• Blagojevich/Burris roundup: The Illinois AG admits his power is limited to block the Governor's appointments, saying yesterday's posturing was merely "a moral stand." Fair enough. The Illinois Senate, meanwhile, has no plans to fast-track impeachment proceedings for Blagojevich and Patrick Fitzgerald has requested a 90-day extension before indicting the Governor. Illinois state rep. Danny Davis is apparently interested in Barack Obama's Senate seat, but refused an offer from Blagojevich, stating that "it would be difficult to generate the trust level people would have to have in me. I just decided there was too much turmoil, too much disagreement." Unfortunately, this was not the position taken by Burris, who has already constructed a large pre-mortem monument to himself.
• Alberto Gonzales, like Dick Cheney, is perplexed by the public perception of him. "What is it that I did that is so fundamentally wrong, that deserves this kind of response to my service?" the disgraced former attorney general asked in bewilderment. Recognizing his chronic amnesia (at least in front of Senate committees), I suggest he peruse this memory-exercising list.
• Barack Obama's transition team has dismissed 90 Bush appointees in the defense department while retaining Bob Gates and his staff. The cut represents less than half of roughly 250 appointees at the Pentagon, The Hill reports.
• Eve Fairbanks has a good forward-looking piece on where and how Congressional conservatives plan to draw a line in the sand next year, modeled after last August's hissy fit over offshore drilling. As a preview of coming attractions, Ben Smith looks at how "bailout politics" are affecting the race for RNC chair and The Anchorage Daily News notes that Sarah Palin has once again been invited to speak at next year's CPAC convention, although she hasn't committed yet.
• The Los Angeles Times reports that the Obama administration plans to campaign heavily for next year's economic stimulus package that will be crafted early in the 111th Congress and The Washington Post takes a crack at answering how the Obama campaign's use of technology will transition to the business of executive government.
• Confirmation dates have been set for Eric Holder and Arne Duncan, and Congressional Democrats have selected Douglas W. Elmendorf to head the Congressional Budget Office, replacing OMB director-designate Peter R. Orszag.
• Mike Tomasky gives us a year-end list: the 19 Worst Americans of 2008. Oh, MMVIII, we'll miss ya.

--Mori Dinauer

The College Board has decided, against the wishes of many college admissions officials and advocates for low-income students, to institute "score choice," allowing students to withhold from colleges all but their highest combined SAT score.

I'm against this for a number of reasons. First, it's pretty clear this policy will disadvantage students who cannot afford to take the test multiple times or shell out for tutors and classes to help them raise their score. Secondly, the College Board claims this will decrease student stress by giving teens the ability to hide scores if they happened to have a really bad day on testing day. In practice, though, this option already exists; it's called "canceling" your score. One of my best friends had a sort of mini panic attack the first time she sat for the SAT. She walked out of the testing center, called the College Board, and canceled the score. No harm, no foul. You have to make the decision quickly, but if you know you bombed or ran out of time, you can ensure that your test won't even be graded.

Are there any parents of high school students out there who feel differently? Any high schoolers?

--Dana Goldstein

No, I'm not talking about your holiday season returns. Matt Yglesias has an interesting post today about bringing urban style living to the suburbs by constructing housing attached to malls. I myself would find living inside or in close proximity to a shopping mall pretty dispiriting. In college, I wrote a magazine article about a group of artist-activists in Providence, R.I. who were protesting that city's construction of an immense shopping mall smack in the heart of its dilapidated downtown. Next door were new, mall-branded luxury apartments and condos, which I regarded with the deep aesthetic disdain only a college student can feel. But a visit back to Providence this October forced me to reconsider my assumptions about the mall and its impact on the city. Rather than putting mom and pops out of business, as had been the earnest liberal fear in the 1990s and early part of the current decade, the mall, by attracting suburbanites to Providence, has spurred the rehabilitation of downtown. The side streets, once rife with empty store fronts, are now home to more than a handful of locally-owned clothing boutiques, bookstores, furniture shops, and the like. The mall actually accomplished everything its neo-liberal defenders promised it would, revitalizing urban life in Rhode Island.

But the same cannot necessarily be promised in the suburbs, where malls really do shut down local businesses and detract from street life. Housing in or near the mall will provide a walkable lifestyle to those who can afford it, but the larger community won't be granted the same benefits, because towns of 30,000 people are usually too small to support both a mall and a downtown shopping district, especially if they are a little further afield from the city than are the Bethesdas or Silver Springs Matt writes about. Most suburbs, after all, are not contiguous with cities. So is living at the mall a large-scale solution to suburban driving culture, and one that is sensitive to the economic needs and sustainable development of smaller communities? I don't think so.

--Dana Goldstein

Henry Farrel writes that a much-discussed decline in civic engagement is, to the surprise of its theorists, being reversed by partisanship:

This academic movement to reverse civic decline had an unusual level of impact outside the ivory tower, because politicians were struggling with the same problems. Bill and Hillary Clinton invited many of the movement's key academic and civic figures to a series of meetings in the White House and at Camp David. Before long, however, the impulse to redefine citizenship was lost in the partisan warfare of the Clinton era.

At roughly the same time, though, a promising young organizer-turned-politician from Chicago joined Robert Putnam's Saguaro Seminar, which brought together religious and civic leaders to explore ways to rebuild civic engagement in America. Today, when Barack Obama speaks about how citizens can transcend their political divisions to participate in projects of common purpose, he is drawing on the arguments and ideas from these intellectual debates of a decade ago. Ironically, while his election revives this dormant tradition, it also reveals the limitation of the underlying theory of civic decline.

As always, subscribe to our RSS feed to receive our articles as soon as they are published.

--The Editors

All the cable networks naturally saw big ratings gains in 2008, but MSNBC led the pack:

Fox News racked up its seventh straight year as the most-watched cable news channel, delivering an average prime-time viewership of 2.1 million, 40% more than 2007, according to data released Tuesday by Nielsen Media Research. CNN placed second with 1.3 million, up 69%, while MNSBC drew 920,000, a boost of 82%.

Part of that increase is due to Rachel Maddow, who dramatically increased ratings in her 9 PM timeslot when her show debuted this fall (if these figures just covered the last three months, I'd expect the difference to be even larger). I looked at why liberals like her so much and what her rise says about liberal media in September.

--Sam Boyd

Say, you think public opinion in the Arab world has just gotten even more negative about Israel and the U.S.? My understanding was that it would have been a good idea to try and separate HAMAS from more moderate Arab regimes but it turns out creating a huge wave of popular sympathy for Gazans has created a public backlash against that idea. This is not only making it harder for moderate Arab regimes to condemn HAMAS, but also splitting apart fragile peace talks that recently emerged in the region:

The polarization appears to have ended a thaw that had taken place in the past year, Mr. Masri said. Syria had been reaching out to the West and holding indirect peace talks with Israel. Lebanon’s political factions had reached a peace deal. Syria and Saudi Arabia had made gestures toward resolving their feud.

Now, fault lines visible during the summer 2006 war between Israel and Hezbollah have reappeared. Syria has been pressing for an emergency Arab summit meeting, but Egypt and Saudi Arabia have resisted.

It's a good thing we don't have thousands of troops deployed in the Muslim-majority countries, fighting wars that depend on a strategy of counter-insurgency and winning the support of the local population. In a similar stroke of luck, the dictators the U.S. has allied with in Middle Eastern countries like Saudia Arabia and Egypt support the goal of destroying HAMAS -- the movement threatens to undermine their legitimacy -- but the conflict has made it risky to come out against the group. In some cases, see Jordan for an example, the conflict is destablizing the regimes of U.S. allies.

-- Tim Fernholz

• Ok, let me see if I've got the story straight so far. Rod Blagojevich decides to appoint former Illinois AG Roland Burris to fill Barack Obama's Senate seat, despite earlier warnings from Senate Democrats that any Blagojevich appointment would not be seated. Harry Reid calls the Burris appointment "unacceptable" and Senate Democrats draft a letter telling imploring Blagojevich to not make the appointment, threatening to use their authority granted by Article I, Section 5 of the Constitution ("Each House shall be the Judge of the Elections, Returns and Qualifications of its own Members") -- despite the fact that when the Senate attempted this in 1969 the Supreme Court overruled the action 8-1. Meanwhile, IL Secretary of State Jesse White has threatened to block any appointments made by the embattled Governor. Finally, Ben Smith notes Burris' lobbying ties might be a difficult fit with the ethics standards of the Obama White House, despite the president-elect's support for Burris in his 2002 gubernatorial campaign against Blagojevich.
• The Minnesota State Canvassing Board has put Al Franken ahead of Norm Coleman by a grand total of 50 votes after ruling on several ballot challenges and NRSC Chair John Cornyn threatens to not provisionally seat Franken because the Democrat is "falsely declaring victory" and his ballot challenges are "creating additional chaos and disorder in the Minnesota recount."
• This is excellent news for Republicans: Politico claims the "Magic Negro" incident could actually help Chip Saltsman in the race for RNC chair because some of his defenders cite the controversy as proof that the liberal media is out to get conservatives. Uh-huh. But the real question: is what's good for Saltsman good for the GOP? These GOPers certainly seem to think so.
• Ted Kennedy has scheduled confirmation hearings for Tom Daschle and Hilda Solis in early January in order to expedite the incoming Administration's agenda and the IMF praises the Obama stimulus package, the fund's chief economist stating that "the size corresponds roughly to what we think is needed."
• The Cato Institute does not like GOP superstar Bobby Jindal's Medicare reform proposals.
• The Villiage Voice has "The Top 10 "Rightblogger Stories of 2008." Ah, memories.

--Mori Dinauer

Given the complexity of the situation, I'm reluctant to get too deep into the weeds on the December War (because the 2006 conflict with Hezbollah was the "July War," right?) but I do have to question Israel's aims in escalating the conflict. First, here's a comment by Israel's President, Shimon Peres:

Speaking to reporters along side IDF Chief of Staff Gabi Ashkenazi, Peres said that the goal of the current operation was not just to stop the continuing rocket fire from Gaza, but to put a halt to terror worldwide.

"Terror is a worldwide problem, and it is ours as well," Peres said.

A brief reality check: This operation will do nothing to stop terrorism worldwide, and in fact it will likely exacerbate the problems of terrorism around the world in the near- and long-term, as once again terrorist groups have a bloody shirt to wave and a grievance to claim, while their operational capabilities will not be affected. HAMAS is a pernicious actor and should recognize Israel and make other concessions towards the peace process, but it doesn't appear that they will, or that this conflict will lead them towards doing so. In the best case scenario, the specific capabilities of HAMAS will be retarded in the Gaza strip area, although for all of the bombing it seems that HAMAS is still quite capable of launching Qassam rockets at Israel.

The Israeli cabinet has decided that the goals of Operation Cast Lead (at least a less euphemistic name than "Enduring Freedom") are "creating a different long-term security situation in the south, while bolstering Israel's deterrence." That whole news analysis, entitled "Hamas is hoping for an IDF ground operation in Gaza," is worth a read, and also raises the question of why certain foreign policy thinkers always do their best to give enemies, whether HAMAS in Gaza or Al Qaeda in Iraq, exactly what they want. But look again at the goals of that statement. Bolstering deterrence, sure, but I don't think anyone in Palestine (or any of Israel's neighbors) didn't believe Israel would be willing to use overwhelming force in defense of their country. Meanwhile, how is this conflict creating a different long-term security situation? HAMAS may now be more popular among the Palestinian people than before, and the humanitarian crisis in Gaza has only worsened. It seems that it will be nigh on impossible to eliminate the threat of Qassam rockets without some kind of massive occupation of Gaza, which doesn't seem to be in Israel's best interests, either.

The news analysis concludes:

As for the Palestinians, they plan to declare victory regardless of what happens. If the IDF withdraws rapidly, without a ground operation and without having seriously reduced the rocket fire, Hamas will boast that it survived and Israel blinked first.

It seems unwise to become involved in a conflict where, no matter the outcome, the perception is that the other side has won. Perhaps the conflict will carve out space for Arab moderates to separate themselves from HAMAS, but given Mark Lynch's analysis of Arab media thus far, that's not the first reaction. But the real question now is how this ends, and the most depressing thing to realize is that no one has any idea about how that will happen. Both sides are searching for a third party to moderate, and neither the U.S., Europe, or the Arab league has jumped up to fill the role.

Dear internet: Before you critcize my naivete concerning Israel's security posture, point me towards an explanation of how this conflict is in Israel's interest, or more important from my parochial point of view, how the Bush administration's response to the conflict is in the United States' best interest. Also, I don't really have any interest in who's fault what is, because that line of discussion doesn't lead towards any kind of resolution.

-- Tim Fernholz

Because it will likely be difficult for U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald to convict Governor Rod Blagojevich on the charge of solicitation of bribery in connection with Barack Obama's former Senate seat, some people speculated that Fitzgerald went public with the investigation when he did so as to prevent Blagojevich from appointing anyone to the seat. It does not appear to have worked. Lynn Sweet reports:

I've learned that Gov. Blagojevich is poised to name former Illinois Attorney General Roland Burris to replace President elect Barack Obama in the Senate on Tuesday afternoon. The embattled Blagojevich, fighting impeachment charges in the Illinois House, just called a press conference for 2 p.m. Chicago time at the Thompson State of Illinois Center.

Burris was the first African American to win statewide office in Illinois when he was elected comptroller, serving from 1983 to 1991. He served as Illinois Attorney General from 1991 to 1995. Burris previously ran and lost bids for the U.S. senate and governor.

Of course, the first question on everyone's minds is bound to be, what did Burris promise Blagojevich in exchange for the seat, which is why many people assumed that the appointment was too tainted for anyone to really accept. As Sweet notes, if elected, Burris would be the only black senator in the upper house of our color-blind racial utopia.

UPDATE: Josh Kalven points out that a few weeks ago, Burris didn't think much of Blago:

Burris announced his interest in the seat at a December 13 press conference. And he didn't pull any punches with regards to the governor. He described Blagojevich's alleged efforts to sell the Senate appointment as "pretty appalling" and "just reprehensible." He also endorsed Attorney Gen. Lisa Madigan's effort at the time to get the Illinois Supreme Court to remove the governor from office, describing Blagojevich as "incapacitated."

-- A. Serwer

It always fascinates me how, in the context of the Arab Israeli conflict, Jews who err on the side of Israel in all things suddenly become immediate arbiters of ethnic authenticity, as Marty Peretz does here, going after, among others, my colleague Ezra Klein and roll dog Spencer Ackerman, as a result of their criticisms of Israel's Gaza operation:

I pity them their hatred of their inheritance. Actually of both their inheritances, Jewish and American. They are pip-squeaks, and I do not much read them. But when any one of them writes a real doozey it is likely to come to my attention.

I guess I find this fascinating because when Jews do this, they sound like no one more than Malcolm X divvying up black folks into Field Negroes and House Negroes. In the minds of folks like Peretz, any Jew who does not acquiesce, without criticism, to whatever military actions Israel deems necessary is caught, like a house slave, in the throes of their own self-hatred. They are unable to unshackle themselves from centuries of anti-Semitism and self-loathing, and are doomed to justify whatever viciousness undertaken against their people out of a twisted desire to be accepted by those who hate them. Rather than looking after massa, self-hating Jews look after Hamas.

Of course, these same hawkish Jews, who police their own with such viciousness, love it when past TNR contributor Shelby Steele eviscerates the "totalitarian" arbiters of black identity, while placing on their shoulders the enduring problems of the black community. From a 2006 C-SPAN interview on Steele's book, White Guilt:

Well, now I've come to realize that almost every oppressed group that comes into freedom does this, they're shocked, humiliated by it, they then form an identity that is much more intense, that is in fact totalitarian, that demands that you not only be black but that you be black in a certain way, that you make your bond with the group and that you put that identity above your individuality.

Since I come from both black folks and Jews I sometimes have a tendency to see connections where there aren't any. But it looks to me like Peretz's arguments, and those of his ideological cohorts closely resemble the kind of identity politics he and his ideological cohorts claim hinder black advancement.

Note: this post has been edited for clarity.

What's most suprising is how long it took Republican Senate Leader Mitch McConnell to come out and say this  about the proposed stimulus legislation, and how tepid his demands are:

“A trillion-dollar spending bill would be the largest spending bill in the history of our country at a time when our national debt is already the largest in history,” McConnell, a Kentucky Republican, said in a statement. “As a result, it will require tough scrutiny and oversight. Taxpayers, already stretched to the limit, deserve nothing less.”

McConnell called for giving lawmakers and the public at least one week to review the legislation once it has been written. He also said he wanted Senate committee hearings on the measure, rather than immediate floor consideration.

As this article on the same subject notes, neither McConnell nor Republican House Leader John Boehner has come out in direct opposition of the bill. Rather, they'd like to posture about wasteful spending, likely in an attempt to obtain concessions that include wasteful spending on their own priorities or to try and force more of the stimulus into tax cut schemes. McConnell's staff is now gathering news reports of local officials mentioning projects they'd like stimulus funding for that don't seem entirely legit, even though it's unclear exactly how funding from the stimulus bill will be allocated, and it's already been promised that there will be no earmarks in the legislation. I wonder if this is a bad time to remind McConnell that he ran for reelection promising "deliver huge amounts of federal money" for the Bluegrass State. Don't bite the hand that feeds, Mitch!

Obama is apparently looking to create a consensus bill that will capture 80 votes in the Senate. It's a good goal at the outset but I have a hard time imagining any kind of substantial stimulus bill in the range economists suggest is necessary will be able to garner that much support among Republicans. On the other hand, the TARP bailout bill passed 74-25, so with six more Senate seats in hand on the Democratic side it's not impossible to imagine maintaining the same coalition for the new legislation. While the stimulus proposal is less controversial than the TARP bailout, since it has more consensus among economists and isn't seen as a handout to Wall Street, it also will come to the floor in a much less panicked atmosphere. That could make it easier for obstructionists at a time when we really needed this stimulus package to be passed months ago.

Meanwhile, in the House, Boehner may be ready to capitulate, but the conservative cadre -- with folks like Mike Pence, Jeff Flake and Jeb Hensarling in the lead -- will likely oppose the bill (with little avail, the House being the majoritarian institution that it is). But the question is whether their theatrical arguments -- see this fine story by Eve Fairbanks -- will catch on at all among the public at large. It seems unlikely, especially if Christmas consumer spending reports continue to be dismal, and the next set of unemployment numbers once again exceeds expectations.

-- Tim Fernholz

The New York Times is reporting that U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald has filed a motion to provide audio tapes of four of the recorded calls connected to the criminal complaint against Governor Rod Blagojevich to the Illinois House panel that is seeking his impeachment. The recordings refer to Blagojevich's efforts to raise money before a new ethics law went into effect. According to the Times, the calls will be edited to omit elements "not material to the fundraising case." Which is to say that we won't hear Blagojevich cursing out the president-elect on the evening news anytime soon.

Blago's lawyer, Edward Genson, is not pleased:

“These are shadows,” Mr. Genson said of the claims. “We’re not told who’s doing the talking other than saying Rod Blagojevich. There is nothing in that complaint that we know that we are able to either refute or establish without knowing the names of the people, and then, if we know the names of the people that are involved, we are told that we can’t subpoena to see if in fact what those words meant.”

Mr. Genson said the panel should recommend that the impeachment proceedings continue only if it found “clear and convincing” evidence that the governor had engaged in criminal activity or noncriminal actions that were of a “magnitude and gravity” of a crime.

I'm somewhat sympathetic to Genson's point here. In a criminal case, Fitzgerald wouldn't get to cherry-pick the evidence without the defense at least being able to see what they've collected. Here, Fitzgerald is only providing the audio that he's outlined in the motion, out of its original context. Gerson doesn't have an opportunity to examine it beforehand or in full and make an effective counterargument. The threshold for impeachment is that "clear and convincing" evidence of actions on behalf of the governor that were of the “magnitude and gravity” of a crime, and even if what is on the tapes is clear, how convincing should it be taken entirely out of context?

-- A. Serwer

I explained yesterday that part of the entirely unconvincing defense of Rush Limbaugh's "Barack The Magic Negro" as satire is that no one defending it gets the joke or can explain it. Republican flack Kate Obenshain was on MSNBC yesterday, where anchor Tamron Hall took her to the woodshed over her defense of the song. This is Obenshain's defense from the transcript provided by Thinkprogress:

I will point out though that the magic negro first appeared in the “Los Angeles Times” as an editorial, and it is a parody. It is, I mean, the appropriateness of Rush Limbaugh running this show — this song is — it is a perfectly appropriate thing to point out absurdity through use of the absurd. He’s basically criticizing Al Sharpton and this columnist for saying Barack Obama wasn’t black enough. Now, was it appropriate for Chip Saltsman to send it out? No, it was foolish. We need for our conservative leaders to be clearly articulating those principles that bring a broad spectrum of individuals to the republican party, something our candidate for president wasn’t able to do.

Okay, what I have to explain is that this is verbatim the defense of the song that Rush Limbaugh provides his ditto-bots with: "Illustrating absurdity by being absurd." "It's not an attack on Obama, it's an attack on Sharpton." "David Eherenstein said it first." Limbaugh made these meager excuses from the safety of his studio, and his followers actually believe they can go out and repeat the things he says and the "brilliance" of them will be recognized. A "brilliance" their addled little heads can't even articulate, but merely pay tribute to through childlike repetition, not realizing that the originator gets paid millions of dollars to offend people and draw ratings. The joke, is of course, at least partially on them, as anyone not emotionally dependent on Rush Limbaugh can tell after listening to the show for five minutes.

Of course, the reason Hall was angry, and the reason the parody sparked a backlash almost two years ago that no one in the Republican Party thought mattered is that to the extent the song attacks Obama, it attacks him for being black. Which is to say, it attacks black people. "Magic Negro" has no use as a term of cinematic or philosophical analysis in Limbaugh's song, the point of its use is to belittle Obama with an archaic racial language. But two years ago that didn't matter to the Republican Party, because Obama was going to lose to Hillary Clinton and the Republican Party didn't mind being a white party. But since many people in the Republican Party don't actually care what Shelby Steele thinks as long as he stands around and makes the party look less white, and party pollsters recognize that Obama's victory has more to do with a diversifying country than a land of guilty whites begging for absolution, they know that they have to stop being a party that appears hostile to minorities. They've just been working so hard to excuse that hostility for so long they have no idea how to do that. 

Given the fact that the party officials seems to be rallying around Chip Saltsman for being brave enough to do something that makes liberals mad, it doesn't seem like many Republicans actually want to appeal to nonwhites, because if they weren't so lazy and stupid they'd be Republicans. The GOP are the Real Americans after all, and who would want to change that by diluting the party with people who have "had the government take care of them their whole lives"?

-- A. Serwer

Last week, I had a question for Caroline Kennedy: Will you run in 2010, and if not, doesn't that reflect on your motivations for seeking the seat? Will only seek the appointment only if you can camapaign with the benefit of incumbency? At that time, Kennedy wasn't talking to reporters, but she is now, and either Nick Confessore still peruses the blog, or he's relying on the deep mental connection shared by all former TAP writing fellows:

Nick Confessore: ... Why not run if you want this job? If you were sincere about this job, why not run in 2010 regardless of what happens in the next two months?

Caroline Kennedy: Well, you know, I’m a Democrat, a loyal Democrat, I would support whoever the governor appoints, and as I said, I think there are many ways to serve and advance the issues that I care about, and I have a long time to do that, so I plan, in 2010, to support the Democrat.

NC: It just seems like the only — your interest in this seat coincided with the chance to become appointed to it, which is the easy way into the seat, and so it raises questions. If you really want it —

CK: Actually, I think that actually a campaign would be an easier way, because I think it would give me a chance to explain exactly what I’m doing, why I would want to do this, and, you know, and get people to know me better and to understand exactly what my plans would be, how hard I would work, you know, kind of...

NC: Would you have sought this if there hadn’t been an appointment open, if it had been an election?

CK: I think we covered that.

NC: What’s the answer, then, if we covered it? Would you have considered going for this office if no appointment was available? If it was just an open seat in 2012? Would that have appealed to you?

CK: Well, it — 2012 is four years from now, and I just said that after 2010 I would think about, you know, anything, and I’m committed to these issues. This is the opportunity that’s now. I didn’t expect that it would come along, but, you know, a lot of life is seizing the moment and doing the unexpected thing. And I think, um, you know, that’s an important part of life. So is working hard over a long period of time. And so, I am, as I said, I told the governor I was interested, he has a process, he has a lot of candidates to weigh, and he’ll make the best decision for New York. And that’s why I will support whoever he picks.

(Pause)

Is that it? You guys want to ask that again? (Laughter)

And there you have it. The whole interview is interesting, but I don't think her answers add up to a compelling case for her appointment as New York's Senator.

-- Tim Fernholz

Bonus Confessore fun:

NC: I guess another way of thinking about it is that Jennifer Aniston movie, where she tells her boyfriend, ‘I want you to want to do the dishes,’ you know? And I wonder if Senator Kennedy wanted you to want to do it.

David Halbfinger: “The Break-Up.”

CK: (Laughter) I hope you’re going to put this in the article, not just the answer. OK?

• The Hill reports that RNC members have called for their own special meeting, an "unprecedented" move that allows the member states to bypass the usual Washington hierarchy. Ostensibly the meeting is to allow the large field of candidates for the national chair to get a chance to make their case, but I can't help but wonder if maybe they're all trying to get on the same page after the "Barack the Magic Negro" fiasco. Speaking of which, does anyone else find it odd that Ben Smith would characterize Charlie Crist's post-election efforts as a "leader of the modernizing, more diverse Republican Party," while ignoring the fact that it took several days for Crist's staff to come up with a condemnation of the sophisticated humor of the Saltsman Christmas gift? Or for that matter, why Republicans are just now getting around to expressing outrage over a "joke" that's been around since March.
• I see The Wall St. Journal is having trouble accommodating the inevitable slowing of the news cycle that the holidays bring, reporting that Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid faces a "potentially tough fight" for re-election as "perhaps the most-vulnerable Democrat who will face re-election in a midterm race." Eve Fairbanks brings a little clarity to the situation, noting that Reid's would-be Republican opponent is currently under indictment, and that the Nevada state GOP is in shambles.
• Back in the day, when I argued Jim Webb would be more effective as a Democratic Senator than Barack Obama's vice president, I wasn't thinking about prison reform being one of his signature issues. But apparently the now-senior Senator from Virginia wants to tackle it in the 111th Congress. Excellent.
• The synergy between MoveOn.org and Barack Obama's agenda, reported in today's Politico, is hardly an accident according to Matt Yglesias, who confirms his suspicions with a followup from MoveOn's Communications Director: "Rather than blind followers, as Politico portrays, our members have been determined and persevering in their pursuit of these progressive goals. The only thing that’s changed is now they have an Administration who is friendly to these aims--at least in rhetoric."
• Rahm Emanuel will resign his House seat on Friday, leaving a five day window for Gov. Rod Blagojevich to decide if he wants to fill the vacancy with a special election or appoint some tainted goods to Congress.
• CQ Politics has compiled their annual study on the partisan voting patterns for the 110th Congress, the conventional wisdom-confirming results of which can be found in PDF and interactive table forms.
• The comedy stylings of Karl Rove are always guaranteed to leave you in stitches ("In the 35 years I've known George W. Bush, he's always had a book nearby. He plays up being a good ol' boy from Midland, Texas, but he was a history major at Yale and graduated from Harvard Business School. You don't make it through either unless you are a reader."), but let it be known that Condoleeza Rice and Laura Bush are each mining the rich earth of the Bush legacy project for pure comedy gold as well.
• Speaking of the great Bush whitewash of aught-eight, Ed Gillespie gives us the "Myths & Facts About the Real Bush Record." To accept Gillespie's historical revisionism, you'd also be accepting that 1) Bush's economic policies have made for a prosperous America and reduced inequality, 2) his foreign policy has been a towering success, and 3) there hasn't been a better president on global warming and environmental protection. Heckuva job!
• Weekend/holiday leftovers: Steve Clemons on the prescience of Joe Biden's prediction that a president Obama would be tested on foreign policy early in his administration, and Ari Berman on the "prophecy" of Howard Dean's 50-state strategy.

--Mori Dinauer

This article about how badly the Bush administration has managed the Occupational Safety and Health Administration gives us the opportunity to speculate about what even basically competent appointees content to let OSHA employees simply do their jobs could accomplish there. And don't get me started about what life might be like for American workers if the political appointees were more than just basically competent but actually interested in improving the conditions in U.S. workplaces. But first ... what if people who were actively interested in worsening conditions in U.S. workplaces worked at OSHA?

The agency's first director under Bush, John L. Henshaw, startled career officials by telling them in an early meeting that employers were OSHA's real customers, not the nation's workers. "Everybody was pretty amazed," one of those present recalled. "Our purpose is to ensure employee safety and health. . . . He just looked at things differently."

... In 2006, Henshaw was replaced by Edwin G. Foulke Jr., a South Carolina lawyer and former Bush fundraiser who spent years defending companies cited by OSHA for safety and health violations.

Foulke quickly acquired a reputation inside the Labor Department as a man who literally fell asleep on the job: Eyewitnesses said they saw him suddenly doze off at staff meetings, during teleconferences, in one-on-one briefings, at retreats involving senior deputies, on the dais at a conference in Europe, at an award ceremony for a corporation and during an interview with a candidate for deputy regional administrator.

All this as various proposed regulations to protect workers from toxic chemicals, help hospitals prevent the spread of tuberculosis and improve safety at construction sites were not issued. One note I raised in this piece the other week was that even if EFCA is potentially difficult and naysayers think Obama isn't prioritizing labor issues, a lot can be done within agencies like OSHA to promote effective change without raising high-profile political battles. Elections, and their consequences.

-- Tim Fernholz

Robert Kuttner explains why competence is not a substitute for liberalism:

In November 2005, the Prospect published an ingenious and influential piece by Sam Rosenfeld and Matt Yglesias titled "The Incompetence Dodge." The article took lethal aim at liberal hawks who had argued that the Iraq War was the right idea; it had just been executed incompetently. Rosenfeld and Yglesias demolished that conceit, demonstrating that the whole enterprise was flawed, in premise as well as execution.

Some progressives who find themselves disappointed by Barack Obama's senior economic appointments are consoling themselves with what might be termed "the competence dodge." The orthodox moderates named to top economic positions, the argument goes, were admittedly part of former Clinton Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin's team whose deregulatory policies helped spawn today's crisis. But at least they are highly competent.

As always, subscribe to our RSS feed to receive our articles as soon as they are published.

--The Editors

The strife in Gaza is a story we've seen a few times before, and anyone who's been paying attention has seen it's dynamics play out on a less intense but similarly pernicious level for years now. Ta-Nehisi, grappling with the story, stumbles along the precipice of apathy:

It just feels like nothing changes. I've never understood why anyone in their right mind would accept us as an honest broker, given our declared allegiances. But more than that, I wonder why it's incumbent on us to broker at all. Lately, our judgment isn't exactly been the greatest either.

It's an understandable line of thinking. Unfortunately, though, the U.S., for all our flaws, remains in the best position to broker any kind of peace deal at all, and precisely because of our "declared allegiances" to the existance of Israel and towards a two-state solution. Few other actors can command even the measured trust that the U.S. has in Israel, or our leverage over them; and as the events of the last few days have shown, Israel has by far larger capacity to cause destruction and shift the dynamics of the two-state debate. This isn't to comment on the morality of the issues involved; Ezra handles some of the, um, cyclical aspects of that debate here. But basically I can't imagine any other actor getting Israel to budge on anything -- and budge they must -- so it falls to America's Discredited Foreign Policy (TM) to save the day. That, and without U.S. buy-in it is unlikely the rest of the Quartet will act decisively.

But beyond the question of whether the U.S. is in any position to help the two belligerents move towards peace, there is the fact that the U.S. really needs to see this conflict ended for the sake of our own national security interests. The burgeoning violence undermines U.S. security in the Middle East and around the world. This conflict has the capacity to create terrorist recruiting propaganda for years to come and give new life to moribund transnational terrorist groups lacking a focus, it undermines stability in a region where the U.S. has large numbers of troops deployed, and threatens to raise oil prices, which will be a bitter pill to swallow given the state of our economy. It can't be stressed enough how the Israel-Palestine conflict drives public opinion about the U.S. in the Middle East -- and around the world -- more so even than the U.S. occupation in Iraq. That is why it's incumbent on us to be a broker.

The other side of this discussion is that we haven't really been a broker at all in the last eight years. The Bush administration has not made the Israel-Palestine conflict a priority and it shows. Daniel Levy makes the case that the new administration cannot simply let the conflict simmer while it deals with other agenda items. Efforts at serious regional diplomacy -- not just during but after this crisis -- are going to have to be substantive and sustained. While it's unclear exactly how this conflict will effect Barack Obama's plans for the region, Politico speculates that it may make him more hawkish, mainly by asking people who don't work for him --- people who, in fact, work for AIPAC -- if it will. (Their answer: yes!) But there has been a debate brewing in Obamaland over what kind of approach to take to Israel, and breaking out of the failed policies of the past may be made harder by the current violence, which doesn't promise to change anything about the conflict but instead radicalize those involved with it. Which, as we all know, is a recipe for resolution.

-- Tim Fernholz

Via Steve Benen, we find Jim Webb on the right track.

This spring, Webb (D-Va.) plans to introduce legislation on a long-standing passion of his: reforming the U.S. prison system. Jails teem with young black men who later struggle to rejoin society, he says. Drug addicts and the mentally ill take up cells that would be better used for violent criminals. And politicians have failed to address this costly problem for fear of being labeled "soft on crime."

I've been reading defenses of Rush Limbaugh's "Barack, The Magic Negro" on right wing blogs for a while now and I often get the impression that the people defending the song as satire don't actually get the point, and that they've never actually read David Ehrenstein's original op-ed. Take for example, Rick Moran, who sounds like he's writing promotional copy for conservative satirist Paul Shanklin:

The latest blow up involves a Rush Limbaugh parody that first surfaced on his show during the campaign. “Barack the Magic Negro,” an edgy satire of Obama’s celebrity and popularity with white voters that was written by Paul Shanklin and played numerous times on Rush’s show. (The term ‘Barack the Magic Negro” was first used in an Los Angeles Times column by cultural critic David Ehrenstein – a fact that the parody makes mention of. Ehrenstein is a white liberal.)

Speaking as an African American whose last name has led to his racial "credentials" being challenged — often several times a day — I know how pesky this sort of thing can be.

So yeah, Ehrenstein can't be a white liberal, because he has his hands full being black. The song also wasn't a satire of Obama's "popularity" with white voters, it was a satire of the motivations of guilty white liberals in making Obama popular. The use of Al Sharpton is meant to mock the jealousy of established black leadership at Obama's rise, particularly the arbitrary barriers of racial authenticity placed in his way. I hasten to add that not only was Sharpton's jealousy an invention of the New York Post and their anonymous sources, (the opposite was true) but that concerns with Obama's racial authenticity were very much an interest conservative whites and their black surrogates.

Erick Erickson joins in on the fail:

The columnist, an African-American, came up with the term and Rush Limbaugh had Paul Shanklin sing it in Al Sharpton’s voice. In the twenty years of Rush Limbaugh’s show, I venture to say there has never been a funnier parody.

There is absolutely nothing racist about the song, but the race baiters of the world love to think there is. The added humor is that the song accurately captures the problems of the race baiters in American with Obama as President.

"The Magic Negro" was most definitely not introduced as a term by David Ehrenstein. But you don't have to take a film class or my word for it to know that, because in his original column, Ehrenstein explains where he got the term (citing that elusive source known as Wikipedia):

The Magic Negro is a figure of postmodern folk culture, coined by snarky 20th century sociologists, to explain a cultural figure who emerged in the wake of Brown vs. Board of Education.

[...]

He's there to assuage white "guilt" (i.e., the minimal discomfort they feel) over the role of slavery and racial segregation in American history, while replacing stereotypes of a dangerous, highly sexualized black man with a benign figure for whom interracial sexual congress holds no interest.

There's never been a funnier parody, Erickson says, but this guy doesn't even get the joke, and has no idea of the cultural forces that produced a widely used term that he attributes to a columnist whose column he hasn't read. The song isn't about "race baiters in American with Obama as president," because the parody was introduced in March of 2007, when few people really believed Obama would cruise to a victory in the general election with 365 electoral votes. The song is an attempted satire of liberal white guilt and the jealousy of established black leadership, but it's an utter failure, for one big reason: The intended audience is itself too dense and ignorant to even come close to getting Ehrenstein's point. Like good little ditto-bots, they defend the song as parody, they just can't tell you what it means.Their defenses of the song amount to complaints that everyone else is too dumb to get the brilliance of a satire that is beyond their capacity to explain. Which forces one to ask the question, if they don't get the joke, what exactly do they think is so damn funny?

"Barack The Magic Negro". It almost sounds like nigger, get it?

Isn't it fun-ny?

Note: My apologies for the censorship, TAPPED is a family blog. Usually.

A much commented upon statement from Marty Peretz, on the battle currently raging in Gaza:

Message: do not f*ck with the Jews.

I'm not sure if this is applicable to international conflicts, but I can't help but notice that the people I've known who spent a lot of time proving that they weren't to be f*cked with often ended up getting f*cked with. It's more than a single act, it's a commitment to a lifestyle. 

I'll be frank and say that I don't understand how obliterating Gaza improves Israel's strategic position. There's no reason to believe that hitting Hamas harder than they've ever been hit before will change anything for the better. A further radicalized population in Gaza will only be less amenable to a deal than they were before. Hamas' view is that there can be no peace with Israel, ever. With bombs raining overhead, what reason do Palestinians in Gaza have to see anything differently?

-- A. Serwer

After Obama's team released an internal review showing that they had little contact with Blagojevich and no awareness of his play-for-pay schemes, Blagojevich's attorney, Ed Genson, sensed an opportunity. Despite the sensational nature of the accusation that Blagojevich was attempting to sell Obama's former Senate seat, it is probably the weakest element of the case against Blagojevich. If Obama's aides say that they were unaware of Blagojevich's schemes, Genson can argue that no solicitation of bribery ever took place.

But it looks like, at Patrick Fitzgerald's request, the Illinois House panel that is looking into impeachment procedures against Blagojevich will not subpeona Obama's aides for testimony:

The chairman of the House impeachment committee, state Rep. Barbara Flynn Currie (D-Chicago), will respect Fitzgerald's request and not issue the subpoenas for incoming White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel and close Obama friend and adviser Valerie Jarrett, panel spokesman Steve Brown said Saturday. Ed Genson, Blagojevich's attorney, sought their testimony before the impeachment panel.

Brown said Currie, who holds the power to subpoena witnesses before the 21-member panel deciding whether to impeach Blagojevich, also will not call two other witnesses Genson sought: Democratic U.S. Rep. Jesse Jackson Jr., whose emissaries allegedly offered to raise cash for the governor in exchange for the seat, according to federal prosecutors, and Nils Larsen, a Tribune Co. executive vice president who helped engineer Sam Zell's purchase of the company.

As it turns out, teenagers lie:

Teenagers who pledge to remain virgins until marriage are just as likely to have premarital sex as those who do not promise abstinence and are significantly less likely to use condoms and other forms of birth control when they do, according to a study released today.

The new analysis of data from a large federal survey found that more than half of youths became sexually active before marriage regardless of whether they had taken a "virginity pledge," but that the percentage who took precautions against pregnancy or sexually transmitted diseases was 10 points lower for pledgers than for non-pledgers.

This is almost old news, but since we have a new administration coming in they might want to think about leaving behind some of the methods of fighting teen pregnancy and disease that have proven to be the least effective. As long as we're looking to trim the federal budget, abstinence-only programs would seem to be a good candidate for funding cuts.

-- A. Serwer

Folks are getting a lot of yucks out of the news that the military is using Viagra to bribe tribal elders in Afghanistan. Obviously the effectivness of inducements for local allies is an important consideration in counterinsurgency, and both money and guns have nasty side effects when put in the hands of leaders who are, let us say, somewhat ambivalent about U.S. forces in the area. But when I first heard about the Viagra bribes, I had to say I was somewhat put-off by the idea of aiding sixty year-old tribal leaders with their marital problems in a country where women can be forcibly married off at a very young age and have few rights in general. Spencer Ackerman and Megan Carpentier had similar concerns.

One of the stated goals of the U.S. occupation of Afghanistan is improving the lot of women there, and this kind of bribery seems to undermine that goal. It's hard to say whether the benefit outweights the cost, although it seems the cost of distributing weapons would be higher. Money apparently attracts too much attention and can make the informant worthless, but it seems like steps could be taken to prevent that from happening. Ezra and Jesse jokingly ask whether this kind of bribe is hard or soft power. I'd say it's morally ambiguous power and maybe we should think harder about the consequences of its deployment.

-- Tim Fernholz

Some good news on the education front: A major problem with No Child Left Behind is that the law allows states to create their own standards and assessments. So while states like New York, Massachusetts, and California use fairly rigorous tests, states like Wyoming, Pennsylvania, and Ohio have dumbed their standards and tests down, meaning that students' scores mean very little in terms of their ability to compete on the job market or in college admissions.

Now the National Governors' Association, an influential group because of the localized nature of most education policy, has come out in favor of international benchmarking for state curricula. This means that states, when devising curricula and standards, would consider the best practices of high achieving countries like Finland, and the skills and knowledge tested by international assessments, such as the OECD's Program for International Student Assessments.

This move by the NGA will hopefully create the political willpower in Congress to address the problem of dumbed down local standards in the reauthorization process for NCLB.

Hat tip: GothamSchools.

--Dana Goldstein

Though I didn't think Caroline Kennedy should be appointed to the New York senate seat before, her "campaign" should disqualify her even further. Whether the fault lies with Kennedy or her advisors, she has displayed a tin political ear in an environment that should make any pol worth their salt hyper-sensitive to concerns about ill-gained appointments, nepotism and, yes, Sarah Palin, avoiding questions from the media. This article points to all that in spades. Consider:

[New York Governor David Paterson] is frustrated and chagrined, the advisers said, because he believes that he extended Ms. Kennedy the chance to demonstrate her qualifications but that her operatives have exploited the opportunity to convey a sense that she is all but appointed already. He views this as an attempt to box him in, the advisers said.

Meanwhile, Kennedy's attempts to demonstrate her qualifications have consisted of a call to the governor to let him know her interest, a number of private meetings with officials across the state and an apparent inability to answer even written questions convincingly. Verbal questions from reporters usually result in her spokesperson issuing a correcting statement.

It's not clear that campaining for an appointment is a bad thing, since it gives the public some information and a chance to weigh in (at least through opinion polling), which is more than they get if Paterson only considers his own political interests before picking someone for the post. But no one knows quite why Kennedy is running, or rather, what her motivations are. If she's going to campaign for the appointment, she should have answer to the first question any pol gets asked: why do they want to be in this office? Without a good answer, she's already in trouble.

For example: "President Obama needs an ally in the Senate to help push his policies through." "New Yorkers need someone to fight for their public infrastructure in Washington." "More Kennedys in office is simply a public good." "I'd like to spend more time with elderly white dudes." Whatever. But at least give the public -- and Paterson -- a reason.

-- Tim Fernholz

Hey all,

It's been an incredibly exciting year here at TAP Online, and, well, we're ready for a break. The blog will be a little less frequent in content over the next week and a half while our staff enjoys some much-need time off. We'll still be publishing about an article a day over on the main site, and we'll be back in full force after New Year's.

Have lovely holidays and safe travels.

--The Editors

Hendrik Hertzberg tries to make an affirmative case for appointing Caroline Kennedy to the Senate, which is a relief from all the "but lots of people in the Senate suck too" responses by her supporters to her critics:

To harp a bit on the theme of my current Comment, one of the plus sides of getting a senator by appointment is that he or she doesn't have to “earn” it—i.e., doesn't have to spend years begging for money over the phone, doesn't have to establish “roots” in some Podunk locality at the cost of forgoing any understanding of the rest of the world, doesn't have to make nice with local realtors and the like—in short, doesn't have to have organized his or her entire life around the American way of office-seeking. This makes it possible, of course, for an appointed senator to be an absolutely clueless nonentity. But it also makes it possible, at least in theory, for an appointed senator to be interesting in a way that adds some spark or variety to the institution.

This is fine as far as it goes, but Kennedy will still have to spend the next four years begging for money. And the affirmative case for her unorthodox accomplishments is pretty thin. (Hertzberg: "I think Caroline would be in the second category. She is intelligent, sophisticated, educated, and public-spirited. Yes, she is somewhat shy. But don’t shy persons deserve representation, too?" -- Not that convincing.) Really, as the Comment makes clear, Hertzberg makes the case for appointing non-elected-officials, not for appointing Kennedy. And that's the problem. Somehow the debate has become "Kennedy: acceptable or unacceptable?" rather than "Kennedy: better than all 20 million or so people in the state?"

--Sam Boyd

Mike Crowley flags the latest opinions of Afghan President Hamid Karzai, who is speaking out against plans to send 30,000 more American troops to Afghanistan, beginning with 4,000 scheduled to arrive early this spring. Karzai also strongly condemns the idea, borrowed from Iraq, that empowering local militias will be an effective counter-insurgency tactic. Though his statements may be intended to serve his own internal political purposes -- Karzai is running for another term as president next year -- his critique should still give Americans pause. Karzai's concerns, which include civilian casualties and dropping public approval of the presence of U.S. forces, also hit on a major strategic problem: If U.S. forces are deployed for COIN purposes inside Afghan provinces, how does that achieve American goals in the region? And what, incidentally, are American goals in the region? Heres' a recent interview with the Afghan president:

Q: How will more troops solve the problems in Afghanistan?

A: Sending more troops to the Afghan cities, to the Afghan villages, will not solve anything. Sending more troops to control the border, is sensible, makes sense. Sending more troops to help the Afghans regain the territories that we had, in that by making terrible mistakes we lost to the Taliban, makes sense. That is where I need help. I don't need help anywhere else.

Q: But the U.S. is talking about sending the bulk of 4,000 troops to Wardak and Logar provinces, just outside Kabul, next month. What do you think about that?

A: I don't think we need forces there. I think we need them on the border and I think we need them especially to bring [southern] Helmand [province] back under the control of the Afghan people and the Afghan law.

As momentum towards redeployment continues to build, voices like Karai's shold spur U.S. officials towards a fundamental review of their approach to Afghanistan. And incidentally, this quote from that Karzai interview really captures the weird dynamic between U.S. and its various client leaders:

There are days that you speak louder than softer or lower. At times the American leadership has tolerated my extreme harsh talk, and I am grateful to them for that. And at times, I have tolerated their lack of knowledge and lack of information on Afghanistan.

--Tim Fernholz

A special Holiday Think Tank Round-Up today. Green housing, state budgets, and Gitmo await:

• Green House. CAP's David Abromowitz examines the possibility of retrofitting 6 million HUD-subsidized rental units with energy efficient technology. An initiative focusing on energy conservation ccould be accomplished with a variety of policy changes that would make it easier to invest in projects like solar panels. A GAO report Abromowitz cites suggests that inexpensive improvements -- in the $2,500 to $5,000 range -- could lower $5 billion in current energy costs by 25 to 40 percent. Abromowitz also notes the potential for creating jobs with this iniative and stimulating the moribund economy. Housing advocates would love to see any kind of rehabilitation funding come their way in January's stimulus plan, and linking their issue with other priorities is the best way to do it.
• Bad news bears. The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities reports that 30 state governments are responding to declining revenues during the recession by cutting important services to taxpayers. Cuts in healthcare funding for children in 19 states, services for seniors and the disabled, cuts to both K-12 and Higher Ed, and workforce reductions are all in the offing. CBPP suggests that states take measures to raise revenue with new taxes or by closing tax loopholes for corporations and the wealth. Federal assistance will also be necessary, the report argues, to prevent increasing unemployment and further stress on the economic safety net. Most states don't have the resources to respond to the economic troubles themselves, especially with credit still difficult to obtain, and it falls to national authorities to provide aid.
• Gitmo guest list. Less a policy proposal than a chilling artifact of our times, the Brookings institution offers a regularly updated report of who exactly is being held by the United States government in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. While some detainees are well-known, for many others details about their identity (and the reasons for their detainment) are sketchy at best. Alleged members of Al Qaeda only make up a bare majority of the 248 current detainees; very few of those are high-level operatives. Only 64 detainees were captured in situations -- such as combat -- that "strongly suggest belligerency." The report "shows little evidence of a concentration of the most dangerous detainees resulting from the dwindling of the Guantánamo population," which flies in the face of the arguments that the prison should remain open.

--Tim Fernholz

Past Round-Ups:
12/16/2008
12/9/2008

Paul Waldman looks at how far we've come on healthcare, and where we still have to go:

Since the remarkable results of Nov. 4, there has been much discussion about the new progressive moment in which America finds itself. But it has actually been evident for some time that we're talking about old issues in new ways. Let's take just one -- health care reform-- which could actually happen next year. One thing we know is that there will be a serious, even vicious fight over the issue. What we don't know is whether President-elect Obama will seize the moment, or succumb to the same fear that has stayed Democrats' hands for so long.

In the presidential primaries, all three top Democratic candidates -- Obama, Hillary Clinton, and John Edwards -- featured in their health care plans something that would have been unimaginable just a few years ago, a public option. The public option is a government health insurance program akin to Medicare, which would be open to anyone. Credit should go to Edwards, who not only was the first of the three to propose it, but who said that if so many people chose the public option that over time it evolved into a single-payer system, that would be fine with him. That kind of talk used to come only from candidates with no chance of winning.

Gershom Gorenberg explains how a far-rightist hijaked Israel's Likud party:

I met Moshe Feiglin, today the rebel prince of Israel's Likud party, in September 1998, at the Jerusalem Convention Center. Fifteen hundred radical rightists were pouring into the big graceless lobby. They'd come for an annual convention dedicated to rebuilding the ancient Jewish Temple where the Dome of the Rock now stands. Pamphleteers from sundry splinter groups worked the crowd. I recognized Feiglin's face -- lean and hungry, with a close-trimmed beard -- from news stories. Before Yitzhak Rabin's assassination, Feiglin's Zo Artzeinu (This Is Our Land) movement had led stormy protests, including blocking major highways, in a bid to prevent Israel from ceding territory for peace.

In the lobby, he was handing out bumper stickers demanding "Jewish Leadership for Israel." I asked, "We don't have Jewish leaders?" Feiglin sneered, as if everyone knew better. Right-winger Benjamin Netanyahu, then prime minister, obviously didn't fit Feiglin's requirements.

--The Editors

John McWhorter offers an interesting comparison of Rick Warren and Joseph Lowery at TNR:

Warren opposes gay marriage; 70 percent of black voters in California supported Proposition 8. Warren is pro-life; in 2004, a Zogby poll tabulated that while about half of Americans overall were pro-life, 62 percent of blacks were.

Black Reverend Joseph Lowery, heading up the rear doing the inaugural benediction, has the positions Warren's detractors prefer: pro-choice, in favor of gay marriage. These, however, cannot be treated as default "black" views, because so very many black people of all walks do not share them. Warren and Lowery will represent two variations on black ideology, of which the one Warren represents is arguably the dominant one.

That's true. But if we're just measuring who best represents black ideology based on views of gay marriage and abortion, then Rick Warren is more representative than Barack Obama. But I don't see anyone on Georgia Avenue wearing Rick Warren t-shirts, so there's probably more to it than that.

--A. Serwer

In an article from our new print issue, Robert Kuttner explains:

History has delivered Barack Obama the greatest economic crisis since the one that greeted Franklin Roosevelt. As in 1933, the crisis is the direct result of free-market ideology and conservative misrule, which once again stand disgraced. This creates a once-in-a-century opportunity for Obama to redeem American progressivism as the nation's majority philosophy, with government playing a far more active role in the economy -- not just to produce a recovery but to restore a more egalitarian and secure society. However, this opportunity also produces an equally huge risk of failing, which would be seen as a failure of liberal government. Conservative ideology and Republican rule would come roaring back.

Success requires bold, immediate action. First and foremost, Obama must pull back the economy from the brink of depression. Only if he masters this primary challenge and points the economy toward recovery will he gain the political capital needed for the other hurdles -- from reform of collapsing health and pension systems to the long-term conversion of the energy economy.

--The Editors

I rarely like Richard Cohen, but I find myself agreeing with him here:

Finally, what we do not hold in common is the categorization of a civil rights issue -- the rights of gays to be treated equally -- as some sort of cranky cultural difference. For that we need moral leadership, which, on this occasion, Obama has failed to provide. For some people, that's nothing to celebrate.

We'll continue to lose until we can successfully relabel LGBT rights a civil-rights issue situated firmly within the context of other civil-rights struggles, not an issue mired in the culture-war swamp of moral controversy. (To a lesser degree, the same goes for abortion rights.) "Culture" implies we are comfortable with different parts of our country and different groups of people seeing this issue differently. It implies that there is no absolute right or wrong -- just two sparring factions -- and that we'll simply have to wait for the rest of the country to come around. Culture changes slowly. This is something I've heard a lot in the wake of the passage of California's Proposition 8, which bans same-sex marriage. "History is on our side! Don't worry, the demographic trends are with us!"

I'm sorry, but that's just not good enough. These are the kind of conciliatory comments that go part and parcel with the culture-war frame. Civil-rights era activists knew history was on their side. But their goal was not to make every white American comfortable with the idea of sharing public spaces and power with people of color. It was to guarantee people of color those rights, regardless of where the culture stood. That's the thing about rights. You have to claim them.

As anyone who reads this blog knows, I'm opposed to comparing discrete experiences of suffering. But I think Friedman's point, that the civil rights movement was focused less on changing the culture than changing the laws, and that in the end, changing the laws changed the culture, is an important observation to make. Couching anti-gay rhetoric in the language of culture has kept the Christian right from being held accountable for what they are actually doing, which is denying people the civil right to marry the consenting adult of their choice.

--A. Serwer

One of the more frustrating elements of the Bernie Madoff scandal is the fact that the regulatory system seemed to have been stymied by Madoff's influence and the various efforts he made to avoid scrutiny. On several occasions, the SEC didn't act on information that was given to them that suggested Madoff was doing something illegal. The SEC received a letter almost a decade ago warning them that Madoff was conducting a criminal enterprise and, as Paul Kiel notes, there were other warning signs.

Madoff did a number of things that helped hinder prosecution, including simultaneously running a separate, legitimate business that the SEC looked at instead and didn't find any problems with. Jake Bernstein takes a look at an inspector general's report dealing with other shenanigans at the SEC, and finds reports of employees downloading porn, using commission resources to run private businesses, and at least one case of a regulator using their position to intimidate a broker who was working on a family member's investments. Not quite as dramatic as the scandal that enveloped the Department of the Interior, but a reminder of how poorly many of these agencies were run under the outgoing administration.

-- A. Serwer

Whenever someone tries to blame the housing price bubble on the Community Reinvestment Act, or suggests that the real reason the financial crisis got so out of hand were all those irresponsible homeowners taking loans they couldn't pay back, or argues that what we really need is less government interference, they should be forced to read this:

A senior federal banking regulator approved a plan by IndyMac Bank to exaggerate its financial health in a May federal filing, allowing the California company to avoid regulatory restrictions only two months before it collapsed, a federal inquiry has found.

...The Washington Post reported last month that OTS allowed thrifts to lend massively while reserves against future losses dwindled. Even as problems became apparent, the agency continued to prioritize deregulation. The latest findings underscore that OTS failed to enforce its own rules.

... The new numbers also averted an intervention by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp., which could have acted to limit the eventual cost of IndyMac's failure. The FDIC now estimates the cost at about $8.9 billion. The agency is funded by the banking industry.

No doubt to some a regulatory agency failing to regulate is a sign that we need ... fewer regulations on the financial industry. But in the real world, the lesson here is that the incoming administration can improve the situation simply by hiring bureacrats who will actually enforce existing rules and act, as one source in the article puts it, as cops and not consultants. The specific regulator who allowed Indymac to cheat on its statements had previously been demoted for delaying the Charles Keating Savings and Loan investigation. Why was he back in charge? Perversely, that demotion probably a plus when he was considered for the job.

--Tim Fernholz

From the Presidential Inaugural Committee:

Washington, D.C. - On January 20th, President-elect Barack Obama will take the oath of office using the same Bible upon which President Lincoln was sworn in at his first inauguration. The Bible is currently part of the collections of the Library of Congress.

I know it's just symbolic, but I wish there was someone to disabuse me of the notion that Obama is the second coming of Lincoln. Oh, wait.

But there's a more sinister parallel; the press release notes that the bible in question was used by then-Chief Justice of the Supreme Court Roger B. Taney to swear in the great emancipator. Taney was, of course, the gentleman who wrote the opinion in Dredd Scott v. Sandford, which infamously codified the "inferiority" of black Americans and allowed for the spread of slavery in new federal territories. I wouldn't compare Taney to John Roberts, but if Obama is the president he'd like us to believe he is, having Rick Warren deliver the invocation is about as ironic as seeing Taney elevate the man who would destroy slavery.

--Tim Fernholz

• Joe Biden seems determined to be an assertive vice president, telling George Stephanopoulos he will oversee a "middle-class task force" that gauges how well the policies of the Obama administration are helping working Americans. Tim asks whether this is nothing less than Biden promoting himself to "labor czar" while Dick Cheney thinks Biden will weaken the office. Also, what Obama promised Biden for the VP slot.
• Paul Krugman has acknowledged that he is "in communications" with the Obama transition team, but declined to elaborate further. The Nobel laureate has repeatedly stated that he lacks the proper temperament to be in politics, but I wouldn't put it past him to advise the incoming administration in some sort of unofficial capacity, especially since Krugman would be inclined towards -- as he has in the past -- disagreement with the president-elect.
• The Washington Post asks whether Howard Dean, mastermind of the "50-state strategy," is a victim of his own success, and Politico looks at the rise of California politicians in shaping the Obama administration and Democratic caucus. Seems more a more worthwhile subject to explore than the non-issue of a lack of Southerners in the Obama cabinet.
• Speaking of manufactured controversy, Tech President looks at the latest tinfoil hat fashion trend storming through the right-wing blogosphere: Obama using a .gov domain for his transition web site.
  
• If you're confused about this whole Matt Yglesias/CAP/Third Way "controversy" (must be one of those days), Steve Benen has a useful synopsis and roundup of opinion, including Ezra's sage remarks that "CAP is not a blog publisher. They are a think tank. They are the nerve center of the Democratic governing class. Their president has led Obama's transition effort. It's fairly uncharted territory for a think tank of that prestige -- indeed, of any prestige at all -- to hire a young progressive blogger and let him retain his voice on their site." See also The Atlantic's special editorial correction.
  
• Weekend leftovers: History repeats itself in Minnesota, the true motivation behind Southern GOP Senators' opposition to the auto bailout, the would-be indispensability of Ted Kennedy to health care reform, Pew's "final verdict" on the Bush years, the many pardons of Rob Blagojevich, and what RNC chair Mike Duncan really thinks about the state of his party.

--Mori Dinauer

Prospect Executive Editor Mark Schmitt and Reason magazine Editor-in-Chief Matt Welch recorded a blogginheads segment last week. Here they are on the possibility of avoiding a depression and courting inflation:

And on Washington in the wake of Obama's victory:

Here's the whole thing:

--The Editors

The journalistic malpractice in the press' coverage of the Blagojevich scandal has been pretty unbelievable. As the folks at Media Matters' County Fair have been pointing out for weeks, much of the press has been ahead of the right in looking to draw conclusions and connections between Obama and Blagojevich. Liberals reacted to the criminal complaint against the governor with amusement, in large part because the initial information was exculpatory: Blagojevich is shown being angry that the Obama camp wasn't welcoming any deals, and the lead prosecutor on the case went out of his way to say that neither Obama nor his staff were under investigation.

Yet somehow, through a lot of metaphors involving clouds and shadows and some really irresponsible speculation, the media consensus is that Obama has done something wrong and that it will be (a) covered up or (b) proof that the Administration is corrupt -- especially if no proof of wrongdoing is found, because that just proves the coverup was successful.

Today Eric Boehlert goes after a piece by Newsweek's Michael Isikoff, in which Isikoff talks about what he would do if he had subpeona power. An excerpt from Isikoff:

Invoking his wartime commander-in-chief authority, NEWSWEEK Editor Jon Meacham has granted yours truly, a lowly investigative correspondent, sweeping subpoena power to demand that President-elect Barack Obama and his transition team answer all my questions about their dealings with Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich, who stands accused of putting Obama's vacant U.S. Senate up for sale to the highest bidder.

The funny thing is, there's already a prosecutor on the case who would know if there was any wrongdoing on the part of the President-elect's office. If he had any questions that might lead to answers about wrongdoing on the behalf of the President-elect, he would be asking them. But he isn't. Boehlert says:

As for the hyped five questions Isikoff would ask if he could put the president-election under oath (gee, nothing presumptuous with that premise, right?), trust us, his five have been floated, literally, by every other Blago-obsessed pundit in the Beltway over the last two weeks.

So, you have this web of interconnections. What this really means, I think, because this is such rank corruption, in fact, it`s probably the most, you know, naked corruption caught on tape since Abscam. This now becomes a much bigger deal, a much more high-profile investigation which means every whiff, every allegation, that every whiff of an allegation will have to be vigorously investigated by the FBI and the U.S. attorney.

And that means if anybody in this very wide-ranging case says word "Boo" about Obama or anybody close to Obama, the FBI will feel obligated to investigate it to the hilt. So, we may get, at a minimum, FBI agents showing up at the White House wanting to question people about allegations that come up in the course of this investigation.

I mean, when a reporter as rightfully well respected as Isikoff starts clowning like that, what are we supposed to expect from actual hacks? We can expect the kind of coverage that results in poll numbers like these.

It may turn out that there was some wrongdoing, but that doesn't excuse reporting that suggests wrongdoing inevitably occurred before there's any evidence for it. This kind of unreported speculation puts these publications in an awkward position, because there's no way for them, in the case that no wrongdoing actually took place, to save face. If nothing happened, they still have to make it seem like something happened, lest they look like idiots for all but assuring their readers that something did happen.

-- A. Serwer

At the Stranger's Slog, Erica Barnett pulls a snippet from the Rick Warren sermon, "Affair-Proofing Your Marriage:"

The top five needs of most men are:

1. Sexual fulfillment
2. Recreational companionship
3. An attractive spouse
4. Domestic support
5. Admiration

The top five needs of most women are:

1. Affection
2. Conversation
3. Honesty and openness
4. Financial support
5. Family commitment

Did you see any similarities between those two lists? No. No wonder we have so much trouble adjusting in marriage.

I just read that sermon and it turns out that not Warren, but his wife Kay, had dispensed those words of wisdom during the adultery segment of his ten-part series on the Ten Commandments. (Mrs. Warren derived these lists from a book by Dr. Willard Harley, His Needs, Her Needs). As for Pastor Warren, he opined that in modern life it's much more difficult to resist temptation for a normal, red-blooded, sex-obsessed Christian man like himself because, among other things, men encounter more women in the workplace:

In today's world where there are permissive values that basically says anything goes, and an entertainment organization obsessed with sex, and sex is used to sale everything from cars to bananas and there are more women in the work place, and there is birth control and constant bombardment by the media, you don't stand much of a change of remaining pure unless you establish some guidelines for your life.

The Warrens' views are deeply embedded in fundamentalist Christian movements that decree that womens' "wifely" duty is to meet her husband's needs and to submit to his spiritual authority. (Such a view of the Bible is the official policy of the Southern Baptist Convention, of which Warren's church is a part.) Early next year, Beacon Press will publish Kathryn Joyce's Quiverfull: Inside the Christian Patriarchy Movement, which details various strands of fundamentalism informing and perpetuating these supposedly "biblical" notions of gender roles. Warren might represent a gentler version of these harsh and authoritarian fundamentalists, but Joyce's keen reporting as she journeyed into the world of "wifely submission" and "male headship" will prove to be an invaluable resource for understanding the origins of some of his comments on gender.

--Sarah Posner

Sarah's post critiquing Alan Wolfe's essay in TNR is interesting. The whole Rick Warren kerfuffle (actually it may have reached windspeeds high enough to upgrade it to a brouhaha at this point) has inspired a lot of fuzzy thinking (not from Sarah though) -- one reason I haven't written anything is that I couldn't quite explain to myself or anyone else why I wasn't that bothered by it. But I think Ed Kilgore does a very good job of summarizing the politics here:

Warren's motivation seems to be to reestablish the political independence of conservative evangelicals. Best I can tell, he dislikes the "marriage" between his religious flock and the secular-conservative GOP because (a) he is a more thoroughgoing fundamentalist than others, and takes seriously biblical injunctions like "creation care" and anti-poverty efforts, along with the usual social-conservative agenda, and (b) he thinks the Christian Right hasn't gotten much from its relationship with the GOP, and needs to regain some leverage. [...]

If Alan Wolfe is right, and Obama is trying to split the conservative coalition, and perhaps tempt its membership into a more moderate position, then both Warren and Obama have very similar motives: cooperating with the enemy of their enemy for purely tactical purposes.

Maybe Barack Obama is the United States of the 1970s, Rick Warren is Red China, and James Dobson is the Soviet Union. Obama and Warren have lots of reasons to make nice with each other, with an eye towards the maddening effect it's having on Dobson. But let's don't confuse this with some real convergence of views, actual or probably even potential. Obama's and Warren's views on some very fundamental aspects of moral and political life are irreconcilable.

This is a key point, I think. Warren may sometimes get involved in politics, as with Prop. 8, but he's not in favor of the religious right being a subsidiary of the GOP in the way that, say, Mike Huckabee or James Dobson are. Meanwhile, Katha Politt makes a comprehensive case against Warren in the LA Times but, to my eyes, ends up undermining her own point with this:

To understand how angry and disappointed many Democrats are that Barack Obama has invited evangelical preacher Rick Warren to give the invocation at his inaugural, imagine if a President-elect John McCain had offered this unique honor to the Rev. Al Sharpton -- or the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr. I know, it's hard to picture: John McCain would never do that in a million years. Republicans respect their base even when, as in McCain's case, it doesn't really return the favor.

But the GOP's habit of avoiding offending the base hasn't accomplished anything! In fact, it has resulted in a national consensus in favor of all the things the GOP base hates!

Is there something repugnant about inviting Warren? Sure, just like negotiating with mass-murderer Mao Zedong was repugnant in its way too. Nor was it either strictly necessary or really fair to the staunch anti-communists who'd backed Nixon. But I think history will judge this as an attempt to make the issues evangelicals will never agree with liberals on, like abortion, less toxic to political cooperation in other areas, which at least seems like a plausible goal to me.

--Sam Boyd

Over at TNR, Alan Wolfe makes a silly and unsupported argument that Rick Warren's acceptance of Barack Obama's invitation to deliver the invocation at inauguration will marginalize the hard-core religious right and mainstream the less hard-core conservative evangelicals into the larger political culture.

Wolfe writes:

Warren's decision to accept an invitation from a liberal president is as clear a symbol of the entry of evangelicals into mainstream culture as one can imagine. In the conservative Christian subculture, liberals are treated with scorn. In the real world, they control the White House and Congress. How many evangelical preachers will be able to demonize Obama once Mr. Evangelical himself has blessed him? By opposing Warren's choice with such vehemence, the left seems determined to drive evangelicals back to the world of victimology and conspiracy-mongering. This is not wise.

Wolfe overlooks so many realities here I'm not sure where to start. How about with the fact that Warren himself has treated liberals with scorn? Or the fact that Warren's willingness to bless Obama's presidency has not stopped evangelicals (and hard-right Catholics as well) from demonizing Obama, judging from my inbox, which is filled with invective about Warren from his brethren? Most laughably -- and dangerously -- Wolfe blames liberals' opposition to Warren for "driving" evangelicals into "the world of victimology and conspiracy-mongering." So by that he means that liberals should just keep their mouths shut so as to not make the religious right do what has been its modus operandi for the last three decades?

--Sarah Posner

If you aren't already, you should be following the story of the Bush administration's eleventh-hour attempt to attack reproductive freedom. New Health and Human Services regulations would allow clinics to apply for Title X family planning funds even if they don't counsel pregnant women on all of their reproductive options -- including abortion -- as the law currently requires. The regulations would also allow nurses and doctors opposed to abortion and birth control not only to refuse to provide these services, but also to refuse to refer their patients to other health care providers who do provide these services. Currently, hospitals and clinics that practice such discrimination are barred from receiving federal funding; that would no longer be the case under the new regulation. At RH Reality Check, Emily Douglas has a good write-up of all the details.

The HHS rules must be approved by the GAO and Congress to take effect. Hillary Clinton, in an act that reminds me why I'll miss having her in the Senate, has introduced legislation blocking the regulations. The other good news is that the Obama team is reportedly researching all the various Bush era abortion rules that should be overturned by the incoming president, including, of course, the Global Gag Rule. But just a reminder that we'll need to stay vigilant in these last weeks of Bush.

--Dana Goldstein

The important thing to remember is that even if Dick Cheney was telling the truth about top Democrats being aware of illegal surveillance and torture programs, that in no way makes those programs constitutional or even acceptable. It may mean that some Democrats are hypocrites, and that they used the Bush Administration's implementation of controversial policies to gain a political advantage, but it doesn't bear at all on whether those programs should continue.

Instead it reveals the importance of making sure that unconstitutional policies are not being implemented in backrooms under a cloak of secrecy, precisely because either party is capable of abusing its power. It makes Cheney's understanding of the vice president's office as the seat of imperial power in the United States even less palatable. Spencer Ackerman has the right idea: The fact that there may have been a bi-partisan agreement to violate the Constitution doesn't make those violations acceptable.

--A. Serwer

The only way you can describe Obama's cabinet as lacking southerners is if you ignore blacks and women in the cabinet. As Steve Benen points out, Carol Browner is from Florida, Ron Kirk is a Texan, and Lisa Jackson is from New Orleans.

But the southern "snub" isn't really about there being no "southerners" in the cabinet. It's about there not being enough white men in the cabinet -- complaining about a lack of southerners is a less embarrassing way of expressing that than sounding like Michael Savage. For decades, "southernness" has symbolized a kind of white normalcy. It's why presidential candidates, no matter how brilliant (Clinton) or blue-blooded (Bush) have been able to use a southern identity to present themselves as "regular" Americans. It's why McCain aide Nancy Pfotenhauer said "Real Virginia" is "southern in nature." "Real Americans" are "southern in nature" and the only way to be "southern in nature" is to be white, and preferably a man. These thumbsuckers instinctively omit Kirk, Jackson, and Browner becasue they are essentially about the decline of what Bill O'Reilly fondly refers to as "the white male power structure."

--A. Serwer

Courtney Martin writes about new opportunities in a new year:

As I read coverage of the unpublished 513-page account of the American-led reconstruction of Iraq, a wave of sad recognition washed over me. The narrative thread of how a $100 billion effort to "save" Iraq became a giant save-your-own-ass bureaucracy was one that I had seen repeatedly in the news recently. A depressingly familiar story.

I'm not just talking about the story of botched humanitarian intervention. I'm talking about the story of hubris on a grand, immoral scale. It begins with some characteristic acts of a swollen ego -- inflated numbers and quick-draw decision-making. The story builds tension as the protagonists lose perspective, a sense of responsibility to others, and a commitment to the truth. And then it ends -- sometimes in a government bailout deus ex machina, sometimes in a collective shrug by the embarrassed American people, and all too often in the suffering of innocent people.

It's time for a return to integrity.

--The Editors

Caroline Kennedy's staff has partially answered questionnaires from The New York Times and Politico as to her political beliefs. What I like: her support for gay marriage and labor protections at charter schools, and her opposition to private school vouchers and parental consent laws for minors seeking abortions. What's less encouraging: her refusal to lay out detailed plans or beliefs about reforming the financial services industry, a key issue for any New York senator, especially right now.

Andrew Sullivan's Kennedy-Palin analogy, which I wrote about last week, is starting to catch on. Kennedy needs to do a detailed televsion interview ASAP to remind the world that she's smart, articulate, and can think on her feet. She's only hurting herself by avoiding it.

--Dana Goldstein

Conservatives have taken to condemning the New Deal with unusual zeal in recent months as the need for a second New Deal becomes clear. Eric Rauchway explains that they're wrong, but that President Roosevelt did make some big mistakes:

Any smart historian of the 1930s is a New Deal critic. The Obama administration unquestionably needs to respond more effectively to the current crisis than the Roosevelt administration did to the Great Depression. But not because the "New Deal didn't work," as conservative pundits are now frequently saying -- it did. It didn't go far enough fast enough, and it included some other mistakes from which we can usefully learn, but ignoring its successes will only make things worse.

The most important thing to know about Roosevelt's economics is that, despite claims to the contrary, the economy recovered during the New Deal. During Roosevelt's first two terms, the U.S. economy grew at average annual growth rates of 9 percent to 10 percent, with the exception of the recession year of 1937-1938. As economist Christina Romer (now director-designate of the Council of Economic Advisers) writes, these rates were "spectacular, even for an economy pulling out of a severe recession."

--The Editors

Brentin Mock reports:

If President-Elect Barack Obama's recent cabinet choices are any indication, the decades-old environmental justice movement may finally see many of its top policy goals fulfilled. The Obama administration is poised to finally deliver on White House promises made in the early 1990s to protect minorities from toxic waste, and with the addition of an Office of Urban Policy, it may go even further toward correcting historical racial disparities when it comes to environmental hazards.

--The Editors

This New York Times article on incoming press secretary Robert Gibbs has an amusing insight into the President-elect's sense of humor:

Obama called Gibbs “a very good friend of mine” who, like himself, is a “well-informed sports fan” and appreciates “gallows humor.” When I asked him for an example of this gallows humor, Obama demurred. “I’m not sure all of it is clean,” he said.

Obama: restoring dirty jokes to the White House.

-- A. Serwer

Arthur Brooks is my favorite concern troll. On Saturday, Nick Kristoff became the latest columnist to trot out Brooks and his surprising finding that conservatives give more to charity than liberals:

“When I started doing research on charity,” Mr. Brooks wrote, “I expected to find that political liberals — who, I believed, genuinely cared more about others than conservatives did — would turn out to be the most privately charitable people. So when my early findings led me to the opposite conclusion, I assumed I had made some sort of technical error. I re-ran analyses. I got new data. Nothing worked. In the end, I had no option but to change my views.”

Back in March, George Will, trying to be extra cute, described Brooks as an "independent" social scientist who was "mugged by data."

In real life, Brooks is a visiting scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. In fact, he's becoming president of AEI in about a week, and his work largely consists of making counterintuitive arguments in which positive qualities associated with liberals are actually false, or things we should associate with conservatives. A small sample of Brook's work:

"The Political Gender Gap," an op-ed for the Wall Street Journal that argues gender based-wage disparities are meaningless because women actually "feel more free".

"Liberal Hatemongers," again for the Journal, in which Brooks explains that liberals are the real racists.

"Democrats and Diversity" for the fair, balanced, and now defunct New York Sun, which explains that conservatives live and interact with more diverse settings than liberals do (ROFLCAKES).

Of course, there's much more of Mr. Brooks work at AEI archived for your pleasure. I'm not a sociologist, and I'm not qualified to comment on the quality of his studies, but it seems to me like the refusal to identify Brooks as a conservative who works for a conservative think tank and specializes in trying to subvert harmful notions about conservatives and conservatism is self-discrediting. Maybe the next time Brooks is cited by one of your major newspaper columnists the paper in question will see fit to inform the reader of his background.

--A. Serwer

There's an argument -- maybe best made by John Judis -- that despite the optimism I chronicled here, labor is a low priority for the incoming Obama administration. Though it is true that labor's number one priority, the Employee Free Choice Act, is unlikely to be passed early in the new term, that's somewhat out of Obama's hands: It is hard to make the case that sixty votes can be found in the Senate to stop a Republican filibuster against the bill. But the fact that the transition didn't introduce the labor secretary with the rest of the economic team shouldn't be used to argue that the administration won't work on those issues; the delay really reflects the difficulty in picking someone for the position who would satisfy the various interested constituentcies while still being a strong manager who is familiar with labor issues.

Obama's pick for Labor Secretary is Representative Hilda Solis, and our resident Solis-expert, Harold Meyerson, say she's great. Various sources in the labor movement are also enthusiastic about the appointment and Solis' long history of advocating for workers. She'll have an opportunity to do a lot of work inside the department on less-glamorous but critically important tasks like ensuring that safety regulations are actually enforced. But critics question whether she'll have the clout to win economic battles with, say, Tim Geithner at Treasury or the anti-labor coalition in Congress. As Judis puts it, "If you think these are important jobs, what you want is someone of national standing who can sell your and their program to the public and to Congress--and particularly to the Senate, where the Democrats are going to need 60 votes on some key issues."

Which is why today's announcement from the transition team is so interesting (full release after the jump):

Today the Obama Transition team announced the President-elect’s intention to form a ‘White House Task Force on Working Families,’ to be chaired by Vice President-elect Joe Biden, effective January 20, 2009. The Task Force will be a major initiative targeted at raising the living standards of middle-class, working families in America. The task force will be comprised of top-level administration policy makers, and in addition to regular meetings, it will conduct outreach sessions with representatives of labor, business, and the advocacy communities.

Did the VP just become labor czar? And if you were going to pick someone to find 60 votes for EFCA in the Senate, wouldn't you want that person to be Joe Biden? On the other hand, throwing a task force at an intractable problem is certainly a play we've seen before here in Washington -- at least it's not a blue ribbon commission. But Biden has been vehement since the campaign that he expects to be doing substantive work for the new administration, and his hiring of Jared Bernstein as his Chief Economic Adviser certainly presaged this move; given the crowded field of foreign policymakers in the Obama administration, Biden is putting himself in the position to exert a lot of pressure on policies that are good for labor.

In the release, Biden says that “Our charge is to look at existing and future policies across the board and use a yard stick to measure how they are impacting the working and middle-class families: Is the number of these families growing? Are they prospering? President-elect Obama and I know the economic health of working families has eroded, and we intend to turn that around.” That statement echoes something Anna Burger, Chair of the Change to Win Coalition, told me the other week:  the Bush administration looked at policymaking through a screen that emphasized business interests, and that to rebuild the middle class, the next administration needs to look through a screen that emphasizes the needs of workers.

-- Tim Fernholz

OBAMA TRANSITION TEAM ANNOUNCES WHITE HOUSE TASK FORCE ON WORKING FAMILIES

President-elect Obama Taps Vice President-elect Biden to Chair

Washington, DC – Today the Obama Transition team announced the President-elect’s intention to form a ‘White House Task Force on Working Families,’ to be chaired by Vice President-elect Joe Biden, effective January 20, 2009. The Task Force will be a major initiative targeted at raising the living standards of middle-class, working families in America. The task force will be comprised of top-level administration policy makers, and in addition to regular meetings, it will conduct outreach sessions with representatives of labor, business, and the advocacy communities.

“My administration will be absolutely committed to the future of America’s middle-class and working families. They will be front and center every day in our work in the White House. And this Task Force will be one vehicle we will use to ensure that we never forget that commitment. I think it can make a great contribution to our work, and I’m grateful that the Vice President-elect has agreed to chair it,” said President-elect Obama.

The Vice President-elect said: “Our charge is to look at existing and future policies across the board and use a yard stick to measure how they are impacting the working and middle-class families: Is the number of these families growing? Are they prospering? President-elect Obama and I know the economic health of working families has eroded, and we intend to turn that around.”

The Vice President-elect and members of the task force will work with a wide array of federal agencies that have responsibility for key issues facing middle class and working families, and expedite administrative reforms, propose Executive orders, and develop legislative and policy proposals that can be of special importance to working families.

The President-elect has set the following goals for the task force:

· Expanding education and lifelong training opportunities

· Improving work and family balance

· Restoring labor standards, including workplace safety

· Helping to protect middle-class and working-family incomes

· Protecting retirement security

Members of the White House Task Force on Working Families will include the Secretaries of Labor, Health and Human Services, Education, and Commerce, as well as the Directors of the National Economic Council, the Office of Management and Budget, the Domestic Policy Council, and the Chair of the Council of Economic Advisors.

The Task Force will operate in a transparent fashion, with any submissions to it from outside groups posted online, and open, two-way dialogue directly with the American people. The Task Force will issue annual reports on its findings and recommendations, which will be made available to the public and will be posted on the internet.

###

• As expected, the president-elect has named Hilda Solis for Labor, Ray LaHood for Transportation, and Ron Kirk for U.S. Trade Representative. Karen Mills was also named as head of the Small Business Administration and the rumor mill has either Julius Genachowski or Blair Levin as the next FCC chair.
• Unsurprisingly, Rod Blagojevich is determined to fight to prove his innocence, proclaiming at his first press conference since his arrest that "I will fight, I will fight, I will fight, till I take my very last breath. I have done nothing wrong."
• Al Franken has taken the lead in the never ending Minnesota ballot recount, leading by as much as 250 votes by one tally, and Norm Coleman is heading back to court to argue that duplicate ballots had been counted. See also, "The Worst Ballot Challenge of All."
• You'd think that the prospect of lying to Congress about matters of national security would carry such serious consequences that no one would jeopardize their freedom, livelihood, or careers by doing so. Well, you'd be wrong. It also would have been nice to include the word "criminal" in this list of single words the public used to describe the 43rd president, although I can't complain about the highest-rated word.
• Standing tall with the world's finest theocracies, the United States declined to sign a UN declaration calling for the worldwide decriminalization of homosexuality, despite it being signed by "all 27 European Union members, as well as Japan, Australia, Mexico and three dozen other countries." Jonathan Stein looks at the U.S. official reasoning (problems with state-federal jurisdiction) and remarks: "Sure. Why would we sign an internationally supported declaration in favor of human rights? It would keep local landlords and private employers from discriminating. We can't have that!"
• Amidst all the attention (and scorn) being heaped on Rick Warren, Ben Smith points to the oddity of the other inaugural preacher being practically Warren's opposite on matters of tolerance. Meanwhile, Pew gathers the data on the religious makeup of the American public, and how that is represented in Congress.
• James Vega writes at the Democratic Strategist on the folly of mistaking "the surge" for military strategy and Thomas Edsall considers the long Republican purgatory.

--Mori Dinauer

Shell Oil has decided that drilling for oil and gas in the Beaufort Sea outside of Alaska is probably not worth the aggravation right now:

"Shell Oil has canceled its drilling and other exploration plans for next year in the Beaufort Sea while it focuses on court challenges to its offshore plan.

A three-judge panel of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled last month that federal regulators improperly granted Shell permission to drill in the Beaufort. The court ordered the Minerals Management Service to reconsider how exploratory drilling would affect wildlife and Inupiat Eskimo subsistence hunting and fishing."

I reported back in October that Sarah Palin was going to be disappointed with her "drill, baby, drill" plans for Alaska, because of these environmental concerns about drilling in the Beaufort. She wasted no time putting out a press release expressing how sick she was about Shell's decision:

"Governor Sarah Palin today expressed her disappointment in Shell Oil Company’s decision to cancel drilling activities in the Outer Continental Shelf (OCS) of Alaska’s Beaufort Sea for 2009.
The decision comes on the heels of a ruling by a three-judge panel of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals on November 20. “Alaska’s economic past and future are tied directly to the development of our abundant natural resources," the governor said. “The loss of this exploration activity will cost our state’s families hundreds of jobs next year.”

Looks like she might need to start palin' around with Begich soon enough.

--Brentin Mock

"New CBO report" is not a phrase that generates a lot of click-throughs, but Ezra Klein makes the case that today's report on health care is extremely important (and that the CBO matters a lot more than you think):

Kennedy's office sent out a press release. The New York Times ran a story. The Wonk Room wrote up the findings. This is not how Congressional Budget Office reports are usually greeted. But the release of their two books on health care -- Key Issues in Analyzing Major Health Insurance Proposals and Budget Options, Volume I: Health Care -- is a big deal. Indeed, the books are unprecedented. But the coverage thus far isn't quite getting at their import.

To understand why these books matter, consider the first sentence of my profile of Peter Orszag, former head of the Congressional Budget Office and incoming director of the Office of Management and Budget. It's a quote from Senator Ron Wyden, one of Congress's most involved and aware reformers. "The history of health reform," he says, "is congressmen sending health legislation off to the Congressional Budget Office to die."

This is not part of the normal history. The CBO's rulings don't make much news. But they can be decisive.

To understand why, ask yourself this question: How do we decide how much a government program costs? It's an essential question. Programs need prices, because the government has to produce a budget. But pricing legislation in advance is impossible. Consider the challenges of a health-care plan that only exists on paper. What medical technologies will emerge in coming years? Will there be a recession that forces more Americans onto government subsidies? Will the next flu season be a bad one? No one knows.

But you still need a number. So Washington operates amidst a tacitly agreed-upon imprecision. What the CBO says, goes.

Read his post and then go take a look at his Orszag profile from the last print issue.

--The Editors

I think there's a bit of jumping the gun here with Rick Warren and his remarks about Syria. Syria and her government are surely no fan of the Jewish people. Syrian President Bashar al-Assad is prone to making anti-Semitic statements, but as far as religious freedom is concerned I don't know that Warren's statement is really that far from the truth. Here's what Warren said:

"The Syrian government has long had a bad reputation in America, but if one considers a positive action like welcoming in thousands of Christian refugees from Iraq, or the protection of freedom to worship for Christians and Jews in Syria, it should not be ignored."

According to a State Department report on U.S. relations with Syria from 2001, the Jewish community that remains in Syria is painfully small. According to the report, released earlier this year:

"Press reports in September 2000, recounting a meeting of Syrian Jewish leaders with President Bashar al-Asad, estimated that some 3,500 out of a previous total of 4,000 Syrian Jews had emigrated to the United States or Israel."

That would leave about 500 Syrian Jews. The report adds that "Some Syrian Jews hesitate to leave their relatively prosperous lives in Syria, especially since the liberal decrees of April 1992, for a more uncertain economic future abroad, and some have remained because of age, health, or reluctance to move," and that Syria's "Christian community and tiny Jewish minority (see below) have been free to practice their religion without interference".

I don't think that justifies Warren's conclusion that Syria gets an unwarranted "bad reputation," they are after all a state sponsor of terrorism. But his statement that religious freedom in Syria is better than many other Arab countries is consistent with the State Department's findings. Now maybe this information is out of date, it's about seven years old. It certainly doesn't excuse the anti-Semitism of Syria's leaders. But it doesn't sound like Warren is factually wrong about this. He's certainly said enough offensive things that we don't need to jump down his throat for something that isn't that offensive. I mean am I crazy here? Because I just think I thought I saw Greg Sargent, Eric Kleefield and John Aravoisis link to people like Debbie Schlussel and publications like World Net Daily for the purpose of going after a guy who thinks women who have abortions are comparable to Nazis.

UPDATE/CORRECTION: I was unable to raise anyone on the phone who could talk authoritatively on anti-Semitism in Syria, but I did find the report from the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor that Worldnetdaily cited, which I'll excerpt after the jump.

There were no reported acts of physical violence against, or harassment of, Jewish persons. Government officials occasionally used radio and television programming, news articles, cartoons, and other mass media to condone anti-Semitic material. Anti-Israel material was widespread, some of which carried anti-Semitic overtones.

[...]

The government primarily cited national security as the reason for barring the country's approximately 40 Jewish citizens from government employment, serving in the armed forces, and contact with Israel. Jews also were the only religious minority group whose passports and identity cards noted their religion. Jewish citizens had to obtain permission from the security services before traveling abroad and faced excessive government scrutiny when applying for licenses, deeds, or other official documents. The government enforced a law against exporting historical and cultural treasures to prohibit the Jewish community from sending historical Torahs abroad.

So Syria's record of mistreating its Jews post-2001 is actually pretty bad, and Sargent was correct in his characterization of Syria. So clearly I was the one who was wrong and jumped the gun here.

--A. Serwer

The most egregious example of the Bush Administration deliberately lying to the American people about the danger posed by Iraq in order to justify an invasion is the "Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa," clause inserted into the 2003 State of the Union Address. How many Americans were shaken off the fence by the claim that Saddam might be developing nuclear weapons? We'll never know, but I'm guessing that the president of the United States declaring that a nuclear threat was imminent was profoundly affecting for most people. When Bush made this statement, we were already close to war, the AUMF had already passed, and the heavy use of the term "WMD" had already blurred distinctions between nuclear, biological, and other armaments, as it was meant to. In the lead up to the invasion in March 2003, this is the moment I remember the most. It may be the bias of hindsight, who knows. But a new report from Henry Waxman and the House Committee on Government Oversight reveals just how deliberately fabricated the claim was (as predicted by Jeff Lomanaco on TAPPED last year).

The village consensus was that the CIA offered bad intelligence. But that's not what happened. The CIA and other administration officials tried desperately to get the reference to uranium removed at least twice and succeeded. But the idea that the CIA was at fault was comfortable for everyone; it helped the press cover their failures, it let congress off the hook, it exonerated the Bush Administration, and it allowed Americans to avoid coming to terms with the truth that the President of the United States and his administration had knowingly manipulated the country to war. In the meantime, administration officials responsible for this fabrication and attempting to obfuscate it will move on to comfortable post-administration careers while the Obama Administration figures out how to withdraw American troops who have been at war for almost six years because of this administration's flagrant disregard for its own responsibilities. Some like Michael Gerson and Alberto Gonzales already have.

--A. Serwer

Matt and Spencer greet the news that China will contribute to anti-piracy efforts with a bit of faux surprise; the motivating concept behind the most recent Maritime Strategy and its predecessor, the 1000 Ship Navy, holds that naval power isn't zero-sum. Galrahn has a good discussion here considering piracy as the quintessential test of the 1000 Ship Navy concept. Of course, the Maritime Strategy includes a component on the deterrence of peer competitors, but part of that deterrence involves the integration of such competitors (Russia, China) into multilateral arrangements so that the potential competitors have a stake in international society. Incidents like this, in which thirty Chinese crewmen were rescued from pirates by multinational forces, are hoped to reinforce great power commitment to multilateral norms.

The Maritime Strategy is high liberal internationalism; it's founded on the concept of cooperation in an arena traditionally reserved for competition, and spreading the costs (and benefits) of hegemony as widely as possible. The rescue operations following the 2004 tsunami represent another manifestation of the Strategy.

On the issue of piracy more generally, see this interview with a pirate, this discussion of the effectiveness of assaults on pirate bases, and this discussion of the role played by Kenya in Somali piracy.

--Robert Farley

Time's John Cloud is apparently not content to make the obvious case against Obama's embrace of Rick Warren and his abhorrent beliefs about gays, women, and violence. No, that's not enough: Obama it seems, might as well be mild-mannered white supremacist Richard Russell, Jr.

Obama reminds me a little bit of Richard Russell Jr., the longtime senator from Georgia who — as historian Robert Caro has noted — cultivated a reputation as a thoughtful, tolerant politician even as he defended inequality and segregation for decades. Obama gave a wonderfully Russellian defense of Warren Thursday at a press conference. Americans, he said, need to "come together" even when they disagree on social issues. "That dialogue is part of what my campaign is all about," he said. Russell would often use the same tactic to deflect criticism of his civil rights record. It was a distraction, Russell said, from the important business of the day uniting all Americans. Obama also said today that he is a "fierce advocate for equality" for gays, which is — given his opposition to equal marriage rights — simply a lie. It recalls the time Russell said, "I'm as interested in the Negro people of my state as anyone in the Senate. I love them."

Russell had a record of blocking civil rights reforms whenever possible. Obama has supported non-discrimination laws, civil unions, and health care coverage for same sex couples. He scored a 94 on the Human Rights Campaign's legislative scorecard this year. He is not a "good natured" bigot in the form of Russell, whose false genteel exterior belied a career based on outright hatred, he is a political opportunist whose legislative record on gay rights remains encouraging in the face of outrageous cultural and political triangulation.

The point of the comparison, of course, is that Obama is black and Cloud, like others, thinks there's something uniquely evil about black people with prejudices. Ta-Nehisi Coates has argued that this is about seeing a "nobility" in victimhood, but my knee-jerk reaction is that quite obviously only some people are entitled to be wrong. The response of some people in the aftermath of Prop 8 suggested there was something particularly galling about the idea that black people could ever look down their noses at anyone else, and this underlying notion drives Cloud's argument. Paternalism becomes an even more likely motivation when you consider that Cloud once defended vocal gay rights opponent and sometime f-bomb-dropper Ann Coulter on the grounds that she, you know, has gay friends.

-- A. Serwer

To follow up on this, it's not merely that the California court's decision was directed entirely at state actors, and had no bearing on the actions of private churches at all. It's that the whole category of "hate speech," as it pertains to American law, doesn't exist. The state cannot restrict speech solely based in its content, no matter how hateful or potentially dangerous; this has been well-settled federal law for nearly 40 years. (The separate category of hate crimes, which deal with the intent of the perpetrators of violent crimes -- which is always relevant -- as opposed to their beliefs per se is again of no relevance to Warren's claims.) This is recognized by critics of the libertarian American approach as well as those (like me) who generally favor it.

Whatever the decision Prop 8 sought to overturn had said, therefore, it simply could not have made any action by a church criminal, and anybody who actually knew anything about American politics and constitutional law would know that. Whether Warren himself is fully immersed in a world of paranoid conservative fantasia or is simply cynically pandering to the ignorant paranoia of his audience I can't say, but either way it doesn't speak well of him.

--Scott Lemieux

I heard a lot of blow back after I wrote on Wednesday that I believed Caroline Kennedy just might make a very good senator. Nepotism is unseemly. But in real-life politics, a smart, well-connected senator with star power and the ear of the president is better situated to be an effective legislator than a member of Congress with years of experience, but no major achievement associated with his or her tenure. Especially grating is the argument from Nick Kristof and others that there is something un-feminist about appointing Kennedy. Historically, as my friend Kerry Howley has written, family connections have been one of the primary ways women break glass ceilings and ascend to positions of power. Men -- including the Bushes, Gores, Salazars, Udalls, Chafees, and Jacksons -- have been benefiting from these relationships for centuries. Of course, nepotism is classist, because it benefits those whose families have stature and influence. But nepotism has also, often, explicitly benefited women.

Today Andrew Sullivan, who rarely meets a woman whose political ambitions he approves of, writes that Kennedy is "less qualified than Palin," because at least Palin was a self-made woman. True enough. But I thought the point of politics was passing good policy -- policy with social utility. Can anyone really argue that Caroline Kennedy would be a less informed, coherent, intelligent legislator than Sarah Palin? That she is less motivated by the common good? It is a ridiculous analogy to draw.

--Dana Goldstein

In an article from our last print issue inaugurating a new feature in the magazine, Michael Tomasky describes a book that changed his life:

The idea of "life changing" led me to reach into the memory hole for those rare occasions when reading a book so fired my mind that, while I was immersed in it, I could think of nothing else. You know the feeling: You can't wait for work or class to finish so you can plow back into the book; as you near the end, you actually slow down because you don't want it to stop and can't imagine not being able to read it anymore.

It turns out that it's a novel, Milan Kundera's The Joke, that met for me the above criteria: The book is quite political and contains within its pages lessons about how people adapt to the larger political contexts in which they live. These are lessons that were and are more universal than one might assume -- given that Kundera was assaying totalitarian society -- about what can happen when the stirrings of the soul are thwarted by the imperatives of the state.

And Sudhir Muralidhar reviews the new movie Nothing But the Truth based on the Judith Miller controversy:

Nuance, however, is not Hollywood’s specialty, so it’s no wonder that the film adaptation of the story traded in some of the thornier issues at the heart of the case for cleaner, easier to dramatize ones. Rachel Armstrong (Kate Beckinsale), the heroine at the center of the new film Nothing But the Truth, is not Judith Miller. Yes, she goes to jail for refusing to name a source who revealed the identity of a covert CIA operative (Vera Farmiga). Yes, that CIA operative is married to a former ambassador who writes op-eds arguing against the current government’s foreign policy. Yes, she is hounded by a particularly aggressive and determined special prosecutor (Matt Dillon). But Armstrong doesn’t have any of the political baggage that made Miller’s case so interesting, and, as a consequence, her story is far less challenging and compelling than the real one that inspired it.

As always, subscribe to our RSS feed to receive our articles as soon as they are published.

--The Editors

But Warren (who admits that his natural impulse is to sleep with every beautiful woman he sees -- blech) can control his. Really. Watch it here:

Meanwhile, don't miss Mike Madden's report in Salon today, in which he confirms that it was indeed Obama, and not the Inaugural Committee, that hand-picked Warren to give the invocation.

--Sarah Posner

Via Michelle Goldberg and the Episcopal Diocese of Washington comes some not very flattering insights into Rick Warren's much-vaunted international work.

Goldberg, author of the essential book on the Christian right, Kingdom Coming, has a new book coming out this spring about the impact of religious fundamentalism on reproductive freedom worldwide. On Religion Dispatches, she reveals some of the impact of Warren himself from her reporting in Uganda:

Yet this is symbolism with real-world consequences and concrete implications. First of all, it reifies the image that Warren has been assiduously constructing for himself as “America’s Pastor,” a post-partisan and benevolent figure with a quasi-official role atop the nation’s civic life. When it comes to his public persona, Warren is something of a magician. He has convinced much of the media and many influential Democrats that he represents a new, more centrist breed of evangelical with a broader agenda than the old religious right. This is, in many ways, deceptive. Yes, Warren has done a lot of work on AIDS in Africa, but he supports the same types of destructive, abstinence-only policies as the Bush administration. One of his protegés, Ugandan pastor Martin Ssempa, has been a major force in moving that country away from its lifesaving safer-sex programs. He’s been known to burn condoms at Makerere University, the prestigious school in Uganda’s capital, and in his Pentecostal services, marked by much sobbing and speaking in tongues, he offers the promise of faith healing to his desperate congregants, a particularly cruel ruse in a country ravaged by HIV.

And the Right Reverend John Bryson Chane, Eighth Bishop of Washington, has this to say:

Mr. Warren has been rightly praised for his efforts to deepen the engagement of evangelical Christians with impoverished Africans. He has been justifiably lauded for putting the AIDS epidemic and global warming on the political agenda of the Christian right. Yet extravagant compassion toward some of God’s people does not justify the repression of others. Jesus came to save all of humankind, and as Archbishop Desmond Tutu has pointed out, “All means all.” But rather than embrace the wisdom of Archbishop Tutu, Mr. Warren has allied himself with men such as Archbishop Henry Orombi of Uganda who seek to “purify” the Anglican Communion, of which my Church is a member, by driving out gay and lesbian Christians and their supporters.

Last night I was on the Sirius/XM program "Make It Plain" with Mark Thompson. A listener called in from Colorado, an Obama supporter and a Christian who works on the front lines of serving the poor. To say she was angry or offended by the Warren choice is not quite accurate: She was wounded, particularly by Warren's denigration of the social justice gospel as inferior to his brand of evangelicalism. "When Rick Warren puts me down," she said, "he's negating our faith."

Chane concludes: "[I]n honoring Mr. Warren, the president-elect confers legitimacy on attitudes that are deeply contrary to the all-inclusive love of God. He is courting the powerful at the expense of the marginalized, and in doing so, he stands the Gospel on its head."

--Sarah Posner

So boss Mark Schmitt has a compelling theory that the GOP will rebuild itself at the state level through strong governors who can govern in a technically competent if conservative way, citing chief executives like Pataki, Engler, Thompson, Whitman, and Voinovich who seemed in the late nineties to be a raft of sanity in the sea of madness emitting from the Republican opposition in Washington.

And of course, now we mention almost entirely GOP governors as we speculate about (ugh) 2012. Tim Pawlenty, Mitch Daniels, Sarah Palin and, of course, Bobby Jindal. But it looks like Bobby has run into some trouble down on the Bayou, as he gambled his state's future on the rising price of oil.

Louisiana was able to make up nearly 17 percent of its revenue from oil taxes as prices climbed to $143 per barrel, but now that they sit at around $40, things don't look too good. A $1 billion surplus was already spent at the beginning of the year, and then the state rolled back an income tax increase. Suddenly, the state is facing a deficit next year of $2 billion. It's the last place a governor wants to find himself -- especially a conservative governor who embraces the insane GOP tax gospel that makes no provision for increasing government revenues even when that is a good idea. Jindal has announced -- smartly -- that he won't run for president in 2012, but that means he needs to win his 2011 election if he wants to have a future in national politics. And that will be hard to do if he doesn't make some tough governing decisions with aplomb. Despite the familiarity with which Jindal is spoken of in Washington, he's actually spent more time in government here as a executive branch appointee and congressman than he has as Louisiana's governor (he's been in office just under a year).

Right now, there are more Democratic governors in the United States than Republican ones, but expect that balance to shift as states take on the brunt of the recession -- unless, of course, President-elect Obama's economic stimulus plan includes plenty of aid to state programs. But just as the recession presents both a challenge and an opportunity to Obama, it does the same to folks like Jindal. Only Jindal's fiscal toolkit is much more limited. Time to get creative, governor.

--Tim Fernholz

• Today's official transition announcements: Mary Schapiro for chairwoman of the SEC, Gary Gensler for chairman of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission and Dan Tarullo for a seat on the Federal Reserve Board. Transition buzz: Hilda Solis for Labor secretary, physicist John Holdren for science adviser, William White for Naval secretary, Admiral Dennis Blair for director of National Intelligence, marine biologist Jane Lubchenco for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and Zeke Emanuel, Rahm's brother, as senior counselor at the White House Office of Management and Budget on health policy, working closely with HHS-designate Tom Daschle.
• The emerging non-outraged/baffled thesis as to why Barack Obama is having Rick Warren lead the inaugural invocation is that it's politically savvy. Tim takes down one representative sample, this Damon Linker defense of the pick, but the least thoughtful part is where Linker submits that "it is in Obama's interest (and the Democrats') to peel as many moderate evangelicals away from the GOP as he can," as if this is some sort of vital swing demographic in the making. Leaving aside what a "moderate evangelical" is (do they believe life begins at conception, for instance?) it's instructive to remember who these people vote for. According to the CNN 2008 election exit poll, protestants went for McCain 54-45 and white evangelicals/born again by around 3-1 while comprising at most about a quarter of the sample. Given this reality, would "peeling away" a few moderates even make a difference?
• The Economist's Democracy in America blog breaks down "the Obama Congress, district by district," and the results are interesting. "[T]he current Democratic majority is the most stable in decades" and that's even before the Dem-friendly maps gets codified following the 2010 census. Also, a new ABC News/Washington Post poll finds that 56 percent of Americans think Democrats will do a better job handling the main challenges the nation faces over the next few years compared to just 23 percent for Republicans. Clearly, more evidence of our center-right nation.
• Chicago Sun-Times columnist Mark Brown has a novel solution to Illinois' Blagojevich problem: "Just how much money do you think it would take to persuade Blagojevich to get the bleep out of the way? I'm serious. ... Would a year's salary do the trick? Probably not, but he'd have to give it serious thought. Two years' salary? Might be too generous, but it would be better than if he somehow remained governor for the next two years and we had to pay him anyway."
• Speaking of governors filling Senate vacancies, Nolan McCarty crunches the numbers since the passage of the 17th Amendment (which mandated that senators be popularly elected) and finds that appointments were far more frequent in the in the '10s-'60s than they are today, probably because folks simply live longer now and don't die in office as often. But also the expectations for the appointee have changed as well: "Back in the day when most appointed senators were placeholders and caretakers, granting this power to a governor seemed okay. Now that the norm is that appointed senators are expected to run for reelection and hold the seat, the practice creates more opportunities for corruption and conflicts of interest than we really ought to tolerate."
• The evidence keeps mounting that Karl Rove is angling for a career as a professional comedian. Speaking to Reader's Digest, Rove observed that "less obvious is how to create a White House where forceful debate can take place. Plain speaking, straight talk, and dissent must be encouraged, with participants thoroughly prepared, ideas offered with deference for opposing views, and colleagues not subjected to self-serving leaks. The power of the Oval Office can cower critics and silence disagreement; the Chief Executive must labor hard to make it a place of debate and vigorous debate."
• Eric Kleefeld makes the case that when the dust finally settles Al Franken will probably win the Minnesota Senate race, in a decision that could come as early as tomorrow when the canvassing board certifies the results.

--Mori Dinauer

New York Gov. David Paterson revealed his budget proposal for the next fiscal year earlier this week. He deserves credit for the care with which he managed budget cuts; though some social programs are being cut, he's not really going after schools or entitlements. And given that he is legally required to introduce a balanced budget, and the state is facing massive losses in revenue from the cratering financial services industry, cuts were probably unavoidable. But when it comes to Paterson chose to increase revenues, his choices were much less sensible.

Basically, he seems to have tried to mask the fact that he's increasing taxes by dividing them into 88 fees and special sales taxes on things like taxis, non-diet sodas, and movies -- the main burden of which seems likely to fall on the middle class. This was probably primarily a political calculation. But I think Patrick Ruffini, despite his general neo-Hooverite policy recommendations, makes a pretty good case that the sheer volume and absurdity of the increases (does anyone really want to be on-record as supporting a tax on iTunes?) will backfire and end up doing more political damage than a straight forward income-tax increase would have. The details of the taxes are endlessly mockable, and that's not good if you're David Paterson -- those details give his opponents 88 ways to criticize him, each more novel than, "Hey, he raised our taxes!"

And on a policy level, too, this seems like a fairly bad idea. While most of the new taxes are on things consumed by people who are at least doing decently, they will also hurt people who provide those things, like taxi drivers, movie theater employees, and so on. And instead of falling primarily on the already well-off who, despite the recent woes of the financial industry, still get a wildly disproportionate share of our nation's wealth, they will fall mainly on the middle class. Finally, as Nate Silver points out, taking consumption rather than income discourages spending relative to savings, the last thing you want to do in a recession. 

Not to mention that New York has another option, though not necessarily a good one. Unlike most other states, New York only requires that the governor submit a balanced budget, not that the final budget passed by the legislature and signed by the governor actually be balanced. While states are much less well-placed than the federal government to do deficit-based stimulus spending, stimulus is needed right now and it seems reasonable to take on some additional debt to provide it, particularly when federal funds for state budgets may very well only be months away. 

--Sam Boyd

It looks like Defense Secretary Robert Gates is moving forward on closing Guantanamo:

Pentagon spokesman Geoff Morrell said Mr Gates - who is to retain his position in the new administration - had wanted to be prepared in case Mr Obama wished to tackle the issue "early in his tenure". 

"He has asked his team for a proposal on how to shut it down, what will be required specifically to close it and move the detainees from that facility, and at the same time protect the American people from dangerous terrorists," he said.

The fact that Gates is already drawing up plans to close the facility can probably be seen as an indication that Obama intends to keep his promise. Hopefully this will be followed by concrete changes in interrogation policy as well.

--A. Serwer

Ron Kirk will be announced as the United States Trade Representative. Kirk, a lawyer and lobbyist, has been the Mayor of Dallas, a U.S. Senate candidate, and an aide to Lloyd Bentsen. What I don't see -- and maybe he did this with Bentsen -- is a ton of, hmm, trade experience. Certainly he worked as mayor to bring investment into his city, but that's not the same thing (Apparently, his experience led to speculation he would fit well at Transportation or HUD). Similarly, the current occupant of the post, Susan Schwab, and the previous one, Rob Portman, didn't really have a lot of international experience either (Bush's first pick for the post, Robert Zoellick, had worked at the State Department). I'm not sure, however, what the real requirements of the job are: do you need a deep understanding of international trade policy or is it enough to be a skilled negotiator?

Similar to the Ray Lahood pick for DOT -- a congressman who seems to have voted reasonably well on transportation issues but is not considered a transportation expert -- you have to wonder what the angle is here. So I will be trying to find that out...

--Tim Fernholz

We started this magazine almost twenty years ago, in the hope of seeing a progressive moment come to America again, and helping to bring it about. Along the way we’ve published some highly influential articles, and incubated some terrific young talent. Most importantly, we’ve kept a flame alive -- a vision of a politically possible progressive America.

Now, ironically, a progressive administration will take office at precisely a time when conservative policies have wrecked the economy -- much as the Prospect has long warned. This is a very hopeful time for a new politics, but a very precarious time financially. The economic meltdown impacts everyone, not just well-to-do folks swindled by the likes of Bernie Madoff. The economic squeeze hits everyone from retirees to young people starting out.

The coming year promises to be difficult for non-profits like the Prospect, so we will need your support more than ever.
So, this holiday season, help keep the Prospect strong and feisty, with a tax deductible gift. It’s a sounder investment than putting your money on Wall Street. You can sleep easy knowing that your funds will be put to good use.

--Robert Kuttner

Dana Goldstein reports on how Finland's education success shows that reform is both possible and more complex than we think:

That's right: Merit pay exists in Finland. So does school choice; only the most academically-inclined Finnish 15-year-olds continue their education in general (as opposed to vocational) upper secondary schools, which compete with one another for the students with the highest grade point averages.

But Finland is also home to strong, politically powerful teachers' unions. And tenure. And principals who complain tenure makes it too difficult to fire bad teachers. Alcoholism is one of the few offenses that allows primary school principal Timo Heikkinen to axe a teacher, he said, and only after providing the employee with counseling and negotiating with his or her union. Sound familiar?

Robert Kuttner says that Mary Schapiro, Obama's pick to head the SEC, is just what Wall Street wanted:

And of course, her appointment is no accident. There were much tougher, more public minded appointees for SEC chair on the short list, but they were blocked by fierce industry lobbying warning that tough regulators would be divisive or controversial -- which they indeed would, if they did their jobs. Wall Street fundraisers for Obama used their ample access to resist a tough appointee. People in other power centers, like the Treasury and the White House, did not want a tough and independent SEC. If you think the appointment process exists in some kind of platonic post-ideological vacuum, get real.

Matt Yglesias writes that the current situation in Somalia is largely our fault:

Americans don't spend much time thinking about Somalia. And what time we do spend has in recent months been focused on somewhat amused accounts of the uptick in pirate activity off the Somali coast. But the piracy is but a symptom of the larger problem of lawlessness and anarchy in Somalia. To Americans who have paid no attention to East Africa in the time between the departure of U.S. forces from Somalia in 1995 and the recent spate of pirate attacks, this situation may appear merely endemic to the region. But it's not. The Somali situation was, in many ways, improving as of two years ago. At which point the Bush administration initiated a new adventure that, like most Bush administration deeds, was ill-conceived and worked out poorly. In this case, it destroyed the country, has been responsible for the deaths of untold thousands of people, has created the pirate problem, and is breeding a new generation of anti-American jihadists.

And Tim Fernholz explains the numerous skills of Obama's pick to head the Department of Housing and Urban Development and the numerous challenges he faces:

Shaun Donovan had a problem. As deputy assistant secretary for multifamily housing at the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) during the Clinton administration, he learned of two troubled low-income senior-housing developments in Atlanta, comprising some 500 units. The nonprofits that managed the homes lacked the capital to rehabilitate the aging buildings. A larger nonprofit was in negotiations to take over management of the buildings and find further capital for rehabilitation, but HUD rules prevented the takeover until after financing for the rehabilitation was completed -- and the money wasn't there yet. The developments were set to close without new management, so Donovan intervened to shepherd the deal through HUD's bureaucracy. Within three years, the new managers had rehabilitated the buildings by securing state tax breaks and issuing bonds.

As always, subscribe to our RSS feed to receive our articles as soon as they are published.

--The Editors

What does Rep. Hilda Solis, Barack Obama’s selection for secretary of labor, bring to the job? Only a record of passionate commitment to working people, a high level of political smarts, and some genuine displays of raw guts that could make her a star of American liberalism.

In 1996, when she was a back-bencher (and the first Latina) in the California State Senate, Hilda Solis did something that no other political figure I known of had done before, or has done since: She took money out of her own political account to fund a social justice campaign. Under California law, the state minimum wage is set by the gubernatorially-appointed Industrial Welfare Commission, and California’s governors for the preceding 14 years, Republicans George Deukmejian and Pete Wilson, hadn’t exactly appointed members inclined to raise that wage. So Solis dipped into her own campaign treasury and came up with the money to fund the signature-gatherers to put a minimum wage hike initiative on the California ballot. The signature gatherers gathered the signatures, the measure was placed on the ballot, it passed handily in the next election, and California’s low-wage janitors and gardeners and fry and taco cooks, and millions like them, got a significant raise.

While in the legislature, Solis also became the chief proponent in state government for the environmental justice movement that was bubbling up in various working-class communities around the state, steering to passage bills that reduced airborne carcinogens in industrial areas and that created parkland alongside the rivers that run through some of Los Angeles’ poorest neighborhoods. She took a leading role in promoting domestic violence awareness in the state’s communities of color.

And in 2000, she did something liberals always talk about doing and almost never do: she challenged an incumbent Democratic congressman with a piss-poor record in that Spring’s Democratic primary, and defeated him soundly. Marty Martinez, a 9-term incumbent seeking his 10th, had voted for NAFTA, opposed gun controls and abortion rights, and backed the extension of a freeway into a residential area -- managing to estrange labor, enviros, feminists and liberals of all descriptions. Still, Democrats virtually never run against incumbents, from the left or from anyplace. But Solis, with the encouragement of L.A. County AFL-CIO chieftain Miguel Contreras, did just that. She not only won, but defeated Matinez by a whopping 69 percent to 31 percent margin.

In the House, Solis has continued to champion labor causes, immigrants' rights, women’s health and environmental protections. She also worked closely with Rahm Emanuel in recruiting Democratic House candidates from the Southwest and Latino-dominated districts, so she brings to her new job a strong relationship with Obama’s incoming chief-of-staff. Now, she’s in the key position to promote the Employee Free Choice Act, which seems likely to be the most contentious issue on Obama’s agenda. But Solis has never been deterred by controversy.

--Harold Meyerson

I've met Hilda Solis, and I can say that she's very smart and committed to an issue dear to my own heart: the intersection of feminism and labor rights. She has highlighted the way women of color are disproportionately affected by the wage gap between men and women, writing, "Latinas earn on average 57 cents to every dollar that a man earns. African-American women earn just 68 cents to every dollar that a man earns." That is compared to 77 cents on the male dollar for all women.

We'll have more on Solis later from our resident labor expert, Harold Meyerson.

--Dana Goldstein

The President-Elect's statement:

“Let me start by talking about my own views. I think that it is no secret that I am a fierce advocate for equality for gay and lesbian Americans. It is something that I have been consistent on and something that I intend to continue to be consistent on during my presidency. What I’ve also said is that it is important for America to come together, even though we may have disagreements on certain social issues, and I would note that a couple of years ago, I was invited to Rick Warren’s church to speak despite his awareness that I held views that were entirely contrary to his when it came to gay and lesbian rights, when it came to issues like abortion. Nevertheless I had an opportunity to speak, and that dialogue I think is part of what my campaign’s been all about, that we’re not going to agree on every single issue, but what we have to do is to be able to create an atmosphere where we can disagree without being disagreeable, and then focus on those things that we hold in common as Americans.”

--A. Serwer

If Caroline Kennedy isn't appointed to New York's open U.S. Senate seat, will she run in 2010? Which is to say, does she want to be a Senator because she feels passionately that she is the best person to represent New Yorkers, or because it seems like it will be really easy for her to get a senate seat right now?

Apparently, there's some confusion about the answers to these questions.

--Tim Fernholz

Since it's not to nice speak ill of the dead, I thought I'd point out that Paul Weyrich's major saving grace (from our POV, of course) was his advocacy for public transit. Today is a particularly good time to recall Weyrich's transit record, since yesterday we heard the news that Obama plans on appointing a Republican, Ray LaHood, to be transportation secretary. And as Ryan Avent writes, it'll be a good thing if LaHood approaches his new job as an opportunity to "explain to his Republican pals that rail is good for growth."

LaHood should begin by revisiting Weyrich's 2001 treatise, co-written with William Lind, "Twelve Anti-Transit Myths: A Conservative Critique." Delightfully written, the paper, which attacks the idea that demand for public transportation "naturally" peaked during the WWII era, looks prescient in hindsight, now that we're experiencing record levels of ridership in regions across the nation. Weyrich understood that good transportation and development policies meant stronger local communities. And that, ultimately, meshed nicely with his religious conservative worldview.

One of the more creative unstated assumptions behind the transit critics' work is the assumption that the way we live now is "natural." Almost complete dependence on automobiles to go anywhere or do anything, traffic-choked roads and suburban sprawl -- it all just "happened." A quip by Oscar Wilde comes to mind: "The problem with being 'natural' is that it is such a difficult pose to maintain."

In fact, we got to where we are through social engineering, massive amounts of it. In no other society in history have places to live, places to work and places to shop been separated from one another, separated so widely that you need a car to get from one to another. Why did it happen here? Because after World War II, social engineers rewrote the building codes to mandate it. In most places, if a developer now wants to build a traditional town, a place where you can walk from home to work or shopping, he can't. The codes won't let him.

--Dana Goldstein

Writer Damon Linker has a new a blog, and just in time to weigh in on this whole Rick Warren situation. His first argument doesn't surprise -- Warren is outreach to evangelicals, the price you pay for politics, etc. But his second comment on the subject just misses the point. Archly, Linker tell us that

Liberals love to declare the end of the culture war, but as soon as a Democrat reaches out to someone on the other side of the cultural/religious divide, prominent liberal groups throw temper tantrums. (Would anything resembling this level of outrage have been sparked by Obama tapping someone who dissented from a liberal line on taxes? Or guns? Or health care? Or even the war? I very much doubt it.)

And so the culture war continues . . .

No, no, no, Damon. When liberals wrote the two articles you link to, they were arguing that economic and other policy issues trumped cultural grandstanding this election -- would you disagree? -- thanks in part to Obama's ability to reach out to people all over the cultural spectrum. But liberals aren't angry about Obama picking Warren because it's reaching out to someone on the other side of the cultural/religious divide; they're angry because Obama has reached out to someone who compares gay marriage to polygamy and incest, who equates pro-choice people with Nazis, who enables torture and who has called for the assassination of a foreign leader on religious grounds. There are other religious leaders, even conservative ones, that would have been more acceptable on any one of these issues, but Warren certainly combines each sensitive spot -- homophobia, extreme anti-choice rhetoric, torture, and international religious grandstanding -- guaranteed to worry the left. But making out all liberals to be somehow anti-religious, and referring to legitimate concerns as "temper tantrums," is the high-handed laziness of someone too busy to report and content to rely on stereotypes.

Perhaps the worst part of Obama's decision is Warren's international commentary; many of his other positions are expected and could be tolerated. This very apt point has been made in other places, but it's a normal American response to view theocratic Iran as a terrifying threat because their leaders will reference apocalyptic religious ideas. And now our president is sharing the stage with ... a preacher who has called on us to kill Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in the name of eliminating evil in the world. Glass houses, etc. Given that Linker wrote a book about the theocons and their plan to end secular government, one would think this would concern him more. Linker's post is High Broderism; condemning a conflict of ideas -- be it "partisanship" or "the culture war" -- without taking time to understand what the fight means to those participating in it.

For my part, as a religious liberal, I understand and respect Obama's motives in tapping Warren to deliver the invocation, but I'm also disappointed that he chose someone whose rhetoric, especially since the election, has grown more divisive. But, at the end of the day, Obama is everybody's president; President Bush's inability to grasp that fact -- to grasp that liberals and Democrats are also Americans -- played a big part in the failure of his presidency. Obama would make the same mistake at his peril. Unlike some, I thought Obama's decision to participate in the Saddleback forum was a good one, and he did well there.

Here's my wish, since I don't imagine they'll rescind the Warren invite: Have Rev. Joseph Lowery deliver the invocation, and Warren end the ceremony. Better, but much less likely: Reach out to socially conservative Americans by inviting a Catholic bishop who opposes torture and the war and supports social justice. A man can dream ...

--Tim Fernholz

Paul Weyrich, one of the early architects of the religious right, died this morning. Although he'd been in ailing health for a number of years and quite frail the last time I saw him speak publicly, he was still considered an icon to conservatives generally, and to religious right activists in particular.

Weyrich, who co-founded the Heritage Foundation in addition to his own Free Congress Foundation and many other organizations, was instrumental in bringing the social conservative issues into the burgeoning conservative movement in the late 1970s. When I interviewed Weyrich in 1986, he recalled how the "new Right" (as it was then called) was primarily interested in "free enterprise" and "limited government" and that during early coalition meetings the "silence" on what Weyrich called "family issues" was "deafening." Weyrich played a key role in bringing the moral majority types into alliance with the movement conservatives.

Weyrich claimed then, over 20 years ago, that his new movement represented change, and that liberals represented the status quo. "We in fact are the progressives, if you will, or radicals, if you prefer, who in fact are for change," he told me. "This is a great political turnabout, one which I don't think is fully appreciated."

--Sarah Posner

Mark Silk, professor at Trinity College, expert on religion and public life, and editor of the Spiritual Politics blog, calls on me to take note of former Clinton Administration press secretary Mike McCurry's Daily Beast post extolling the virtues of the Democrats' allegedly new-found religion.

Silk -- whose blog, by the way, is insightful and informative -- has previously labeled my critiques of the Democrats' overly strenuous religious outreach, and the negative consequences of it, "grumpy" and "mildly dyspeptic."

McCurry, on the other hand, is rejoicing that his party has moved past "a long dormancy in which many Democrats became uncomfortable with open expressions of faith. Conservatives became the ones who invoked God and the Bible in the name of their narrow social-political agenda. Their majority was moral and their coalitions Christian and they married faith and political activism in the tradition we now call 'wedge politics.'" I totally understand how dismaying it is to liberal Christians that the religious right has succeeded in defining -- in a negative way -- what it means to be a Christian in America. But then McCurry goes on to employ some of the very right-wing tropes used to discredit liberals to cast aspersions on his Democratic brethren: "The liberal faithful fled the scene in favor of latte and Tim Russert on Sunday mornings. Organized expressions of faith were rare at Democratic party gatherings."

Oh, horrors. Could there be anything more blasphemous than drinking a latte on the Sabbath or not praying at a DNC?

Now, seriously, McCurry's got to realize that "organized expressions of faith" are not dismissed by Democrats because they hate religion (Pastor Dan lays out the history of Democrats' faithfulness). Perhaps some Democrats are not comfortable talking about their religion (and neither are some Republicans, as John McCain proved this year). But I ask: so what? The whole idea that feeling comfortable talking about one's faith has suddenly become a requirement to seek public office is deeply offensive to the Constitution and a pluralistic society. Many of the people advocating for this increased talk about faith are clearly talking about Christian faith only; it's not like a Muslim -- or an atheist, for that matter -- would gain a lot of ground talking about their religious or areligious views on the campaign trail. I very much doubt any of the political consultants who are pushing Democrats to do the God talk would advise a client to break out the Koran to explain peace and justice.

McCurry feels the Democrats have redeemed themselves by electing Obama, "a man of strong religious faith who is comfortable connecting his spiritual life to his public role as a policymaker." Obama's campaign, McCurry insists, "benefited from a determined effort – which started during the 2004 campaign and accelerated since – to reach out to communities of faith and let them know that Democrats are their brothers and sisters."

But there's a distinction here that McCurry fails to note. Obama was at his very best when he spoke in ecumenical, spiritual language about hope, common dreams, and common good. But the very worst moments in the campaign came when Democrats and the cheerleaders of stepped-up religious talk bent over backwards to appeal to conservative evangelicals, or to use rhetoric that would appeal to them. And that proves not that the Democrats got religion, but that the religious right has more clout than the "new" evangelicals would dare to admit.

--Sarah Posner

An email just went out to the press corps announcing that, as promised, Bill Clinton has released his foundation's donor list ahead of his wife's confirmation hearing for her appointment as secretary of state. But no sooner had I clicked over to the foundation's website and read that the governments of Saudi Arabia, Oman, and Qatar had donated multiple millions of dollars each to Clinton's charitable works, than the site crashed. The website of Friends of Saudi Arabia, a group listed as a million-dollar donor to the Clinton Foundation, is also down. But according to the U.S.-Saudi Arabia Information Service:

Friends of Saudi Arabia is an apolitical, secular, educational, non-profit organization that serves to build bridges of goodwill and understanding between Saudi Arabia and the international community.

Events hosted by Friends of Saudi Arabia serve as a tool for nurturing dialogue, debate, alliance building and networking opportunities between people of diverse backgrounds with hopes to dispel misconceptions, establish friendships, and inspire global understanding and exchange. Friends of Saudi Arabia aims to promote better “people to people” understanding as well as bridging social and cultural gaps.

--Dana Goldstein

Update: The donor website is back up and running, albeit slowly and sporadically. If you click through the first few pages, which are dominated by governments, family foundations, and international NGOs, you can see the corporations that support the foundation. Some, such as Pfizer, have a less than progressive record on issues the foundation works on, such as ensuring access to medicines for HIV/AIDS patients living in poverty. Pfizer donated between $500,001 and $1 million.

According to a classified Pentagon report obtained by The New York Times, reconstruction of the Georgian Army in the wake of the South Ossetia War has not gone well:

The Georgian military, which was routed in August during a brief war with Russia, suffers from widespread mismanagement and unqualified leadership, and is in need of extensive reforms to become a modern fighting force, according to a classified Pentagon assessment conducted this fall.

The assessment, by a team of American military officers that worked quietly in Tbilisi, Georgia’s capital, in October and November, offers a clinical view of a politicized military culture and substandard practices in a country lobbying to join NATO while embroiled in two bloody territorial disputes with Russia.

In fairness, I suspect that many of the military organizations left by the receding Soviet Empire suffer from the same problems. But then, most of those organizations don't belong to countries that see fit to pick fights with Russia, and consequently to have their military deficiencies exposed to the world.

--Robert Farley

There's an argument, made by Ezra among others, that Obama is allowing Rick Warren to give the invocation at his inaugural in order to "reach out" to Evangelicals. Maybe, in the same way George W. Bush thought a gospel choir at the 2000 convention would "reach out" to black folks. Like Bush, to the extent he's reaching out, he's reaching for a fairly small middle, which seems odd since, you know, the election is over.

I think it's more likely that he's marginalizing Warren's rivals among the Evangelical leadership. Warren is not actually any less conservative than Dobson or Robertson or anyone else. He is less partisan. His views on abortion and violence are similarly inconsistent, with one being abhorrent and the other acceptable. (The power and legitimacy of the American state, it seems, turns the conservative faithful into moral relativists.) But Warren has shown a tendency not to attack individual political figures the way his peers have, and so Obama has made the decision to elevate Warren at his rivals' expense. I had an argument with my colleague Brentin Mock yesterday about Obama's decision, where he pointed out that someone else would be occupying Warren's leadership role if it wasn't Warren, and given the alternatives he's the best choice.

None of this really changes the fact that mainstreaming homophobia is inexcusable, and that Warren does not deserve to share a stage with the Rev. Joseph Lowery. The contrast between Warren's celebrity and Lowery's life fighting for civil rights is absolutely staggering. It's possible to interpret the decision to include Warren and Lowery as another Lincoln "we are not enemies but friends" moment, an attempt to bring the religious right and religious left together. The only problem is the most offended parties, the LGBTQ community and the women Warren equates with Nazis, are not in any symbolic sense present to make the choice to be friends or enemies. Had Obama, say, chosen a gay pastor and forced Warren to make the difficult decision of whether or not to appear, the situation might be a bit different. At the same time, Lowery's presence as a symbol of his generation's sacrifice is absolutely necessary. Obama simply wouldn't be able to run for president without men like Joseph Lowery.

Even if one reads Warren's presence as a cold political calculation, it's hard to see why the LGBTQ community wouldn't be outraged at being exploited for the purpose of cultural triangulation. Obama isn't a homophobe, but you gotta wonder how long the LGBTQ community has to wait before they get a president who thinks homophobia is unacceptable. What ultimately matters, I suppose, is what Obama decides to do while in office. Lincoln was a white supremacist, but he still freed the slaves. Lyndon Johnson tried to throw Fannie Lou Hamer out of the 1964 Democratic convention to avoid alienating the Dixiecrats, and he still signed the Civil Rights Act. Symbolic moments like the inauguration are less meaningful than what Obama actually decides to do while in office, but they're far from meaningless.

UPDATE: Brentin says I misunderstood what he meant and that he never said Warren was the "best" of the options.

--A. Serwer

Folks are talking about this outstanding Vanity Fair article on torture by David Rose. Spencer highlights this quote:

“We were done a tremendous disservice by the administration,” one official says. “We had no background in this; it’s not something we do. They stuck us with a totally unwelcome job and left us hanging out to dry. I’m worried that the next administration is going to prosecute the guys who got involved, and there won’t be any presidential pardons at the end of it. It would be O.K. if it were John Ashcroft or Alberto Gonzales. But it won’t be. It’ll be some poor G.S.-13 [bureaucrat] who was just trying to do his job.”

Indeed, there's a certain irony to the story; the CIA has permanently wounded itself in an effort to win the approval of people who hate the CIA.

--Robert Farley

• Barack Obama has named former Iowa Gov. Tom Vilsack secretary of agriculture and Colorado Sen. Ken Salazar to head the Department of the Interior, leaving Transportation and Labor the only remaining unfilled cabinet posts. (Rep. Ray LaHood (R-Ill.) is being considered for Transportation and Harley Shaiken for Labor.) In other transition news, California Representative Xavier Becerra has turned down an offer to be U.S. Trade Representative in the Obama administration.
• Like Sarah, I am utterly baffled by the Inaugural Committee's (and presumably the PEOTUS') decision to have Rick Warren deliver the invocation at Obama's inauguration. I can understand politicians kowtowing to religious leaders during a campaign, but why continue to do so after the election? I know I'm just a godless liberal, but am I missing some sort of well-hidden influence this man possesses that needs to be cultivated lest it wither away?
• Ever since Time Magazine chose "you" as its Person of the Year I had assumed the honor would continue to explore new depths of avant-garde post-modernism. I was shocked, then, to see the magazine go out on a limb and pick Barack Obama for this year's award. Far more interesting is this 1980 photo shoot of the president-elect while he was a student at Occidental College in Los Angeles.
• It appears that the Illinois Supreme Court has rejected AG Lisa Madigan's argument to have Gov. Rod Blagojevich declared unfit to hold office, according to Chicago Breaking News. This effort is was distinct from impeachment proceedings in the state House.
• This upcoming New York Times Magazine piece on the Obama campaign's relationship with the press is full of wise decisions on behalf of spokesman Robert Gibbs and Communications Director Dan Pfeiffer. On snubbing the WaPo editorial board: "You could go to Cedar Rapids and Waterloo and understand that people aren’t reading The Washington Post." On cocktail party journalism: "These are interviews that you agree to because you were always bumping into the reporter at cocktail parties, and they keep asking for the candidate's time. We could laugh every time our opponents would do them."
• Reports of George Tenet downing half a bottle of scotch in Prince Bandar's swimming pool and ranting about "neoconservative Jews" seem just a bit too fanciful, but I could be wrong.

--Mori Dinauer

Speculation has died down a bit, but it appears that Admiral Dennis C. Blair is still under consideration for a high-level intelligence post in the Obama administration, likely director of national intelligence. He's an interesting character who is considered smart about the possibility of engagement, not conflict, with countries like China, and he has made the right noises on terrorism reduction. But ... and there's always a but ... it seems that Blair, while serving as head of Pacific Command in 2000, had some unpleasant dealings with Indonesian leaders and displayed some remarkably poor judgment on intelligence about violence in East Timor. First, here's the Washington Post's Dana Priest:

Blair wanted to mend military relations with the world's fourth-largest country. But U.S. Ambassador to Indonesia Robert S. Gelbard had opposed the trip, as had some in the State Department and Congress. They believed Blair's visit would undermine President Clinton's decision to cut off military ties to Indonesia in outrage over its army's involvement in a brutal militia rampage in East Timor. The goal was to pressure Indonesia's army into adopting reforms demanded by the country's first democratically elected president in 31 years.

Under the dictatorial regime of then-President Suharto, Congress had funded a generous program to train Indonesia's military, despite the fact that Suharto's security forces routinely jailed, tortured and killed thousands of opposition activists. In East Timor, a former Portuguese colony Indonesia invaded in 1975, the army and its militia supporters had killed 200,000 East Timorese, a third of the population.

Outrage over the violence prompted Congress in 1992 to cut funding for the International Military Education and Training (IMET) programs, but the Pentagon worked around Congress's restrictions. Blair and others in the military viewed Indonesia's human rights abuses more as a reflection of the military's financial straits and lack of discipline than a concerted effort to intimidate its citizenry.

Despite the congressional ban, U.S. Special Operation Forces trained Indonesia's elite and savage special forces through the Joint Combined Exchange Training (JCET) program, which taught urban warfare, sniper tactics and crowd control.

... From a windowless concrete building near Blair's Pacific Command headquarters, seven intelligence analysts at the "Joint Intelligence Center," the world's largest military intelligence center, had tracked the movements of Indonesian and militia forces since May 1998. They watched as East Timor refugees were herded into camps in an effort to intimidate and control pro-independence peasants. Analysts and United Nations monitors saw the violence bubbling into a wholesale rampage.

But at no point, Blair acknowledges, did he or his subordinates reach out to the Indonesian contacts trained through IMET or JCET to try to stop the brewing crisis. In fact, later, U.S. officials were chagrined to learn that five of the 15 Indonesian military officers named by the country's human rights commission as allegedly involved in "crimes against humanity" in East Timor were former IMET students.

Tsk, tsk. For an on the ground perspective and analysis, see this piece from the Nation. The reporting makes it seem as though the good Admiral is more than a little tin-eared in terms of assessing actionable intelligence and responding to human rights violations. While it's very easy to second-guess decisions like Blair's with the benefit of hindsight, any time in a majority-minority setting with people being put in camps is a good time to get more interested.

-- Tim Fernholz

When I reported from the Republican National Convention this summer on conservatives who see the light on mass transit and greater density, I didn't expect that Barack Obama would end up appointing a Republican secretary of transportation. But as several outlets are reporting, that's exactly what Obama has done, tapping GOP Congressman Ray LaHood , who represents part of central and western Illinois, including the mid-size city of Peoria.

Adam Doster has a good run-down of LaHood's record at Progress Illinois. LaHood has bucked his party's line by supporting increased funding for Amtrak, and he voted this year for the Saving Energy Through Public Transportation Act. But LaHood has no record of leadership on transit and, suffice to say, advocates are disappointed. They were hoping for more of a fire-breather in this position. Look for them to begin pushing for the appointment of a big city public transit czar (such as Janette Sadik-Khan) to head the Federal Transit Authority, the DOT agency with jurisdiction over mass transit.

If there's any upside to the LaHood appointment, it is that if he does become a strong advocate for public transit, it could neutralize the issue politically, and help scrub it clean of the veneer of "urban elitism." After all, there's nothing elitist about infrastructure policies that create jobs while protecting the environment and making it easier for people to go about their daily business.

--Dana Goldstein

Reading Bob Somerby's critique of Dana Milbank's column this morning, I was really struck by these two paragraphs in Milbank's piece:

Next up in Obama's insomnia treatment was an acceptance speech by the previously unknown nominee [Arne Duncan], followed by the president-elect's own blend of convoluted and passive answers to questions: "We're going to have to work through a lot of these difficulties, these structural difficulties that built up over many decades, some of it having to do with the financial industry and the huge amounts of leverage, the huge amounts of debt that were taken on, the speculation and the risk that was occurring, the lack of financial regulation, some of it having to do with our housing market, stabilizing that." 

The whole thing might have ended in snores if McCormick hadn't piped up about Blagojevich. After upbraiding the reporter for his first two attempts at a question, Obama dispatched McCormick's third try -- whether there should be a special election to fill Obama's Senate seat -- with a no-comment. "I'm going to let the state legislature make a determination," he said.

The entire column is about how boring Obama's press conference was. I understand that Milbank's job is to write a funny, newsy column, but if you're totally uninterested in the details of governing, you find education policy so terribly boring that you don't even feel obligated to know anything about the "previously unknown" person you're covering who was head of the school system in one of the biggest cities in the country, why don't you just find another job and end your suffering? I mean I just don't get it.

-- A. Serwer

As I was in the middle of writing a different post about the pitfalls of the Democrats' religious outreach, the news comes from People for the American Way's Right Wing Watch that Rick Warren, who just this week equated gay marriage with polygamy and incest, and who thinks that Christians who work for social justice are Marxists, will deliver the invocation at Obama's inauguration.

I am speechless.

--Sarah Posner

Our own Harold Meyerson has a particularly insightful column in the Post today about the United Autoworkers. There's a lot of good history there, but the contemporary relevance comes from these notes about bailout objectors who go after the union for "killing" the deal:

Over the past several weeks, it has become clear that the Republican right hates the UAW so much that it would prefer to plunge the nation into a depression rather than craft a bridge loan that doesn't single out the auto industry's unionized workers for punishment. (As manufacturing consultant Michael Wessel pointed out, no Republican demanded that Big Three executives have their pay permanently reduced to the relatively spartan levels of Japanese auto executives' pay.) Today, setting the terms of that loan has become the final task of the Bush presidency, which puts the auto workers in the unenviable position of depending, if not on the kindness of strangers, then on the impartiality of the most partisan president of modern times.

Republicans complain that labor costs at the Big Three are out of line with those at the non-union transplant factories in the South, factories that Southern governors have subsidized with billions of taxpayer dollars. But the UAW has already agreed to concessions bringing its members' wages to near-Southern levels, and labor costs already comprise less than 10 percent of the cost of a new car. (On Wall Street, employee compensation at the seven largest financial firms in 2007 constituted 60 percent of the firms' expenses, yet reducing overall employee compensation wasn't an issue in the financial bailout.)

Looking at the facts, it rapidly becomes clear that worker compensation is not the excuse for killing the Big Three bailout conservatives would like it to be; in fact, it's barely relevant compared to, say, health care costs. Nor is free market ideology much of an excuse: this piece from the Washington Independent has been floating around but deserves plenty of attention. The southern senators who led the fight against helping the automakers have an auto industry of their own, consisting of foreign companies who are heavily subsidized by the states their factories are based in. No complaints about those government hand-outs, I note.

Which isn't to say there aren't any good arguments against the bailout; obviously rescuing a dying industry based on promises that it would turn itself around isn't the most appealing plan in the world. But simply ignoring the much stronger response -- that our current economic situation demands actions that prop up the economy, particularly by re-purposing a huge industry that employs many workers, rather than hastening its fall -- in favor of disingenuous attacks on laborers and vain stands on non-existent principle are at best foolish, and at their worst dangerous.

-- Tim Fernholz

We’ve had a lot of great moments at The American Prospect over the last year. Remember when Tim Fernholz told the entire lefty blogosphere to chill out? Or how about Sarah Posner giving you the inside scoop on what the religious right was up to every week? Remember when Mark Schmitt laid out the “Real Americans” playbook in May, before Sarah Palin was a twinkle in Steve Schmidt’s eye, or Dana Goldstein bagged an interview with veteran protester and Ron Paul partisan Adam Kokesh right after he disrupted McCain's speech at the Republican convention? Ezra Klein revealed the mystery behind Max Baucus, and Sam Boyd told you what those squiggly lines meant. Ann Friedman showed us how to get more women in elected office, and Phoebe Connelly broke down Jon Burge for those of us who'd never been to Chi-Town.

I know you love this stuff. I love this stuff. It's why I couldn't be happier to work at The American Prospect. It's more than a magazine. It’s like this gigantic brick wall where all these great liberal writers and reporters have tagged their name. Whether it’s big dogs like Bob Kuttner and Paul Starr, seasoned vets like Josh Marshall or Jon Chait, or youngbloods like Ezra Klein and Matthew Yglesias, the Prospect has history.

But the Prospect needs to have a future, too. And we need your help. In the spirit of the season, we’re asking for your (tax-deductible) donation to help keep our blogs, Web journalism and print magazine going. And if you like our work as much as I think you do, you should really consider helping us out. Because with the Prospect, you know your money will never end up as evidence in an FBI criminal complaint involving a conspiracy to buy an open Senate seat. It just goes to funding the in-depth, snarkalicious, policy-heavy liberal journalism you love. And isn't that a [bleep]ing valuable thing?

-- A. Serwer

An Iowa corn-man wouldn't be my pick for secretary of agriculture, but Tom Vilsack talked some sense on school lunch programs in this tough, wonky November interview with the student newspaper at Macalester College in Minnesota. Here is Vilsack describing one of the duties of the agriculture secretary:

You have the reauthorization of the school nutrition program. You have to be focused on whether we are doing right by our children in schools across America in terms of nutritious food that we subsidize and we provide in school lunch programs.

The USDA's National School Lunch Program was passed by Congress and signed into law by President Truman in 1946. The primary goal was to use agricultural excess to give students the pure caloric energy they needed to perform academically; anti-poverty crusaders from the early twentieth century on recognized that hunger was preventing many children from learning. But although concern about the nutritional content of school lunches is perennial, the USDA has yet to make a real commitment to creating standards. My public school lunches were so disgusting that if I didn't have a packed meal from home, I would eat chocolate chip cookies or french fries for lunch. We shouldn't be subjecting more generations of American children to these nutritional debacles.

--Dana Goldstein

The latest argument from right-wing bloggers against Eric Holder, other than the Marc Rich pardon and the return of Elian Gonzales to his father, is his appointment to the Illinois gaming board by Rod Blagojevich. Blagojevich named Holder to be a special investigator, and the board rejected Holder based on their concerns that he wouldn't be independent from the governor. Holder omitted his interaction with Blagojevich on a recent questionnaire, which is leading some voices on the right to cry "cover-up."

It sounds to me unlikely that Holder "forgot" about almost getting a job with Blagojevich. But I'm not sure how the fact that he almost worked for Blago matters -- Holder wasn't accused of any wrongdoing, and there's no indication that he's ever been a party to corruption in Illinois. Blagojevich was looking for someone to fill a job, and he picked Holder. It's not clear to me what, beyond the disingenuous hand-wringing about "ties to Blagojevich," is objectionable here. Blagojevich was governor of the state of Illinois. He has connections to lots of people who are involved in politics in the state. Most of these people are not corrupt.

On the other hand, it is easy to see what the right would find objectionable about a vocal opponent of torture being appointed attorney general. Holder has his problems, as I've discussed before, but almost taking a job with  Blagojevich isn't one of the more compelling arguments against him.

-- A. Serwer

In a rare case of everyone being right, today current HUD Secretary (since June) Steve Preston said Congress wrote inflexible rules for helping refinance unworkable mortgages, and Barney Frank blamed the Bush administration for forcing Congress to write unworkable rules. As one person in The Washington Post story notes, this is because the middle ground between helping everyone in trouble and forcing people to suffer the consequences of their bad mortgages is no ground at all. The program in question, Hope for Homeowners, allows the FHA to insure a new mortgage as long as the lender takes a loss and the homeowner splits future equity with the government. How effective is this?

The three-year program was supposed to help 400,000 borrowers avoid foreclosure. But it has attracted only 312 applications since its October launch because it is too expensive and onerous for lenders and borrowers alike, Preston said in an interview.

Awful. Fed Chair Ben Bernanke and FDIC Chief Sheila Bair have spent a lot of time harping on foreclosure prevention, but there's been no change, for the primary reason that it's a real political no-go to make the program enticing enough for lenders and mortgage holders to go into it. Basically, it prompts questions from people who don't have foreclosure problems, such as, "How come nobody's refinancing me?" But the problem with that approach is that pretty soon you end up with a lot of empty houses on your block, a lot more people accessing social safety nets, and broad aggregate damage to the economy as people's credit and finances are destroyed by foreclosure.

I spoke about some of these issues on Monday with Conrad Egan, head of the National Housing Conference, who recalled a pithy saying: "If your neighbor's house next door is burning, you can't be critical of what started the fire, you gotta put the fire out." He didn't add that if you don't, pretty soon the whole neighborhood goes up in smoke.

-- Tim Fernholz

When I used to watch Baratunde Thurston's comedy routine about his mother taking photographs of crack dealers across the street I thought he was exaggerating. He wasn't, as he explains in his latest post about attending Sidwell and sharing the Distinguished Alumni Award with former CIA director John Deutch.

-- A. Serwer

Look, it's hard not to speculate. Human beings are prone to anticipation, it's an instinct. But there comes a point in journalism where speculation becomes basically idiotic, namely, when you've begun to criticize people for things they haven't done yet, as Politico does in a story headlined "Nepotism Nation: Dems embrace dynasty politics."

His secretary of state will be Hillary Clinton, the wife of the former president. The Senate seat she’ll vacate is being pursued by Caroline Kennedy, the daughter of a president and the niece of two senators. Joe Biden’s Senate seat may go to his son Beau. Colorado Sen. Ken Salazar, Obama’s pick for Interior Secretary, could end up being replaced by his brother, Rep. John Salazar.

And Obama’s own seat could go to the son of the Rev. Jesse Jackson Sr. – less likely now in light of developments in the Rod Blagojevich scandal – or to the daughter of Illinois’ current House speaker.

So, yes, other than Hillary Clinton, every single example of the Democrats "embracing nepotism" is something that hasn't happened yet. No mention of the outgoing president's family history or what he thinks of his brother becoming a United States senator, reported elsewhere in the same publication. Let's keep in mind that you have to go back to Nixon to find a Republican ticket that wins without a Bush. In an earlier news cycle, Politico breathlessly searched the internet to find liberals who were unhappy with Obama's cabinet appointments, here, they don't quote a single one critical of the possibility of appointing Caroline Kennedy to the Senate, despite the fact that liberal bloggers have been tearing their hair out about it all week. None of this is to say that nepotism isn't rampant among both political officeholders and power brokers, but that it's hardly a Democratic phenomenon, and there are better examples than appointments that haven't occurred.

The fact that Jesse Jackson Jr. is unlikely to get that Senate seat looks more like the result of media figures speculating about wrongdoing on his part. That is the undescribed "development" that hurt his chances and it's sort of ridiculous for the press to talk around it. Also, Jackson's paternal grandfather was a sharecropper and despite his influence within the party, the highest office his father ever held was shadow senator from Washington, D.C. so let's not get ahead of ourselves comparing him to the Udalls and the Bushes, the Gores, Sunnunus, or Doles.

But to get back to the point, nepotism is something that is going to happen happens among Democrats.

Maybe it's a generational thing, but upon first reflection, I was little moved by the idea of my home state governor, David Paterson, sending Caroline Kennedy to the Senate. As much as I admire Ted Kennedy's achievements, and am proud of New York's representation, once-upon-a-time, by Bobby, I simply saw little reason to reward Caroline, a political novice, with a seat that has the potential, but by no means the guarantee, of being deeply influential during the crucial first year of the Obama administration. Yes, Caroline has developed an expertise in public education issues as a philanthropist in New York City. And yes, as Joe Conason points out, Teddy was also written off as a legacy case when he first ran for office, and went on to become a liberal legislative giant. But something concerned me about Caroline: it was that she is politically untested, completely inexperienced in the policy-making process.

And yet, upon further consideration, I am tentatively ready to say that I think Caroline would be a good choice for the seat. The candidate of the feminist organizations, Carolyn Maloney, has worked on some important issues in Congress, including gay rights and the rights of rape victims. But she isn't known as a wonk or a quick study, and in a year when progressive policy opportunities abound, seriousness will be rewarded. Kennedy, on the other hand, though completely new to legislation, will be surrounded by the highest-caliber staff members and enjoy a direct line to the president, to whom she awarded a crucial mid-primary endorsement. And though most of Kennedy's books have been treacly souvenirs to her tragic family history, she has, with co-author Ellen Alderman, written two books on questions of constitutional law that are critical to liberalism, The Right to Privacy and In Our Defense: The Bill of Rights in Action.

What remains a concern is that by appointing a celebrity like Kennedy to the seat, Paterson will be in large part ensuring a pathway to reelection in a heavily Democratic state. Kennedy is young, and with Chuck Schumer firmly enmeshed in New York's other Senate seat, the path forward for politicians such as Nydia Velazquez and Kirstin Gillibrand won't be clear. But the primary concern should be appointing the most effective and smartest senator right now. Caroline Kennedy just might be that person.

--Dana Goldstein

• Barack Obama will name Arne Duncan secretary of Education. Dana summarizes what this means for federal education policy.
• Yesterday the Illinois House voted 113-0 to begin impeachment proceedings against Rod Blagojevich.
  
• The Minnesota Supreme Court will hear arguments tomorrow on behalf of the Norm Coleman campaign, which is seeking to create an emergency ban on reviewing any rejected absentee ballots cast in the election.
• Marc Ambinder on the "most important" White House office: "Everyone who wants anything from the federal government has to interface with the now conjoined office of intergovernmental affairs and public liaison in the Obama White House. To head this office, Obama has appointed his best friend and most trusted counselor, Valerie Jarrett. ... The bigger the federal government gets, the more important these offices become. They'll probably be THE powerhouse in the Obama White House from the perspective of politics, constituency relations, interest and client groups, the Washington community, state, local and tribal governments."
• Rick Perlstein digs up an unflattering article he wrote about Jay Carney in light of the Time correspondent's decision to become Joe Biden's communications director. Perlstein has no idea if Carney is suited to the position but offers, "[M]aybe Team O welcomes a flack who insults bloggers even when they're right -- it puffs up the prejudices of the legacy media, which is part of a flack's job."
• If I were Barack Obama, I'd be very uncomfortable with the idea that Dick Cheney likes my national security team.
• Chris Cillizza reports that appointing Caroline Kennedy to Hillary Clinton's Senate seat was at the request of Harry Reid. One presumes this is tactical -- the well-heeled Kennedy Clan could probably hold any office for the Democrats. But I wish the rest of the Democratic party would follow Obama's example of promoting a system that advances meritocracy rather than aristocracy.
• The official 2008 election turnout statistics are now available, revealing the highest level of participation since 1968.

--Mori Dinauer

This week, it's Islamist politics, immigrant labor dynamics, anti-terror strategy and straight facts about trains. It's also time to say thanks and goodbye to the loyal interns who have worked on TTR all fall -- Zeesham Aleem, Stuart Whatley, David Heller, and Carrie Petri. Also a special cameo by former TAP intern Daniel Strauss, who's always ready to pinch-hit. Anyway, round-up ho:

• We'll see you at the Islamist crossroads. [PDF] In a new Carnegie Endowment paper, Marina Ottaway and Amr Hamzawy explore a inherent weakness that is now apparent in Islamist movements: political compromise. As Islamist parties begin to participate in political systems, they must make short-term concessions to serve their long-term goals. Unfortunately, this incites criticism from their base supporters, who accuse them of not adhering to their party's more hard-line religious principles in the short-term. But if reformers within Islamist movements can't participate in democratic systems, there is even more legitimacy for hard-liners. The paper describes this as a "crossroads" for Islamist political movements and maintains that those movements whose participation is hampered will fall under further hard-line influence. Thus, it is important that states allow full political participation for these parties if they hope to achieve democratic moderation in the long-term.-- SW
  
  
• Here today; gone tomorrow? The growth of foreign-born Latinos in the labor force leveled off this year, according to a Pew Hispanic Center report released yesterday. The report suggests that fewer Latino immigrants have been entering the U.S. since 2005 than in years previous. Since immigrant Latinos in the labor force mostly work in construction, early in the last decade their contribution to the labor force grew as residential building projects did; now, as housing stagnates, so does the immigrant Latino contribution to the labor force. And of those newly joining the labor ranks, most are native-born as opposed to immigrant. But after all this, Pew can't say with confidence that any significant number of Latino immigrants have actually been leaving the U.S.-- CP
• How's your anti-terror portfolio? Uncertainty surrounding the prevention of future terrorist attacks inspired a recent RAND Corporation policy brief. The author advocates a complementary approach to terror prevention entailing prevention and mitigation policies aimed at lessening the consequences of successful terrorist attacks. Traditional prevention measures, such as those those designed to stop attacks outright, ought to be implemented alongside mitigation measures, or those designed to limit the effects of a terrorist operation. Policymakers, according to this report, should conceive of anti-terror measures as a portfolio offering a combination of elements that, together, perform better when facing a wider variety of future threats. -- DH
• Transit by the numbers. The Federal Transit Administration recently released a study comparing carbon emissions of different modes of transportation. Unsurprisingly, public transportation did very well and private automobiles ... didn't. The study found that 59.5 percent of all transportation emissions come from passenger cars or non-duty trucks while 0.8 percent come from buses and motorcycles and 8.7 percent come from non-road transportation options, presumably rail options. As a rule, an excellent public transportation service is going to be much better for the environment than good roads and cars. The FTA study reports that, on average, buses emit 0.65 pounds of CO2 per passenger per mile, heavy rails emit 0.24, light rail 0.41, and commuter rails 0.35.-- DS

-- TAP Staff

Past Round-Ups:
12/9/08
12/2/08

Mike Lillis notes the staunch commitment to the free market that underlies the principled opposition of reactionary Southern senators to the auto bailout:

“You look at the South,” [Sen. Richard] Shelby said. “You take — not just Mercedes in my hometown — but BMW, Honda and all of them. These companies are flourishing with American workers made in America.”

But the flourishing of the transplants didn’t come without significant taxpayer help. Shelby’s Alabama, for example, secured construction of a Mercedes-Benz plant in 1993 by offering $253 million in state and local tax breaks, worker training and land improvement. For Honda, the state’s sweetener surrounding a 1999 deal to build a mini-van plant was $158 million in similar perks, adding $90 million in enticements when the company expanded the plant three years later. A 2001 deal with Toyota left the company with $29 million in taxpayer gifts.

Alabama is hardly alone. Corker’s Tennessee recently lured Volkswagen to build a manufacturing plant in Chattanooga, offering the German automaker tax breaks, training and land preparation that could total $577 million. In 2005, the state inspired Nissan to relocate its headquarters from southern California by offering $197 million in incentives, including $20 million in utility savings.

In 1992, South Carolina snagged a BMW plant for $150 million in giveaways. In Mississippi in 2003, Nissan was lured with $363 million. In Georgia, a still-under-construction Kia plant received breaks estimated to be $415 million. The list goes on.

Moreover, in terms of the national interest, this kind of subsidy war is in many respects even worse. While countless jobs will permanently vanish if Detroit is allowed to fail (including many not directly associated with the auto industry), these kinds of subsidies just result in jobs being created in one state as opposed to another. (While I think that the Supreme Court was ultimately right not to rule these subsidies unconstitutional under the Commerce Clause, I must admit that a small part of me still wishes that they had done so.) But, certainly, any claim that Republican opposition to the bailout is rooted in any kind of commitment to libertarian economic principles is a joke.

--Scott Lemieux

You really have to get up early in the morning to be more wrong than Kirsten Powers. Today she makes the inane argument that Obama "mishandled the media" in the ongoing Blagojevich scandal and that's why they've been making so many assumptions about the president-elect's conduct without any evidence of wrongdoing, and considerable evidence that there was none. Powers says, "but you made me do this" while offering up a few bungling, idiotic errors of her own.

The Obama team has sometimes claimed that it's holding off on giving details at Fitzgerald's request - and sometimes that it will talk specifics as soon as it has found exactly what contact occurred. Which is it?

Yesterday, the Obama team seemed finally to be getting the story under control, saying it has completed its internal review but will be holding it a week at Fitzgerald's request. That conflicts with Obama's past promise to release details "in a few days" but the Obama team can argue that it is out of their control.

In the intervening time, Obama has repeatedly stated defensively that he had no contact with the governor or his office and had not discussed the Senate seat, as if either would somehow be inappropriate.

So, if he hadn't had any personal contact with Blagojevich, he should have lied and said he did so that the press wouldn't be suspicious?

Then there is this gem:

Heck, an Obama staffer is on tape offering the furious Blago no more than "appreciation" for giving the seat to Obama's preferred candidate.

No actually, Blagojevich himself is on tape complaining that Obama was offering nothing more than "appreciation." There is no Obama staffer on tape anywhere in the report. There isn't even a clear indication that the appreciation statement is the result of communication between Blagojevich and Obama's staff, rather than merely Blagojevich's personal assumption. But Powers couldn't be bothered to actually read the complaint before dashing off an op-ed to the New York Post about how Obama mismanaged the media.

To reiterate: In the midst of arguing that ongoing coverage of the Blagojevich scandal unfairly casts aspersions on Obama, and that this is the result of the Obama team "mismanaging" the media, Powers commits basic factual errors. Ostensibly Powers' inability to do her own basic research is also Obama's fault, part and parcel of their "mismanaging" of the media. It's almost as if it's not the reporter or writers' responsibility to get the facts straight.  Powers' argument is nothing but a retroactive justification of poor reporting from someone who didn't bother to fact-check their own work.

-- A. Serwer

One of the reasons that people worry so much about connections between pirates and terrorists is that the two groups exist in the same legal netherworld. Drug traffickers also inhabit this world, which is why we get absurd arguments about how the terrorists will win if people smoke marijuana. Moises Naim, editor of Foreign Policy, wrote a book on this issue called Illicit, although his work focused more on intellectual property theft than maritime piracy. The upshot is that while the simple story about how drug dealers and pirates help terrorists is wrong, there's a more complex story about financial flows and financial methods that are shared by all such illicit groups. Pirate money may not go directly to terrorists, but it does become part of a shady pool of finance that is drawn upon by terrorists and other illegal groups. Incidentally, one of the best things about Casino Royale is that the film put the spotlight specifically on this aspect of terrorist funding; it's perhaps the first time that a James Bond movie has credibly discussed an actual public policy problem.

Via ID, an AP article discusses these issues in the context of piracy and the Somali diaspora:

The dramatic spike in piracy in African waters this year is backed by an international network mostly of Somali expatriates from the Horn of Africa to as far as North America, who offer funds, equipment and information in exchange for a cut of the ransoms, according to researchers, officials and members of the racket. With help from the network, Somali pirates have brought in at least $30 million in ransom so far this year.

"The Somali diaspora all around the world now have taken to this business enterprise," said Michael Weinstein, a Somalia expert at Purdue University in Indiana. He likened the racket to "syndicates where you buy shares, so to speak, and you get a cut of the ransom."

--Robert Farley

I've been watching the news of Bernie Madoff's apparent Ponzi scheme with a certain fascination -- it's easier to understand than CDOs -- but also a certain distance. I don't know anyone who hangs out at the Palm Beach Country Club. And most of the charities affected did not involve causes of much interest to me.That changed yesterday when I got the note that the JEHT Foundation was closing, effective immediately.

Not all foundations are alike, and there was something very special about JEHT (the name is an acronym for Justice, Equality, Human dignity, and Tolerance). It was one of a few philanthropies that really saw its mission as political, in the best sense of the word: trying to change the circumstances and assumptions of the world, and not just reduce hardship around the edges. At its creation in 2000, it was one of only two large foundations (The Open Society Institute, where I worked, was the other) that was seriously involved in criminal justice, trying to reduce incarceration and improve life prospects for people coming out of prison. As a funder of political reform, they were one of the very few that did not just support the familiar campaign finance reform advocates, but were willing to encourage a serious rethinking of the assumptions and methods of that effort. While the JEHT staff was small, by foundation standards, relative to the tens millions of dollars in grants, it was one of the most respected and capable staffs in philanthropy, and was mostly committed to helping organizations achieve their goals, rather than serve the foundation's.

But as a result of their daring and initiative, a lot of organizations were quite dependent on JEHT, because there was little other support in these fields. These are not safe grants to soft charities. You can see the list of their criminal justice grants here. There will be huge consequences to this loss.

Foundations as a rule don't like to follow the lead of others. They like to feel they are following their own path. But here's a case where the best thing a large or small foundation focused on social change could do is look at some of the organizations that were expecting funding from JEHT for this year or next, and find a way to continue it.

(Full disclosure: I'm told that in the past JEHT provided some support to the Prospect. But that's before my time.)

-- Mark Schmitt

Another Air Force nuclear missile site has failed inspection:

The Air Force has indeed blown a third test of its nuclear handling capabilities, as Danger Room first reported over the weekend. In a memo, the Air Force confirmed that the 90th Missile Wing at F.E. Warren Air Force Base “rated unsatisfactory” on its nuclear surety inspection. Testers found fault with the missile unit’s “management and administration,” as well as its “tools, tests, tie-down and handling equipment.”

This marks roughly the umpteenth nuclear failure on the part of the Air Force in the last couple of years, beginning with the unauthorized flight of six nuclear warheads cross-country on a B-52. Nuclear sloppiness was the announced reason for the firing of the Air Force chiefs earlier this year.

Broadly speaking, the problem is that nuclear expertise is no longer seen as a way to get ahead in the Air Force. Young officers like to specialize in areas that are exciting, intellectually engaging, have a future, and will lead to a promising promotion path. Right now, nuclear weapons are not perceived as such an area, because the nuclear deterrent is no longer viewed as the most critical part of the Air Force’s job. Accordingly, the best officers look elsewhere, and those who do find themselves on the nuclear track quickly try to find their way out. The result is that the branch becomes a backwater, which would be less of a problem if its primary job wasn’t the management of nuclear weapons. The same thing happened with counter-insurgency during and shortly after the Vietnam War; it was well understood that the Army did not prioritize counter-insurgency, meaning that young officers had no incentive to develop an expertise in it. The larger problem is that the Air Force still lacks a plausible post-Cold War mission, but that’s an issue for another day.

—Robert Farley

It seemed somewhat hard to believe that Jesse Jackson Jr. could have been unaware of his political allies allegedly offering donations to Blagojevich in exchange for Obama's former Senate seat. Most people err on the side of guilt when it comes to politicians and ethical lapses, for better or for worse. But a report from a Chicago ABC affiliate suggests that Jackson may actually have been telling the truth. It appears that Jackson had previously cooperated with the Feds in building a case against the Illinois governor:

ABC7 has learned that since late last summer, the congressman has worked with federal prosecutors, informing on an alleged Blagojevich administration scheme two and half years earlier.

The meeting in June of 2006 at a Gold Coast hotel included Congressman Jesse Jackson, Jr. and Blagojevich fundraiser Antoin "Tony" Rezko.

The topic was a proposed third airport at Peotone, Jackson's pet project which needed more state money. Rezko allegedly demanded that the governor be given control of the airport's board. Jackson refused and state support for the project stopped.

Then last summer, weeks after Rezko was found guilty of un-related corruption, the U.S. Attorney's Office interviewed the congressman as a possible witness against the governor in the Peotone matter.

Not only that, but Jackson had refused pay-to-play in the past:

And sources tell ABC7 that Jackson has been in regular contact with the feds and has told the government that in 2003 Blagojevich denied the congressman's wife Sandi an appointment as Illinois lottery director because Jackson would not donate $25,000 to the governor's campaign fund.

It seems highly unlikely that Jackson, having gone to the Feds in the past about Blagojevich, and having refused to pay-to-play on prior occasions, would have subsequently involved himself in one of Blagojevich's schemes. The ABC report notes Fitzgerald's advice from last week:

"There may be people who had no idea what was going on...who had no idea they were being discussed," said Patrick Fitzgerald, U.S. attorney. "We ask that the press in particular not cast aspersions. This complaint is only about the two people who were charged."

I don't suppose many people have taken that to heart.

-- A. Serwer

The New York Times' David Johnston pulls the punch bowl away from the party today and points out that as far as the most sensational elements of the criminal complaint against Rod Blagojevich, (namely the auction of Obama's former senate seat) are concerned, the Feds may not have a case:

In the case of Mr. Blagojevich, it would be legal for the governor to accept a campaign contribution from someone he appointed to the Senate seat. What would create legal problems for him is if he was tape-recorded specifically offering a seat in exchange for the contribution. What would make the case even easier to prosecute is if he was recorded offering the seat in exchange for a personal favor, like cash, a job or a job for a family member.

Indeed the government has claimed the wiretaps show that Mr. Blagojevich told his aides that he wanted to offer the seat in exchange for contributions and for personal favors, including jobs for himself and his wife.

But talk is not enough. Any case will ultimately turn on the strength of the tapes, and whether the governor made it clear to any of the candidates for the Senate seat that he would give it only in exchange for something of value.

The other instances in the complaint, like Blagojevich's alleged attempt to get editors at the Chicago Tribune fired in exchange for greasing the sale of Wrigley Field, or allegedly holding up state funding of a children's hospital in lieu of campaign donations, would seem like far more obvious instances of solicitation of bribery. Part of what is allowing the fevered speculation of the media and the right over the potential involvement of the Obama administration is that we don't know, in the case of the Senate seat, if that solicitation actually took place.

Yesterday, Obama's camp released a statement saying that the prosecutor, U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald, has requested that they not release the results of their internal review of communications between their office and Blagojevich's office. This hasn't stopped people like Hugh Hewitt from making wacky suggestions about how this situation should be handled. Hewitt tells his readers that Obama's statement is "slippery" and attacks him for having reneged on "full disclosure" without noting that the prosecuting attorney in the case asked him not to release the report. Hewitt then writes:

The president-elect appears to be hiding the facts about contacts between his staff and advisors and Blagojevich, which leads to the conclusion that there is something to hide here. To end the speculation, the president-elect need only request that the United States Attorney release transcripts of all conversations taped between Blagojevich and and Obama staffer or advisor.

Hewitt is suggesting that a prosecuting attorney can release evidence in a pending case for the sole purpose of alleviating a political dispute. But CNN's legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin explained in an email to me that under the federal law, Fitzgerald can only use the product of federal wiretaps under certain very limited circumstances -- in court documents or in open court, like a bail hearing or a trial. It would, in fact, be illegal for Fitzgerald to just throw out whatever part of the tapes Hugh Hewitt, radio host, thinks are relevant to his political agenda. It's not Fitzgerald's evidence. It's the state's evidence, and there are laws governing its use. 

Toobin adds, "It would be illegal, and rightly so, for him to be able to decide what he wants public and what not, just based on his sense of the political situation." But for Hewitt, there is no law, only politics. At which point you begin to understand how something like torture becomes "defensible."

H/T John Cole

-- A. Serwer

Regarding Politico's Lincoln obsession and its chief enabler, Sean Wilentz, a correspondent sends this quote, found in newspaper coverage of the 1860 primary...

"Americans will never elect a one-term congressman from Illinois who was in bed with the railroad companies and ran down his country during its war to spread the blessings of democracy in Mexico. And, just you watch, he'll play the race card too!"

-Sean "Young Hickory" Wilentz, James K. Polk Chair of Manifest Destiny, The College of New Jersey, 1860

-- Tim Fernholz

Ezra is absolutely right that the strength of Arne Duncan at the Department of Education will be his ability to synthesize the best approaches of both major camps in the Democratic education wars; those who focus on poverty, and those who focus on shaking up bureaucracies. But just a reminder to Ezra, Seyward Darby, and other folks who are lauding test score gains under Duncan in Chicago (or under any other superintendent): A major problem of the testing apparatus under No Child Left Behind is that states can make up their own standards. A report from the Center for American Progress and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce found that Illinois is in the middle of the pack when it comes to the rigor of its standards.

So blogger-sociologist Eduwonkette, who works handily with statistics, looked at Chicago's performance not according to Illinois tests, but according to the National Assessment of Educational Progress. Also known as "The Nation's Report Card," the NAEP is administered by the Department of Education to students across the country and, in typical American fashion, counts for nothing, despite experts' recognition of its findings as the best benchmark we've got. Eduwonkette found that under Duncan's tenure, gaps between black and white students actually grew:

There are no statistically significant declines in these gaps in 4th or 8th grade reading or math. In many cases - for example, 4th and 8th grade math and 8th grade reading - it's not that the black-white achievement gap is declining, but not by enough to be statistically significant. These gaps are actually growing. Sigh.

This doesn't meant Duncan is a bad superintendent, or that we can't learn anything from him, or that he shouldn't be secretary of education. His leadership on early childhood education, polytechnic secondary schools, and careful growth of the charter sector is a model. But we have to be very careful when we talk about student achievement and the achievement gap, because we just don't have agreed-upon ways of measuring success and failure. Indeed, that's a major problem with NCLB that I hope Duncan will address as secretary.

--Dana Goldstein

I doubt that there are many people on Earth who will be able to understand what life will be like for Sasha and Malia Obama at Sidwell. Even though I knew that the Obamas would choose Sidwell for security reasons, among other things, I was somewhat disappointed. Not because the Obama kids going to public school would have been some kind of political symbol, but because this will likely be the first of many choices that unconsciously isolates Sasha and Malia from some of the struggles that defined their parents' upbringings, which for many parents, is just the idea. But in a city that is mostly black, they will be attending a school with few black teachers and few black students, and I wonder what they will make of that. Because of who their parents are, Sasha and Malia will be icons in ways we probably really don't understand yet, and their Sidwell experience will no doubt play a large role in shaping the people they are to become.

At my other gig over at Jack and Jill Politics, Cheryl Contee has a post up about her experience at Sidwell, particularly one surreal event involving a very political teacher and the child of a Reagan diplomat who crafted American policy towards South Africa in the '80s. (I highly recommend reading her post. It's sort of an odd coincidence that Baratunde, Cheryl and I all have District roots, but their understanding of Sidwell is different than mine since they actually went there, and I just hated on kids who went there like public school kids in DC do.) As Cheryl explains, the Obama girls may have to confront in their social lives the repercussions of whatever Obama does while in office in ways they're probably not used to.

The Obamas need to know that their children will become probably a lot better educated about their father’s government, beliefs and policies than they ever have before through going to Sidwell. At a minimum, they should be prepared to answer some direct & specific questions that don’t involve dolls, High School Musical, Gossip Girls, puppies nor slumber parties. No matter what reassurances administrators may give, politics is pervasive at Sidwell and really everywhere else in DC. Especially when the powerful mix.

Also, there are a very few African-American teachers at Sidwell and the Obama girls will necessarily have a slightly different relationship and experience with them than they will with their other teachers — just as I did as a kid. It’s a strange phenomenon but sometimes black Sidwell graduates come back to teach there. Teachers with that profile have the potential to become powerful allies, mentors and confidantes for the Obama girls as adults who will be able to understand the way few others there will some of the feelings they will experience. Because what Malia and Sasha will experience won’t be exactly like Chelsea Clinton’s road through Sidwell.

No, I expect it won't be. Baratunde and Cheryl will be doing a kind of series on this, so I highly recommend checking back. The first entry is here.

-- A. Serwer

Every night, reporters go to bed with "guidance" from the Obama-Biden team ringing in their inboxes. On today's sched:

[T]he President-elect will hold a meeting with key members of his economic team. Attendees will include: Vice President-elect Biden, Secretary of Treasury designee Timothy Geithner, National Economic Council Director designee Lawrence Summers, Office of Management and Budget designee Peter Orszag, Council of Economic Advisors Chair designee Christina Romer, Domestic Policy Council Director designee Melody Barnes, Assistant to the President for Energy and Climate Change Carol Browner, Chief Economist and Economic Policy Advisor to the Vice-President designee Jared Bernstein, President's Economic Recovery Advisory Board Chair Paul Volcker, Member designee of the Council of Economic Advisers and Staff Director designee of the President's Economic Recovery Advisory Board Austan Goolsbee, and White House Chief of Staff designee Rahm Emanuel.

My first reaction to this is, what in God's name are all of these people actually going to do together in a room? Is flying everyone to Chicago for this dramatic meeting really the most efficient way for PEOTUS (an awkward acronym that's growing on me) to get economic advice?

But then I imagined a world where most of this discussion took place over conference calls and in smaller meetings, and some memos were drafted for the chief-executive-to-be. It would probably as effective as this mostly symbolic meeting, but it would also be less transparent and reassuring to people worried about the economy. Reporters would be dying to know what was happening, and the answers (Summers and Bernstein just had an hour-long economic argument with the president-elect, Orzag just took thirty minutes to walk the president-elect through the offsets for the 2009 budget) wouldn't be half so interesting as getting the entire team around a table for a good old-fashioned bull session. Plus, it allows for tea-leaves reading: Browner is part of the economic team now, eh? Bernstein will be attending economic team meetings, putting a progressive voice at the table. So I doubt anything will be decided today, but this meeting is a symbol that things will be decided.

-- Tim Fernholz

I joined The American Prospect in mid-October as president and publisher. I was delighted to work with Bob Kuttner, Mark Schmitt, and the rest of our talented staff to produce some of the highest quality journalism available anywhere this election cycle. We’ve been rewarded to see our magazine grow dramatically in terms of its online readership over these last few months. For your continued readership during this exciting season, I can’t thank you enough. Of course, the point of this post is to ask you for a bit more -- a donation to support our work.

As some of our other posters have noted, this is truly The American Prospect’s moment. We exist as a sort of bridge between seasoned writers, journalists, and advocates who have been covering progressive politics for decades and new, fresh ideas from some of the best voices on the Web. To continue to bring you some of the best content on the Web and in print, we need your support.

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--George Slowik Jr., President and Publisher of The American Prospect

With the Democratic Party embroiled in internal debate over public school reform, it is very much like Barack Obama to tap Chicago public schools CEO Arne Duncan as education secretary. Duncan is one of the only prominent education leaders in the country who signed both the Broader, Bolder and the Education Equality Project manifestos. Duncan, a longtime Obama friend and adviser, has shown particular interest in early childhood education, a major part of Obama's education and anti-poverty agenda. And he sends his own kids to Chicago public schools. Here's hoping he'll live in the city when he moves to D.C. and continue his family's track record of support for the public system.

But although Duncan is being hailed as a compromise between free-market education reformers and teachers' unions, we shouldn't delude ourselves as to the nature of Duncan's relationship with the Chicago Teachers Union. Duncan closed schools (never a popular move), removed teachers from the classroom, and supported charter schools, which now make up about 10 percent of the Chicago system. To get a sense of the grassroots opposition to Duncan, check out the Caucus of Rank and File Teachers and Substance News. Notably, these two groups, critics from the left, believe the Chicago Teachers Union is corrupt and little better than management at representing teachers' and students' needs; on the other hand, a more centrist observer, Alexander Russo, writes that Duncan hasn't been tough enough in his negotiations with the union, and should have done more to attract middle class and affluent families to Chicago's public schools. Russo also snarks that national union chief Randi Weingarten's recent kind words about Duncan's relationship with the CTU could hardly have been made "with a straight face."

Any pick of an actual superintendent to head the Department of Education, as opposed to a governor relatively ignorant of the nitty gritty of education debates, is a move by Obama in the direction of serious, hands-on reform. That's good news, I think, for those of us -- regardless of ideology -- who hope education will become a first tier issue under the Obama administration.

--Dana Goldstein

• In his Saturday radio address, Barack Obama named New York Housing Commissioner Shaun Donovan to be secretary of Housing and Urban Development, and The Denver Post reports that Sen. Ken Salazar is a leading contender to head the Department of the Interior. Obama will hold a press conference this evening where he will officially announce his picks for the Department of Energy and the EPA.
  
• I still think Caroline Kennedy running for Hillary Clinton's Senate seat reeks of dynastic privilege, but at least she's working for it now, instead of simply inheriting it because of her name.
• The Electoral College votes today for president of the United States, in what CQ Politics calls a "ritual." I'll be the last to defend the contemporary relevance of the Electoral College, but this vote isn't some meaningless ritual -- it's required by a law no higher than the Constitution. Bring on the national popular vote, please, but until then the law's the law.
• The Wall Street Journal has a good article on the softening political support for net neutrality, particularly among Obama and Lawrence Lessig. Tim concludes that Lessig's position hasn't been inconsistent on the issue, and Obama transition spokesperson Nick Shapiro denies any change to the president-elect's commitment to neutrality.
• Patrick Leahy has delayed the confirmation hearing for Attorney General-designate Eric Holder by a week to placate Republicans who suddenly want to get to the bottom of Holder's involvement in a presidential pardon that occurred eight years ago. The delay will interfere with Hillary Clinton's confirmation hearings, originally scheduled for January 13.
• Obama will continue the tradition of riding to his inauguration by train, swinging by Wilmington to pick up Joe Biden. The train tour will begin January 17.
• Miscellanea: Jay Carney is leaving Time to take as position as Joe Biden's communications director, Craig Newmark dissects Obama's vague call for "a craigslist for service," John Dean writes an open letter to the president-elect, and Princeton political scientist Nolan McCarty argues that not only was the 110th Congress the "most liberal" since the New Deal, the 111th is on track to be even more so.
• And finally, the Obama '08 logos that didn't make the cut.

--Mori Dinauer

Everyone is talking about Bush almost getting a mouthful of shoe over the weekend during his surprise visit to Iraq. But watching Bush prance around in Iraq, congratulating the performance of America's soldiers after what he's done for the last eight years, strikes me as among the most frustrating of ironies. Can there be a president who has behaved more recklessly or disrespectfully in proportion to the sacrifice he asked of the men and women under his command? First Bush asked them to fight under false pretenses in Iraq. Then he extended deployments in a manner that made mental trauma more likely for soldiers, and gave them inadequate medical care when they came home.

Some of these actions can be attributed to pure incompetence. But one that can't is Bush's repeated denials that "enhanced interrogation" policies -- an approach to "gathering intelligence" that has led to people being tortured and even murdered -- were given the green light by from the top levels of his administration. Dan Froomkin outlines how Bush signed a memo in 2002 exempting suspected terrorists from protection under the Geneva Conventions, before issuing statement after statement in the following years that instances of torture which led to physical injury and even death were exceptions, rather than policy as outlined by the George W. Bush himself.

That to me is the most galling of betrayals: Bush knew that he was asking the troops to do, and rather take responsibility for setting in place a policy that undermines the principles of the Constitution and everything this country stands for, he let the troops take the rap like he had nothing to do with it. That requires an exceptional ability to divorce yourself from your moral obligations as a human being, and it astounds me that to this day that people are still defending both the policy and the man who implemented it. There's little to defend; not only is torture morally reprehensible, it yields questionable results.

Yet there may be something in Matthew Yglesias' response to Reuel Marc Gerecht (Scott also responded here) that helps us understand why proponents of torture continue to advocate for its use. Yglesias points out that Gerecht's formulation inadvertently makes "cruelty and torture are the real virtues, and humanity and due process the vices." That makes some sense if the intent of torture is to be cruel, rather than to gather intelligence. At this point all practical policy considerations fly out the window, because the idea is to hurt people. If I were to hazard a guess, I'd say the root of this anger, this desire to create cruelty, remains the fear engendered by 9/11, and the desire to punish those responsible. Torture then becomes a method of unleashing cruelty on those we imagine "responsible," and is thus transmuted into a twisted interpretation of another virtue: justice. But of course, there is no justice without due process, and no virtue in cruelty for its own sake. And it's difficult to see justice in a president walking free after having allowed soldiers to be imprisoned for behavior he authorized. 

-- A. Serwer

The Senate Judiciary committee has posted Eric Holder's nomination questionnaire on their website. A quick perusal reveals little in the way of detail but rather a broad survey of Holder's legal career, from his prosecution of a corrupt cop who sold confiscated drugs to drug dealers to his corporate work at Covington and Burling. One item sure to be brought up by Republicans at the Senate Confirmation hearing -- and conspiracy theorists in general -- is this amicus brief (PDF) he signed (and presumably helped prepare) arguing in favor of the city's gun ban during the Supreme Court's consideration of D.C. vs. Heller. Holder is also on a number of different boards of directors -- wonder how he keeps track of all them? -- and, of course, his compensation at C & B is impressive, amounting to more than a cool $2 million per year. (It sounds like a lot to me, of course, but that's money that CEOs scoff at ...).

For now, it seems clear that Senator Arlen Specter, the ranking Republican on the Judiciary Committee, has delayed Holder's nomination hearings until January 15, much to the displeasure of Chairman Patrick Leahy, who last week released a letter demanding quick attention to the nomination and pointing out the relative speed with which previous AGs from both Democratic and Republican administrations have been appointed.

--Tim Fernholz

Is it just me or does the Iraqi government prosecuting the shoe-throwing journalist for "insulting the Iraqi state" undermine Bush's triumphalism in Iraq more than the actual shoe-throwing itself?

"They can't accuse me of homophobia," says Rick Warren, the celebrity preacher and icon of the "new" or "broader agenda" evangelicals, in a new interview with Beliefnet editor Steven Waldman. Pastor Rick protests that he's not a homophobe because he's given money to people with AIDS. He has gay friends and has even eaten dinner in "gay homes."

Waldman kicked off the marriage segment of a multi-topic interview with Warren by asking him which is a bigger threat to the American family, divorce or gay marriage. Warren said it's divorce -- and proceeded to explain that evangelicals harp on gay marriage rather than divorce because he and his brethren love talking about other people's "sins."

Warren dodged Waldman's question about whether he supported civil unions or domestic partnerships, answering instead, "I support full equal rights for everyone in America," adding that he only opposes a "redefinition" of marriage. He went on to say he's opposed to gay marriage the same way he is opposed to a brother and sister marrying (that would be incest), a man marrying a child (that would be statutory rape), or someone having multiple spouses (that would be polygamy). Pressed by Waldman, Warren said he considered those crimes equivalent to gay marriage.

Warren claimed he supported Proposition 8 because of a free-speech issue -- asserting that "any pastor could be considered doing hate speech . . . if he shared his views that homosexuality wasn't the most natural way for relationships." That's a standard religious right canard: turning pluralism into "discrimination" against Christians. (Or, claiming that saying "Happy Holidays" instead of "Merry Christmas" is a "war" that demeans Christianity.) Not only is it a silly argument logically, it's completely fabricated when it comes to Proposition 8: had it not passed, the free speech rights of pastors in California would have remained intact.

--Sarah Posner

Today the WSJ ran an article about the crack-up of the Net Neutrality coalition. Bummer, I thought, because now Google is evil and corporations are crushing innovation and Obama has slapped us in the face with a betrayal and even Lawrence Lessig, Internet folk hero, has sold out to the man. Well, it turns out that the situation might not be so dire, as Lessig writes on his blog:

It is true, as the Journal reports, that I have stated that network providers should be free to charge different rates for different service -- "so long," the Journal quotes, "as the faster service at a higher price is available to anyone willing to pay it.

For example, in April, 2008, I testified before the Senate Commerce Committee. This is what I said:

"As I testified in 2006, in my view that minimal strategy right now marries the basic principles of “Internet Freedom” first outlined by Chairman Michael Powell, and modified more recently by the FCC, to one additional requirement — a ban on discriminatory access tiering. While broadband providers should be free, in my view, to price consumer access to the Internet differently — setting a higher price, for example, for faster or greater access — they should not be free to apply discriminatory surcharges to those who make content or applications available on the Internet. As I testified, in my view, such “access tiering” risks creating a strong incentive among Internet providers to favor some companies over others; that incentive in turn tends to support business models that exploit scarcity rather than abundance. If Google, for example, knew if could buy a kind of access for its video content that iFilm couldn’t, then it could exploit its advantage to create an even greater disadvantage for its competitors; network providers in turn could deliver on that disadvantage only if the non-privileged service was inferior to the privileged service."

That's the same thing I said to the FCC in its hearing at Stanford. You can hear what I said beginning at minute 18:20 here. There I distinguish between "zero price regulations" (such as Markey's bill (which I say I am against)) and what I called "zero discriminatory surcharge rules" (which I say I am for). The zero discriminatory surcharge rules are just that -- rules against discriminatory surcharges -- charging Google something different from what a network charges iFilm. The regulation I call for is a "MFN" requirement -- that everyone has the right to the rates of the most favored nation.

This is precisely the position that the Journal breathlessly attributes to me today. It represents no change -- no "softening" no "shift" in my views.

Now no doubt my position might be wrong. Some friends in the network neutrality movement as well as some scholars believe it is wrong -- that it doesn't go far enough. But the suggestion that the position is "recent" is baseless. If I'm wrong, I've always been wrong.

So at least Lessig is consistent in his support for regulations that would hinder monopolization. And the article's evidence that Obama's position is somehow changing is nonsensical at best, just like most claims made thus far that Obama's position on anything is changing. But the actions of Google (secret negotiations for a fast pipe), Microsoft (which has changed its position), and Amazon (which has a special deal with Sprint to speed up Kindle downloads) all point to a lessened commitment among the Internet business community to net neutrality -- and a much harder fight to ensure it exists when the issue comes up for debate next year.

-- Tim Fernholz

Denver schools Superintendent Michael Bennet at the Democratic National Convention.

At TNR, Seyward Darby is reporting that three "reformers" comprise the short list to be Obama's secretary of education: Chicago schools CEO Arne Duncan; Denver superintendent Michael Bennet; and Obama campaign surrogate John Schnur, CEO of the non-profit New Leaders for New Schools, which trains principals. As I had guessed, Linda Darling-Hammond, the union-friendly head of the transition team's education policy group, is not under serious consideration. It is unclear to what extent this was always the case -- Darling-Hammond is an academic without previous government or management experience -- and to what extent Darling-Hammond's vocal critics derailed her chances.

What is clear is that Duncan, Schnur, and Bennet are all folks who can sit across the table from union heads with some track record of credibility in their eyes -- credibility that fire-breathers such as Joel Klein and Michelle Rhee haven't earned. Bennet in particular is intriguing; during the Democratic National Committee this summer in his hometown, Bennet was able to avoid a high-profile teachers strike by negotiating a contract, including merit pay, that was acceptable to both unions and accountability hawks. Starting salaries increased, as did extra pay for teachers taking on more difficult assignments. Student achievement has risen slowly but surely under Bennet, but according to the Denver Post, he has been denied his own annual bonus due to concerns about lack of communication with the community. That is a common complaint about superintendents who close schools and significantly change policies, as Bennet has, and shouldn't be a disqualifying factor.

--Dana Goldstein

Politico features its second article in two weeks shooting down the notion that Obama and Abraham Lincoln have a lot in common, this time penned by -- or I should say, attributed to -- the editor-in-chief himself. It seems the publication has a obsession with heavily reported pieces decrying comparisons between the Great Emancipator and the Great [Insert Future Accomplishment Here]. One wonders if they have enough material to sustain this rate, or if they'll switch to the increasingly relevant "Barack Obama is not Franklin Roosevelt" genre.

UPDATE: Via Ta-Nehisi, here's a third Lincoln-related story from Politico published in November; it's an interview with historian Doris Kearns Goodwin about the (please may it be forgotten forever) "Team of Rivals" meme. That's three in the last month ...

--Tim Fernholz

In addition to the many other ways in which it's abominable, Reuel Marc Gerecht's op-ed supporting Stalinist interrogation methods and opposing the rule of law contains one of the most farcical invocations of the "ticking time bomb" scenario ever:

But this third way, which is essentially where America was before the Clinton administration embraced rendition, is plausible only if Mr. Obama is lucky. He might be. If there is no “ticking time bomb” situation — say, where waterboarding a future Khalid Shaikh Mohammed (the 9/11 mastermind) could save thousands of civilians — then there is neither need for the C.I.A.’s exceptional methods, nor the harsh services of Jordan’s General Intelligence Department."