-transport system that has grown up to service people to get them to the checkpoints for the West Bank.

If you follow this neighborhood down the side streets, you will come to Wadi al-Joz, another Palestinian neighborhood in the eastern part of the city. It is another neighborhood unknown to most American Jews, and probably to most American tourists to Israel. Here you will find some of the think tanks and academic institutions of the Palestinians (a campus of Al Quds is in Sheikh Jarrah and PASSIA, the Palestinian academic institute is in Wadi Joz). There are no street signs.

This is the Jerusalem (along with the Holy Esplanade/Temple Mount and Haram al-Sharif) that the Palestinians want as the capitol of their future state and this is the Jerusalem that I believe they deserve. There are several proposals that are workable to divide the city between East and West and to allow full access by each religion to the holy basin and to their holy sites. In an article in the current issue of Dissent magazine, I delve into the details of these plans--for anyone who wants to know or argue about Jerusalem, a walking tour of the actual city (or a driving tour perhaps) would make the most sense-today's municipal borders extend deep into the West Bank, including tens of thousands of Palestinians who want to and should be part of a future Palestine. When Americans are asked about a 'united Jerusalem' they are never asked to consider or even to understand the actual border or the ramification of the current border. This adds to a false choice and it must be stressed that this also adds to a complete misunderstanding by the overwhelming number of American Jews what Jerusalem is and what it can be--because until there is a resolution to this situation, JErusalem, the city of gold, will continue to suffer-it is the second poorest city in Israel, filled with strife not only between Jews and Arabs but between Jews and Jews as the city becomes older, more poor and more ultra-religious (fundamentalists both Jewish and Muslim).

Sheikh Jarrah - East Jerusalem - Israel - Jew - Palestinian people

Senate Passes Onerous Iran Sanctions By Voice Vote After Five Minute Debate

2010-02-06T17:55:23Z

Anyone who has followed the Senate's handling of health care reform can't help but be impressed (or depressed) by the glacial pace at which things move in that place. In fact, it appears that Senate sloth contributed mightily to the failure of reform (by comparison, the House is a model of streamlined efficiency).

But the Senate can and does move with dispatch when it wants to (or is unable to resist the pressure to move). Sometimes a President can get the Senate to move as quickly as he wants. FDR and LBJ were famous for that. More often than Presidents, powerful interest groups can light a fire under the self-proclaimed "world's most deliberative body."

For instance, just last week the Senate passed comprehensive sanctions on Iran -- a bill being pushed by AIPAC neocons and the other "usual suspects" -- in record time. It was brought up with only three senators on the floor; there was a five minute debate and it passed by voice vote. Just like that.

Not everyone was happy that it passed by voice vote. It's an election year and senators want some Iran-bashing credit with their donors.

They needn't worry. The bill will be back soon enough in the form of a House-Senate conference bill. Since both the House and Senate bills are almost equally hawkish, senators who want to demonstrate their anti-Iran fervor to both lobbyists and donors will have ample opportunity to do so.

The White House did not want the Senate to act now. It is still hoping to resolve the stalemate with Iran over its nuclear development diplomatically or, failing that, it wants to join our allies -- plus Russia and maybe China -- in imposing multilateral sanctions.

It fears that unilateral sanctions would have the effect of derailing multilateral action.

Also, the President wants to have the discretion to apply sanctions as the national interest requires, deliberately and not with a sledgehammer. The House sanctions bill eliminates any Presidential discretion and would force him to apply sanctions in any and every situation that meets the all-encompassing Congressional criteria.

But Congress waits for no President when it comes to certain issues (often involving the Middle East), especially in election years. So we now have bills in both chambers that will impress the lobbyists they were designed to impress (and who helped craft the bills) without likely doing much of anything to constrain Iran's nuclear ambitions. Similarly, they will not harm the people they are meant to harm while hurting innocent Iranians instead.

The Congressional sanctions bills target Iran's imports of refined petroleum (gasoline and other refined products) which Iranians use to power their cars and heat their homes. Iran, for all its raw petroleum, has very little refining capacity so it depends on imports. Under the provisions of the Congressional bills, no refined products could legally get into Iran, leaving its economy crippled (that, at least, is the hope of its sponsors),

Congress appears indifferent to the impact this would have ordinary Iranian people.

Imagine if a foreign country could block gasoline sales to the United States. Who would suffer? Actually, we know the answer from experience. As gas prices here have dramatically risen over the past decade or so, it has been the average income or lower income Americans who have been hurt most. The wealthy can afford to pay and so can the powerful. It's the "working stiff" who can't make ends meet. For the rich and powerful, four, five or even ten dollar a gallon gas would have no impact.

It's no different in Iran. A gas cutoff would gravely harm the powerless and benefit the powerful, especially the all-powerful Revolutionary Guard which corners the market on contraband and would make out like the thuggish bandits they are.

What a strange time to be punishing the average Iranian. It is as if the sponsors of these bills (which were drafted before the stolen Iranian election) are unaware that millions of Iranians have taken to the street to fight against the Khameini regime.

If there is one thing that could save the estasblishment, it would be the punishment of Iranians, as a people, from outside.

And that is what these sanctions would do. It would inflict pain, but, like the Israeli blockade of Gaza, it would not bring the government down. (If Hamas can withstand much worse sanctions than anything we could impose on Iran, how can anyone imagine that gas sanctions would topple the Iranian regime?)

Punishing civilians, specifically the collective punishment of innocent civilians, is not only counterproductive, it is immoral.

Take the sanctions already in place which ban the sale of spare or replacement airplane parts to Iran. In 2005, a report prepared for the International Civil Aviation Organization predicted that the lives of civilian Iranian passengers were endangered by those sanctions and that innocent people would die in crashes.

Writing in the Guardian (London) this week, correspondent James Denselow said that the crashes and deaths are already happening.

"Last month more than 40 passengers were injured when an IranianTupolev 154 crash-landed at Mashhad. Another Russian-built Tupolev crashed last year en route to Armenia, killing all 168 on board. Iran has a poor aviation safety record, with numerous crashes since US aviation sanctions prevented it from buying more reliable western planes in 1995. The question that arises from these incidents is whether banning civilian airline parts represents 'smart' sanctions that are intended to maximise the pressure on the ruling regime while limiting their unintended side effects, or whether it puts the lives of innocent travellers of all nationalities at risk."

The answer is obvious. There is nothing smart about collective punishment, nothing smart about punishing the innocent in the vain hope that some of the guilty will also feel pain. And there is nothing smart about punishing a nation which is in the midst of a revolution, with people dying to overthrow a horrific regime.

These bills punish the revolutionaries -- along with every other Iranian -- and make their mission more difficult.

Historically, countries rally behind even the most loathsome governments when faced by outside threat. Even the utter destruction of Dresden and other German cities by the allies did not reduce Hitler's hold on the people. Quite the contrary.

Fortunately, Ahmadinejad and Khameini's hold on the Iranian people is already weak. Every action America and our allies take should be designed with the goal of making it even weaker. Instead, we come up with a strategy that does not distinguish between the loathsome regime and the people who are suffering under it and thereby undercuts the opposition.

Smart sanctions would help bring down the Iranian regime or, at the very least, make it more open to negotiations over its nuclear plans. To be "smart," however, they must target the regime and not the Iranian people. The House and Senate passed sanctions are not only dumb, they are the very kind of sanctions Ahmadinejad would devise if it was up to him.

Congress should either come up with something smart or butt out. The President can handle this one without their politically-motivated input.

SOME INSIDE SCOOP ON THE BILL'S PASSAGE: The administration had 4 amendments to considerably weaken the bill and restore the President's authority. But AIPAC was strongly opposed to them.

And under the streamlined procedure, no amendments were allowed.

But then John McCain had his own amendment to make the bill even tougher. And he went into his usual teeth-gnashing howling tantrum demanding that Reid allow his amendment to be considered.

But, if they considered McCain, then the four administration amendments would be considered too. And the lobbyists desperately didn't want that.

So they dispatched droopy Joe Lieberman, McCain's best friend forever, to explain that if they allowed his amendment then the President's concerns might be addressed too.

The two bosom buddies wept over this Sophie's Choice situation for awhile and then Mc Cain gave in, with the assurance that his amendment would be considered later.

Another win for the champ, AIPAC! Another loss for America. See this for part of the story.

CROSSPOSTED AT MEDIA MATTERS ACTION NETWORK

Iran - Middle East - United States - Senate - Health care