Sorry folks, we forgot to put one of these up yesterday and that's a shame 'cause we had some great articles. First up, Gershom Gorenberg has five questions Israel should answer before bombing Iran (see this follow up post on his blog for more):
Destroying some Iranian facilities but not others, Litvak suggests, would only slow down Tehran's nuclear program. Even a solid military success might delay it by no more than a few years. In the meantime, the political effect would probably be to "unify the public in support of the regime." Dror lists as a "real possibility" that "Iran's determination to secretly develop nuclear weapons" would be redoubled, "with a thirst for revenge."
Dylan Matthews talks with J Street founder Jeremy Ben-Ami:
DM: Okay, about one of the other candidates you endorsed, Darcy Burner, in Washington. Matt Stoller had a report a couple weeks ago saying that Burner had told him that she had gotten a phone call from some people with affiliations with AIPAC, who told her, in explicit terms, to move away from J Street -- that you guys are extreme leftists who want to leave Israel for dead. How much do things like that worry you, both in that case and in going forward with J Street?
JB-A: It actually doesn't worry me at all, because, first of all, when people circulate lies and complete distortions of truth, it's not going to work. In the end, the types of things that they're saying are simply provable as wrong. If you go to our advisory council, people on our finance committee, people who signed up to support J Street in Israel, people who ran the Israel Defense Forces, the commander in chief of the Israel Defense Forces, the man who ran the occupation of the West Bank, and the former foreign minister of the state of Israel. If people are going to go around telling congressional candidates that people like that are anti-Israel or trying to undo the state and are anti-Semitic, it's just so ludicrous that I don't anticipate it would have any impact.
And Dean Baker has the latest economic news, including analysis of the recent surge in inflation and the collapse of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac:
However, the big question is how will the Fed respond to the news that rising import prices are pushing inflation higher? The correct response is to grin and bear it. We set ourselves up for this hit when the Clinton administration consciously pursued a high-dollar policy in the late 1990s. This policy produced short-term gains in the form of cheap imports but was clearly unsustainable over the long term. The Clinton crew rightly bet that it would be gone when it was time to pay the bill.
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