I'll be on Keith Olbermann's show tonight around 8:30 Eastern talking Gupta and health care.

• John Bolton's zombie idea.

• Reining in doctors who cost too much.

• Hillary Clinton haunted by pork.

• 2007 health care spending grew at lowest rate in last decade.

Probably House, right? Or maybe Doogie Hauser? But no, those are pretend doctors. Name a real doctor.

Odds are high that for most people, Dr. Sanjay Gupta would be the eventual reply. Gupta is CNN's friendly neighborhood neurosurgeon and a columnist for Time magazine. He's the smiling face of America's medical establishment. And Barack Obama is days away from naming him surgeon general.

Gupta is a great pick. To illustrate why, here's another question: Who's the current surgeon general? Odd that you just blurted out Steven K. Galson are low. That's not necessarily a problem. The surgeon general isn't just the guy who writes warnings for cigarette labels. He commands the 6,000 health professionals in the Public Health Commissioned Corps. He gives out awards. There's no evidence Galson is failing in those duties.

But Gupta is not leaving CNN and Time to give out medals. The surgeon general has an informal role as the country's leading medical and lifestyle educator, and it's that role the Gupta is uniquely positioned to fill. There's not a doctor in this country with half his media training and experience, nor one with a rolodex of editors and reporters a tenth as large.

Expect Gupta to be doing more than health education, though. According to Howard Kurtz, Gupta has negotiated "an expanded role in providing health policy advice." And if he's advising the project, he'll almost certainly be advocating for it, too. Which means Sanjay Gupta, arguably the nation's most trusted health care authority, will back on TV screens arguing for Obama's universal health care plan, lending it his credibility as a doctor, a trusted media presence, and the nation's surgeon general. It's a far cry from the days when Ira Magaziner and Hillary Clinton were reform's best known advocates.

I'd been operating under the assumption that Marc Ambinder was correct and Feinstein and Rockefeller weren't informed of Panetta because the name leaked early. But Biden's comment doesn't fit that model. Caught outside the Senate today, Biden said, "I'm still a Senate man and I always think this way: I think it's always good to talk to the requisite members of Congress. I think it was just a mistake."

It's possible that Biden is simply out of the loop here. Or it's possible that he's being unclear and means to say that her ignorance was accidental, rather than a strategic error on the president-elect's part. Or maybe they're just trying to do some apologizing rather than getting into a complicated question of leaks. In any case, it remains weird. But worse than weird is the idea floating around some quarters that it's actually awesome. That Obama purposefully didn't inform Feinstein and Rockefeller because, as Scott Horton argues over at Harper's, Rockefeller and Feinstein were failures on the Committee, and Obama didn't want their opinion. "I’m delighted that the Obama team didn’t consult them," says Horton.

This sort of thing is a very bad idea. Horton is right to heap scorn on Rockefeller and DiFi's committee performance. But history suggests that acting highhandedly with powerful senators is a bad idea. Those are votes Obama will need not only on his nominee, but on much else, and the last thing his administration should do is anger them or their allies. The point of presidential consultation is to show respect for their opinions and make sure the working relationship is constructive. Putting that aside for either pique or vengeance is a bad idea indeed, and not the sort of thing progressives should cheer. On this, Biden is right. Talking to the members is always a good idea.

Yesterday, I invited you to submit questions for Daniel Levy, director of the Middle East Initiative at the New America Foundation and the Prospects for Peace Initiative at The Century Foundation, a former adviser to Ehud Barak and Yossi Beilin, and a former analyst at the International Crisis Group. He sent the answers back a few hours ago, and the exchange is after the jump. You folks ask some hard questions.

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Back in 2001, David Manilow sold a show to Chicago's WTTW station called "Check, Please!" The premise was simple: Each show would feature a couple locals who would review an eatery of their choice, then review the choices of the other amateur critics. But Manilow had a problem: He needed one more reviewer. So he called a young state Senator he knew, some guy named Barack Obama.

The episode was never broadcast. Obama didn't seem "amateur" enough, and he dominated the show. But on the 16th, it'll see the light of day, airing as the 100th episode of "Check, Please!" Until then, we've got some early video of Barack Obama, foodie:

Senator Ron Wyden, a member of the Senate Select Intelligence Committee, is getting some headlines today for having had early contact with the Obama transition team on Panetta. I spoke with him on the controversy a few moments ago.

His first point was historical. There's an implication that Panetta is an ahistorical choice, that CIA usually goes to a career officer. Not true. "George H.W Bush was nominated to head the CIA and had absolutely no background in the area," he said. "Certainly less than Leon Panetta, who had experience as chief of staff and head of OMB. But if you head to the CIA today, the building is named after Bush."

"I talked to the Obama transition team on intelligence. I can't get into the substance of that. But there is something important today." he continued. "Our chair, Diane Feinstein, is going to be introducing legislation to make a dramatic break with the policies of Bush and Cheney and end torture and close Guantanamo." That's interesting. Expect the Obama administration to give Feinstein rather what she wants in return for support on Panetta. The problem with not consulting her -- even if it was an accidental leak -- is that it makes her look out of control. This legislation may prove the vehicle she uses to emphasize the powers of her committee and her intention to exercise a meaningful oversight role (which, to be sure, was not something either her or Rockefeller did in the disastrous Porter Goss era).

"The Intelligence Committee does little in public," concluded Wyden. "One part that is public is the confirmation hearing, and you can be sure, given the events of the past 24 hours, that there will be a serious grilling of the nominee. I think, on the basis of knowing Leon Panetta for many years, when the Committee doors close, people will be saying that Leon Panetta is qualified for this job."

Update: Feinstein is being conciliatory. Biden is being off-message. Feingold loves teh Panetta.

Steve Coll has the smartest take on Panetta's appointment that I've seen:

The C.I.A. directorship is a diminished post, no longer in charge of the full intelligence community and subordinate to the Director of National Intelligence (who will apparently be Dennis Blair, a retired admiral.) Still, the C.I.A. director has four important jobs: manage the White House relationship; manage Congress, particularly to obtain budgetary favor; manage the agency’s workforce and daily operations; and manage liaisons with other spy chiefs, friendly and unfriendly. Panetta is thoroughly qualified for the first two functions but unqualified for the latter two. He seems to have been selected as a kind of political auditor and consensus builder. He will make sure the White House is protected from surprises or risks emanating from C.I.A. operations; he will ensure that interrogation and detention practices change, and that the Democratic Congress is satisfied by those changes; he will ensure that all of this occurs with a minimum of disruptive bloodletting.

The essential problem is that Panetta is a man of Washington, not a man of the world. He’s seventy-years-old, spends his time on his California farm, and he’s been out of the deal flow, as they say on Wall Street, for about a decade; he knows California budget policy like the back of his hand, but what intuition or insight does he bring to the most dangerous territories in American foreign policy—Anbar Province, the Logar Valley, the Federally Administered Tribal Areas? Compared to his counterparts in Pakistan, Jordan, Israel, Britain, etc.—the critical relationships in national security that the C.I.A. Director alone can manage—he is a relative novice not only about intelligence operations but also about the foreign-policy contexts in which they occur...Panetta may make the White House feel more secure about unfinished bureaucratic and operational reforms at Langley, but he is unqualified to forge the next-generation spy service that a country with as many enemies as this one has needs and deserves.

But this all falls apart if Panetta cannot attract the confidence of his staff and raise the morale of his agency. And it will be a problem if those beneath Panetta don't judge him able to accurately assess their work. It's true, of course, that Panetta has foreign policy experience by virtue of having been Clinton's chief of staff. But as Coll notes, Panetta was chief of staff in the 90s. His tenure in Washington was a long time ago, and much has changed. He's facing down a helluva learning curve.

The narrative goes something like this: On June 19th, Hamas and Israel successfully reached agreement on a ceasefire in Cairo. More or less, that ceasefire held for six months, at which point it was to be renegotiated. Hamas inexplicably refused and launched dozens of missiles, provoking an Israeli response. And now we're here.

The terms of the ceasefire, and the disputes that led to is dissolution, aren't getting much attention. But they're important for understanding the current conflict. And that's the first point: There were terms. According to interviews given to the International Crisis Group, the agreement looked something like this:

1. Both sides cease all military action by 6am on June 19th.


2. The duration of the ceasefire is six months.


3. 72 hours after the ceasefire begins, the Israeli blockade will be eased to allow more goods through (Hamas said the agreed-upon number was 30 percent).


4. 10 days after that, all crossings between Gaza and Israel would be opened, and Israel would lift the ban on all goods except those used in the construction of projectiles and explosives.


5. After three weeks, negotiations on a prisoner exchange would commence, as would negotiations on opening the crossing between Egypt and Hamas (which Israel believed was being used for arms smuggling).


6. There would be later negotiations to expand the ceasefire to the West Bank.

As June 19th approached, both sides expressed interest in renegotiating the ceasefire, but only if they could fully achieve their goals. Hamas said, publicly, that given the choice between "starvation and fighting," they would choose fighting. The judged that ordinary Gazans were turning on the organization and moving towards more hardline elements because Hamas's compromises hadn't brought concrete gains. War, at least, would elevate their standing in the Arab world, quiet their political competitors, and dramatize Gaza's intense plight. As a Hamas spokesperson argued, "We didn’t really have a choice. It was either die slowly because of the blockade or more quickly due to confrontation. Israel was telling us, 'accept the blockade that is killing you'. Despite all the suffering, this aggression put an end to a more painful situation. Now, the whole world is seeing that Palestinians are being killed. Before, people would die and no one would take note."

According to the ICG, the ceasefire really dissolved when Israel blew up a tunnel in Hamas's territory (they said it would be used for kidnappings) and Hamas responded with rockets. Military build-up ensued on both sides. None of this has much bearing on the wisdom of Israel's actions. But presenting Hamas's rockets and Israel's attack on Gaza as if they are a discrete set of events, rather than presenting them in context of the blockade and the kidnappings and the attacks and the terms of the ceasefire and the conditions in Gaza and Israel's fear of arms smuggling, obscures too much.

It's going to prove a weird spectacle on Capitol Hill if Senate Democrats end up seating Caroline Kennedy, a celebrity scion who's never served in public office nor won an election, at the exact same time that they're blocking Roland Burris, a career public servant who has both won elections and served in government. That's not to say they shouldn't do it -- the issue is Blagojevich, not Burris -- but it's going to look strange. All of which again underscores the need to move away from governor appointments and toward special elections when vacancies arise.

The most interesting adjustment is a modification of the motion to recommit, one of the few ways that the minority party in the House can kill a piece of legislation. A motion to recommit sends the bill back to its originating committee with instructions to amend it; this in effect ends consideration of the legislation. The change that has been made, like all fun legal changes, revolves around a single word: In the past, the minority party could recommit the bill "promptly," which returned it to committee. Now they will be unable to do that, instead recommitting the bill "forthwith," which forces an immediate floor vote (after a short debate) on whatever amendment the minority would like to have attached to the bill, preventing the parliamentary maneuver from holding up the final legislation for long.

Now that's a lot of Robert's Rules mumbo-jumbo, what's the real world effect? The procedure has been used to kill bills on issues like D.C. voting rights, public housing improvements, and various appropriations and authorization bills that included provisions opposed by Republicans...The motion to recommit has been around for a while, but like the filibuster, it has seen increasing use in the last decade or so -- Newt Gingrich deployed it with great effect while in the minority during the early nineties. If the rules change eases legislative obstruction and is politically uncontroversial, one wonders if the burgeoning support for removing the filibuster from the Senate, or amending filibuster rules to make it harder to enact, will grow large enough to see action from Democratic Leadership. The change is also a sign of the confidence of Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi and her team, reflecting her desire to put a real stamp on the institution and her own legacy.

Ending the filibuster wouldn't be a quiet change to the rules. It would be a brutal war. That bit of obstruction has a political and cultural salience that no other minority maneuver can touch.

But there are precedents for this sort of thing. John F. Kennedy is remembered as a weak president who laid the rhetorical groundwork for the Great Society but managed to enact none of it. But it was a small change Kenendy championed in Congress's procedural architecture that arguably made all of Johnson's achievements possible. Each bill that goes to the House floor requires a "rule" that sets the time allotted for debate and the types of amendments that can be considered. The rule is decided by the Rules Committee. Without it, the bill can't advance.

In the 1960s, the chairman of the Rules Committee was a canny arch-segregationist named Howard Smith who well understood his power to stall a bill by simply declining to set a hearing date for its rules. That didn't kill the legislation so much as it kept it from ever enjoying life. But it worked. When Kennedy was elected, he called Sam Rayburn, then Speaker of the House, to Florida for a quick conference. He wanted to expand the Committee from 12 members to 15, adding three liberals who would ensure a majority voted in favor of progress. Before he died, Rayburn called the campaign to expand the Rules Committee "the worst fight of my life." But he won it. If he hadn't, everything from the Civil Rights Act to Medicare might have been extinguished by Smith's parliamentary maneuvering.

All of which is to make two points: First, the rules matter. And second, they can be changed. The fight to change them can be ugly and hard, but sometimes, as it was in the 1960s, it can be worth it. If over the next few years, Democrats find themselves relatively unencumbered by the filibuster (they will have 59 votes), then engaging that battle might be unwise. But if they find that the filibuster blocks everything from global warming to health reform, then they'll have to ask themselves how many lives should be sacrificed on the altar of Senate tradition.

(For more on all this, see my review of The Liberal Hour.)

Tim Fernholz has the scoops on the Senate Leadership's 2009 Agenda For A New American Awesomeness.* The only question is what they'll do in 2010. I mean, having revived the economy, expanded the middle class, protected homeowners, fixed Wall Street, reformed health care, solved global warming, restored American power, reformed the education system, made the government radically more transparent, passed comprehensive immigration reform, and set the budget on a path to long-term sustainability, what will be left? Making contemporary rock and roll suck less? Pushing up the release date of the first Avengers movie?

*Not necessarily its real name.

when Hamas, Hezbollah and Iran became leading players in the Middle East struggle, that land-for-peace game was suspended. A different game with different rules was begun. This new game is not oriented toward a final agreement. The extremist groups believe in the eventual extermination of Israel. They’re not interested in a handshake on the White House lawn.

And to some degree, it worked. But contra Brooks, no one ever wanted just a handshake on the White House lawn. There were, and are, real interests at stake. The promise of a photo hasn't given way to a deal. Arafat's failure to deliver sufficient improvements in the lives of Palestinians helped legitimize the hardliners in Hamas. The fact that Israel couldn't end the rockets and kidnapping pushed the electorate towards Likud and Netanyahu. The handshake on the lawn only deepened anger over the collapse at Camp David. And now, Fatah has fallen apart, and Israel, with America's help, has ensured that the Palestinian Authority has lost the final shreds of its claim to legitimacy. What comes now is the long wait until Israel recognizes that it must negotiate with Hamas, just as it did with Arafat.

Paul Krugman runs the numbers and concludes, "we’re probably looking at a [stimulus] plan that will shave less than 2 percentage points off the average unemployment rate for the next two years, and possibly quite a lot less. This raises real concerns about whether the incoming administration is lowballing its plans in an attempt to get bipartisan consensus."

The Obama administration has publicly stated that they want 80 votes in the Senate. That's probably coming from the congressional leadership, which faces elections in tow years. But attracting half of the GOP means concessions: A smaller bill. Tax cuts, not all of them progressive, some of them simple lump fund transfers to business with little in the way of stimulus effects.

The idea behind 80 votes is simple: It ensures bipartisan cover. It's hard for the GOP to run against what it voted for. And it's better if the economic response doesn't become a partisan war. But Democrats control the Congress and the Presidency and will be blamed for whatever happens in the next two years. As such, it's hard to imagine that they're not better off with a more effective bill that attracts fewer Republican votes but provides more economic stimulus.

Reports that Dianne Feinstein, the incoming chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, and Jay Rockefeller, the outgoing chair, weren't consulted on Obama's choice of Panetta are weird indeed. The plausible explanation comes from Ambinder: It leaked. According to him, the Obama team meant to to announce Panetta later in the week, after notifying DiFi and Rockefeller.

The irony is that Panetta didn't want the CIA job, at least not originally. He wanted to go to Commerce, which made much more sense for a former director of the Office of Management and Budget. But Commerce went to Richardson. It's easy to imagine a world in which Panetta's appointment hadn't leaked, DiFi had expressed quiet opposition, and Richardson's withdrawal had cleared the way for Panetta at Commerce. As it is, it would be hard for the Obama administration to back down on Panetta now. The key question now is who they choose as his deputy. That figure will have to be a career spy with a lot of respect from the rank-and-file and a serious shot at moving to the top job in a few years. Otherwise, you're looking at Senate opposition and, much worse, a demoralized CIA that lacks confidence in its director.

Also, it's doesn't look good that the worst leak of the Obama administration came in its spymaster.

On the question of the tax cuts embedded in the stimulus measure, Jon Cohn spoke to a senior economist on Obama's team, who said:

The spending versus taxes distinction is the wrong way to think about it. The question is at the margin. So one dollar of infrastructure is better than one dollar of tax cuts. But if you already have a hundred dollars of infrastructure then adding one dollar of infrastructure is a lot less effective than adding one dollar of tax cuts.

The need for economic stimulus and the need for infrastructure investment have been combined into a single policy. But they are not the same. A stimulus bill requires money that can be spent in the next six months to a year. Modernizing's America's infrastructure requires projects that could take the next year simply to identify, much less plan. The stimulus bill will not solve our infrastructure problem. There are plenty of projects that are important long-term investments but do not qualify as short-term stimulus. That means they shouldn't be done in this bill, but that does not mean they shouldn't be done. The stimulus bill is a good vehicle for some infrastructure investment, but its passage can't mark the end of our attention to the issue.

Michael Lewis and David Einhorn have an important pair of pieces on what went wrong in our financial markets, and what needs to be done to fix them. Their diagnosis makes a lot of good points, among them the revolving door between the SEC's enforcement division and Wall Street. "A casual observer could be forgiven for thinking that the whole point of landing the job as the S.E.C.’s director of enforcement is to position oneself for the better paying one on Wall Street," they write. But if tighter enforcement might have caught Madoff, it would have done little to avert the subprime crisis. That wasn't a problem of the market rather than the government:

A lot has been said and written, for instance, about the corrupting effects on Wall Street of gigantic bonuses. What happened inside the major Wall Street firms, though, was more deeply unsettling than greedy people lusting for big checks: leaders of public corporations, especially financial corporations, are as good as required to lead for the short term.

Richard Fuld, the former chief executive of Lehman Brothers, E. Stanley O’Neal, the former chief executive of Merrill Lynch, and Charles O. Prince III, Citigroup’s chief executive, may have paid themselves humongous sums of money at the end of each year, as a result of the bond market bonanza. But if any one of them had set himself up as a whistleblower — had stood up and said “this business is irresponsible and we are not going to participate in it” — he would probably have been fired. Not immediately, perhaps. But a few quarters of earnings that lagged behind those of every other Wall Street firm would invite outrage from subordinates, who would flee for other, less responsible firms, and from shareholders, who would call for his resignation. Eventually he’d be replaced by someone willing to make money from the credit bubble.

You can't get away from the fact that everyone had the incentives to do almost exactly what they did. Fuld didn't betray the market in chasing subprime profits. He obeyed it. And for all Lewis and Einhorn's intellectual firepower, they don't have a good answer to that problem. Because the CEO's are not the autonomous actors Forbes profiles present them as. If Fuld refused to invest in subprime then his returns would lag in comparison to his competitors. His investors, who don't know much of the market or its history, would make a simple calculation and go with the higher-performing firm down the road. That is why Fuld's traders would go to other firms and his board would fire him. The market can stay irrational longer than he can stay solvent. Henry Blodget tells the story of Julian Robertson, an iconic hedge fund manager who correctly assessed the tech bubble as, well, a bubble. So he shorted it. Between 1998 and 2000, most of his investors had left, taking the fund from $20 billion to $6 billion. In spring of that year, he closed down his fund. The next year, the bubble popped.

Lewis and Einhorn do have one worthwhile suggestion though: Make it hurt. A cold read of the past year would reveal that few but Lehman paid for their actions. The executives at most of the firms survived. The firms survived. The shareholders survived. Come the next bubble, an executive who recalled these days would be hard-pressed to decide that the consequences of herd behavior were worse than the isolation of heterodoxy. So Lewis and Einhorn suggest an alternative approach in the future:

There are other things the Treasury might do when a major financial firm assumed to be “too big to fail” comes knocking, asking for free money. Here’s one: Let it fail.

Not as chaotically as Lehman Brothers was allowed to fail. If a failing firm is deemed “too big” for that honor, then it should be explicitly nationalized, both to limit its effect on other firms and to protect the guts of the system. Its shareholders should be wiped out, and its management replaced. Its valuable parts should be sold off as functioning businesses to the highest bidders — perhaps to some bank that was not swept up in the credit bubble. The rest should be liquidated, in calm markets. Do this and, for everyone except the firms that invented the mess, the pain will likely subside.

This, they say, is what Sweden did when faced with its financial crisis, and it worked rather well.

This is a nice point by Daniel Levy:

We also frequently hear the claim - what would America do if it came under rocket fire from Canada or Mexico? Again, there can be no justification for rockets targeting Israel's south, and of course America would respond if it were under fire from Canada or Mexico. But let's at least complete the analogy and here is that bigger picture. Gaza constitutes under 6 percent of the '67 territory in which a Palestinian state is supposed to be created (Gaza, West Bank, Palestinian East Jerusalem), about 94 percent remains under occupation so under our scenario 94 percent of Canada or Mexico would have remained under a 40 plus year American occupation with settlements and roadblocks, and with the "liberated" 6 percent still under siege. Now I like the Mexicans and Canadians as much as the next person but is it totally inconceivable that under such circumstances some of them would have formed hardline armed groups that would even become very popular and use that 6 percent of territory to launch attacks against America? I will leave it to your imagination.

In these conversations, I always end up back at Aaron David Miller's insight: It is very hard to reconcile the interests of a threatened nation and an occupied one. But it is impossible if you only understand the interests of the threatened and refuse to admit the grievances of the occupied. As Levy concludes, "American politicians need to find a language that at the same time is both staunchly supportive of Israel and its security but also able to convincingly empathize with the Palestinians and their predicament." Without that, you can't broker peace. All you can do is take sides.

• The International Crisis Group's Report on Gaza.

• Frost/Nixon: A Dishonorable Distortion of History.

• The Legend of Master Legend.

• The End of the Financial World As We Know It.

Yves Smith has a nice post on the trouble with using tax cuts as your primary source of stimulus. "The problem with tax cuts," she writes, "is they may not be spent." Imagine a tax cut of $400 to a household that makes $120,000, that isn't unable to pay their mortgage but is anxious about the future. Will they spend it? Or save it?

If they save it, then the tax cut was wasted money, at least as far as stimulus goes. This is not an idyll worry. "We saw it, big time, with last summer's tax rebate. Gary Shilling did a detailed look at when the checks got in the hands of taxpayers versus changes in retail spending. He concluded that about 80% of the tax rebate was saved." Yikes. Conversely, the benefit to government spending is that the money gets spent.

There are a couple mitigating factors here. The first is that the government can only spend so much money so quickly. After the first couple hundred billion, you begin to run out of things you wanted to do. And some of that stuff might not even be good to do, like building endless new highways. If you need $800 billion in stimulus but governments can only quickly spend $300 billion, then a tax cut might be better than nothing.

The second is that we know how to target tax cuts such that they get spent. It's simple, really. Give the money to the poor. They, after all, need to spend it. They need to pay off debt and fix the car and send in the heating bill. The more progressive the tax cut is, the likelier it is to be used.

Somewhat surprisingly, Obama has named Leon Panetta, Bill Clinton's former chief of staff, as director of the Central Intelligence Agency. Panetta has no particular background in intelligence, but deep experience in the executive branch. Moira Whelan argues that this will be a crucial asset to the CIA. "[Panetta] knows how brains work inside the West Wing because he was there as White House Chief of Staff, and therefore will know how to provide information that gets attention in the way it should...this will give the IC a big advantage in terms of getting their point of view across in the Oval." Panetta is also an uncompromising opponent of torture. Last August he took to the Washington Monthly to write:

According to the latest polls, two-thirds of the American public believes that torturing suspected terrorists to gain important information is justified in some circumstances. How did we transform from champions of human dignity and individual rights into a nation of armchair torturers? One word: fear.

Fear is blinding, hateful, and vengeful. It makes the end justify the means. And why not? If torture can stop the next terrorist attack, the next suicide bomber, then what's wrong with a little waterboarding or electric shock?

The simple answer is the rule of law...We cannot simply suspend these beliefs in the name of national security. Those who support torture may believe that we can abuse captives in certain select circumstances and still be true to our values. But that is a false compromise. We either believe in the dignity of the individual, the rule of law, and the prohibition of cruel and unusual punishment, or we don't. There is no middle ground.

We cannot and we must not use torture under any circumstances. We are better than that.

It's hard to say what Panetta will do as head of the CIA. But we can say what he won't do. And maybe, for now, that's improvement enough.

Michael Oren is "a distinguished fellow at the Shalem Center and a professor at the foreign service school of Georgetown University” who specializes in Israeli politics and has been writing furiously for an array of American outlets since the war in Gaza began. Indeed, the description I just quoted comes from the bio line beneath his LA Times op-ed. As Tony Karon notes, though, there's a bit more to Oren's story. "Oren is currently in Gaza, in the uniform of the Israeli Defense Force, in which he is a reserve officer whose current duty is as a media officer working to shape perceptions of the Gaza operation." Nothing wrong with that, of course. But it's the sort of thing that should be made clear.

One of the odder wrinkles in the conversation over Israel's attack on Gaza is the incredible present-bias it exhibits. One day Israel was not dropping bombs on Gaza, and people seemed fine with that, and then the next day they were dropping bombs on Gaza, and people began asking how they could possibly do anything else. Not only have we always been at war with Eastasia, but there has never been any option besides being at war with Eastasia. Matt Yglesias put it well this weekend:

I think that if people want to be honest, they need to ask themselves how many of them were sitting around the day before Israel started this action not only feeling that it would be smart for Israel to start a massive military action in Gaza but feeling so strongly about it that one would question the Jewish credentials and basic intelligence of anyone who didn’t agree. Frankly, I didn’t hear a lot of Americans taking that position. Then the Israeli government changed its policy, and a lot of Americans decided to agree with the new Israeli policy. Which is fine as far as it goes. But people who didn’t regard the previous policy as unconscionable at the time have no business suddenly deciding that it’s unconscionable to disagree with the new policy.

The question is not whether there were alternatives. It's whether Operation Cast Lead was the best possible approach. Whether it was preferable to air strikes without a ground invasion, or a ground invasion without air strikes, or easing the economic blockade, or doing nothing. It seems undeniable that Operation Cast Lead has devastated Hamas's conventional weapons capabilities. Those capabilities were meaningless. Now they will be even more so. In the short-term, that may mean fewer rocket attacks. In the long-term, however, Hamas is likely to be less internationally isolated, more hardline, and more credible as a symbol of Palestinian resistance and suffering. And that may be the good outcome. The bad outcome would be Salafism taking root in Gaza.

And for those who ask the question of alternatives, one thought experiment. The Israeli political class has been explicit in contrasting the ruthless efficiency of the Gaza operation with the ineptitude of the Lebanon War. To read the Israeli press, the Gaza incursion has the feel of a rebound relationship. Which begs the question: If Israel had not gone to war in Lebanon and suffered a humiliating stalemate, would it be at war in Gaza? And if not -- if there's even a chance of not -- what does that imply about the necessity of this mission?

No one wants to be against "innovation." The word is practically a synonym for "awesome." And who wants to be anti-awesome? But the problem with our health care system is that far too little effort is expended making sure the innovation is good innovation. Take the case of Claritin, the wonder anti-allergy drug. In 2001, loratidine, Claritin's active ingredient, went off patent. Generic producers streamed into the market. Many more people could access Claritin, or at least the compounds that made Claritin powerful. Right on schedule, Schering, Claritin's producer, emerged with Clarinex. Now the active ingredient was desloratadine, and it was said to be effective, for longer. There was little evidence of that. But it was eligible for patent protection, and Schering spent billions of dollars convincing doctors to prescribe it, and so they made profits and health care became a bit more expensive. That was bad, or at least useless and costly, "innovation." On the other side, there's much good innovation. And there should be some status quo bias in favor of protecting a system that does produce important advances.

The problem is, we actually do need to strike a balance. In health care, unlike in other industries, almost anything that is approved is prescribed and paid for. By all of us. bad innovation imposes public costs. Pharmaceutical companies are incredibly sophisticated at generating their own demand. So what to do? My preference, at least in the short-term, would be an alternative track for drug development based around prizes, not patents. This would not replace the current patent system, but compete with it. Nobel prize winning economist Joe Stiglitz advocates this idea ("The fundamental problem with the patent system is simple: it is based on restricting the use of knowledge"), and Senator Bernie Sanders has turned it into legislation. It could do much to ease the most perverse incentives of the private sector -- the need to induce demand and wall off research -- while preserving the incentives for innovation. It could be funded by the public sector but the decision makers -- those competing for the prize -- would remain private. It might not solve our problems, but it could help. It's worth trying.

I don't know what to say. Honestly, it's an honor just to be considered.

The lightning round begins: Who is everyone’s favorite Republican president? Reagan. Reagan. Reagan. Reagan. Reagan. And finally, from Ken Blackwell: “Ronald Reagan, who brought me into the Republican party.”

“Good,” says Norquist. “Everyone got that one right.”[...]

Next question: How many guns does everyone own? Blackwell owns seven, which he uses “very well,” and Saltsman rapid-fire lists the guns he owns, ending with a 30 ought 6. “And Ken, I’ll take you on any time.” He means hunting, not dueling, I think.

It's really weird that Republican candidates for high office almost never named Abraham Lincoln as their favorite Republican president. He was, after all, a Republican. And he was inarguably more consequential than Reagan, no matter how enamored you are of Reagan's tenure. Indeed, most historians consider him America's greatest president. But few Republicans appear to feel similarly. It's almost as if they think naming him will offend certain elements of their coalition. The elements that listens to songs entitled "Barack, the Magic Negro," for instance.

Here's a thought experiment:

Imagine that Egypt, Jordan, and Syria had won the Six Day War, leading to a massive exodus of Jews from the territory of Israel. Imagine that the victorious Arab states had eventually decided to permit the Palestinians to establish a state of their own on the territory of the former Jewish state. (That's unlikely, of course, but this is a thought experiment). Imagine that a million or so Jews had ended up as stateless refugees confined to that narrow enclave known as the Gaza Strip. Then imagine that a group of hardline Orthodox Jews took over control of that territory and organized a resistance movement. They also steadfastly refused to recognize the new Palestinian state, arguing that its creation was illegal and that their expulsion from Israel was unjust. Imagine that they obtained backing from sympathizers around the world and that they began to smuggle weapons into the territory. Then imagine that they started firing at Palestinian towns and villages and refused to stop despite continued reprisals and civilian casualties.

Here's the question: would the United States be denouncing those Jews in Gaza as "terrorists" and encouraging the Palestinian state to use overwhelming force against them?

There are certain problems with this analogy relating to international law. Namely, under the auspices of the institution that major world powers had recently made up, the Jewish state was a legal entity and its destruction would have been illegal, and it wouldn't have been strange for the US to intervene. But the Palestinians didn't exactly buy into the legal process that created the state of Israel. This is how the situation looks to them, and to most of the Arab world.

Moreover, as an explanation of how American interest group politics impact the conflict, Walt's point is undeniable. Imagine any situation in which the plights of an oppressed Arab and oppressed Jewish group are equal, and imagine how much coverage each would amass in America's op-ed columns and presidential campaigns. There's nothing wrong with that. The concerns of the Irish are also advantaged, as are those of sugar producers.But it's important to be aware of. And it explains why polls show that Palestinians don't trust America to act as a fair broker. They're right. Domestic politics make it impossible for America to act as a neutral broker in the conflict, and that has implications for any eventual settlement.

Felix Salmon examines the SEC's failure to uncover Madoff's Ponzi scheme even when they were explicitly investigating whether Madoff was operating a Ponzi scheme and concludes, "investors simply cannot rely on regulators to protect them. Either there's an explicit government guarantee, like the one on bank and brokerage accounts, or you're basically on your own." That seems correct.

I'm not sure investors were really expecting that the government would protect them from being suckered into Ponzi schemes, but they did presume certain rules of the road: Traders understood financial instruments, the financial sector understood the assets it was heavily invested in, and the incentives were such that relatively few would assume too much risk and almost none would try and defraud. They didn't think, in other words, that they needed much protection.

Madoff's scheme was large, but he's still only a single trader. Outright fraud hasn't been too much of a problem. The other assumptions, however, proved more dangerously incorrect.

I mentioned earlier that one of my goals for the blog this year is to make it a more regular outlet for expert commentary. Part of that effort will be semi-regular "5 questions" features. The idea, if it works, is that I'll line up an expert on something in the news, and you folks can submit questions. I'll pick the most useful five and send them over for answers. I'm going to start with Daniel Levy.

Levy is a Senior Fellow and Director of the Middle East Initiative at the New America Foundation and a Senior Fellow and Director of the Prospects for Peace Initiative at The Century Foundation. During the Barak Government, he worked in the Israeli Prime Minister's Office as special adviser and head of Jerusalem Affairs, then as senior policy adviser to then Israeli Minister of Justice, Yossi Beilin. He was a member of the official Israeli delegation to the Taba negotiations with the Palestinians in January 2001, and previously served on the Israeli negotiating team to the "Oslo B" Agreement from May to September 1995, under Prime Minister Rabin. He also served as the lead Israeli drafter of the Geneva Initiative, a joint Israeli-Palestinian effort that suggests a detailed model for a peace agreement to end the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. From 2003 to 2004, he worked as an analyst for the International Crisis Group Middle East Program. All of which is to say, he knows a lot of the relevant players on both sides of the conflict, and should be able to offer some real insight.

Ask away.

Via Tom Ricks -- whose new blog at Foreign Policy is excellent, by the way -- comes this analysis of Hamas from the notorious anti-Semites at The Army War College:

"HAMAS' political and strategic development has been both ignored and misreported in Israeli and Western sources which villainize the group, much as the PLO was once characterized as an anti-Semitic terrorist group...Negotiating solely with the weaker Palestinian party-Fatah-cannot deliver the security Israel requires. . . . The underlying strategies of Israel and HAMAS appear mutually exclusive . . . . Yet each side is still capable of revising its desired endstate and of necessary concessions to establish and preserve a long-term truce, or even a longer-term peace...Israel and the United States need to abandon their policies of non-negotiation and non-communication with HAMAS."