The McChrystal review was done by August 1st. It is now the end of October.

According to today's Washington Post ("Obama seeking options on forces; President looks to send fewer additional troops"), we'll get a decision by the end of November. That's four months. And it's evident that the review at this point is being driven entirely by White House political concerns. 148 American soldiers have died while the president holds seminars.

It's really outrageous.

There are, though, comical aspects to the Post story.

One is that Army chief of staff George Casey, a stubborn opponent of the Iraq surge at the end of 2006, is using this excuse to oppose an Afghanistan surge: "The Army is particularly concerned that soldiers who spend less than 18 months at home between combat tours do not have enough time to train for high-intensity tank warfare."

Just where are we going to fight that kind of war in the very near future?

Another is this: "But opinion among members of Obama's national security team is divided, and he now appears to be seeking a compromise solution that would satisfy both his military and civilian advisers."

Huh? Who are those "civilian advisers?" Secretary of Defense Gates is with Generals McChrystal and Petraeus, and (I gather) so too are Secretary of State Clinton and Special Envoy Richard Holbrooke -- all the "civilian advisers" who have real responsibility for the situation. But Joe Biden and Rahm Emanuel have political concerns -- so Obama is trying to find a "compromise" that would "satisfy" them too.

Sometimes, in political and public policy, compromise is a good thing. But it's not a way to win a war. Especially when the "compromise" is between what your own military commander judges, based on an extensive review, he needs, and what your political hacks want.

As 60 Minutes reported last week, Medicare fraud is rampant and has now replaced the cocaine (ahem) business as the major criminal activity in South Florida. Both 60 Minutes and the Washington Post report that Medicare fraud now costs American taxpayers roughly $60 billion a year. That may sound like a lot of money, but surely it pales next to the extraordinary profits of private insurance companies, right?

Well, let's see.... Last year, the profits of the ten largest insurance companies in America were just over $8 billion -- combined. No single insurance company made even five percent of what Medicare reportedly loses in fraud.

While we're making comparisons, in its real first ten years (2014-23), the Senate Finance Committee bill would cost $1.7 trillion. At the rate of last year's profits, the combined ten-year profits of America's ten largest insurance companies would be $83 billion -- five percent of the costs of the Senate Finance Committee bill. Eighty-three billion dollars may not buy you much in comparison with BaucusCare, but -- on the bright side -- that ten-year tally is somewhat more than what Medicare loses each year in fraud.

So, the next time someone alleges that government-run health care is cheaper because of "lower administrative costs" -- a truly preposterous claim on its surface -- these numbers would be good ones to have at the ready: $60 billion in annual Medicare fraud, $8 billion in combined annual profits for America's ten largest insurance companies.

Over at the Corner, Marc Thiessen points out that recently released excerpts of the CIA’s Inspector General Report on the CIA’s detention and interrogation program further undermine former FBI agent Ali Soufan’s story. Soufan, you will recall, is the former FBI agent who claims that the enhanced interrogation techniques employed by the CIA were worthless and that he could have gotten the necessary intelligence out of high-level al Qaeda terrorists, such as Abu Zubaydah, without resorting to these techniques by using the FBI’s standard methods (including rapport-building).

One of the principal examples Soufan cites in making his case is the identification of Jose Padilla -- an al Qaeda-trained terrorist who intended to commit terrorist attacks in the U.S. before he was arrested in Chicago in 2002. Soufan has said that the FBI learned of Padilla’s identity before any of the CIA’s techniques were employed. As Thiessen explains, a previous account in the Washington Post noted that some of these techniques (forced nudity, sleep deprivation) were used early on during Zubaydah’s detention, and before he gave up Jose Padilla’s identity. That is, those techniques were used prior to Zubaydah giving up Padilla. This directly contradicts Soufan’s claim.

Now, newly released excerpts of the CIA Inspector General’s report shed even more light on Soufan’s increasingly shaky claims. For example, Thiessen notes this excerpt from the IG’s report:

“Gibson stated that during the CIA interrogations Zubaydah ‘gave up’ Jose Padilla and identified several targets for future al Qaeda attacks, including the Brooklyn Bridge and the Statue of Liberty.”

“Gibson” is Soufan’s FBI colleague and participated with him in the early questioning of high-value al Qaeda detainees. Whereas Soufan has said he objected to certain parts of the interrogation program, Gibson (according to the IG’s report) had no such misgivings. Moreover, as explained in the quote above, Gibson says that the intelligence on Padilla was gleaned during the CIA’s interrogations -- not the FBI’s. This, again, directly contradicts Soufan’s claims.

There’s more. Consider this newly-released excerpt (emphasis added):

The Assistant Chief said that the detainees were manacled to the ceiling and subjected to blaring musing around the clock. He said the FBI worked with the CIA in developing questions for Binalshibh, but were denied access to him for 4 or 5 days, until Thomas was given 45 minutes with him. Thomas stated that Binalshibh was naked and chained to the floor when Thomas was given access to him. Thomas told the OIG that he obtained valuable actionable intelligence in a short time but that the CIA quickly shut down the interview.

“Binalshibh” is Ramzi Binalshibh -- al Qaeda’s chief point man for the September 11 attacks. Binalshibh acted as an intermediary between the hijackers in Europe and the U.S. and al Qaeda central in Afghanistan.

“Thomas” is almost certainly Ali Soufan. He has been identified elsewhere as the “Thomas” referenced in the report and the details provided on Agent Thomas match Soufan.

Notice the underlined sentence again with those two facts in mind. It appears that Ali Soufan, the crusader against “torture,” actually questioned Binalshibh while he was “naked and chained to the floor.”

This is hardly the FBI’s modus operandi. And whatever “valuable actionable intelligence” Soufan got out of Binalshibh was clearly obtained in circumstances that are drastically different than those used during the FBI’s classic rapport-building sessions.

So, did Soufan question al Qaeda suspects that were naked and chained to the floor? And if he did, how does he square this with his claim that the CIA’s interrogation techniques were unnecessary and immoral?

The recently-released excerpts of the Inspector General’s report raise even more doubts about Soufan’s increasingly shaky story.

This week saw several prominent columnists add their two cents to the debate about whether to send additional troops to Afghanistan. Some had useful insights based on recent trips to Afghanistan, not necessarily all supportive of General McChrystal’s entire request for 40,000 additional troops, but stressing the need to properly resource the effort and maintain the fortitude required to achieve success.

And then there was Tom Friedman’s column on Wednesday in the New York Times.

In a piece that could have only been stranger if was written from Mumbai and used an Indian call center as a trope to explain the U.S. predicament in Afghanistan. Friedman, channeling George Will, wrote that instead of sending additional forces, “We need to be thinking about how to reduce our footprint and our goals there in a responsible way, not dig deeper.” He comes to this conclusion because we supposedly do not have the allies, Afghan partners, or domestic political will required to win.

Friedman’s convoluted reasoning includes gems such as “all the times when a key player in the Middle East actually did something that put a smile on my face -- all of them have one thing in common: America had nothing to do with it.” He couples this with the claim that a protracted fight in Afghanistan will weaken the United States, while conveniently glossing over the implications of the United States being chased out of Afghanistan by a ragtag band of insurgents.

The sad thing about Tom Friedman’s current take on Afghanistan is that he, like George Will, was once a whole hearted supporter of the war on terrorism -- someone who understood the stakes and what was required to win. On September 13, 2001, Friedman wrote “Does my country really understand that this is World War III? And if this attack was the Pearl Harbor of World War III, it means there is a long, long war ahead.”

In November of 2001:

We need to be really focused, really serious, and just a little bit crazy. I don't mean we should indiscriminately kill people, especially innocent Afghans. I mean that the terrorists and their supporters need to know that from here forward we will do whatever it takes to defend our way of life -- and then some. From here forward, it's the bad guys who need to be afraid every waking moment. The more frightened our enemies are today, the fewer we will have to fight tomorrow.

By July of this year, after agonizing for several years over the situation in Iraq, the invasion of which he supported in 2003, Friedman had grown increasingly pessimistic about the situation in Afghanistan, but still wrote:

So there you have it. In grand strategic terms, I still don’t know if this Afghan war makes sense anymore. I was dubious before I arrived, and I still am. But when you see two little Afghan girls crouched on the front steps of their new school, clutching tightly with both arms the notebooks handed to them by a U.S. admiral -- as if they were their first dolls -- it’s hard to say: “Let’s just walk away.” Not yet.

How does Friedman reconcile his new view about Afghanistan with the image of those two little Afghan girls?

The NRCC won't need to pull any of its ads off the air in the NY-23 race because both of its spots are attacks on Democrat Bill Owens.

While Politico reported last Sunday that the NRCC would spend $200,000 to $300,000 on ads during the final 10 days of the race that would "focus on Owens and Scozzafava," an NRCC official tells me that, in fact, their group has only been running the anti-Owens ads for the past two weeks. One NRCC ad that stopped running a few weeks ago featured a message that supported Scozzafava and hit Owens, the official says.

RNC chairman Michael Steele announced today:

Effective immediately, the RNC will endorse and support the conservative candidate in the race, Doug Hoffman. Doug’s campaign will receive the financial backing of the RNC, and get-out-the-vote efforts to defeat Bill Owens on Tuesday.

I've asked people at the RNC/NRCC for more details on exactly what resources they're going to devote to Hoffman and will update this post if/when they get back to me. Although it's probably too late to buy up more ad time, Republicans could certainly help out by putting more boots on the ground in the final 72 hours to get out the vote. A Democratic congressional staffer told me last night that most staff of one New York Democrat's office is heading up to NY-23 to get out the vote for Owens this weekend.

Update: An RNC official says the organization will spend money on phonebanking, ads, and sending staffers to get out the vote for Hoffman, but the official declined to get into details on how much money the RNC will be spending. A Republican source tells me that it's not, in fact, too late to make a new ad buy in the district.

Steve Hayes wrote this morning that, as high-risk people such as pregnant-mothers and young children are unable to get Swine Flue vaccinations, the Obama administration has decided to give the scarce shots to the detainees housed at Gitmo. The AP reported last night that 114 children have died from the Swine Flu since April.

The Hill reports that Rep. Mike Pence (R, Ind.) and Rep. Bart Stupak (D, Mich.) think that Americans deserve those shots more than al Qaeda terrorists:

"As long as Americans must wait to receive the vaccine, the detainees in Guantanamo Bay should not be given preferential treatment to receive the H1N1 vaccination," Rep. Bart Stupak (D-Mich.) wrote in a letter to Secretary of the Army John McHugh on Friday.

Pence, too, shared Stupak's concerns, but he also used his interview Friday to take a shot at Democrats -- and their handling of other healthcare crises -- in particular.

"I think this is exactly the kind of misadministration of healthcare, this and other aspects of the way this government is responding to the H1N1 virus, that ought to give the American people great pause about this massive government-run insurance plan that's been unveiled this week by House Democrats," Pence said.

A statement from John Boehner, Eric Cantor, and Pete Sessions:

“As the House stands on the cusp of the forthcoming vote on a trillion-dollar healthcare reform measure, it is vital that we unify behind a candidate that will support reining in massive government spending and work with Republicans in Congress to restore fiscal sanity and propose thoughtful measures to get our nation’s economy on the right track.

“With Assemblywoman Scozzafava suspending her campaign, we urge voters to support Doug Hoffman’s candidacy in New York’s 23rd Congressional District.

“He is the only active candidate in the race who supports lower taxes, fiscal responsibility and opposes Nancy Pelosi’s agenda of government-run healthcare, more government and less jobs.

“We look forward to welcoming Doug Hoffman into the House Republican Conference as we work together for the good of our nation.”

Update: A statement from New York GOP chairman Ed Cox:

“As Election Day approaches, it is critical that we come together to elect a candidate who will fight the damaging policies of Nancy Pelosi and the Democratic leadership in Congress. Doug Hoffman is a Republican who has pledged to protect the taxpayer and support policies that will turn our economy around. With unemployment in the North Country in double digits and hard-working people being burdened by the excesses of government, the people of the 23rd District need that Republican representation now more than ever. That must be our focus in the final days of this campaign.

Dede Scozzafava has placed her Party and her principles over politics and position for years. For those who know her, her actions today come as no surprise because they show real leadership. It is testament to her character and strength under difficult circumstances. Throughout her career, she has built a record of standing up for the people of the North County. This move demonstrates her commitment to ensuring that those people have a Republican, fiscally conservative voice in Congress. As an elected official that has been her driving force and she will continue to serve her constituents and all New Yorkers with great distinction for many years to come.”

Via Townhall Newt Gingrich tweets:

Scozzafava dropping out leaves hoffman as only anti-tax anti-pelosi vote in ny 23 Every voter opposed to tax increases support doug hoffman

The Democratic firm Public Policy Polling was in the middle of conducting a poll on the NY-23 race when Scozzafava dropped out. It showed conservative Doug Hoffman beating Democrat Bill Owens by 19 points--but it didn't yet have a full sample. PPP writes on Twitter:

With about 200 interviews down we had Hoffman 45 Owens 26 Scozzafava 17...her withdrawal will just make it that much easier for Hoffman

Of course, as noted below, the independent Siena poll showed Hoffman trailing Owens by 1 point.

As a new Siena Poll released this morning showed Democrat Bill Owens (36 percent) and conservative Doug Hoffman (35 percent) neck and neck--and liberal Republican candidate Dede Scozzafava at 20 percent--Scozzafava withdrew from the race. Josh Kraushaar has the statement:

Dear Friends and Supporters:

Throughout the course of my campaign for Congress, I have made the people of the 23rd District and the issues that affect them the focal point of my campaign. As a life long resident of this District, I care deeply and passionately about its people and our way of life. Whether as a candidate for Congress, a State Assemblywoman or a small town Mayor, I have always sought to act with the best interest of our District and its residents in mind—and today I again seek to act for the good of our community.

The opportunity to run as the Republican and Independence Party candidate to represent the 23rd District has been and remains one of the greatest honors of my life. During the past several months, as I’ve traveled the district, meeting and talking with voters about the issues that matter most to them, I’ve been overwhelmed by the amount of support I’ve received as I sought to serve as their voice in Washington. However, as Winston Churchill once said, Democracy can be a fickle employer, and the road to public office is not always a smooth one.

In recent days, polls have indicated that my chances of winning this election are not as strong as we would like them to be. The reality that I’ve come to accept is that in today’s political arena, you must be able to back up your message with money—and as I’ve been outspent on both sides, I’ve been unable to effectively address many of the charges that have been made about my record. But as I’ve said from the start of this campaign, this election is not about me, it’s about the people of this District. And, as always, today I will do what I believe serves their interests best.

It is increasingly clear that pressure is mounting on many of my supporters to shift their support. Consequently, I hereby release those individuals who have endorsed and supported my campaign to transfer their support as they see fit to do so. I am and have always been a proud Republican. It is my hope that with my actions today, my Party will emerge stronger and our District and our nation can take an important step towards restoring the enduring strength and economic prosperity that has defined us for generations.

On Election Day my name will appear on the ballot, but victory is unlikely. To those who support me – and to those who choose not to – I offer my sincerest thanks.

Dede

Update: Hoffman's statement:

“This morning’s events prove what we have said for the last week; this campaign is a horserace between me and Nancy Pelosi’s handpicked candidate, Bill Owens. At this moment, the Democratic Party, the Working Families Party, ACORN, Big Labor and pro-abortion groups are flooding the district with troops and they are flooding the airwaves with a million dollars worth of negative ads. They are throwing mud; they are trying to stop me.

“It’s time for us to send a message to Washington—we’re sick and tired of big-spending, high-taxing, career politicians and by voting for me on Tuesday you will send that message loud and clear.”

See if you can tell what's missing from this Associated Press story about the release of an FBI overview of a Dick Cheney interview during the CIA leak case.

There are obvious mistakes -- the reporter repeats the myth that Joe Wilson cast doubt on CIA reports about Iraq-Niger uranium claims when he returned from Niger, when in fact the CIA actually thought Wilson's reporting, to the extent that it was meaningful, enhanced the credibility of those earlier reports -- but I'm looking for an omission.

In his review of the episode, the writer gets so carried away with his attempt to make it look like Cheney was behind the leak -- "In the FBI's interview, Cheney's memory of key events appeared hazy" or "Cheney's occasional denials that he talked about Plame to various people at the White House are among the few things in the lengthy interview with the FBI that Cheney appeared certain about" -- that he forgets the single most important piece of information about the case. What is it?

The identity of the leaker: Richard Armitage.

Last week, President Obama declared a national emergency because of the H1N1 virus. What had been a matter of concern, was elevated, in the minds of many, to something that is cause for panic. Citizens across the country have spent hours trying to schedule an appointment for a vaccination. Others have waited in long lines in order to get a shot.

Parents of "at risk" children have been tying up the phone lines of their pediatricians trying to find out who has the vaccine and where they might go to get their kids a shot. Parents in a Milwaukee suburb spent hours in the rain waiting for a shot. A group of concerned mothers from Maryland will be waking their children before dawn Saturday and driving nearly an hour to wait in line for who knows how long -- all in the hopes of scoring one of 800 vaccinations available in a neighboring county. Pediatricians are waking up in the middle of the night after nightmares about a vaccine shortage.

Frustration and anger have been building but there had not been an obvious target for those feelings. That may have changed late Friday afternoon with the news that the Pentagon has offered to give swine flu shots to detainees and Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

Major Diana Haynie, a spokesman for the Joint Task Force at Gitmo, explained the decision this way.
"Detainees at JTF Guantanamo are considered to be at higher risk and therefore they will be offered the H1N1 vaccination."

Really? Higher risk than who? Pregnant women are six times more likely than others to have a fatal bout of swine flu -- and yet some of them have been unable to get a shot. The shortage is so severe that state and local health officials have been forced to cancel and reschedule vaccination clinics, and to adjust their strategies about who gets a shot and when. According to this article:

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention lists those at greatest risk of serious illness from swine flu as: pregnant women; healthcare and emergency medical staff who have direct contact with patients; people who live with or provide care for children under 6 months old; children ages 6 months to 4 years; and children 5 to 18 with chronic medical conditions such as asthma and diseases of the heart and liver.

The CDC forgot to list Gitmo detainees. "JTF Guantanamo conducts safe, humane, legal and transparent care and custody of detainees. As such, we must provide detainees the medical care necessary to maintain their health," said the Gitmo spokesman.

So Khalid Sheikh Mohamed, the man who conceived the 9/11 attacks that killed nearly 3000 Americans, is eligible for a swine flu vaccination. But Kristin Bencik, a pediatrician working overtime to treat kids suspected of having swine flu, has chosen to forego a shot so that she is not taking one away from one of her vulnerable patients. And she is really a "higher risk" case -- she's pregnant.

It's worth wondering what effect all of this will have on efforts by Democrats to pass a $1 trillion overhaul of the US health care system.

As Bill Kristol notes:

we're seeing a big government health care program in operation right now--the Obama administration's effort to deal with the swine flu problem. No, come to think of it, it's now the swine flu emergency. Last week, President Obama so legally designated it. How's that test case in government-run emergency care going?

Turn on your local news to find out. You'll see false reassurances, broken promises, rationing which doesn't provide the promised rations, queues lengthening while supplies run out, and lots of bureaucrats explaining just why things aren't working quite as their centrally planned plans had planned.

The swine flu emergency is a foretaste of life under the Pelosi Plan. Surely this spectacle, happening in real time before us, will give even more Democrats pause. Do they really want to be known as the Swine Flu Democrats?

It's a good question. And he asked it before word leaked that the terrorists in Gitmo are eligible to receive those coveted shots while thousands upon thousands of normal American taxpayers cannot get one.

If you thought people were angry in August...

There’s a profile of the Obama marriage by Jodi Kantor coming out in this Sunday’s NYT Magazine which, while I can’t recommend it due to the incredibly high stultification factor of its subject and prose, I did find compelling on account of a) its confirming what I have thought about the two of them, and particularly the spear side, since they appeared meteorically on the scene, namely, that they are a pair of self-regarding pompous bores -- he a worse one than she, I think -- with little to recommend them as president and first lady other than the historic fact of their being elitist leftists of color; and b) its manifesting everything that’s causing the New York Times to slide slowly like melting ice cream dripping off the counter into dull obsolescence, in this case by sending the woman who trolled Facebook during the campaign looking for high school friends of Bridget McCain who'd be willing to dish on her mother to seize on the insipid details of its favorite politician's marriage and proffer them as journalistic gold.

“Theirs is by no means a co-presidency,” Ms. Kantor writes.

[A]ides say the first lady has little engagement with banking reform, nuclear disarmament or most of the other issues that dominate her husband’s days. But their goals are increasingly intertwined, with Michelle Obama speaking out on health care reform, privately mulling over Supreme Court nominees with the president and serving as his consultant on personnel and public opinion. When they lounge on the Truman Balcony or sit inside at their round dining table, she describes how she believes his initiatives are perceived outside Washington; later, say advisers, the president quotes the first lady in Oval Office meetings.

I awake from a deep sleep: Little engagement with banking reform and nuclear disarmament? Am I relieved or disappointed? Don’t know. But it’s bracing to learn Mrs. Obama’s got her finger on the pulse of Washington outsiders. Oh, at first, like the skeptical denizens of Hyde Park, the Upper West Side, and Beverly Hills, she had her doubts:

But slowly he worked on her. One day she heard him give a speech and found herself captivated by the possibilities of what might be. . . . “When you listen to her tell that story,” Robert Gibbs, the campaign spokesman and now the White House press secretary, told me, voters thought, “It’s O.K., yeah, this could work.”

The possibilities of what might be. Yeah, this could work. That’s a story worth repeating! And so, if you are still awake, is this: “What I value most about my marriage,” says the president of the United States, “is that it is separate and apart from a lot of the silliness of Washington, and Michelle is not part of that silliness.”

Steve Hayes and Andrew Hayes correct the record on Brett Favre.

Bibi shouldn't take it personally, Ben-Ami thinks his own father is a terrorist."

What he meant to say.

Former Secretary of State George Shultz on communicating with Iran:

People say we didn’t communicate with Iran, but we did. When Iran was messing around with Kuwaiti shipping, you remember, we re-flagged the Kuwaiti tankers so we could protect them, and when the Iranian president was at the United Nations, giving a speech saying the last thing Iran would do would put a mine in the Persian Gulf, our Navy was taking a picture of them doing it. And then we boarded the ship and we took some mines off for evidence, took the sailors off the ship, sank the ship, took the sailors to Dubai and said to the Iranians, come and get your sailors and cut it out. Now, that was communication. (Laughter.)

Joseph Abrams on the most powerful writer since Julius Caesar.

Since the 19th century, there have been calls for America to adopt a parliamentary form of government -- you know, like Britain or Canada. Woodrow Wilson, in his days as an academic, favored this. More recently, liberal intellectuals and activists have recommended we move to a parliamentary system. It would make it easier to get things done, especially progressive reforms. A president with attractive plans for improving the lives of the rest of us would be able to pursue his agenda without fear of being thwarted by checks and balances. In short, our government would depart the 18th century and enter the modern era.

But think what would happen if we went this route. Instead of electing a president as chief executive and commander-in-chief, the head of the majority party in the lower house of parliament would become prime minister and head of the government. In Britain, this is Gordon Brown, leader of the Labor party. Here, who would that be? House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, the liberal terror of Washington and author of a new scheme for a government takeover of health care. She’d be in charge. She’d be our national leader with power beyond her current dreams.

Which affirms once more the wisdom of our Constitution and the sagacity and vision of James Madison and his fellow drafters of that document. As grim as things may be with President Obama, they could be worse. We could be stuck with Prime Minister Pelosi.

The “kings” and “princes” of sand and oil who rule Saudi Arabia may have signed on to the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child in 1997, but the daughters of their subjects—and no doubt some of their own, as well—still live under the sick tyranny of shariah-interpreting that endorses the predations of pedophiles upon them, and insists, in a Whoopi Goldbergian kind of inversion, that to deprive little girls of conjugation with men old enough to be their grandfathers is to treat them “unfairly.” How cold the comfort, in the circumstances, that the “jurists” upholding this appalling penalty against defenseless victims invoke the marriage of their Prophet to a six-year-old girl—and by the way, a six-year-old, for those who’ve never met any, is someone who’s just begun to lose her baby teeth—to justify it. But how much more dreadful must it be for these children to realize that those who should by nature be their refuge from the harsh ugly world, their fathers, are the brokers of their misery, selling them to old men for . . . what? To pay off debts? To pare down the number of mouths to feed?

One recent such horror story out of the Wahhabi paradise comes to us from the indispensable MEMRI:

The Saudi daily 'Okaz reported on August 25, 2009 that the father of a 10-year-old girl had removed her from her aunt's home, where she had been hiding for 10 days, and brought her back to her husband, who, according to the girl's relatives, is 80 years old. In an 'Okaz interview, the husband stated that he was not yet 80, accused the girl's aunt of interfering in his private life, and claimed that according to the shari'a his marriage is legal as long as the girl's father consents to it. He explained that the girl's father had first offered him his older daughter, but when the latter refused, the father had suggested the younger one, and he had agreed, since when girl was shown to him, he couldn't see anything to prevent their getting married.

Sabria Jawhar, a Jedddah-based HuffPo blogger who by her own description is “one of the leading women journalists in the Kingdom,” argues that the abusive guardianship by fathers of their daughters is a tribal warping of Islam, yet manages in the same breath to defend repressive Islamic travel restrictions on women, declaring that

advocating to completely abolish guardianship rules is not a productive means to deal with abuses in the system. The problem with some Saudi activists is that they want to make wholesale changes that are contrary to Islam, which requires a mahram for traveling women. If one wonders why great numbers of Saudi women don't join . . . it's because they are asked to defy Islam.

But is child-selling for a dowry Islamic? Ms. Jawhar is . . . agnostic: “As for girls at age of 15, that is a young, but not unreasonable, age in our society and holds up to an international standard.” (The HuffPo’s where feminism may tangle with multi-cultism and lose.) But Iraqi shariah scholar Abd Al-Hamid Al-’Ubeidi gives us the expert’s view:

In some Islamic countries, the age of maturity can be 8 or 10 years. In Yemen, a girl might get her period at the age of 8. In cold countries, such as Russia, Belarus, Scandinavia, New Zealand, Canada, and so on, a girl might not reach maturity until she is 22 years old. She might not get her period until then. Therefore, the greatness of Islamic law is manifest in the fact that marriage is not just for pleasure. True, it is the basic objective for marriage, but there are some cases that require solutions.

Indeed, marriage is not just for pleasure. The marriage of a grown—not to say aged—man to a ten-year-old girl is a solution only to the case of a pedophile seeking his next victim. If that’s Islamic, call me a Crusader.

Something frightening is happening on the Hill. I can feel it, but I just can't see it.

The White House’s stimulus program is a joke. Indeed, the Obama administration would be better served if it handed out money on the side of the street, than it is by its current job creation program. Consider the current numbers:

Reports to be released Friday on the government Web site Recovery.gov are expected to show that the $150 billion in grants and loans made so far under the economic stimulus package have created or saved about 650,000 jobs, White House officials said Friday morning.

Now, some simple math:

Cost: $150,000,000,000

“Created or saved” jobs: 650,000

Cost per “created or saved” job = $230,769.23

And the White House call this a success?

Yes, yes it does. Joe the-vice-president Biden’s chief economist, Jared Bernstein, says:

“Good news, folks…But as we applaud these unprecedented efforts in transparency and this new confirmation that the Recovery Act is successfully creating jobs across America, we are also acutely aware that even the highest estimates of jobs created or saved by the Act only partially offset the extent of job losses since the recession took hold last year. For this reason, we plan to continue to squeeze every job out of every dollar left to spend in the Recovery Act, and to do so with the same level of transparency achieved thus far.”

Here, folks, is the Obama administration squeezing good news out of bad news. But transparency reigns supreme: the economic news still looks bad.

THE WEEKLY STANDARD has obtained a document authored by Judge Richard Goldstone that is now being circulated on Capitol Hill. The document was written in response to HR 867 -- the resolution sponsored by Ileana Ros-Lehtinen and Howard Berman condemning Goldstone's report on Israeli war crimes in Operation Cast Lead. Goldstone explains in the document that he sends his "comments on this resolution in an effort to correct factual errors."

Spencer Ackerman reported today that J Street would oppose the resolution in the House, but J Street chief Jeremy Ben-Ami has also said his organization "refuses to embrace" the Goldstone report. But it seems that certain elements of J Street have indeed embraced Goldstone and his report. Upon further inspection of the Goldstone letter, the actual author seems to be Morton H. Halperin, who serves on the J Street advisory council and is a senior adviser at George Soros's Open Society Institute. The original document can be downloaded here. (A check of the file's "properties" reveals the author as Morton H. Halperin.)

Individuals with official ties to J Street are not just embracing the Goldstone report, they are involved in efforts on behalf of Goldstone himself to scuttle opposition to the report in Congress. It's just another example of the disconnect between J Street's official positions and the actions of those who are connected to the organization.

Rep. Grayson's self-importance will not be available for comment during the weekend: "No Grayson until Monday? Shut down the servers."

Hot Mormon moms pose for calendar. (Hey, it's Friday.)

NYT caught taking out a section of its story on Obama's Dover photo-op that indicated it was a photo-op.

The Medicare fraud model for Obamacare.

The CBO on the House health-care bill.

The whiff of a scandal changes the landscape in Kansas.

Ahh, "media justice." That sounds like a great idea.

White House now fighting with Edmunds.com over Cash-for-Clunkers boondoggle overwhelming success.

Only in D.C.: Pols and talking heads take "what are you going to be for Halloween?" and turn it into opportunity for painfully unfunny talking-points jokes.

Roll on, greatest Senator ever. Roll on.

Washington shall control your health care.

George Pataki endorsed conservative Doug Hoffman last night. This is significant. The former New York governor is a moderate and part of the New York establishment. He won by big margins in the 23rd District when he ran for governor.

A friend notes also that Pataki waited until after Hoffman performed well during last night's debate with Owens and Scozzafava to make the endorsement. Pataki was probably motivated more by political calculation than by principle in his endorsement. He knows Hoffman can win and Scozzafava can't.

The Obama administration's diplomatic efforts on North Korea have stalled, the peace process is going nowhere fast, and now the negotiations with Iran have collapsed entirely. The Telegraph reports on the Obama administration's now failed attempt to talk the Iranians out of their nuclear materials:

"It's like playing chess with a monkey," said one diplomat close to the talks. "You get them to checkmate, and then they swallow the king."

Monkeys with nuclear weapons -- what could go wrong?

So when do we think Margaret Carlson files her column for Bloomberg? In a column datelined yesterday, Carlson takes after Sarah Palin for meddling in the NY-23 race. Carlson writes, "Early October saw Scozzafava in the lead. She now trails Democrat Bill Owens. Hoffman is within a few points of catching her."

In fact, Hoffman has had a double-digit lead on Scozzafava all week. The demands of Palin-bashing are incredibly time-consuming, of course. But still.

THE WEEKLY STANDARD reported last week on a Congressional resolution sponsored by Reps. Howard Berman and Ileana Ros-Lehtinen that would strongly condemn the Goldstone report and call "on the President and the Secretary of State to oppose unequivocally any endorsement or further consideration of the 'Report of the United Nations Fact Finding Mission on the Gaza Conflict in multilateral fora.'"

J Street has put out two statements on Goldstone, neither one of which actually condemned the report. But the same day that we reported this resolution had been introduced in Congress, J Street director Jeremy Ben-Ami told Jeffrey Goldberg that his organization "refuses to embrace the Goldstone report." Naturally, we asked if J Street would therefore support the Ros-Lehtinen-Berman resolution.

The answer from J Street policy director Hadar Susskind was comical in its vagueness. "There's a lot of space between condemn and embrace," Susskind told me, after saying that he'd not had a chance to read the resolution that had been circulating in the House for over a week at that time. Indeed, there is a lot of space between condemn and embrace, and Spencer Ackerman reports that J Street will put out a statement that boldly falls somewhere in between then two. J Street will say it is "unable to support" the resolution, and instead offer a fantasy list of items it would support in a resolution on Goldstone -- none of which include condemnation of the report itself.

Every mainstream Jewish organization in the United States and Israel has condemned the Goldstone report. But J Street, unlike every other Jewish organization, is held hostage by a base of support that is anti-Zionist and anti-Israel. And yet the group knows that its failure to condemn Goldstone leaves it vulnerable to the charge that it is not really a pro-Israel organization. So J Street finds itself in that vast space between condemn and embrace. This is the organization that the anti-Israel left describes as a progressive, and courageous, alternative to AIPAC.

The bill that passed out of Dodd's committee yesterday was built on the legislation crafted by these three. For more background on how this went down in committee yesterday, see here. And with the Iranians thumbing their collective nose at Obama over the shipment of uranium to Russia, the timing of this sanctions legislation really couldn't be better.

Bayh, Lieberman, and Kyl Call for Prompt Final Passage of Bill by Full Senate

WASHINGTON, D.C. – Senators Evan Bayh (D-IN), Joe Lieberman (ID-CT), and Jon Kyl (R-AZ) issued the following statement today, following the unanimous passage by the Senate Banking Committee of the Comprehensive Iran Sanctions, Accountability and Divestment Act of 2009:

“We applaud the unanimous passage of the Comprehensive Iran Sanctions, Accountability and Divestment Act of 2009 by the Senate Banking Committee. This important legislation incorporates key provisions of the Iran Refined Petroleum Sanctions Act (S. 908), which we introduced earlier this year and which 77 members of the Senate have cosponsored. We are likewise extremely encouraged by the passage of the House counterpart of S. 908 yesterday by the House Foreign Affairs Committee. This legislation would empower the President with the explicit authority to target Iran’s dependence on imported gasoline and other refined petroleum products.

“We wish to thank Chairman Dodd and Senator Shelby for their leadership in the Senate Banking Committee on this important issue. As the government of Iran continues to refuse to comply with the international community’s demands that it cease its illicit nuclear activities, it is appropriate that both the House and the Senate have responded this week with a big step toward the imposition of crippling sanctions.

“It is clear that an overwhelming bipartisan majority in both houses of Congress now supports the imposition of tough new sanctions on the government of Iran. We believe that now is the right time to bring this legislation to the Senate floor, and look forward to working with the Senate leadership to ensure its final passage, as quickly as possible.”

Bayh, Lieberman, and Kyl introduced the toughest economic sanctions legislation to date against the Iranian regime to pressure the regime to change course, comply with international law, and suspend its nuclear program, as demanded by multiple United Nations Security Council resolutions. This legislation, the Iran Refined Petroleum Sanctions Act (S. 908), was incorporated as part of the Comprehensive Iran Sanctions, Accountability and Divestment Act of 2009.

The Bayh-Lieberman-Kyl provisions would give President Obama expanded authority to impose severe economic penalties on foreign firms involved in the export of gasoline and other refined petroleum products to Iran, including a complete ban on doing business in the United States. Iran currently lacks the refining capacity to meet domestic consumption and must import as much as 40 percent of its gasoline from abroad. During the presidential campaign, President Obama endorsed the strategy of using Iran’s dependence on foreign gasoline imports as leverage in the nuclear dispute.

Politico reports:

The House Republican leadership is prepared to welcome Doug Hoffman into its ranks, National Republican Congressional Committee Chairman Pete Sessions (R-Texas) said Thursday, a sign that the GOP establishment is recalibrating its approach toward the contentious New York special election and the Conservative Party nominee whose candidacy has divided the party.

“He would be very welcome with open arms,” Sessions told POLITICO in an interview off the House floor.

Sessions’s comments came as polls showed Hoffman surging in the Nov. 3 special election against Republican nominee Dede Scozzafava, a moderate who supports abortion rights and gay marriage, and Democratic attorney Bill Owens. Nearly a dozen rank-and-file Republican members announced their endorsements of Hoffman Thursday.

Two Democrats, pro-life Rep. Bart Stupak of Michigan and pro-choice Rep. John Yarmuth of Kentucky, talked about abortion in the health care bill on Hardball with Chris Matthews tonight:

Yarmuth claims that the bill maintains the status quo on abortion, but that just isn't true. Current law prevents federal funds from paying directly for elective abortions or for insurance plans that cover elective abortions.

Update: Transcript here.

From the FBI press release on last night’s Dearborn, MI raid-turned-shootout that left radical Imam Luqman Ameen Abdullah, aka Christopher Thomas, dead:

Abdullah was the leader of part of a group that calls themselves Ummah (“the brotherhood”), a group of mostly African-American converts to Islam, which seeks to establish a separate Sharia-law governed state within the United States. The Ummah is ruled by Jamil Abdullah Al-Amin, formerly known as H. Rapp Brown, who is serving a state sentence in USP Florence, CO, ADMAX, for the murder of two police officers in Georgia.

Interesting to note the active tense used in the release. The use of the phrase “is ruled” should raise an eyebrow or two for those following the debate over where to relocate the terrorists currently housed at Gitmo. Two of the most mentioned locations being considered by the Obama administration are the federal prison in Standish, Michigan and the federal Administrative Maximum (aka “Supermax”) prison in Florence, Colorado. One of the left’s core arguments in the debate rests on the belief that the security provided by such a facility would render Gitmo’s terrorists totally unable to organize and convert fellow prisoners eager to learn from the jihad-masters.

In this case, not only did a domestic Islamic terrorist organization arise from within the walls of our prison system, but the “Supermax” facility currently serves as the headquarters for this radical group.

It appears FBI Director Robert Mueller’s “relevant concerns” about bringing Gitmo’s terrorists to the United States are not so far-fetched after all.

So far as we know, no terror cells are currently being run from inside Guantanamo.

Earlier today the FinanceBanking Committee debated amendments to the Comprehensive Iran Sanctions, Accountability and Divestment Act of 2009, a piece of legislation that is built around the Bayh-Kyl-Lieberman Iran sanctions bill that has garnered some 76 cosponsors in the Senate.

Dodd's bill, which is supported by the committee's ranking member Senator Richard Shelby, is the counterpart to the Iran sanctions legislation Rep. Howard Berman marked up in the House Foreign Affairs Committee yesterday, though the Senate bill adds language allowing state pension funds to divest from Iran and attempts to halt the flow of goods into Iran from Middle East ports (last year the New York Times detailed the ease with which dual use goods may flow into Iran from ports like Dubai). However, the focus of both bills would be to target Iran's dependence on the importation of refined petroleum products (Iran now produces 40 percent less refined petroleum than it did when the Shah fell while the population of the country has doubled over the same time period).

Senator Bob Corker introduced an amendment yesterday calling for these sanctions to be imposed in coordination with Russia and China. The amendment was adopted, and in an interview with THE WEEKLY STANDARD this afternoon, Corker warned that if unilateral U.S. sanctions were imposed, the difference in Iran's imports would "easily be made up by Russia and China." The Obama administration can "exercise some testosterone doing it ourselves," but in Iran, Corker says, "the effect that we can have on refined petroleum is very small." Of course, targeting gasoline imports was a key plank of Obama's Iran policy during the campaign, and the measure itself seems to have broad bipartisan support in both houses of Congress. During the campaign Obama talked a lot about multilateral sanctions, but in the event he's been unable to secure the support of either Russia or China and looks to have little hope of doing so. Multilateral sanctions would be better than unilateral sanctions, but unilateral sanctions look likely to be the only option.

However, it wasn't the amendment that Corker introduced yesterday that had Iran-watchers talking. It was an amendment he had planned to introduce today but pulled at the last minute. This second amendment would have changed the 'shalls' in the bill to 'mays' -- i.e., the bill would no longer command President Obama to impose petroleum sanctions in 120 days barring some major diplomatic breakthrough (the president shall...), but would instead allow the president to impose those sanctions (the president may...).

Corker offered several rationales for this attempt to change the language. First off, he said, "when we pass this the president has to do it in 120 days...I question the timing." In other words, Corker worries that the language would limit the president's flexibility. However, it's not at all clear that's true -- the bill, like many other pieces of Iran legislation, contains a national security waiver that can be invoked at the president's discretion (it also has several other waivers, including a waiver that would allow the president to waive sanctions on individual companies based in allied countries where the government is cooperating with the United States on the Iran threat).

Corker also said that he "made the point that by using the word 'shall,' they were sending a message of no confidence in the president." Corker said that observation was met by silence from the Democrats in the room, but sources familiar with the history of this legislation note the language was crafted before Obama's election, and add that the use of the word 'shall' is standard legislative language.

The real problem with Corker's amendment, and the reason that there was so little support for it among members of the committee, was that Dodd's bill actually gives the president no new authority to impose sanctions on Iran -- it is merely a statement of broad bipartisan support and resolve for the president should he choose to exercise his existing authority under the International Emergency Powers Act. If we are to convince the Iranians of the seriousness of our purpose, Congress needs to show it is ready to wield the stick.

What's odd about all this is that Corker makes all the right hawkish noises on Iran's nuclear program. This bill is "our last best sanctions before military [action]," Corker said, insisting that he "absolutely" favored a military strike if the diplomatic course failed. "A nuclear weaponized Iran is probably the greatest threat we face," Corker said. Given all that, it is odd that Corker would try to introduce an amendment that makes the U.S. Senate appear less than committed to tough sanctions.

The Iran sanctions legislation ultimately passed out of committee today by a unanimous (23-0) vote.

A poll of 600 likely voters by Research2000 for the left-wing blog Daily Kos shows conservative Doug Hoffman and Democrat Bill Owens neck and neck while liberal Republican Dede Scozzafava is sinking like a stone.

Allahpundit writes that the pollsters "did miss an opportunity, though, by failing to poll Scozzafava voters on who their second choice is. That would have finally given us a sense of how things are likely to break if her supporters decide she’s a lost cause next week and force themselves to choose between Owens and Hoffman. Instead, they polled Hoffman’s supporters on that question, which was stupid given that he’s vaulted past her and thus is no longer the one playing spoiler."

Speaker Nancy Pelosi unveiled the House Democrats' merged health-care bill today. It weighs in at 1,990 pages--you can read them all here. Tevi Troy has compiled a good list of who will be unhappy with the bill here.

The bill purportedly costs just under $900 billion over ten years (though the Democrats haven't released the CBO's "preliminary" score yet; UPDATE: Here's the CBO score; the bill would actually cost over $1 trillion). It will be paid for with a 5.4% surtax on individuals making more than $500,000, a 2.5% tax on medical device manufacturers, up to an 8% payroll tax on businesses with more than $500,000 in payroll that don't provide employees health insurance, "between $125 billion and $150 billion" in cuts for pharmaceutical companies -- "almost twice the $80 billion they agreed to under the White House deal" -- and a $2,500 limit on contributions to tax-exempt health flexible spending accounts.

The bill is also paid for through Medicare "savings" (read: "cuts"). The Democrats claim that the bill would reduce the deficit by $30 billion over 10 years (after that, things look iffy). The problem is that the Democrats assume that Medicare reimbursement rates will be slashed by 20 percent. But House Democrats introduced separate legislation today to eliminate the scheduled Medicare cuts--the so-called "doc fix" bill. So, if you add that bill with the health-care bill, the health-care bill would add more than $200 billion to the deficit, rather than cut $30 billion, over 10 years.

And what do we get in return? A government-run insurance plan or "public option," an expansion of Medicaid to those making 150% of the poverty line, subsidies or "affordability credits" for those making between 150% and 400% of the poverty line, and a raft of coverage restrictions for insurance companies. Best of all, the Washington Post notes that the "insurance industry would face new coverage restrictions," and the bill would "require health plans to allow young adults to remain on their parents' insurance policies until their 27th birthdays." (I'm pleased to know that the Democrats want to extend Ezra Klein's childhood for two more years.)

And, of course, the bill provides coverage for elective abortions for those on the public plan as well as for those who purchase federally subsidized plans. The bill includes the language of the Energy and Commerce committee's Capps amendment.

President Obama said during his health-care address to Congress that "under our plan, no federal dollars will be used to fund abortions." The (false) talking point from the White House is that the Hyde amendment prevents federal-funding of abortions, but in fact that amendment would not apply to the health-care bill.

Pelosi-care is a mess. No wonder the public remains opposed to health care reform.

The bill contains the word "shall" 3,425 times. But I'm sure all those are used to tell you how the government "shall" stay out of your health-care decisions, right?

Pg. 1516 regulates vending machines: In the case of an article of food sold from a vending machine that ‘‘(I) does not permit a prospective purchaser to examine the Nutrition Facts Panel before purchasing the article or does not otherwise provide visible nutrition information at the point of purchase; and ‘‘(II) is operated by a person who is engaged in the business of owning or operating 20 or more vending machines, the vending machine operator shall provide a sign in close proximity to each article of food or the selection button that includes a clear and conspicuous statement disclosing the number of calories contained in the article.

Pg. 31, under a section titled, "Sunshine on price gouging of health insurance issuers": The Secretary of Health and Human Services, in conjunction with States, shall establish a process for the annual review of increases in premiums for health insurance coverage. Such process shall require health insurance issuers to submit a justification for any premium increases prior to implementation of the increase.

The "doc fix"— coming in at about $200 billion—is yet to come, and will be handled in a separate piece of legislation, just as the Senate tried.

The bill adds a new section to the federal tax code: "'PART VIII:HEALTH CARE RELATED TAXES.' Among the new taxes are penalties for individuals who don't purchase insurance and employers who don't provide insurance, income tax surcharges of up to 5.6% to those earning more than $1 million, and a 2.5% excise tax on medical devices."

Pg. 132: The bill creates the Office of the Ultimate Bureaucrat Health Choices Administration headed by the Health Choices Commissioner. Among the commissioner's duties (he will be appointed by the president and approved by the Senate): "establishment of qualified health benefits plan standards," "administration of individual affordability credits under subtitle C of title III, including determination of eligibility for such credits," auditing insurance exchange participants to provide "accountability" for meeting his established standards and billing those insurance companies for the audits, collecting unspecified "data," penalizing, suspending payments to, and terminating insurance plans that don't meet exchange standards, establishing " effective and efficient administration of the Health Insurance Exchange," and "development of standards for the definitions of terms used in health insurance coverage, including insurance-related terms."

No word on who will hold this unelected bureaucrat accountable for doing any of this well or fairly. But hey, look on the bright side, we will have a new federal office. And, who doesn't need another of those?

The Democratic National Committee makes the kind of stupid mistake we've come to expect from their Republican counterparts -- promoting an ad that features...the desecration of the American flag. Politico's Jonathan Allen reports:

One of the 20 finalists in health care video contest run by Barack Obama’s campaign arm features a mural of an America flag splattered with health care graffiti until it’s covered completely by black paint.

In the video – which is accompanied by the sound of a heart monitor pumping and then flat-lining – words such as “pre-existing conditions,” “homeless” and “death panel” ultimately obliterate the flag, which reappears on screen seconds later with the words “Health Will Bring Our Country Back to Life” on the blue field where the 50 stars usually are.

I don't get it. I mean, I get why the DNC would be oblivious to how real Americans might take offense to the desecration of the American flag. What I don't get is how the liberals who produced this video think that free health care is the only thing that can save this country. After all, the star-spangled banner's been waving proudly for some 230 years despite the lack of a "robust public option."

US News reports that J Street will allow it's university affiliates to drop the "pro-Israel" label and remain affiliated with the J Street organization:

"The student groups don't need to say they are explicitly pro-Israel so long as their programming and outreach operate from the premise that the Jewish state has a right to exist as a Jewish state," says Jessica Rosenblum, a J Street spokesperson.

But on Tuesday, I pressed the same spokeswoman, Jessica Rosenblum, for an answer to the same question. She beckoned to Matt Dorf, the managing partner at Rabinowitz/Dorf Communications and a senior adviser to J Street, to answer the apparently complicated question. Dorf said very clearly that if these groups don't label themselves as explicitly pro-Israel, "then they're not a J Street U chapter." It was a definitive statement of the kind that J Street is suddenly loathe to make and it seemed to put the matter to rest. But apparently Dorf wasn't speaking for J Street -- or was he? Which is it?

J Street has been trying to spin this story for two days now and all the while insisting that the Jerusalem Post story was bogus. The latest official statement from the group came out this morning and still doesn't answer the question. It is reproduced in full below. J Street can't decide if it's pro-Israel or not, but anyone who doubts the group's pro-Israel bona fides is accused of engaging in smears. J Street can't have it both ways.

The latest statement from J Street on the unanswerable question of whether or not it is a "pro-Israel" group:

The national board of J Street U neither discussed nor voted on any action to remove the term "pro-Israel" from our platform, policy or the way we describe ourselves at J Street U's national conference.

We are building this movement because we care about Israel, its future and the future of the entire Middle East. To us being pro-Israel is intertwined with being pro-Palestine, and recognizing this is a vital step in the pursuit of a lasting peace.

Our goal is to engage with our communities on this issue, in order to create room for an open conversation on campus. For too long there has been no space that welcomed those with questions. We believe that when students are given a chance to explore their ideas and come to their own conclusions, we build stronger support for our positions and for Israel.

It appears that President Obama has ended up pretty much nowhere with the Chinese on climate change, despite making this the sine qua non of US-China relations over the past nine months. Yesterday, Todd Stern, the administration's climate change negotiations czar, tried to lower expectations about any kind of bilateral deal between the United States and China on climate change in advance of both Obama's upcoming trip to Beijing and the December climate negotiations in Copenhagen. From AP:

"I don't think we're going to get an agreement per se," said Todd Stern, the U.S. special envoy for climate change. However, he said Obama will work with Chinese President Hu Jintao toward facilitating an agreement at the international meeting.

"It's never been an effort on our side to work toward a separate deal, but we're going to be trying to make as much progress as possible," Stern told reporters following ministerial-level talks on clean energy development and climate change in Shanghai.

"We're pushing them and they're pushing us," he said.

Funny, but Stern told the Center for American Progress in June that a bilateral agreement was the goal and expressed his sympathies for the difficulties the Chinese faced on the path toward such an agreement with the United States.

It's been a bad week for Stern all around. His latest effort to lower expectations follows on reports last week that India and China were joining forces to block any efforts to include binding emissions reductions for developing countries as part of the new framework to be negotiated in Copenhagen in December. Any agreement in Copenhagen that continues the Kyoto arrangement of letting developing countries set their own emissions goals would put the Obama Administration in a politically difficult spot, to say the least.

So basically, the Chinese have told us -- surprise, surprise -- they have no desire to retard their economic growth to save the planet, but they will take whatever advanced technology that we will give them so they can make their continually expanding economic machine more efficient and would be thrilled if we would simultaneously constrain our own economic growth through mandatory emissions reductions. Meanwhile, Obama blew off the Dalai Lama, downgraded other concerns about China's human rights record, told Congress that China is not manipulating its currency, and made various other gratuitous gifts to the Chinese and got nothing in return on the so-called "important" issues of Iran, North Korea, rebalancing of the Chinese economy, and now his signature issue of climate change.

Who could have possibly seen this coming? Its not like the Chinese have clearly signaled that they will not sign a deal with hard targets on emissions. Oh, wait -- they have. A bunch of times.

No kiddin': Politicians butt in at bailed-out GM

Obama: Pelosi is the best Speaker ever. (No, really. He said it.)

"Representative Grayson, I hear that your sister is a superior whore.”

Obama writes a letter to 330,000 voters in Virginia, to get the vote out.

Pelosi unveils your $894 billion health-care bill.

"As with Rasmussen, NBC/WSJ finds that changes in question wording on the public option can produce big changes in the poll results."

Vast right-wing conspiracy: Bachmann babysat Fox's Gretchen Carlson

Awww, a Democratic president familiar with the workings of the free market.

John Kerry wants Law Library report on Honduras retracted because it contradicts Obama's State Department on Zelaya.

Yesterday the Republican Jewish Coalition was taunting its Democratic rival, the National Jewish Democratic Council, over the appointment of former Republican Senator Chuck Hagel to serve a co-chair of the President's National Intelligence Advisory Board. As the RJC was quick to point out after news of the appointment broke, the NJDC had put out several statements over the years blasting Hagel for his "questionable Israel record." In particular, Hagel had refused to sign a series of letters that had broad bipartisan support and which focused on a range of issues of great importance to the Jewish community. He had refused to sign a letter in August 2006 asking the EU to declare Hezbollah a terrorist organization. In 2004, Hagel had refused to sign a letter urging President Bush to highlight Iran's nuclear program at the G-8 summit.

NJDC executive director Ira Forman responded by blasting his counterpart at the RJC, Matt Brooks. Brooks, Forman said, is "not concerned with little issues like shame or hypocrisy." Forman said that RJC had plenty of opportunities to question Hagel's record when Hagel was serving in the Senate. "Apparently [the RJC] just recently had a revelation" about Hagel's foreign policy views. But neither was Forman prepared to denounce Hagel again now that the shoe was on the other foot. "Anybody who's looking for purity from us is going to be disappointed," Forman said in the course of declining to criticize the appointment.

Still, Forman isn't a fan of Hagel. He suggested that NJDC would publicly oppose Hagel's nomination for a position with more authority. "If [Hagel] was taking a policy role, we'd have real concerns," Forman said. And Forman indicated that his group would oppose Hagel's appointment to any position that had influence over U.S.-Israel relations.

While the RJC may not have "even a little credibility to attack" this appointment, as Forman says, the bipartisan show of discomfort with Hagel's foreign policy views suggests Hagel is not destined for a bigger role in this administration.

An interesting postscript to this story is the fact that Hagel's appointment was announced at J Street's gala dinner on Tuesday night just before Hagel delivered the keynote speech at that event. NJDC is an explicitly partisan, Democratic organization, while J Street aspires, or at least claims to aspire, to bipartisan influence. Still, the fact that Forman remains dubious of Hagel's pro-Israel credentials while J Street--an organization struggling to convince itself and others that it really is pro-Israel--offers the former Nebraska senator a prime speaking slot at its inaugural conference is yet more evidence of the contradictions that are tearing J Street apart.

Update: RJC chief Matt Brooks denies that his group "being somehow inconsistent in our opposition to Hagel." Forman is "being totally disingenuous," Brooks said, noting the RJC had "never given [Hagel] money from our PAC." Brooks argued that this was the truest indicator of support from his group since "we actually vote with our financial resources." Brooks says the RJC PAC raised $195,000 in 2008 in contrast to the $11,000 raised by the NJDC (both numbers according to Brooks).

Brooks points to this statement from last summer, criticizing Hagel ahead of Obama's campaign swing through the Middle East, as evidence that the RJC was not afraid to criticize Hagel while he was still an elected Republican official. On that score, however, Forman correctly notes that the RJC refrained from criticizing Hagel until Hagel had become a public ally of Barack Obama. Still, Brooks says that "the reality is they're the one being inconsistent -- they've muzzled their concern rather than speak out about this appointment."

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is expected to release the text of the Democratic health care proposal tomorrow, with the hope of bringing it to the floor as early as next Friday. Pelosi will claim that the Congressional Budget Office has scored the Democratic bill as deficit neutral over the next ten years.

Of course, there's no guarantee the text Pelosi unveils tomorrow won't be replaced at the last minute on the floor by a manager's amendment that will change various provisions and, conveniently, won't have been fully scored by the CBO--as happened with cap and trade. But leave this quibble aside.

Here's the key fact: The bill will be (allegedly) deficit neutral because of hundreds of billions of dollars in Medicare cuts. If it passes, these will be the largest cuts in Medicare ever. Is the Democratic Party as a whole willing to go into the 2010 election as the party that slashed Medicare? Are individual Democratic members?

Pelosi will whisper to her members not to worry, they can rescind the cuts next year. But then, of course, the legislation will be a deficit buster. And even if the Democratic Congress does rescind the cuts, that will just allow Republicans to run ads criticizing Democrats for cutting Medicare and busting the budget. And, one might add (as Republicans will), raising taxes and hiking premiums.

One more thing: Speaker Pelosi is once again--as on cap and trade--asking her members to walk the plank, absent any evidence there are enough votes in the Senate to pass comparable legislation. In fact, the reason Pelosi is pulling the trigger now is that Reid failed in his effort to get the Senate up to the starting gate first (that was the point of last week's attempted "doc fix").

So, the question is: Will her caucus follow Nancy off a cliff?

Josh Rogin reported today that former Senator Chuck Hagel will serve as co-chair of the President's Intelligence Advisory Board. Hagel was also the keynote speaker at last night's J Street gala dinner. Naturally, Hagel is not a big supporter of Israel (this seems to be a theme among J Street speakers). The Republican Jewish Coalition had some fun pointing reporters to an old statement from their rivals at the National Jewish Democratic Council:

Indecisive Senator Hagel has Questionable Israel Record

As Senator Hagel sits around for six more months and tries to decide whether to launch a futile bid for the White House, he has a lot of questions to answer about his commitment to Israel. Consider this:

- In August 2006, Hagel was one of only 12 Senators who refused to write the EU asking them to declare Hezbollah a terrorist organization.

- In October 2000, Hagel was one of only 4 Senators who refused to sign a Senate letter in support of Israel.

- In November 2001, Hagel was one of only 11 Senators who refused to sign a letter urging President Bush not to meet with the late Yassir Arafat until his forces ended the violence against Israel.

- In December 2005, Hagel was one of only 27 who refused to sign a letter to President Bush to pressure the Palestinian Authroity to ban terrorist groups from participating in Palestinian legislative elections.

- In June 2004, Hagel refused to sign a letter urging President Bush to highlight Iran's nuclear program at the G-8 summit.

We await the NJDC statement denouncing this unfortunate Obama appointment.

From the White House photo stream...

From Jeff Flake, in response to questions about why he voted against a bill “honoring the 2560th anniversary of the birth of Confucius and recognizing his invaluable contributions to philosophy and social and political thought.”

“He who spends time passing trivial legislation may find himself out of time to read healthcare bill,” said Flake.

The boss weighed in on the Confucius resolution here.

Mixed messages coming from NJ today. The first is a shock poll from Quinnipiac suddenly jumping Corzine to +5. This result looks a little suspect. Quinnipiac's last poll (whose survey period ended 8 days before this one's began) had Christie +1. That's an awfully big, awfully fast swing. Casting further doubt, Quinnipiac puts Corzine's share of the vote at 43 percent, even though the same poll has his favorable rating at 41 percent and his job approval at 39 percent. Could Corzine be getting votes from people who don't like him and don't like the job he's doing? Sure! But still . . .

Adding to the confusion, the two polls out immediately before Quinnipiac had Christie +3 and +4 (Rasmussen and Public Policy Polling, respectively). And adding to that confusion, both of those organizations had Christie trending slightly upwards from their previous polls. To be sure, all of these numbers are grouped very tightly, so a lot of this action is taking place within the margin of error.

That said, even the polls that look good for Corzine have aspects that are problematic for him. For instance, that Quinnipiac poll showing him suddenly +5 also shows that 38 percent of Daggett supporters say they might change their mind and that Christie is +16 in that group.

That sounds about right because the same Quinnipiac poll has Christie widening his lead among independents from +9 to +15.

An interesting story from the Republican primary in Connecticut, where the front-runner has flip-flopped on the public option in the wake of Joementum's announcement that he would vote against cloture on any bill that has a public option like the one currently being pushed by embattled Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid:

Former Rep. Rob Simmons (R-Conn.), who is considered the top challenger to Sen. Chris Dodd (D-Conn.), last week said the public option should be "on the table."

Earlier today, though, Simmons applauded Sen. Joseph Lieberman (I-Conn.) for opposing the public option, which Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) included in the final version of healthcare reform legislation.

Lieberman supports card check and holds a bunch of positions that are anathema to the conservative grass roots, but Lieberman isn't a conservative -- and conservatives love him anyway. He got huge support from Republicans in 2006 -- a brutal year for the party -- and Republican candidates in the Northeast could do a lot worse than following his lead.

The annual Soldiers' Angels Project Valour-IT is on again! That means you can use three minutes of your day and your credit card to bring some serious help to a wounded veteran by clicking here:

Project Valour-IT brings voice-activated laptops, Wii game systems, and GPS systems to recuperating veterans with serious injuries to limbs, traumatic brain injury and memory loss, and sever PTSD. Every little bit that you can help will bring those who have sacrificed the most closer and closer to reclaiming their lives.

I spoke with Maj. Chuck Ziegenfuss, for whom the program was started:

“I got blown up. That’s it in a nutshell.”

That’s Maj. Chuck Ziegenfuss’ summary of June 21, 2005—the day when a mortar buried neatly, seamlessly under the asphalt of a road north of Baquba, Iraq went off under his feet, ripping new, unnatural seams in both of his arms and legs, bruising his corneas, and sending him into a long, rough recovery.

When he woke up in a hospital bed at Walter Reed four days later, he faced the enormity of his pain and the recovery ahead of him. He thought it would help him cope if he could get in touch with his fellow soldiers back in Iraq, his blog readers, and friends and relatives, but there were two problems. The only computers were a painful walk down the hallways of Walter Reed, and he did not yet have the use of his hands for typing. Soldiers' Angels, with the help of an anonymous donor, supplied Ziegenfuss with a laptop with voice-recognition software. It gave him a connection to the world, the world he'd known, just when it had seemed farthest away.

“When you’re lying in that bed, you’re thinking, ‘All right, they say I’m gonna live, but what kind of life will I have?’ I’m having thoughts like, ‘I’ll never be able to hold my children again. I’m never gonna be able to teach my son to play catch.’ That is just so incredibly unbearable…Getting the software and being able to get back to that one bit of normal life…it was so much of a relief.”

Since then, Project Valour-IT has helped thousands of wounded soldiers regain that first, tiny but crucial bit of independence after a devastating injury. Will you help another one today? Click here:

Students explain how to write a cover letter that will get you that dream job working for Carlos Slim at the New York Times. The lesson seems to be, "if you bash Fox News, you might land an unpaid internship at Mother Jones."

HT: Hit & Run

The New York Times reports that President Obama plans to amalgamate General McChrystal's COIN strategy with General Biden's (snark) counter-terrorism strategy, focusing on protecting cities instead of villages and towns.

President Obama’s advisers are focusing on a strategy for Afghanistan aimed at protecting about 10 top population centers, administration officials said Tuesday, describing an approach that would stop short of an all-out assault on the Taliban while still seeking to nurture long-term stability.

Mr. Obama has yet to make a decision and has other options available to him, but as officials described it, the debate is no longer over whether to send more troops, but how many more will be needed. The question of how much of the country should fall under the direct protection of American and NATO forces will be central to deciding how many troops will be sent.

Obama's advisors are slapping together two strategies -- each of which simply cannot be prosecuted halfway -- and haphazardly throwing them into the Hindu Kush. So instead of one proven, sound strategy, you now have two that are optimized for nothing. "Protecting cities" has a nice ring to it, but it completely ignores military reality. What about guarding lines of communication? Or supply routes? Who protects Afghanistan's agrarian communities, which are the lifeblood of their economy?

The Rhodesians pursued a failed strategy during their Bush War that was striking in its resemblance to Obama's split-the-baby plan. Short on manpower, Rhodesians focused on holding their major cities and population centers. They slowly lost control of their rural countryside, couldn't protect their commercial farms which -- like Afghanistan -- powered their economy, lost their highways, rail lines, communication nodes, and ultimately the war.

In a different colonial conflict, however, our British allies were successful. During the Malayan Emergency, British forces drove a wedge between the local population and Maoist rebels, controlling vital arteries throughout the countryside, isolating towns and villages, and denying the enemy any potential safe haven. By the end of the war, the communist insurgents were confined to a small kill box -- one the British ensured lived up to its name. The victory, however, didn't come cheap. It took 12 years and nearly 100,000 Commonwealth forces to defeat the enemy.

The obvious lesson here, proven by history, is that COIN isn't something that can be done on a dime's budget. It takes dedication, a kingly share of resources, and an equal amount of patience. However, defeating indigenous insurgents is possible with the right leadership, right strategy, and proper force structure. Naysayers should note that President Obama has all three available to him -- so if we do allow Afghanistan to slip through our fingers, it will be because President Obama chose to lose.

The AP reports:

Former Vice-President Dick Cheney will throw his support behind U.S. Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison's campaign for governor.

The Hutchison campaign confirmed Wednesday that Cheney will endorse the Texas Republican's March primary challenge of Gov. Rick Perry at a fundraiser next month.

The whole of the Bush administration seems to be backing Hutchison (Rove, Hughes, now Cheney)...and as Ben Smith says, "for all Cheney's national unpopularity, he's a clear plus in a Republican primary in Texas."

A good little hit from the Senate Republican Conference:

You likely won't see this poll result elsewhere, so I thought I'd highlight it here. This is a Pew Political IQ test conducted over the phone with 1,002 adults from Oct. 1-4. They were asked 12 questions, and answered an average of 5.3 questions correctly, according to Pew.

But here's the part you likely haven't heard about:

Under a section called "Partisan Knowledge Gap," we find Republicans were more knowledgeable by a double-digit factor on four issues. Although the Glenn Beck question is naturally easier for Republicans, the other three issues are basic political knowledge— what "cap-and-trade" means, who's in control of the House, and who the new Supreme Court Justice is (a question that should perhaps be easier for Democrats). Republicans also led Democrats on identifying the unemployment rate, Fed chairman, Dow level, Max Baucus' position. Republicans correctly answered an Iran/Israel question and an Afghanistan question more often than Dems. Republicans and Democrats were even on identifying the "public option" as a health-care plan.

But take heart, Democrats: You lead Republicans by five points on a whopping one question.

The result is a repeat of a Pew Political IQ test conducted in March, which asked 12 slightly different questions and found Republicans more knowledgeable on 10 questions, even with Democrats on one, and lagging Democrats on just one (number of troops killed in Iraq). Those results are available under the helpful subhead, "Republicans more knowledegable," but I don't remember too many articles using that as a lede.

By contrast, you'll remember copious coverage of the Democracy Corps' focus groups under the title, "The Very Separate World of Conservative Republicans"— another in a long line of "conservatives are crazy" pseudo-scientific studies that are giddily regurgitated by mainstream media every year with very serious eyebrow furrows of faux objectivity.

An April 2007 Pew Quiz showed this about partisan difference: "Republicans and Democrats are equally likely to be represented in the high-knowledge group. But significantly fewer Republicans (26%) than Democrats (31%) fall into the third of the public that knows the least."

A September 2007 quiz showed more Republicans than Democrats could identify even the Democratic Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi.

It looks like conservatives do indeed live in a separate world from liberals— one occupied by 40 percent of the American electorate, where most people know what Tim Geithner's job is.

That's my Stuart Smalley affirmation for our readers. After all, if the polling had gone the other way, the NYT would shout it from the rooftops. I figure since you get told by the media you're crazy all the time, it's worth telling you polling confirms you are crazy— crazy like a fox.

My favorite columnist, TMQ's Gregg Easterbrook, writes about health care reform in this week's column. Check it out! Here's a sample:

I don't really understand what's in the congressional health care plan at the moment -- and since it changes daily, I bet most members of the House and Senate don't really understand either. Health care is only the single largest segment of the U.S. economy, so surely there is no risk in passing a 1,000-page health care bill no one understands!

Meanwhile, William Galston identifies the central paradox of the moment:

On the one hand, survey after survey testifies to the rock-bottom standing of the Republican Party. Fewer Americans identify with the party than in the past, and fewer trust it to deal with the country’s problems. On the other hand, there are hard-to-ignore signs of a conservative resurgence. A 15,000 person Gallup survey out today shows that 40 percent of Americans now identify themselves as conservative (up from 37 percent at the time of Obama’s election), while only 20 percent regard themselves as liberal (down from 22 percent). Far more independents (35 percent) consider themselves conservative than was the case a year ago (only 29 percent).

Galston notes that this shift toward conservatism is also apparent when you look at specific issues such as the right to life, gun rights, and global warming.

"The Clinton administration (in which I served) was derailed by the results of its first midterm election," Galston concludes, "and it took Democrats a decade to recover. While there are reasons to believe that Republicans won’t do as well this time, Democratic leaders should take seriously the possibility of a significant electoral reverse and act strategically to make it less likely." Something tells me that's not likely to happen.

They're spinning this as an "in the off chance sanctions don't work..." contingency plan, but it sounds like an administration succumbing to its own impotence:

The Obama administration is quietly laying the groundwork for long-range strategy that could be used to contain a nuclear-equipped Iran and deter its leaders from using atomic weapons. U.S. officials insist they are not resigned to a nuclear Iran and are pressing negotiations to prevent it from joining the world's nuclear club. But at the same time, the administration has set in place the building blocks of policies to contend with an Iran armed with atomic weapons.

Those elements, former officials and analysts said, include the newly revised defense shield for Europe and deeper defense ties to Gulf states that feel threatened by Iran.

Iran will probably have the bomb before our 2012 election, which means Israel is on its own. What's concerning here is that the administration clearly doesn't understand the deeper strategic implications of Iran owning a nuke and having that launch-on-warning missile technology enjoyed by the US and Russia for decades. Deterrence isn't the point here. We deterred the Soviets from attacking us with nuclear weapons, but that didn't stop them from exporting communism by means of violent proxy wars (which we were often sucked into, costing us billions of dollars and thousands of American lives).

Imagine what happens to the balance of power in the Middle East if Iran, like Russia, could safely shield its terrorist proxies under the protective cover of nuclear-tipped missiles capable of hitting our regional bases, Israel, Europe, and ultimately the continental United States. Allowing Iran access to nuclear weapons is a guaranteed formula for widespread Mid-East strife and a potential nuclear exchange between Iran and Israel. The Obama administration seems to be resigning itself to that avoidable fate.

This was bound to happen, as most American wars have experienced their share of mid to high level defections. This time around, State loses a talented FSO who was serving in one of the toughest regions in Afghanistan.

A former Marine who fought in Iraq, joined the State Department after leaving the military and was a diplomat in a Taliban stronghold in Afghanistan has become the first U.S. official to resign in protest of the Afghan war, the Washington Post reported early Tuesday.

Matthew Hoh, who describes himself as "not some peacenik, pot-smoking hippie who wants everyone to be in love," said he believes the war is simply fueling the insurgency.

"I have lost understanding of and confidence in the strategic purposes of the United States' presence in Afghanistan," Hoh wrote in his resignation letter, dated Sept. 10 but published early Tuesday. "I have doubts and reservations about our current strategy and planned future strategy, but my resignation is based not upon how we are pursuing this war, but why and to what end."

Look, none of our senior military leaders have tried to hide the fact that war is indeed fueling the insurgency. That's why General McChrystal is pursuing an aggressive, proven COIN strategy. However, resigning because you think a Western occupation is "making matters worse" doesn't make a whole lot of sense. Nothing will "fuel the insurgency" more than handing the Taliban a win.

It's worth noting that Hoh was serving in the Zabul region, which is Taliban owned and has a population that's geographically dispersed. That makes the classic population-centric COIN strategy far more difficult to execute. Afghanistan has always been a tough, unforgiving place to fight. But it's a war that we must win. If Hoh thinks that our presence is fueling the regional insurgency, imagine what a devastating loss would do to fuel global extremists. We saw international terrorism skyrocket when we were chased from a little sliver of Somali coastline, it's chilling to think of the decade after a defeat in Afghanistan.

Aside: Though State is down one Foreign Service Officer, Army recruitment numbers are soaring.

John Steele Gordon destroys the National Endowment of the Arts head: one sentence of one speech, five errors.

Video: Hoffman attacked from both sides.

Uh-oh, feminist writers pile on Obama's boys' club: Obama Not Comfortable With Women in Basketball, Golf ... or Anywhere Else

What if Bush did it? Flu vaccine shortage edition.

Valerie Jarrett: Is Fox biased: "Yes, of course." Is MSNBC biased? "Well, let's not talk about bias."

Schwarzenegger's passive-aggressive, but funny, veto message.

"It turns out that the White House-complex bowling alley might be the new Lincoln Bedroom."

The bias of the mainstream...Twitter? Yep.

Blankley: Be conservative, be passionate to win, GOP.

The centrists flee the public option.

Be on guard for the day when this anecdote falsely attributed to Antonin Scalia becomes lefty "fake but accurate" conventional wisdom about the Supreme Court justice:

Earlier today, an Arizona newspaper, the East Valley Tribune, attributed remarks to Justice Scalia that were quite stunning:

Using his "originalist'' philosophy, Scalia said he likely would have dissented from the historic 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision that declared school segregation illegal and struck down the system of "separate but equal'' public schools. He said that decision, which overturned earlier precedent, was designed to provide an approach the majority liked better. "I will stipulate that it will,'' Scalia said. But he said that doesn't make it right. "Kings can do some stuff, some good stuff, that a democratic society could never do,'' he continued. "Hitler developed a wonderful automobile,'' Scalia said. "What does that prove?''

Jack Balkin at Balkinization watched the Scalia video and found the newspaper got it very wrong:

At 23:45 Justice Scalia is clearly misquoted. He says that he stands with Justice Harlan, who dissented in Plessy v. Ferguson. He argues that the original meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment prohibits racial discrimination.

Woe betide him if Scalia ever tries to buy an NFL team, look for this to magically appear on his Wikipedia page and quickly migrate to Think Progress, MSNBC, and lazy sports columnists. To their credit, TPM and Huffington Post have corrected their original, incorrect reports.

The newspaper should apologize. No such luck thus far.

In the tradition of Walter Duranty, Herbert Matthews, and Joe Klein, Steve Clemons interviews the mass-murderer Khaled Meshaal. One hard-hitting question from Clemons: "[Are you] a Palestinian patriot or a Muslim patriot?"

See it to believe it ...

Obama national security adviser Jim Jones spoke today to the assorted Zionists, anti-Zionists, and social justice advocates who had assembled for J Street's inaugural conference. Genuine supporters of Israel would find little to object to in Jones's speech. There are two possible explanations for this. First, it may be that Jones's speech writer took J Street's claims to be pro-Israel at face value and calibrated for a pro-Israel audience. The other possibility is that the administration wanted to distance itself from J Street on some of the major issues -- Goldstone and Iran sanctions in particular -- that have been front and center during the J Street conference. An authoritative source tells THE WEEKLY STANDARD that the administration pushed J Street to have Rep. Robert Wexler introduce Jones -- at these kind of things, introductions are typically made by someone formally affiliated with the organization -- which suggests the second explanation may be the more likely one.

On Goldstone, Jones condemned the report without any serious qualification. J Street has refused either to condemn the report or embrace it. As J Street policy director Hadar Susskind told me yesterday when pressed to explain J Street's position on the report, "There's a lot of space between condemn and embrace."

On Iran, Jones did not mention sanctions specifically, but he did say "all options are on the table." This formulation is so routine, and so consistent with the rhetoric of the previous administration, that it hardly seems worth noting on its own. But in the context of the J Street conference, it was an exceptional statement. J Street opposes sanctions on Iran, let alone the threat of military action. J Street director Jeremy Ben-Ami said yesterday that the "the possibility of military actions is probably the most counterproductive thing that could happen." Apparently the administration has a somewhat different view.

Jones offered several strong statements of support for Israel that would have garnered long and sustained standing ovations at a real pro-Israel conference. At J Street the crowd responded with polite applause. Probably the best response Jones got from the crowd was his declaration that the Obama administration would send a representative to any future conference held by J Street. I'm dubious that representative will be as high-level as Jones. The only standing ovation Jones got was when his speech came to an end. This was odd. Like a political convention, a conference is meant to be theater in which the enthusiasm of delegates is on display for the media. It's possible that most of the participants at the J Street conference just didn't know they were supposed to get up and cheer at the pro-Israel lines (this was J Street's first conference), but more likely they just weren't moved to do so.

The only real problem I had with Jones's speech came when he said that if he could solve only one problem in the world, it would be the Arab-Israeli conflict. Many observers take the view that solving the Iran problem would open the way to a real and lasting peace in Israel, but the administration has taken the other view -- that the Palestinian problem should be solved first. Rahm Emanuel and Barack Obama have both made this case. During the campaign Obama called the Arab-Israeli conflict a "constant sore" that "infect[s] all of our foreign policy."

I was able to ask Jones a quick question as he made his way out of the conference. Jones recently had a public squabble with his long-time friend Senator McCain, who earlier this month accused Jones of playing politics with the war in Afghanistan. I asked Jones if he'd been in touch with McCain since then. He responded, "I called his office and tried to get an appointment -- I hope to see him in the next few days." A spokesman for Senator McCain said they "are working on a mutual time for a meeting."

LIeberman:

Mr. Lieberman, a Connecticut independent who caucuses with the Democrats, told reporters Tuesday that he would vote in favor of a procedural motion allowing debate of the bill. But he said that, unless the bill changes substantially, he would vote with Senate Republicans against a motion to allow a vote on final passage of the bill.

"I think that a lot of people may think that the public option is free. It's not," Mr. Lieberman said. "It's going to cost the taxpayers and people that have health insurance now, and if it doesn't, it's going to add terribly to our national debt."

Then, moderate Republican Sen. Olympia Snowe, whose vote Democrats on Senate Finance worked so hard to earn on the committee vote for an earlier version of the bill:

Maine Sen. Olympia Snowe says she would vote with fellow Republicans to block the Democratic health care overhaul if changes are not made to the version Majority Leader Harry Reid outlined this week.

Another moderate Republican Sen. Susan Collins:

Meanwhile, Maine Republican Susan Collins, who had earlier indicated interest in trying to pass a bipartisan bill this year, issued a statement underscoring her opposition to "a taxpayer-subsidized, government-run health insurance company."

And, moderate Democratic Sen. Blanche Lincoln:

U.S. Sen. Blanche Lincoln, D-Ark., said Tuesday she still can't support a government-funded insurance option, a day after legislation was unveiled that would give states the choice of whether to participate in the program.

"Creating another government-funded option is not where we're going. We don't need to go there," Lincoln told members of the Arkansas Farm Bureau during a video conference. "A government-funded option is something that I think is not the way to go."

The problem Reid faces is that if he pulls back support for the government plan now, it will enrage liberals who will believe he's sold them out to win the support of a few moderates. But if he charges ahead with the government plan proposal, he risks derailing the entire health care effort.

Alert to the New York Times, NPR, and other enlightened folk: The GOP’s anti-intellectualism has reached new heights -- or new depths!

Take a look at today’s press release from House Republican leader John Boehner. It mocks the House’s lax work schedule, and chides the Democrats for wasting everyone’s time with “meaningless resolutions.” One such, according to Boehner, is H. Res. 784, “Honoring the 2,560th Anniversary of the birth of Confucius and recognizing his invaluable contributions to philosophy and social and political thought,” which is expected to be considered under suspension of the rules today. According to the resolution, Confucius “counseled introspection, self-cultivation, sincerity, and the observance of respect within social relationships as a means of achieving justice and attaining morality in personal and public life.”

The GOP’s anti-Confucianism is truly shocking. What do the Republicans have against “introspection, self-cultivation, sincerity” and the like? Are they intolerant of a non-American/non-Christian/non-capitalist thinker?

Have they no shame?

He's the man the Washington Post calls a "Harvard graduate with a soft voice."

Now, from the man who brought you "Republicans want people to die quickly" and the health-care system as "holocaust in America," comes this temperate exchange about Federal Reserve employee Linda Robertson:

"This lobbyist, this K street whore, is trying to teach me about economics," Mr. Grayson fumed in a segment for a radio program hosted by Alex Jones on the Genesis Communications Network.
"This K street whore is trying to teach me about economics," Mr. Jones repeated back to the congressman. "Who was that particular K street whore?"

"I don't remember her name," Mr. Grayson, who once worked as an economist and conveyed he did not feel Ms. Robertson was qualified to lecture Congress on financial matters, said. "This was several month ago, but you can look it up, the lobbyist who was the head lobbyist for Enron was hired with our taxpayer money to try and spend this office effort to try and get transparency at the Federal Reserve."

The radio interview happened about a month ago, but just started making the media and Capitol Hill rounds last night.

Just as Grayson's sexist comments were coming to light, Obama praised him at a Miami fund raiser as an "outstanding" member of Congress.

Meanwhile, the civility police over at the Huffington Post had this to say about it:

"Alan Grayson calls a whore a whore-- Beltway whores freak out"

The article is accompanied by this photo composite of Robertson alongside actual, literal prostitute to former Democratic New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer, Ashley Dupre. Apparently incivility and blatant sexism are applauded on Arianna Huffington's left-leaning site as long as they're employed by a white, male representative who really hates Republicans.

Update: Did I mention Grayson's spokesman was deployed to defend the "whore" comment?

A spokesman to Florida Rep. Alan Grayson is defending the outspoken congressman's recent comment calling an aide to Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke a "K Street whore."...

Grayson spokesman Todd Jurkowski said the congressman's comments came in response to an attack from Robertson over the his support of a GOP-backed bill to audit the Federal Reserve.

"She actually questioned his understanding of the difference between fiscal and monetary policy," he said in a statement to CNN. "She had the audacity to attack a congressman who used to be an economist. She's a career lobbyist who used to work for Enron and advocates for whatever she gets paid to promote."

Jurkowski also questioned why the comments are making news a month after the interview aired.

"Why is this coming up now? This interview happened weeks ago. This is just another way for the NRCC to attack their number 1 target," he said.

Is he the greatest senator ever? He fought for victory in Iraq, he's fighting for victory in Afghanistan, and he's fighting to save us all from Obamacare. Who needs Olympia Snowe when you've got Joementum?

THE WEEKLY STANDARD has learned that veteran and widely-respected Rep. Tom Cole (R, Okla.), former chairman of the National Republican Congressional Committee and a member of the GOP Steering Committee and a Deputy GOP House Whip, will be endorsing Doug Hoffman in the NY-23 race.

This is significant. Cole is a conservative, but not a fire-breathing and bomb-throwing one. He's a shrewd political operative, and indeed made a living as one before becoming a congressman. He'll say in his statement that one reason he's endorsing Hoffman is that he's the one Republican who can win next Tuesday.

The GOP establishment's united front behind Dede Scozzafava is crumbling--along, apparently, with her campaign.

Today is the first anniversary of the death of our friend and colleague Dean Barnett. We loved him, and we miss him. But we are inspired by his memory—by his strength of character, his extraordinary courage, his gift for friendship, and his zest for life.

Here’s a link to what we wrote about Dean a year ago.

And here are links to a few of his most notable articles for us:

His piece on candidate Obama’s resume.

His tribute to the 9/11 Generation.

And his golf course design article, one of his favorites.

Focus group alert: Pelosi picks new name for deceiving voters about the "public option."

Yep, this "taxing the rich for everything" scheme is gonna work great.

What do they say about a gaffe? It's when a politician accidentally speaks the truth.

"Treasury Department's failure to implement anti-fraud measures, or even to require TARP recipients to report how they used the billions Congress and the Treasury Department gave them, makes it highly unlikely that the $317 billion outstanding -- nearly half the TARP total -- will ever be returned to taxpayers."

Responding to John Kerry on Afghanistan.

McDonald's is leaving Iceland. That's how bad the economy is.

The Top 10 political masks for Halloween. Henry Waxman is inexplicably missing.

Sources say NY-23 is a two-man race, with Scozzafava "fading badly," like an unnecessarily summoned cop-car siren in the distance, one might say.

What if Bush had done it?

Can Obama turn this around? “About a quarter of Deeds voters say they are supporting him ‘not too’ enthusiastically or ‘not at all’ enthusiastically,” the Post writes. “More than nine in 10 of those who back McDonnell are ‘very’ enthusiastic or ‘fairly’ enthusiastic about the Republican.”

Will Harry Reid's gamble pay off?

Exploring the back-room deals AARP made on health-care reform.

When the news broke that President Obama was not going to meet with the Dalai Lama during his recent visit to Washington –- ending a practice that has spanned the past two decades and three previous presidents of both parties -– some China hands and Obama sycophants applauded the decision as a pragmatic step to avoid antagonizing a regime whose cooperation was needed on “more important” matters. When they weren’t dismissing their predecessors’ meetings with the Dalai Lama as “cheap symbolism,” White House officials tried to spin their preemptive capitulation as being what the Dalai Lama wanted and a move that would actually help the Tibetans. Placed in a no-win situation, the Tibetans and their supporters attempted to put the best face on it by playing down the slight, at least until someone at the White House flatly told the New York Times that they really did throw the Dalai Lama under the bus because a meeting might be “substantially damaging to the relationship.”

Now come reports out of Tibet that up to four Tibetans have been executed after dubious trials in Lhasa. Can there now be any doubt that dissing the Dalai Lama failed to improve the situation of the Tibetans? Whereas in the past when an American president was planning a visit to Beijing for important summitry, the Chinese have released a token political prisoner or two, this time around they have executed Tibetans (and, possibly some Uighurs too) just before Obama’s arrival. While it would be hyperbolic to say the Chinese made the decision to execute these people as a result of Obama’s downgrading of human rights concerns, we’ll never know if different signals on human rights and Tibet issues might have delayed or even diminished their punishments. When I asked the State Department last Friday why they had not yet commented, I was told they could not confirm the executions but not to expect much even if they did; meanwhile, the Brits had already confirmed -- and condemned -- two of the executions.

But at this point, the Chinese are not even politely pretending to care that the U.S. or others may have any concerns about their brutal treatment of the Tibetan population. In a recent German magazine interview with Zhu Weiquan, a senior Chinese ethnic affairs official, he made it clear that the Chinese feel no need to modulate their current policies in Tibet or engage in meaningful talks with the Dalai Lama or anyone else about that topic. Some choice words from Vice Minister Zhu:

The Tibet issue is purely China's internal affair. We will brief foreign friends on the issue, answer relevant questions and invite you to report in Tibet. But we will never allow foreigners and foreign organizations to meddle in the issue or pretend to be a mediator or moral guardian in Chinese affairs.

I know that some foreign individuals and organizations have been extremely enthusiastic and eager to be engaged in the relationship between us and the Dalai Lama, as well as the so-called "Tibet issue." Let me repeat here: there is neither necessity nor possibility in this regard.

You really have to read the whole (really long) thing to get the full sense of China’s arrogant dismissal of international concerns about Tibet, but this is a pretty in-your-face message to Obama that any effort to curry favor with Beijing by snubbing the Dalai Lama is completely misguided.

I suspected J Street wasn't pro-Israel in any meaningful sense of the term, and the conference seemed to confirm my suspicions, but never did I imagine that J Street would drop the pretense on the final day of their conference:

J Street's university arm has dropped the "pro-Israel" part of the left-wing US lobby's "pro-Israel, pro-peace" slogan to avoid alienating students.

That decision was part of the message conveyed to young activists who attended a special weekend program for students ahead of J Street's first annual conference, which began on Sunday....

Barr, secretary of the J Street U student board that decided the slogan's terminology, explained that on campus, "people feel alienated when the conversation revolves around a connection to Israel only, because people feel connected to Palestine, people feel connected to social justice, people feel connected to the Middle East."

She noted that the individual student chapters would be free to add "pro-Israel," "pro-Israel, pro-Palestine," or other wording that they felt would be effective on this issue, since "it's up to the individuals on campus to know their audience."

Yonatan Shechter, a junior at Hampshire College, said the ultra-liberal Massachusetts campus is inhospitable to terms like "Zionist" and that when his former organization, the Union of Progressive Zionists (which has been absorbed into J Street U), dropped that last word of its name, "people were so relieved."

The J Street conference is featuring anti-Zionist and anti-Israel speakers, the Israeli ambassador refused to attend the event because the group itself has taken positions that the embassy warns may "impair Israel's interests," and its college affiliate has just used the conference as a platform to announce that it no longer considers itself "pro-Israel." Critics of the organization had already seen more than enough evidence to be convinced that this was the case, but for the group's defenders -- how can they now claim J Street is pro-Israel even as J Street itself drops the charade?

J Street is a left-wing group that supports social justice in occupied Palestine and a bunch of other dopey progressive ideas about the Middle East. It is not, as the kids themselves concede, pro-Israel.

After noting the new Gallup poll showing conservative self-ID at a high-water mark, the boss writes in the Washington Post:

The implications of this for the Republican Party over the remaining three years of the Obama presidency are clear: The GOP is going to be pretty unapologetically conservative. There aren't going to be a lot of moderate Republican victories in intra-party skirmishes. And -- with the caveat that the political world can, of course, change quickly -- there will be a conservative Republican presidential nominee in 2012.

That nominee seems unlikely to be a current officeholder. Right now, the four leading candidates for the GOP nomination are private citizens. In a recent Rasmussen poll, the only candidates with double-digit support among Republicans were Mike Huckabee (at 29 percent), Mitt Romney (24 percent), Sarah Palin (18 percent) and Newt Gingrich (14 percent). These four are running way ahead of various senatorial and gubernatorial possibilities. So a party that has over the past two decades nominated a vice president (George H.W. Bush), a senator (Bob Dole), a governor (George W. Bush) and another senator (John McCain), now has as its front-runners four public figures who are, to one degree or another, outsiders.

To an extent this situation is the product of accidental circumstances, and it could change. But when one considers the anti-Washington and anti-political mood in the country, especially among conservatives, it's easier to see it not changing.

Indeed, I suspect that the person most likely to break into this group of front-runners would be a businessman who stands up against President Obama's big-government proposals, a retired general who objects to Obama's foreign policy or a civic activist who rallies the public against some liberal outrage. If a Republican elected official emerges, it will probably be because he or she champions some populist cause, not because that person is a fine representative or senator or governor.

Read the whole thing.

The Playbook reports:

Vice President BIDEN today 'will travel to Wilmington, Delaware. Vice President Biden will be joined by Governor Jack Markell and other Delaware officials to make a major announcement about the future of the former General Motors Boxwood Plant.' An administration official: 'This gives a window into how the U.S. auto industry is transforming--and it is tangible evidence of this White House's commitment to becoming a world leader in building electric vehicles and plug-in hybrids, as well as transitioning old factories for the new economy to put people back to work.'

Nine months in to the Obama administration and we have tangible evidence of the White House's commitment to building electric cars and no evidence that this White House is committed to winning the war that claimed the lives of 14 Americans yesterday.

On October 18, Rahm Emanuel said on CNN that, with respect to the war in Afghanistan, "there's a set of questions that have to have answers that have never been asked. And it's clear after eight years of war, that's basically starting from the beginning, and those questions never got asked."

Stephen F. Hayes reports in the latest issue of THE WEEKLY STANDARD that, in fact, the Bush NSC team conducted a review in late 2008 that "asked many questions and provided exhaustive answers not only to President Bush, but also to the Obama transition team before the inauguration."

Today, Robert Gibbs concedes that the Bush team did conduct a review and that "some of the information was helpful."

The "independent" blogger panel at J Street's conference can only be described as clownish. The panel consisted mostly of crackpots and self-described anti-Zionists and "one-staters" (J Street director Jeremy Ben-Ami calls the one-state solution a "nightmare," but it seems to be the dream of many of the organization's supporters). Though J Street tried to distance itself from the panel by describing it as an "unofficial" and "independent" event, the bloggers used one of the rooms otherwise reserved for conference events, a podium in the front had a J Street placard on it, and a J Street banner hung on the back wall of the room. Ben-Ami came in to "check up" on the panel, and a J Street flack ejected someone from the room at the behest of one of the panelists. If this wasn't an official event, I don't know what official means.

At the event, Helena Cobban, who describes herself as "agnostic" on a two-state solution, said that blogging had "changed international relations" because now the world could get real-time reaction from the people "underneath U.S. and Israeli bombs."

Another panelist, Max Blumenthal, attacked Ben-Ami for having "capitulated" in an interview with Jeffrey Goldberg last week. Most of the media at the conference were pleased with Ben-Ami's interview with Goldberg -- it was proof, they said, that J Street was indeed a reasonable organization. But that was not the view of the average conference participant. There was "a lot to be troubled with in this interview," Blumenthal said. Ben-Ami had "prostrated himself before this 'serious man.'"

Blumenthal really doesn't like Goldberg. He called him the "Chief Rabbi of a one man island," and then, with respect to Ben-Ami, asked, "if you can't stand up to Goldberg, how can you stand up to Netanyahu?" Blumenthal was upset that Ben-Ami had, under pressure from Goldberg, denounced Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer, authors of The Israel Lobby, as anti-Semites. Among the rank and file at the J Street conference, Walt and Mearsheimer are revered. Matt Duss, another panel participant who writes for John Podesta's Center for American Progress, said "the idea of attacking [Walt and Mearsheimer] as anti-Semites is outrageous."

Blumenthal went on to trash Elie Wiesel for speaking this past weekend at the Christians United for Israel conference in San Antonio. After mocking Pastor John Hagee, the founder of CUFI, Blumenthal said "the last time Elie Wiesel trusted someone so much it was Bernie Madoff." Wiesel admitted earlier this year that he lost "everything" he had in Madoff's ponzi scheme. The audience erupted with laughter at Blumenthal's tasteless joke.

Finally, we heard from the proprietor of the blog GazaMom.com, a hijab clad Palestinian woman who said she doesn't consider Mahmoud Abbas to be the legitimate president of the Palestinian Authority. Does she support Hamas? Who knows. "Whenever I hear two-state solution, I shake my head," she said, "I'm a one-stater." Again the room erupted with applause. Philip Weiss, another blogger participating in the panel, looked around and said "there are many Zionists in this room, there are also some non-Zionists and anti-Zionists." I would say that's a pretty good description of the J Street conference as a whole.

One other note: I didn't see a single member of Congress at the conference today. That's not to say there were none there -- there was an afternoon panel featuring Reps. Boustany, Schakowsky, and Filner -- but I didn't see any wandering around. I did see Jonathan Tasini, who is running a primary against New York Democrat Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand in 2010 and has tried to make an issue out of Gillibrand's decision to pull her support for the J Street conference.

New Washington Post poll: McDonnell beating Deeds 55 to 44 percent.

Ross Douthat on Pope Benedict's attempt to reconcile the Anglicans with Rome.

Reihan Salam argues Charlie Crist is the worst governor in America.

Paul Bedard takes a look at The Persecution of Sarah Palin.

Tim Pawlenty endorses Doug Hoffman.

I made my way over to the J Street conference today to see for myself just how "pro-peace, pro-Israel" the organization really is, and there can be no doubt, J Street is pro-peace. But while the leadership of J Street may be pro-Israel, the conference they've organized was at times openly anti-Zionist and anti-Israel.

I had the chance to speak with the director of J Street, Jeremy Ben-Ami, as well as his director of policy and strategy, Hadar Susskind. On the issues, the best that can be said about these two is that they are squishes -- at all costs they avoid taking a strong position on any major issue other than settlements. Take the issue of Iran sanctions, for example. J Street has been at the center of the anti-sanctions coalition. Ben-Ami coauthored an op-ed on the Huffington Post with Trita Parsi, the head of the National Iranian-American Council who serves as the Iranian regime's man in Washington, urging against sanctions legislation in Congress. As that position became increasingly untenable for J Street -- support for sanctions on Iran is near universal in the Jewish community and in Congress -- the group has shifted. In the House, sanctions legislation is being shepherded by the chair of the Foreign Relations Committee, Rep. Howard Berman. J Street has tried to square the circle by supporting Berman's mark-up of the legislation while opposing final passage of the legislation. I asked Susskind, "you do not support sanctions but you support Berman?" He answered: "Correct."

The Goldstone report has also put J Street in an awkward position. J Street released two statements on Goldstone, neither of which condemned the report. Meanwhile, Ben-Ami told the Atlantic's Jeffrey Goldberg that J Street is "refusing to embrace the Goldstone report." I asked Susskind, what is J Street's position on Goldstone? "There's a lot of space between condemn and embrace," he said. When I asked Susskind whether J Street would support a resolution condemning Goldstone, and introduced by the same Howard Berman J Street claims to support on sanctions, Susskind punted, saying he'd not read the text of the resolution. It is, however, hard to believe that the policy director for J Street isn't following this kind of hot-button legislation on the Hill.

Ben-Ami is a professional Democratic operative who is careful to calibrate his message to his audience. When I asked him at a press conference this morning how J Street could be for a mark-up of sanctions legislation but against passage of that legislation, he explained that J Street is "not for passing sanctions at this moment in a way that would undercut the diplomatic process." He later added that "the possibility of military actions is probably the most counterproductive thing that could happen." So the passage of sanctions legislation and the possibility of military action -- the two sticks the Obama administration might use to further the diplomatic process -- are both off the table for J Street. But accuse J Street of opposing sanctions or the use of force and they'll say you're misrepresenting their position.

Another core position for J Street is a refusal to defer to the Israeli government in its positions. In contrast to AIPAC, J Street seeks to persuade the Israeli government if possible but coerce them if necessary in order to achieve a halt to settlements, an end to incursions, a withdrawal from the West Bank, and ultimately a final status agreement. J Street does not say that these issues are up to the Israelis to decide. Yet J Street takes a different view when it comes to engagement with Hamas.

During the campaign, Obama sought to mollify critics of his engagement policy by ruling out any engagement with terror organizations including Hamas and Hezbollah. Ben-Ami's group has yet to break with the president on any issue, and he said today that "the United States government should not and does not need to engage with a terrorist organization in official negotiations." But, he said, "should the government of Israel decide that it is in Israel's best interest to negotiate with Hamas, the United States should not stand in the way -- that's up to Israel to decide." This kind of formulation is typical of AIPAC statements but unusual for J Street. It's interesting that the one issue on which J Street would happily defer to Netanyahu, if Netanyahu were so inclined, is engagement with Hamas.

On two of the most pressing issues facing Israel and the Jewish community -- Goldstone and Iran sanctions -- J Street is unable or unwilling to articulate a position. J Street seems to be walking on egg shells, acutely aware that some of its positions are well outside the Jewish mainstream and that, given recent controversy, it can no longer afford to be perceived as outside the mainstream. Which explains why Ben-Ami tacked decidedly to the right in that interview with Goldberg -- but that interview caused considerable consternation among the J Street rank and file today (more on that in a post later today).

Rabbi Eric Yoffie, the president of the Union of Reform Judaism and one of the most prominent doves in the country, blasted J Street earlier this year for "drawing a moral equivalence between Hamas and Israel." Yoffie spoke at the J Street conference today and was booed by the audience for criticizing Goldstone. J Street is trying to find the space between its hard left, anti-Zionist base and the larger community of liberal, pro-Israel Jews. It's not clear they'll succeed.

Politico reports:

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid will announce this afternoon that he plans to push ahead with a public option vote – most likely one that includes an opt-out provision for states – even though he's currently short several votes for passage, according to people close to the situation.

The Nevada Democrat has 3:15 p.m. press conference to discuss details.

Reid, who spoke with virtually every member of his 60-member caucus this weekend, currently has between 56 and 57 votes for a proposal to create a national insurance plan but allow states to opt out of it, according to Democratic aides.

A public option with a "trigger" – supported by the White House and Sen. Olympia Snowe (R-Maine) – has between 58 and 59 backers. It could be floated as an alternative if the opt-out measure fails to obtain the 60 votes needed for cloture, sources said.

More at the link.

CNN notes Senator Carl Levin doesn't quite acknowledge his flip-flop on the Iraq surge:

KING: Having a good staff and a good library comes in handy when a politician says something now that doesn't match up with what they said back then. You remember the big political debate over President Bush should approve a surge of troops in Iraq. Among those who back at the time were talking December 2006 now said no, bad idea, Senator Carl Levin of Michigan.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

LEVIN: I would oppose increasing forces. I think it would be a mistake because it gets us in deeper rather than getting us out and mainly because it's a political solution which is required here.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

KING: That was then. This is now. (BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

LEVIN: History will show that President Bush reached the right decision. It wasn't the only cause for the improved situation in Iraq, the extent it has improved. But nonetheless, he took the three months. No one pressured President Bush at that time to reach a decision more quickly than he felt he could.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

KING: We don't do that to embarrass Senator Levin. I do it to make the point that sometimes what you think at the moment especially when these debates get so political doesn't always turn out to be the right over time.

I don't believe Obama has yet acknowledged this forthrightly that he was wrong about the surge in Iraq.

A former State Department official who is a completely reliable source on the subject tells me that when you were in apartheid South Africa in the 1980s seeking out human rights activists, Helen Suzman was the person you went to see; the name Richard Goldstone was never uttered. So it’s not exactly shocking to discover there’s more to the story of the South African justice who advertises himself as a lifelong opponent of apartheid than he perhaps would like the world to know.

Israelis of South African origin—people who knew him when—have begun to comment upon him, and the portrait that emerges isn’t very pretty.

"The man is over-ambitious and wants to take over from Ban Ki-Moon as Secretary-General of the United Nations," says Bernhard Lazarus of Tel Aviv, a member of the Board of Governors of Tel Aviv University and a former head of the Jewish community in Durban, Natal, who made aliya [emigrated to Israel] in January this year. "If Mary Robinson - no friend of Israel - had reservations of taking the position, why did he? Sheer arrogance."

Mark Reichenberg, another recent immigrant from South Africa, concurs absolutely on the subject of Mr. Goldstone’s arrogance, but that is the least of it. Mr. Reichenberg excoriates the justice not only for the Hamasic martyrology of his eponymous report, but also, and more severely, for what might be called a little Goldstonian hanky-panky with the truth about his liberal credentials: "Where was Goldstone,” he asks,

“when racism was at its horrific peak in South Africa, when detention without trial was the order of the day, when families were routinely separated, enforced by racial legislation, and when death of black dissenters in police custody was commonplace? Did he then stand up in world forums and cry out against the 'crimes against humanity' perpetrated by the state in his own country? No, instead, he in 1980 accepted an appointment as judge during the apartheid era when other advocates more visibly liberal were ignored or declined the position."

That’s interesting. And in case the victimologists of Hamas murderers see fit to rise to Mr. Goldstone’s defense by pointing out that these are after all Israelis leveling the charge that he’s never been quite the champion of liberty and the down-trodden he has made himself out to be to a too-credulous world, there’s another critic out there with worse to say, and he is not an Israeli. In a searing commentary for Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, the South African historian and journalist—and former human rights activist—R.W. Johnson takes his compatriot to the cleaners.

Goldstone's behavior will not surprise those who have followed his career. As a young advocate in South Africa he drew criticism for the way he privately entertained the attorneys who might bring him cases: this was seen as touting for custom. Similarly, his decision to accept nomination as a judge from the apartheid regime drew criticism from many liberal lawyers who refused to accept such nomination because it meant enforcing apartheid laws. . . . Then, as the political situation changed, so did Goldstone. Entrusted by President F. W. de Klerk with a commission to investigate the causes of violence, Goldstone publicized much damning evidence against the apartheid regime but refused to investigate any form of violence organized by the African National Congress (ANC). This naturally made him the ANC's favorite judge.

There’s plenty more to read there, but I think I can sum it up in brief: The ANC’s favorite judge has now become Hamas’s favorite judge, as well. How not at all surprising.

NRCC chairman Pete Sessions refused to comment on the NY-23 special election for my piece in the magazine this week, but a top NRCC official has stepped forward to defend Scozzafava in an interview with Politico, which reported yesterday that the NRCC will spend $200,000 to $300,000 on "TV ads propping up Scozzafava in the days leading up to the Nov. 3 contest and plans to keep up a near relentless barrage of press releases slamming Hoffman."

The NRCC official, granted anonymity, defends the decision to spend money on Scozzafava and bash Hoffman:

“I have yet to see a poll that shows a path to victory for the Conservative,” the official said. “They have no base.”

Asked why so many prominent Republicans had thrown their support to Hoffman, the official responded, “We’re dealing with data, not hopes and dreams.”

Well, here's the data showing Hoffman's path to victory. The conservative Hoffman is now beating Democrat Bill Owens 31 percent to 27 percent in the new Club for Growth poll; liberal Republican Scozzafava gets less than 20 percent of the vote.

So why is the NRCC spending money attacking Hoffman? If Scozzafava were to pull off a miraculous upset, it would simply set up a nasty NY-23 GOP primary that will cripple the NRCC's fundraising efforts in 2010. Surely NRCC officials know that Scozzafava can't win, which means they must be spending a quarter of a million dollars this week to save face.

Wouldn't it make more sense to spend some of that money on ads attacking Owens, and the rest on a Hail Mary play for David Harmer in California's special congressional election?

A president who's more sports-obsessed, a bigger work-out fanatic, and more addicted to golf than Bush. But the media's not complaining. Odd.

Ouch: "Congressman Kennedy continues to be a disappointment to the Catholic Church and to the citizens of the state of Rhode Island."

Samuelson: "In reality, the public plan, also known as the public option, is mostly an exercise in political avoidance: It pretends to control costs and improve access to quality care when it doesn't."

On mandates: "The paradox is this: Reform advocates start with anecdotes about the underprivileged who are uninsured, then turn around and propose something that would hurt at least some members of that group."

Dems look to move up health-care reform benefits to 2010 to grab some votes.

Lou Holtz coming to Virginia for McDonnell today. Holtz, despite being a former Notre Dame and South Carolina coach, stole this SEC gal's heart on Saturday with a rant about how Congress should read bills and stop worrying about the BCS, all while waving a copy of the Constitution. Sigh.

New Jersey is such an electoral tease.

Throughout the era of Republican rule in Washington, we scored GOP lawmakers for their overspending and earmarks—and so did Nancy Pelosi and other Congressional Democrats. So how do their records compare? From 2001-2008 the average annual increase in appropriations bills came in at 6.4%—or about double the rate of inflation. In this Congress spending is now growing six times faster than inflation."

Unhinged Tea Partier asks Newt about his support for Scozzafava. It's almost as if she's a reasonable human being with rational thoughts, but do not be fooled by this clever lunatic masquerading as a normal, concerned citizen with manners. She is dangerous!

A young eastern European girl survives the Holocaust, but she has lost all. First, perhaps, like so many countless others, her father is shot in the street before her eyes among scores of men rounded up in the ghetto in which her family has been living in starvation and rising terror; next, possibly, her mother dies of dysentery in the train to Auschwitz; later, maybe, when they arrive at the camp she is separated from her two brothers and they are never seen again. How does she survive and make it to Palestine? Somehow. She doesn’t speak of it, and it does not in any case seem to be the question that plagues her. In time, she marries, creates a new family, watches as her refuge becomes the State of Israel. The question that does interest her, and which she continues to ask herself, over and over again, and with which she haunts everyone among the living around her, is why she alone of all her family survived. Her son grows up; the question permeates his life. It enters the army with him, accompanies him as he rises through the ranks to become a major general. On the day on which he is named to one of the highest posts in the Israeli military, she, his mother, sits through the ceremony, then comes to him and tells him: “Now I know. Now I know why I survived.”

My sister, who has lived here for three decades and has just sent her third and fourth children to the army, called information a while ago to get the number of a Jerusalem restaurant. “What?” demanded the operator. “Why are you going to that restaurant? It’s terrible!” It’s better in Hebrew. But still.

"The fate of Jerusalem will be determined only by confrontation and not by the negotiating tables," says a survivor of a different stripe, Hamas “leader” Khaled Meshaal, from his hidey hole in Damascus, as a day of rioting by Palestinian Arabs on the Temple Mount ends. "Jerusalem is all of Jerusalem . . . . The Arabs and Muslims are [the city's] residents, and the Zionists have no claim over it." How much of this is due to the Obama Middle East policy? An un-keepable promise is made to the Palestinians that a negotiation in their favor will take place in exchange for little beyond words from their mouths (their word is their bond). Their response to the slow dawning upon them that this is a chimera is rage. A bunch of “Muslim youths” occupy the al Aqsa Mosque—one of their holiest sites—and from the windows of that sacred precinct stone and firebomb Israeli police. "I call for angry protests in Palestine and in the Arab world,” says Meshaal. “We must send a message to the world: In light of the settlements and actions in Jerusalem, there are no negotiations and we must rethink our steps."

Israelis are more and more openly expressing their disgust with the latest and most dangerous incarnation of the so-called peace process. They worry, with growing intensity with every escalation of violent Arab rhetoric and rage, that in the end the process will have wrought not peace but the Third Intifada. And who can argue with that? I can't help wondering, though, as I listen to the muezzin's call to morning prayers, just what question it is the Arabs are answering when they raise their children to fight for a state this way

Needless to say, if you’re going to watch only one Sunday talk show, you should watch Fox News Sunday.

But, as a fair and balanced kind of guy, I have to admit there are occasional moments of insight on the others. Today, sometime TWS contributor Dan Senor appeared on the Meet the Press roundtable, and then stayed afterwards for their web-only “Take Two” extra segment. You can see it here:

In this segment, Senor discusses his and Saul Singer’s fine new book, Start-up Nation: The Story of Israel’s Economic Miracle. The book will get its (I trust favorable--but who knows?!) review in TWS soon. But Senor’s discussion today of how the Israeli economy and society has taken advantage of the extraordinary real-world experience of its young soldiers is worth watching in its own right, as well as his suggestion that the United States could learn some lessons from Israel in this respect. Chapter 4 of the book is also available at the Meet the Press website. So buy the Senor-Singer book tomorrow (its release date)--but get a foretaste of it today.

During a trip to Germany and the Czech Republic earlier this month, I was surprised to find that many of the Europeans I spoke to seemed more cognizant than the Obama administration of how important it was to commit the resources necessary to win in Afghanistan.

This has not always been the case. The Bush administration tried repeatedly to obtain increased troop commitments from NATO allies and was often rebuffed. The soldiers that were sent were often of limited utility because of political restrictions placed on the areas they would deploy to as well as their rules of engagement.

In its nine months in office, the Obama administration has been unable to turn the president’s vaunted popularity in much of the world into major new international commitments of troops. Now, just as the president is publicly agonizing over what the U.S. strategy in Afghanistan should be, some European leaders seem willing to consider making increased commitments to Afghanistan. In Germany, Chancellor Angela Merkel’s government is considering increasing the size of the German contingent in the country when the deployment’s mandate is renewed later this year, something that is nothing short of amazing given how publicly unpopular the German presence in Afghanistan is. British Prime Minister Gordon Brown announced last week that he was sending an additional 500 troops to the country.

These increased commitments appear to be based on a recognition that a properly resourced counterinsurgency effort is the only way to achieve success in Afghanistan. The New York Times reported yesterday that “NATO defense ministers gave their broad endorsement Friday to the counterinsurgency strategy for Afghanistan laid out by Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal.” Kai Eide, the UN special representative for Afghanistan attended the meeting and said “additional troops are required,” also telling the defense ministers that “this cannot be a U.S.-only enterprise.”

Eide is correct that we should be encouraging additional international commitments in Afghanistan. NATO has staked its credibility on the mission in Afghanistan. However, success or failure will in the end come down to the level of U.S. commitment -- and that will depend upon President Obama’s willingness to lead.

The problem is that the more President Obama equivocates about Afghanistan, the less likely these allies will be to send additional forces. German officials I spoke to in Berlin made clear that they would not be able to push for an increased troop presence if the United States was seen as stepping back from Afghanistan. Vice President Biden, on a trip through Central Europe, told reporters Friday that concerned allies asked him “Are you leaving?” and were satisfied when he told them the U.S. was not. But our allies will rightly judge a failure to implement McChrystal’s strategy as a sign of decreased U.S. commitment to Afghanistan.

The White House took offense at Vice President Cheney’s statement this week that the president was “dithering” on Afghanistan. Friday’s NATO defense ministerial should put this issue to rest -- even the Europeans have acted with more fortitude than our president.

In the end, the public and political outrage was simply too big to ignore. Tens of thousands of French citizens used emails, call-in radio shows, letters to the editor, and online petitions to express their profound anger and disappointment at President Nicolas Sarkozy’s attempt to have his 23-year-old student son Jean installed as head of the public development agency running La Défense, one of Europe’s biggest business districts.

Following several days of massive backlash, “Prince Jean” finally went on TV Thursday night to announce that he would not seek the senior-level government job for fear that his election would be “stained with suspicion.” Interestingly, it was the center-right Le Figaro -- a paper normally supportive of the president -– that first reported that Nicolas Sarkozy was indeed behind his son’s surprise nomination to lead La Défense. Instead, Jean Sarkozy will now serve as one of the agency’s 45 board members, a position to which the young first-term town councilor from Neuilly was just elected Friday morning.

France’s political establishment immediately hailed Jean’s decision as “wise”, “mature” and “courageous”. Call it what you want. In the end, Jean Sarkozy’s barely-face-saving exit spared him, his father and the entire country a major embarrassment, preventing France from reaching the low points of a “Republique bananière” where nepotism and family connections trump everything else.

If you want to see just how little credence Vice President Joe Biden's plan for Afghanistan has inside military circles, look no further than this paragraph from an article written by Peter Spiegel and Yochi Dreazen for the Wall Street Journal:

People familiar with the internal debates say Mr. Obama rejected a strictly counter-terror approach during White House deliberations in early October. One official said Pentagon strategists were asked to draft brief written arguments making the best case for each strategy, but the strategists had difficulties writing out a credible case for the counter-terror approach -- prompting members of Mr. Biden's staff to step in and write the document themselves.

In case that wasn't clear, not a single strategist in the Pentegon was willing to draft a paper to defend the Biden plan. No one wanted to put their name on the document. So, members of Biden's staff -- political appointees -- had to write the brief.

In the new issue of THE WEEKLY STANDARD, Stephen F. Hayes debunks two Obama administration talking point on Afghanistan: "First, that the Bush administration had no real Afghanistan policy and failed for eight years to ask the important questions about the war there. And second, that the Bush administration ignored requests from commanders on the ground to increase troops in Afghanistan."

Hayes writes:

In fact, the Bush administration did ask those questions. From mid-September to mid-November 2008, a National Security Council team, under the direction of General Doug Lute, conducted an exhaustive review of Afghanistan policy. ...

The Lute review asked many questions and provided exhaustive answers not only to President Bush, but also to the Obama transition team before the inauguration. "General Jones was briefed on the results of the Lute review, and that review answered many of the questions that Rahm Emanuel says were never asked," says Bush's national security adviser, Stephen Hadley. Jones and Hadley discussed the review, and Lute gave Jones a detailed PowerPoint presentation on his findings. Among the recommendations: a civilian surge of diplomats and other non-military personnel to the country, expedited training for the Afghan National Army, a strong emphasis on governance and credible elections, and, most important, a fully resourced counterinsurgency strategy.

And:

I couldn't reach Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, but I did talk to a senior defense official who serves with him. This person stressed that Gates has gone to great lengths to avoid being dragged into political fights between administrations. Nonetheless, he offered a strong rebuke to the present White House political team.

"There was no request on anyone's desk for eight months," said the defense official. "There was not a request that went to the White House because we didn't have forces to commit. So on the facts, they're wrong."

Read the whole thing.

Kyle and Joseph Nevins, respectively the brother and father of a Marine serving in Afghanistan, write on the homepage:

As family members of a Marine deployed in Afghanistan, we know the importance of timely decisions in the heat of battle--indecision in the field puts troops at risk and leads to casualties. Likewise, the president's indecision about the next steps in Afghanistan is placing the overall mission and the troops on the ground at risk.

Announcing his counter-insurgency strategy for Afghanistan this past March, President Obama said, "If the Afghan government falls to the Taliban or allows al-Qaeda to go unchallenged, that country will again be a base for terrorists who want to kill as many of our people as they possibly can." This commitment was clearly re-affirmed by the president in an August speech before the Veterans of Foreign Wars. Yet, the president and his advisers are now engaged in a prolonged process of re-thinking America's Afghanistan strategy. What has changed?

According to the White House, it would be irresponsible to act until a credible resolution to the presidential elections in Afghanistan emerges. But we fear, as many have reported, that the real reason for delay is anxiety amongst civilian White House aides that an escalation in Afghanistan will derail the president's domestic agenda. On the latter, let us be clear--considerations of political expediency have no place in the president's war room.

Read the rest here.

An authoritative source informs THE WEEKLY STANDARD that the Democratic Senator from North Carolina, Kay Hagan, has asked J Street to remove her name from the host committee for its inaugural Israel-bashing conference this weekend featuring anti-Semite Salam "Zionism is Nazism" Al-Maryati. This is probably a smart move for a Democrat in a purple state with no obvious anti-Israel constituency. Still, Hagan's name remains on the list published by J Street on its website.

THE WEEKLY STANDARD has twice requested comment from Hagan staffers today. Her office hasn't said anything one way or the other -- it's certainly not an endorsement of J Street that members of Congress continue to duck questions and distance themselves from the group. Hagan's defection would bring the total number of members who have pulled their support for J Street to 13. We will update this post when Hagan's gets back to us with a statement.

Update: The Plum Line's Greg Sargent gets confirmation from J Street: Hagan's out.

The updated list of 13 senators and representatives who have now yanked their support:

Sen. Blanche Lincoln (D-AR)
Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY)
Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY)
Sen. Kay Hagan (D-NC)
Sen. Thad Cochran (R-MS)
Rep. Mike Castle (R-DE)
Rep. Mike Ross (D-AR)
Rep. Michael McCaul (R-TX)
Rep. Leonard Boswell (D-IA)
Rep. John Salazar (D-CO)
Rep. Ed Towns (D-NY)
Rep. Howard Coble (R-NC)
Rep. Geoff Davis (R-KY)

I understand that list will grow over the weekend...

In the course of an interview with Jeffrey Goldberg this morning, J Street director Jeremy Ben-Ami says that his organization is "refusing to embrace the Goldstone report." Is that the same as condemning the report? No, it's not. J Street has released two statements on Goldstone and neither one offered the slightest whiff of criticism for the Goldstone report. Both criticized Israel.

Today Florida Republican Ileana Ros-Lehtinen introduced a resolution condemning the Goldstone report in the strongest terms possible and "calling on the President and the Secretary of State to oppose unequivocally any endorsement or further consideration of the 'Report of the United Nations Fact Finding Mission on the Gaza Conflict in multilateral fora.'" The resolution is cosponsored by California Democrat, and chair of the House Foreign Relations Committee, Howard Berman. The other two original cosponsors are Gary Ackerman (D-NY) and Dan Burton (R-IN).

A congressional aide says it's not clear when the resolution will have action before the committee or consideration on the floor, but the question for J Street is will they support this resolution? Ben-Ami says J Street "refuses to embrace the Goldstone report" -- let him prove it. If J Street is unwilling to put out a statement supporting this resolution, we will know that this is just empty rhetoric on the eve of their conference and at a time when doubts about J Street's support for Israel threaten to make the group toxic in Washington.

PDF of the resolution available here.

Yesterday Andrew Sullivan defended Human Rights Watch from a growing chorus of critics including HRW's founder, who took to the op-ed page of the New York Times this week to castigate the organization for its obsession with Israel at the expense of real human rights abusers in the Middle East like Saudi Arabia. Sullivan also attacked UN Watch, an NGO that does exactly what its name implies and which organized a speech by Colonel Richard Kemp, the former commander of British forces in Afghanistan, at the UN Human Rights Council last week. Kemp rebuked the UN and Richard Goldstone for their biased and inaccurate report alleging Israeli war crimes in Gaza. But Sullivan wasn't impressed. "For a little background on this neutral observer," Sullivan snipped, "here's the Wikipedia entry on UN Watch, the hard neocon group Kemp is representing."

UN Watch executive director Hillel Neuer responds:

To disparage last week’s compelling UN testimony of British hero and military expert Col. Richard Kemp (the speech now ranked as YouTube’s 25th Top Rated News Video of the week), Sullivan tries to discredit us — the Geneva non-governmental organization that sponsored the officer’s address — as being a “hard Neocon group.”

Sullivan’s inexplicable slur fails even in its intended ad hominem effect given that the former commander of British forces in Afghanistan already made the same remarks on the BBC during the war in January. If Sullivan disagrees with the content, it’s neither here nor there that we invited the British hero to repeat his words before the Goldstone-loving despots in Geneva.

The slur is also nothing shy of incoherent. If we are to believe Andrew Sullivan, UN Watch would become the first “hard neocon” group in history to be chaired by a former Carter Administration official who actively campaigned for Barack Obama’s election to the presidency, to lobby for gay rights, featuring as a leading spokesman the father of Canada’s gay marriage bill, and to actively welcome the U.S. decision to join the UN Human Rights Council.

Sullivan has his sources, though: he relies on the universally respected scholarly authority of… anonymous Wikipedia users.

National Journal reports:

A handful of centrist senators from both parties met this morning to discuss withholding their votes to send a healthcare overhaul bill to the floor if it includes provisions they disagree with, such as a public option.

Their concerns might undermine Democratic leaders’ hope of convincing wavering members to vote to avoid a filibuster and allow limited debate whether or not they agree with the overhaul legislation.

“I’ve not said that my cloture vote is a given, and I’d be very concerned about a cloture vote if I believe the underlying bill is something I can’t live with,” said Sen. Ben Nelson, D-Neb.

This is an incredibly ominous sign for union bosses. Nelson has clearly expressed his discomfort if not outright opposition to EFCA. Now he's saying that he will not vote for cloture on a health care bill he wouldn't support in an up or down vote. Assuming Nelson applies that principle to EFCA, it raises further doubts about the Democrats ability to meet the 60 vote threshold on card check.

The START treaty has provisions that ban the development of new ICBMs that carry multiple reentry systems (read: nukes). For years now, Russia has bent that provision by modifying their Topol-M ICBM into the newer RS-24 system, a road-mobile ICBM with a whopping ten bombs per missile. Once START expires in December, Russia will be free to fully deploy the RS-24 -- and is indeed planning to do so.

So why is Obama rushing to forge a new agreement with the Russians when they're clearly not interested in adhering to the old one? Why is Obama deadset on cutting our nuclear arsenal when it's obvious he'll get little from Moscow in return? If the president honestly wants to see results in the new treaty (and if he's interested in avoiding another missile defense snafu), there's an easy way to motivate Moscow to lose the RS-24: bring back the Peacekeeper Missile.

The Peacekeeper was cut by Secretary Rumsfeld as a cost saving measure, which proved to be a shortsighted. It was one of those legendary Cold War weapon systems, with 10 warheads per sortie and laser sharp accuracy. It scared the hell of out of the Russians, both for its advanced reentry systems and it's upgraded guidance sets. We cut the Peacekeeper unilaterally, so there's nothing in START that prevents its resurrection. It'd be an awfully strong bargaining chip in new treaty negotiations, and could indeed incentivize the Russians to ditch their destabilizing new RS-24.

Of course I'm fantasizing -- Obama would never move in a direction opposite of his nuclear-free utopian world, even if it was for the short term and ultimately contributed to his grand disarmament vision. Indeed liberals ridicule the very notion that strong posturing can bring about real diplomatic progress. But it was Ronald Reagan, not lauded disarmament champions, who successfully forged the agreement which pulled all short and medium range nuclear missiles out of Europe -- and he did it by freely deploying the medium range Pershing II nuclear missile and the Ground Launched Cruise Missile in Belgium, Germany, and Great Britain. That's the language the Russians speak and that's the language the Russians understand. If Obama can't wrap his head around the basic nature of his Russian adversary, he's destined for another European missile defense embarrassment come treaty time.

It comes from today's classic Krauthammer column on the White House's war on Fox:

Defend Fox from the likes of Anita Dunn? She's been attacked for extolling Mao's political philosophy in a speech at a high school graduation. But the critics miss the surpassing stupidity of her larger point: She was invoking Mao as support and authority for her impassioned plea for individuality and trusting one's own choices. Mao as champion of individuality? Mao, the greatest imposer of mass uniformity in modern history, creator of a slave society of a near-billion worker bees wearing Mao suits and waving the Little Red Book?

Read the whole thing, as they say.

Elie Wiesel chooses CUFI.

Last year, the supposedly pro-Israel J Street spearheaded a campaign against the indisputably pro-Israel group Christians United for Israel. In July of 2008, J Street circulated a petition urging Senator Joe Lieberman not to speak at CUFI's annual conference, focusing attention on controversial statements made by CUFI founder and director Pastor John Hagee. The campaign was unsuccessful -- Lieberman compared Hagee to Moses in his remarks -- but months earlier Hagee had withdrawn his endorsement of Senator John McCain under intense pressure from J Street and its partisanl allies.

J Street specifically questioned Hagee's pro-Israel bona fides. His views "have nothing to do with Israel's best interests," the group said in a statement deriding Hagee's "supposed support for Israel." And J Street still keeps an opposition research file on Hagee posted on its website.

Apparently J Street's view of Hagee's is not shared by Elie Wiesel, who will be the keynote speaker at CUFI's "Night to Honor Israel" this Sunday in San Antonio at the same time that J Street will be kicking off its own conference in Washington. CUFI will honor Wiesel and, according to a CUFI official, Hagee will announce that his ministry has raised $9 million to be distributed to various Israeli charities. This is the group whose support for Israel J Street deemed illegitimate.

J Street's conference was to have featured a "poetry slam" and panel that was later cut from the program after this blog posted video of one of the speakers making statements that J Street director Jeremy Ben-Ami subsequently condemned as an "abuse of Holocaust imagery." Still speaking at the conference is Salam Al-Marayati, the executive director of the Muslim Public Affairs Council. In 1994 Al-Maryati wrote that "just as Hitler forged a conflict between Judaism and Christianity, apologists for Israel crave for Islam to be at odds with both Judaism and Christianity." On September 11, 2001, just hours after the World Trade Center fell, Al-Maryati pointed the finger at Israel in a radio interview. "If we're going to look at suspects, we should look to the groups that benefit the most from these kinds of incidents, and I think we should put the state of Israel on the suspect list," Al-Maryati said. A year later at the campus of California State University-Northridge, Al-Maryati's Muslim Public Affairs Council put on an exhibit that contained a photograph carrying the slogan "Zionism is Nazism."

On the one hand we have a Holocaust survivor and rightful Nobel Peace Prize winner addressing an organization whose pro-Israel credentials J Street has repeatedly attacked. And on the other we have a paranoid, anti-Semitic, anti-Zionist addressing an organization that the Israeli ambassador refuses to engage on the grounds that the policies it supports could "impair Israel's interests."

Ben-Ami said of Hagee's remarks last spring that they were "offensive not just to Jewish people who suffered at the hands of Adolf Hitler but to all Americans, their parents and grandparents who fought and sacrificed to defeat Nazi Germany." So then why is Elie Wiesel speaking at Hagee's conference and Salam Al-Maryati speaking at Ben-Ami's?

THE WEEKLY STANDARD just received a statement from Sarah Palin endorsing conservative Doug Hoffman for Congress:

The people of the 23rd Congressional District of New York are ready to shake things up, and Doug Hoffman is coming on strong as Election Day approaches! He needs our help now.

The votes of every member of Congress affect every American, so it's important for all of us to pay attention to this important Congressional campaign in upstate New York. I am very pleased to announce my support for Doug Hoffman in his fight to be the next Representative from New York's 23rd Congressional district. It's my honor to endorse Doug and to do what I can to help him win, including having my political action committee, SarahPAC, donate to his campaign the maximum contribution allowed by law.

Our nation is at a crossroads, and this is once again a "time for choosing."

The federal government borrows, spends, and prints too much money, while our national debt hits a record high. Government is growing while the private sector is shrinking, and unemployment is on the rise. Doug Hoffman is committed to ending the reckless spending in Washington, D.C. and the massive increase in the size and scope of the federal government. He is also fully committed to supporting our men and women in uniform as they seek to honorably complete their missions overseas.

And best of all, Doug Hoffman has not been anointed by any political machine.

Doug Hoffman stands for the principles that all Republicans should share: smaller government, lower taxes, strong national defense, and a commitment to individual liberty.

Political parties must stand for something. When Republicans were in the wilderness in the late 1970s, Ronald Reagan knew that the doctrine of "blurring the lines" between parties was not an appropriate way to win elections. Unfortunately, the Republican Party today has decided to choose a candidate that more than blurs the lines, and there is no real difference between the Democrat and the Republican in this race. This is why Doug Hoffman is running on the Conservative Party's ticket.

Republicans and conservatives around the country are sending an important message to the Republican establishment in their outstanding grassroots support for Doug Hoffman: no more politics as usual.

You can help Doug by visiting his official website below and joining me in supporting his campaign:
http://www.doughoffmanforcongress.com/donate3.html

This statement will be on Palin's Facebook page soon.

The White House sent out an alert today to the press pool that "Pay Czar" Kenneth Feinberg would be doing a press availability— a round robin with the major news networks, in which Fox is customarily included. The administration specified that everyone was invited except Fox News, according to Bret Baier on "Special Report" tonight.

The press pool, acting in the interest of its members, admirably stood up to the White House bullying. All the other networks declared that if Fox was not getting an interview, they would not be conducting interviews. The White House responded by cutting Feinberg's time with the networks from five minutes to two minutes.

The White House can dole out access to various administration officials, to be sure, but when dealing with the actual press pool, it has to deal with the White House Press Association—the independent group of journalists charged with looking out for WH reporters' best interests in covering the executive branch. That's much trickier than just talking trash about Fox on TV.

Gibbs seemed to recognize that fact on Tuesday, when he was asked about the Fox News battle by Politico:

Carol E. Lee, Politico: Does that mean the White House doesn't believe they should be part of the press pool?

Gibbs: The press pool is decide by the White House Correspondents Association.

Lee: So you have no opinion on whether they should be ...

Gibbs: I'm not going to delineate for the White House Correspondents Association how the pool is conducted. That's not my job.

Today it is, apparently. Is there a word for how petty this is?

A surprisingly strong editorial on Afghanistan from USA Today.

Rogin says the American embassy in Baghdad is a disaster -- and he's not even reporting on Chris Hill.

Rubio's making a move.

Pelosi says it's "undignified" for Cheney to 'call 'em out' -- but a sitting president...

Paging Scozzfava backers: 73 percent believe Republican establishment has lost touch with base.

Happy October Surprise, Governor Corzine.

A RAAAAAACIST at MSNBC?

$210,000 raised by Doug Hoffman in NY-23 race in the last seven days, online.

Cheney's speech last night on Afghanistan was sublime, laying out the simple realities of a war that we must win. My favorite from the Cheney archives, however, is his 2008 missile defense speech to the Heritage foundation, where he calmly and deliberately laid out the strong case for a robust missile defense system -- and dropped a great Star Wars joke to boot.

You never know what you had until you lost it. See below for the Heritage speech.

Another speaker on J Street's "independent" blogger panel rises to the defend his copanelist Helena Cobban, whose advocacy on behalf of Hamas and disdain for Israel was detailed here earlier today:

Another strike against Cobban, making her deserving of expulsion from our session, is that she equates the violence of Hamas against Israeli targets to the violence of the IDF against Hamas. I kid you not. That’s a hangin’ offense in Goldfarbland. I’d have thought the analogy would be almost self-evident. But apparently where Goldfarb lives Israel’s killing of Hamas leaders is self-defense, while Hamas’ killing of Israelis is terrorism.

Let's see . . . simultaneously condoning the killing of "Hamas leaders" and condemning the killing of Israelis by Hamas. That would be like condoning the war on al Qaeda while condemning the 9/11 attacks. In Goldfarbland, aka the real world, this is self-evident. What planet is J Street on?

The anti-Israel poetry slam is back on:

WE WILL NOT BE SILENT: POETRY ON PALESTINE AND ISRAEL

with Kevin Coval and Josh Healey

Sunday, October 25
4:00-5:30pm
Busboys and Poets, Langston Room
2021 14th St, NW (near U Street Metro station)
Washington, DC

This past week, Kevin Coval and Josh Healey were censored and un-invited from this weekend's J Street conference in D.C. as a result of attacks in various right-wing blogs and online magazines. In defiance of these McCarthyist attacks, and J Street's subsequent accommodation, Coval and Healey have decided to proceed with the original event.

They will share their poems and dialogue about Israel/Palestine, identity and justice, and (especially now) free speech. No longer part of the J Street gathering, this event is open to the whole community: conference attendees, artists, activists, youth, elders, Jews, Palestinians, gentiles, and anyone down to build.

Free event. All-ages, all are welcome.

Rahm Emanuel, October 18, 2009:

What will the Afghan government do or not do? Where are we on the police training? Who would be better doing the police training? Could that be something the Europeans do? Should we take the military's side?

Those are questions that have not been asked. And before you commit troops that are -- not irreversible, but puts you down a certain path -- before you make that decision, there is a set of questions that have to have answers that is never been asked. And it's clear after eight years of war that is basically starting from beginning that those questions never got asked.

Washington Post, October 9, 2008

Lt. Gen. Douglas E. Lute, President Bush's senior adviser for Iraq and Afghanistan, has told Pentagon, intelligence and State Department officials to return to the basic questions: What are our objectives in Afghanistan? What can we hope to achieve? What are our resources? What is our allies' role? What do we know about the enemy? How likely is it that weak Afghan and Pakistani governments will rise to the occasion?

Tyler Cowen has a wonderful piece in the Wilson Quarterly on what the Web means for culture. An excerpt:

The arrival of virtually every new cultural medium has been greeted with the charge that it truncates attention spans and represents the beginning of cultural collapse—the novel (in the 18th century), the comic book, rock ‘n’ roll, television, and now the Web. In fact, there has never been a golden age of all-wise, all-attentive readers. But that’s not to say that nothing has changed. The mass migration of intellectual activity from print to the Web has brought one important development: We have begun paying more attention to information. Overall, that’s a big plus for the new world order.

It is easy to dismiss this cornucopia as information overload. We’ve all seen people scrolling with one hand through a BlackBerry while pecking out instant messages (IMs) on a laptop with the other and eyeing a television (I won’t say “watching”). But even though it is easy to see signs of overload in our busy lives, the reality is that most of us carefully regulate this massive inflow of information to create something uniquely suited to our particular interests and needs—a rich and highly personalized blend of cultural gleanings.

A caveat: Cowen definitely focuses more on the benefits of the new cultural landscape than the costs. Nevertheless, you really ought to read the whole thing.

This is a simple post with a simple request for Michelle Obama. The First Lady said yesterday, during a kids' health fair at the White House:

"My mother would tell us, 'dessert is not a right. It's a treat.'"

To which I say: Extrapolate, please.

I'll also add that I think it's pretty cool that the First Lady can do 142 revolutions with a hula hoop, just in case anyone tries to say I never said anything nice about her. As long as she doesn't decide hula hoops are a "right," not a treat, and therefore necessitate a federal department to distribute them to all citizens using taxpayer money, she and I are on common ground in this area.

Update: A colleague reminds me of this 2008 quote from Michelle, which contradicts her mother's wisdom:

Most Americans, she said, don't want much.

"They don't want the whole pie," she told the women. "There are some who do, but most Americans feel blessed just being able to thrive a little bit. But that is becoming even more out of reach."...

"The truth is, in order to get things like universal health care and a revamped education system, then someone is going to have to give up a piece of their pie so that someone else can have more."

So, dessert is a right, as long as the government takes it from someone who has a lot of dessert. Perhaps Michelle's quote is just another parable to prepare us for the imminent pie-stealing necessitated by Obamacare. These Obamas—so many layers.

If what the White House and Obama supporters have been saying for two years is true, the weighty decision on Afghanistan's troop strength is one that Obama shouldn't have to make. From airy speeches in Berlin, to campaign rallies boasting that The One would renew "tattered" alliances abroad, to smug lectures about President Bush's disrespectful treatment of our international friends and allies, President Obama was supposed to be the great uniter of the grand Western alliance, NATO's savior.

So far, he's saved nothing. President Obama has failed to turn any of his charm and charisma into meaningful support in Afghanistan. Where's the European surge? Where's the flood of NATO troops, inspired by Obama's lofty rhetoric, gushing into the Helmand? General McChrystal needs 48k more soldiers because he needs to hold territory and protect Afghani villages. Why hasn't he been able to supplant McChrystal's request with a sizable international force? Wasn't that the point of electing a President whose greatest strength was his popularity abroad?

President Bush was able to secure a coalition of 36 countries and 50k troops for the unpopular invasion of Iraq and its aftermath. President Obama hasn't been able to muster half that number for what is essentially a global peacekeeping operation. America's image may be improved overseas, but clearly the world -- and our European allies -- still respects muscle over mojo.

Common sense dictates that if you have a nuclear deterrent, you need to verify that it works. If your enemies suspect that it doesn't (or won't) work, deterrence fails and nuclear war evolves from a distant threat to a frightening possibility. The United States hasn't tested a nuclear device since the end of the Cold War. We haven't designed a new weapon since the introduction of the Peacekeeper missile and it's powerful Mk-21 warheads during the Reagan administration. And our much-touted alternative to actual nuclear tests, the Reliable Replacement Warhead, was recently cut by the Obama administration, which is plunging ahead with its quest to dismantle the U.S. nuclear arsenal without considering how destabilizing swift, unilateral disarmament would be to the global balance of power.

Senator Kyl has been a staunch opponent of President Obama's myopic, ideologically centered nuclear policy from the get-go. In yesterday's Wall Street Journal, Kyl offered a pragmatic, reasonable justification for sustaining a safe, reliable, and credible nuclear deterrent. On the issue of restricting nuclear testing with the poorly worded Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (which would have the same chilling effect on U.S. military power as the Kyoto Agreement would have had on our economic power), Kyl nails it:

The CTBT relies on 30 of 51 nations on its executive council -- most of whom are not friendly to the U.S. -- to agree that an illegal test has been conducted, and then to agree to inspect the facilities of the offending country (which can still be declared off-limits by that country). This enforcement mechanism is obviously unworkable.

But there's another defect in the CTBT. There were concerns a decade ago that the U.S. might be unable to safely and reliably maintain its own nuclear deterrent -- and the nuclear umbrella that protects our allies such as Japan, Australia and South Korea -- if it forever surrendered the right to test its weapons. Those concerns over aging and reliability have only grown. Last year, Paul Robinson, chairman emeritus of Sandia National Laboratory, testified before Congress that the reliability of U.S. nuclear weapons still cannot be guaranteed without testing them, despite more than a decade of investments in technological advancements.

Further, we're the only nuclear power that isn't currently upgrading its nuclear arsenal -- and that list includes countries like Russia, China, and North Korea. Our Minuteman III ICBMs were first fielded during the Nixon administration. Our nuclear capable B-52s were designed in the 1950s. And we're equipped with a nuclear inventory that might work should the unthinkable happen.

Remember that we're dealing with a White House that honestly believes unilaterally slashing our nuclear arsenal will somehow "inspire" other nations, particularly Iran and North Korea, to follow suit. It's an administration that believes it would be hypocritical of the United States to advocate nuclear disarmament when we have an inventory of nuclear weapons of our own, as if the United States with its flawless record of nuclear custody and restraint is on the same playing field as Tehran and Pyongyang. That's an executive which clearly does not understand deterrence and does not understand nuclear stabilization.

The Obama administration must decide if it wants to be a nuclear power, or not. If their ideology hasn't completely blinded them to the obvious wisdom in maintaining a safe, credible deterrent, then they need to ensure that it's reliable. That means killing the CTBT, properly funding our strategic forces, and knocking off the lofty lip service to end-of-the-rainbow fantasies like total nuclear disarmament.

This Tuesday, Turkish state-owned TRT channel aired the second episode of “Ayrilik” (“Farewell”), a highly controversial prime-time TV series set against the backdrop of “Operation Cast Lead” in the Gaza strip that shows Israeli soldiers shooting a smiling young girl in the chest, killing babies, steamrolling tanks through crowded streets, lining up a firing squad to execute a group of Palestinians, and so forth. You get the picture.

After its first airing last week, the show quickly sparked fresh diplomatic tensions between Israel and Turkey, with Israeli foreign minister Lieberman protesting that Ayrilik “constitutes the most serious level of [anti-Israeli] incitement, and it is being done with [Turkish] state sponsorship”. His foreign ministry spokesman described the show as “hate-inciting television drama, which depicted distorted facts.” Ankara’s foreign minister Davutoglu quickly hit back, pointing out that Turkey is not “based on censorship” and that the state has no right to comment on the quality of broadcasts or the opinions expressed in them.

The Ayrilik scandal comes on the heels of Turkey’s decision earlier this month to block the Israeli air force from joining the annual multi-national “Anatolian Eagle” military exercise, which prompted the United States and Italy to cancel their participation as well, in a clear show of solidarity with Israel. Turkish leaders cited Israel’s Gaza offensive as the reason for blocking’s Israel’s participation in the exercises. Prime Minister Erdogan told al-Arabia television that Ankara’s decision was due to the “Turkish people’s wishes.” “I had to lend an ear to the voice of my people. They don’t want Israel in these exercises.” Hamas, Syria, and Iran all strongly applauded Turkey’s decision to boot the IDF.

Israeli observers, for their part, are quite concerned about this particular incident, primarily because it demonstrates that even the traditionally pro-Western Turkish military has now decided to support Prime Minister Erdogan and his Islamist AKP party in their anti-Israel course. Also, officials from Israel and Turkey have already made it clear that the on-going deterioration in relations between the two countries could derail bilateral defense trade and military industrial cooperation.

How fitting, then, that Turkey just last week signed a strategic cooperation agreement with Syria that covers both closer civil and defense ties, including the lifting of all visa requirements. Turkish defense minister Goenuel indicated that various contact groups would be established between Turkey and Syria later this month to find concrete ways to improve bilateral defense ties.

Last year, Turkey played an important behind-the-scenes role in facilitating indirect peace talks between Israel and Syria, notably over the Golan Heights. Ankara is very eager to resume that mediating role, not least because it enhances the country’s standing in Washington. However, in response to the latest deterioration in bilateral ties with Turkey, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has already rejected any future mediating role for Ankara in talks with Syria, questioning Turkey’s ability and willingness to serve as an “honest broker”.

And by consensus, I mean a consensus among the American people:

There has been a sharp decline over the past year in the percentage of Americans who say there is solid evidence that global temperatures are rising. And fewer also see global warming as a very serious problem – 35% say that today, down from 44% in April 2008.

The latest national survey by the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press, conducted Sept. 30-Oct. 4 among 1,500 adults reached on cell phones and landlines, finds that 57% think there is solid evidence that the average temperature on earth has been getting warmer over the past few decades. In April 2008, 71% said there was solid evidence of rising global temperatures.

Over the same period, there has been a comparable decline in the proportion of Americans who say global temperatures are rising as a result of human activity, such as burning fossil fuels. Just 36% say that currently, down from 47% last year.

"The problem is," Obama said about global warming in January 2008, "can you get the American people to say this is really important and force their representatives to do the right thing?" We now have a pretty clear answer to that question.

HT: TWI

The fall-out from President-mandated pay cuts: "Chaos will be created at these firms as top people leave in droves. Will the administration then order people back to work?"

Uh-oh. Obama suffers worst third-quarter drop in approval since 1953. B-b-b-but, didn't anyone see that awesome speech he gave last night? A clearly nervous Reid paced the chamber’s well just prior to the vote and afterward looked to blame the defeat on GOP Senators, arguing it was a result of “activities and actions by the Republican-dominated Washington.” At Corzine's rally?

Inspiration from the rhetorician in chief: "Your voice can change the world. Your voice can elect Jon Corzine, governor once again of New Jersey."

Reid blames doc-fix fail on Republican-dominated Washington. Apparently, every time a Democrat policy fails, an angel takes us back to 2004. "A clearly nervous Reid paced the chamber’s well just prior to the vote and afterward looked to blame the defeat on GOP Senators, arguing it was a result of 'activities and actions by the Republican-dominated Washington.'"

HHS Study: Current health-care reform legislation would raise costs. No word on when HHS will be deemed an "un-American" "fearmonger."

American people: Half of us think our costs will go up even though the president keeps trying to convince us we're being duped by insurance companies.

Marsha Blackburn knows "Net Neutrality" is the first step toward regulating the Internet. "The fairness doctrine for the Internet." It's got a ring to it.

Dems seek cover behind bill to fund the troops in order to raise U.S. debt ceiling to $13 trillion.

Do you think they say the name "Cheney" at the White House the way Jerry Seinfeld says "Newman?"

It's a Republican-dominated Washington, according to Harry Reid, and Nancy Pelosi says a tax hike is not a tax hike:

When J Street canceled a scheduled poetry slam at their inaugural conference, J Street director Jeremy Ben-Ami told Politico's Ben Smith that "as J Street is critical of the use and abuse of Holocaust imagery and metaphors by politicians and pundits on the right, it would be inappropriate for us to feature poets at our Conference whose poetry has used such imagery in the past and might also be offensive to some conference participants."

Well, by that standard J Street will now be obliged to drop at least one more speaker from their conference -- Helena Cobban. On the second day of J Street's conference, there will be an "independent" blogger panel including Cobban among other "pro-Israel" voices like Max Blumenthal and Philip Weiss. Cobban is prone to her own Holocaust metaphors when talking about Israel. "When you see the Wall, especially the places where it goes anywhere near built-up Palestinian areas and is studded with looming concrete watch-towers, the overwhelming image that might come to your mind, as it does to mine, is that of the fence-and-watchtower system around a concentration camp," she wrote on her blog in June of this year.

Cobban makes the same point, minus the explicit reference to concentration camps, in the video below (at the 7:50 mark). The watchtowers "send a shiver down my back," she says, and she adds that she asks Israelis "doesn't it remind you of something?" When the Israelis fail to deliver the proper answer -- that the fence should remind them of Aushwitz -- she laments that "people always want to believe the best things about their own actions, don't they?"

But Cobban doesn't just compare Israel to Nazi Germany -- she likes to compare Israel to Hamas as well.

Most people in the west have been wilfully mis- or dis-informed about Hamas and believe either that it is made up of wild-eyed men of violence who perpetrate violence for its own sake, or that its main goal is the violent expulsion of all Jewish people from Israel/Palestine. These impressions are quite misleading. Yes, Hamas has used significant amounts of violence against Israelis since it was founded in 1987. But so too has Israel, against Hamas. Indeed, Israel has killed many times more Hamas supporters and leaders than Hamas has ever killed Israelis. Does that mean we understand Israelis to be only "mindless, wild-eyed men of violence"? No. For both sides, we need to try to understand what they seek to achieve with the violence they use; as well as the conditions under which they can be expected to moderate or end it.

Sometimes Cobban dispenses with comparisons and simply lavishes praise on Hamas while attacking Israel. In one post she attempts to debunk the notion that Hamas is "only the 'terrorist organization' that it's designated to be by the US State Department...made up of wild-eyed, implacable Islamist radicals" -- scare quotes around "terrorist organization" in the original. She goes on to say,

Hamas's founder, Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, always placed a lot of emphasis on the need for education, self-restraint, and the need to rebuild the social fabric of Palestinian constituencies torn apart by years of Israeli attacks, occupation (including the heinous divide-and-rule tactics of the Shin Bet), and physical and social dispersal. Gaza Islamic University (badly bombed by Israel earlier this week) was just one of an entire network of educational and social-welfare institutions with which Hamas sought to rebuild Gazan society.

So while Hamas founder Sheikh Yassin is out there doing good works, the Shin Bet is practicing "heinous divide and rule tactics." Is it not obvious that Cobban prefers Hamas to Israel? And by the way, Cobban is "agnostic" on a two-state solution -- a one-state solution, i.e. the end of Israel as a Jewish Democracy, would be fine with her, too.

Other greatest hits from Cobban include calling Tony Blair a "dishonest schmuck" -- apparently he's nothing like the great and self-restrained Sheikh Yassin. Or how about demanding that Obama withhold aid to Israel until Israel complies with the Goldstone commissions recommendations. Or, my personal favorite, Cobban's write-up of the recent flap over a Swedish newspaper that alleged Israel was harvesting the organs of Palestinians. In the face of this new spin on the old blood libel, Cobban declares "there are a lot more dimensions to this story that I want to look at."

Is this -- comparing Israel to Nazi Germany, praising Hamas, trafficking in blood libel -- what passes for pro-Israel on J Street?

Steve Clemons is very excited that Kadima Party chief Tzipi Livni has sent "a knock-the-ball-out-of-the-park...letter of affirmation to J Street, recognizing potential differences but affiriming a shared strategic vision for the best interests of Israel." No doubt this is a momentous occasion in the quest for peace, but just a little perspective...

Livni refused to come in person, refused to do a live satellite appearance, refused to do a taped message. Instead she wrote a letter -- and even then she's careful to say that she and J Street do "not agree on everything."

Meanwhile, Media Matters has thrown its support behind J Street and accused one its critics of trying "to destroy careers...sending college kids out to gather negative information about journalists, politicians, rabbis, whatever." Says Ben Smith, "Media Matters, of course, would never 'send college kids out to gather negative information' or keep negative files on people. No, wait. That's its job."

John Kyl says we need to test our nukes.

Donnelly goes on counter-attackerman.

Another former detainee killed in a shootout.

Marty Peretz goes to town on HRW and J Street.

Ludacris at the National Press Club?

Just say no to blasphemy laws.

Momentum in the Virginia race going all in one direction.

Dems expose Bob McDonnell -- he's for the sanctity of marriage and the protection of innocent life:

JTA's Washington bureau chief has become the latest name to disappear from the J Street program in advance of next week's conference. Kampeas was to moderate a panel titled "What does it mean to be pro-Israel?"

When I called Kampeas for comment, he referred me to JTA editor in chief Ami Eden. Eden said that JTA had "started to get a lot of calls about" Kampeas's appearance on the panel. "Some of the people who were calling complained, 'how can he moderate and cover the panel'" at the same time. "To be honest, it's not an issue I usually get complaints about," Eden said, noting that Kampeas has participated in similar events in the past with no objection, but "given the hot button nature of the issue, people started calling up and complaining."

Some of those who called were "concerned we were carrying water for J Street," Eden said. "For sure there were people who have concerns about J Street." While saying repeatedly that he had absolute confidence in Kampeas's ability to maintain his objectivity while moderating a panel at the event, ultimately Eden said it was necessary to be "sensitive to the perception" that Kampeas's participation would undermine JTA's credibility.

With the departure of Kampeas, J Street has now lost five speakers -- the three def poets that they cut for the "use and abuse of Holocaust imagery," Geoff Davis, the Kentucky Republican whose name disappeared from the conference program today and whose office refuses to comment on the matter, and now Kampeas. In addition to the 12 members of Congress who've yanked their support, that's 17 individuals who have either distanced themselves from J Street or have been thrown under the bus by J Street lest they provoke any more controversy. When was the last time a conference saw 17 names dropped from the program in the week before the conference started -- and that doesn't even include the Israeli Ambassador who declined J Street's invitation or Senator John Kerry, who looks likely (but is not certain) to be a no-show.

Dick Cheney that is, who will be speaking at the Center for Security Policy tonight. The speech is a real humdinger. Check back here at 6 for the full text of the former vice president's remarks.

Update: Highlights from the Cheney speech...

Most anyone who is given responsibility in matters of national security quickly comes to appreciate the commitments and structures put in place by others who came before. You deploy a military force that was planned and funded by your predecessors. You inherit relationships with partners and obligations to allies that were first undertaken years and even generations earlier. With the authority you hold for a little while, you have great freedom of action. And whatever course you follow, the essential thing is always to keep commitments, and to leave no doubts about the credibility of your country’s word.

So among my other concerns about the drift of events under the present administration, I consider the abandonment of missile defense in Eastern Europe to be a strategic blunder and a breach of good faith. ...

You hardly have to go back to 1939 to understand why these countries desire – and thought they had – a close and trusting relationship with the United States. Only last year, the Russian Army moved into Georgia, under the orders of a man who regards the collapse of the Soviet Union as the greatest geopolitical disaster of the 20th century. Anybody who has spent much time in that part of the world knows what Vladimir Putin is up to. And those who try placating him, by conceding ground and accommodating his wishes, will get nothing in return but more trouble.

What did the Obama Administration get from Russia for its abandonment of Poland and the Czech Republic, and for its famous “Reset” button? Another deeply flawed election and continued Russian opposition to sanctioning Iran for its pursuit of nuclear weapons.

In the short of it, President Obama’s cancellation of America’s agreements with the Polish and Czech governments was a serious blow to the hopes and aspirations of millions of Europeans. For twenty years, these peoples have done nothing but strive to move closer to us, and to gain the opportunities and security that America offered. These are faithful friends and NATO allies, and they deserve better. The impact of making two NATO allies walk the plank won’t be felt only in Europe. Our friends throughout the world are watching and wondering whether America will abandon them as well.

....

I have long been skeptical of engagement with the current regime in Tehran, but even Iran experts who previously advocated for engagement have changed their tune since the rigged elections this past June and the brutal suppression of Iran's democratic protestors. The administration clearly missed an opportunity to stand with Iran's democrats, whose popular protests represent the greatest challenge to the Islamic Republic since its founding in 1979. Instead, the President has been largely silent about the violent crackdown on Iran's protestors, and has moved blindly forward to engage Iran's authoritarian regime. Unless the Islamic Republic fears real consequences from the United States and the international community, it is hard to see how diplomacy will work.

....

We should all be concerned as well with the direction of policy on Afghanistan. For quite a while, the cause of our military in that country went pretty much unquestioned, even on the left. The effort was routinely praised by way of contrast to Iraq, which many wrote off as a failure until the surge proved them wrong. Now suddenly – and despite our success in Iraq – we’re hearing a drumbeat of defeatism over Afghanistan. These criticisms carry the same air of hopelessness, they offer the same short-sighted arguments for walking away, and they should be summarily rejected for the same reasons of national security.

Having announced his Afghanistan strategy last March, President Obama now seems afraid to make a decision, and unable to provide his commander on the ground with the troops he needs to complete his mission.

President Obama has said he understands the stakes for America. When he announced his new strategy he couched the need to succeed in the starkest possible terms, saying, quote, “If the Afghan government falls to the Taliban – or allows al-Qaeda to go unchallenged – that country will again be a base for terrorists who want to kill as many of our people as they possibly can.” End quote.

Five months later, in August of this year, speaking at the VFW, the President made a promise to America’s armed forces. “I will give you a clear mission,” he said, “defined goals, and the equipment and support you need to get the job done. That’s my commitment to you.”

It’s time for President Obama to make good on his promise. The White House must stop dithering while America’s armed forces are in danger.

Make no mistake, signals of indecision out of Washington hurt our allies and embolden our adversaries. Waffling, while our troops on the ground face an emboldened enemy, endangers them and hurts our cause.

...

Our administration always faced its share of criticism, and from some quarters it was always intense. That was especially so in the later years of our term, when the dangers were as serious as ever, but the sense of general alarm after 9/11 was a fading memory. Part of our responsibility, as we saw it, was not to forget the terrible harm that had been done to America … and not to let 9/11 become the prelude to something much bigger and far worse.

Eight years into the effort, one thing we know is that the enemy has spent most of this time on the defensive – and every attempt to strike inside the United States has failed. So you would think that our successors would be going to the intelligence community saying, “How did you did you do it? What were the keys to preventing another attack over that period of time?”

Instead, they’ve chosen a different path entirely – giving in to the angry left, slandering people who did a hard job well, and demagoguing an issue more serious than any other they’ll face in these four years. No one knows just where that path will lead, but I can promise you this: There will always be plenty of us willing to stand up for the policies and the people that have kept this country safe.

On the political left, it will still be asserted that tough interrogations did no good, because this is an article of faith for them, and actual evidence is unwelcome and disregarded. President Obama himself has ruled these methods out, and when he last addressed the subject he filled the air with vague and useless platitudes. His preferred device is to suggest that we could have gotten the same information by other means. We’re invited to think so. But this ignores the hard, inconvenient truth that we did try other means and techniques to elicit information from Khalid Sheikh Muhammed and other al-Qaeda operatives, only turning to enhanced techniques when we failed to produce the actionable intelligence we knew they were withholding. In fact, our intelligence professionals, in urgent circumstances with the highest of stakes, obtained specific information, prevented specific attacks, and saved American lives.

In short, to call enhanced interrogation a program of torture is not only to disregard the program’s legal underpinnings and safeguards. Such accusations are a libel against dedicated professionals who acted honorably and well, in our country’s name and in our country’s cause. What’s more, to completely rule out enhanced interrogation in the future, in favor of half-measures, is unwise in the extreme. In the fight against terrorism, there is no middle ground, and half-measures keep you half exposed.

For all that we’ve lost in this conflict, the United States has never lost its moral bearings – and least of all can that be said of our armed forces and intelligence personnel. They have done right, they have made our country safer, and a lot of Americans are alive today because of them.

The full speech after the jump...

Even the Washington Post is not on board with the Senate's latest efforts to pass ObamaCare:

Senate Majority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.) now says that "we need to fix the Medicare doctors' payments first, outside of health reform" -- thereby allowing $247 billion in new deficit spending to be passed without having to count it against the balance sheet of a Democratic health bill.

This Washington Post editorial doesn't pull many punches in response to Sen. Reid's latest ploy, writing, "This latest maneuver only heightens the fiscal irresponsibility of what already was a fiscal sleight of hand." This, on the heels of the Post's having earlier written that, while the House health bill is full of "budgetary smoke and mirrors," it at least has the virtue of being more "honest" than the Senate bill.

The Founders envisioned the Senate as the more upright and responsible of the two houses. Now here's the majority leader, holding up a credit card in each hand -- one for the "doc fix" and the other for the larger bill that would cost nearly $4 trillion over 20 years, according to the CBO, as I reported in my recent NY Post piece.

The Democrats now seem to think that their best chance to pass ObamaCare is to use the "doc fix" to fix the books. But when even the Washington Post says you are irresponsible, dishonest, and guilty of slights of hand, perhaps it's time to come up with a proposal that you can defend more honestly.

A small bill, anyone?

Kentucky Republican Rep. Geoff Davis had not signed on to J Street's host committee for their conference kicking off later this week, but he was, as of yesterday, listed as a participant in a panel discussion titled "View from the Hill: Congress and the U.S.-Israel Relationship." You can see the cached page from Google here. Today, that same panel is two speakers smaller than it was yesterday -- the names of both Robert Wexler and Geoff Davis have been removed. Wexler is now slated to introduce Jim Jones, the conference's keynote speaker. It's possible that Davis -- as of this morning the only Republican who was associated with the conference other than Louisiana Rep. Charles Boustany -- has dropped out completely. Or maybe he's playing some other role for J Street. THE WEEKLY STANDARD has put several calls into Representative Davis's office to clarify, and we'll update this post if anyone on Davis's staff can find the time to answer the question definitively: Has Davis dropped out of the anti-Israel bash, or is he participating in the conference in some other, as yet unrevealed, capacity?

Look how serious the UN is about the threat from terrorism:

A report by U.N. Special Rapporteur Martin Scheinin that is awaiting approval by the United Nations General Assembly says that security measures taken to detect terrorists "risk unduly penalizing transgender persons whose personal appearance and data are subject to change.”

The report, which was issued August 3, places emphasis on "persons of diverse sexual orientation and gender identities" and recommends that counterterrorism operations be more sensitive to gender issues.

On page 19 the report says: “Enhanced immigration controls that focus attention on male bombers who may be dressing as females to avoid scrutiny make transgender persons susceptible to increased harassment and suspicion.”

So the real problem with suicide bombers hiding their explosive vests under burqas is that it makes tranny terrorists more vulnerable to the truly dangerous racial profiling of professional military and security forces. The Obama administration is creating tranny terrorists faster than they can kill them.

Both Goldfarb and I have offered a collective head scratch over the Obama administration's decision to cut the valuable F-22 Raptor while pouring trillions into economic black holes. Lockheed's F-22 program was a nexus for tens of thousands of defense manufacturing jobs, the preservation of which was the entire point of the hyper-expensive stimulus bill. Now, according to former Secretary of the Air Force Michael Wynne, axing the Raptor will have a destructive ripple effect throughout the entire defense manufacturing world, killing even more jobs, closing production plants, and ultimately hiking up the price of weapon systems like the Joint Strike Fighter (the much-touted F-16 replacement that is years away from operational deployment) and F-18 Super Hornet.

So Obama makes a decision that strategically weakens our posture against peer/near peer competitors, kills thousands of jobs, and drives up the price of everything from titanium to the military's workhorse C-130 Hercules. Weapons development should be focused purely on strategic threats instead of job creation/preservation, but slashing the F-22 makes little sense in either scenario -- particularly at a time when billions are pumped into failing auto manufacturers and mortgage companies.

If, as Obama has said, he accepts the (formerly? arguably?) prestigious Nobel Peace Prize on the international stage on behalf of "American values" and "leadership," is he not violating a central part of his world view and plan for global betterment, as expressed in his speech at the UN in September?

“No world order that elevates one nation or group of people over another will succeed.”

If he is not accepting it for his own accomplishments, then he is endorsing the elevation of the promise, leadership and possibility of America over other nations. Surely he doesn't think that kind of world will succeed.

He should rebuke the Nobel committee for its misplaced belief in American exceptionalism. As a wise man once said, “No one nation can or should try to dominate another nation...In an era when our destiny is shared, power is no longer a zero sum game.”

Participation ribbons for all countries!

Kevin Coval and Josh Healey, the two poets cut from the J Street conference for what J Street director Jeremy Ben-Ami described as "the use and abuse of Holocaust imagery and metaphors," put out a statement:

When he called
My jaw dropped, my eyes welled and I found my pen.
Welcome to the new blacklist.
I write the names of the censored, the silenced, the forgotten the J Street capo has handed my name to the new Jew Gestapo I read my words distorted by neocon distorters.
But will my people, my Jewish people, my Palestinian people hear me. On my terms. On my panel.
What have you done with Rabbi Nachman?

Just kidding. Unfortunately their response was not offered in verse. The actual statement follows after the jump, but it is worth reproducing the final graph above the fold here. They ask, "Progressive American Jews where you at? Holla at us! For real: jewsthatareleft@gmail.com. Let’s reshape the conversation. Let’s build a minyan, a coalition of progressive Jews and gentiles who want what is just and right for ALL people and all people in Israel and Palestine." By all means, any Jews who wish to make Israel a pariah in the international community not through divestment or economic boycotts but through mad def rhymes -- here's your chance to build a minyan.

The actual statement after the jump...

Gov. Paterson deals with the tough choices the federal government doesn't ever make: "I promise I will put (the soda tax) back in my budget address and give the Legislature another chance to do it," Paterson said during an interview on WNYC. "But you can’t keep voting down the ways to create revenues and then saying you don’t want to make cuts."

Most ethical Congress in history now locking Republicans out of the Government Oversight committee room because they're demanding uncomfortable votes on sweetheart mortgage deals. “Because they [Republicans] don’t know how to behave,” Towns said in a statement to POLITICO.

All right, who's gonna leak Paul Ryan shirtless pictures to go with my Flake pics? “When I saw Paul Ryan — man, he’s gotten in great shape. He doesn’t have a six-pack; he’s got, like, a 12-pack,” Brady, a Texas Republican, says of his fellow GOP-er, who hails from Wisconsin.

Dems are planning to stay home in Virginia Nov. 3.

"Young men who voted for either McCain or Barr suffered immediate drops in their testosterone levels after the election results were announced." So, Dem wins create more Dems, huh? Vicious cycle.

The Va. gubernatorial race is now officially an Obama referendum, thanks to new Deeds ad.

Our banana republic finances: "Two examples — one ridiculously expensive, one just ridiculous. But both reveal a nation completely unwilling to deal with current trillion-dollar deficits or long-term shortfalls many multiples of that number."

The opposition: "Non-Maine Republicans object to the Senate Finance bill for three substantive reasons that will be difficult to address without fundamentally changing the direction of reform."

"I thought the government plan was dead," Thune said. "I don't think that anymore."

Another congressman has pulled his name from J Street's host committee -- Rep. Brian P. Bilbray (R-CA). Bilbray's office called THE WEEKLY STANDARD last night to say they were dropping their support for the event, bringing the total number of congressmen to bail to a dozen even. I've spoken with staffers for most of these members, and all of them had pretty much the same story. They signed up their bosses when they were told the group was "pro-Israel" and that nothing -- not even an appearance -- would be expected of the member himself. As these members found out who the speakers at this conference were, as they found out the positions this group supports (against sanctions on Iran and for engagement with Hamas), they took their names off the list.

Last night I went to the annual conference of the National Jewish Democratic Council -- the Democratic equivalent of the Republican Jewish Coalition. I had the chance while I was there to speak with a number of congressmen and leaders of the Jewish left. Some defended J Street. Rep. John Yarmuth (D-KY) said that while he was "not going to defend every speaker," he did "think it presents a different position." Of course, he admitted that position was not his own. "I actually support sanctions on Iran," Yarmuth said.

Rep. Chellie Pingree (D-ME) was also happy to be on J Street's list. "They've been a supporter of mine," she said, and that's good enough for the congresswoman from Maine. When told that one of the keynote speakers at the event had blamed Israel for the 9/11 attacks, Pingree said "I definitely would look into that--that sounds a little bit harsh to me." You think?

And then there was Senator Bob Casey. He's on the J Street list, and yet he has no idea what J Street is. When I asked him whether his serving on the host committee should be construed as an endorsement of either the organization or its positions, he looked like a deer in the headlights. He was not ducking the question, he had just never heard of J Street before. "It's possible that our staff has done something about it that I'm not aware of," Casey said. But when pressed on the actual issues, Casey knew exactly what he was talking about. Casey noted that he is a "cosponsor of one of the leading bills [Lieberman-Bayh-Kyl] moving forward with sanctions," and he said that U.S. divestment in Iran is "critically important." If it's so critically important, why did Casey's staff add his name to the host committee for an organization that opposes sanctions?

One Jewish Democratic operative who would speak only on background said "When I saw 160 members, I thought "you're going to lose some of them.'" Of the 145 odd members who remain on the list, the operative said "I don't think it an endorsement of the positions" that J Street has taken. J Street is "still playing Single A ball," he said. "They have a long ways to go." As for the NJDC affair last night, the crowd was small and the press was outnumbered by members of Congress by at least 4 to 1. Steny Hoyer and Al Franken spoke among others, the atmosphere was collegial and friendly. At the J Street event, there could be 15 reporters for every member of Congress who makes an appearance. NJDC may not be a media darling, but their influence was obvious. If this is the measure of an effective Jewish organization, J Street indeed isn't playing in the same league.

The Scozzafava campaign has retracted spokesman Matt Burns' earlier accusation that WEEKLY STANDARD reporter John McCormack "screamed questions (in-your-face-style)" at NY-23 Republican candidate Dede Scozzafava. The raucous behavior the campaign claimed prompted them to call the police on McCormack Monday didn't happen, according to the reporter's audio recording, reported on by the Associated Press:

In the audio recording of the reporter's questioning played for The Associated Press by McCormack, the reporter didn't raise his voice, but repeated his unanswered questions several times, including one about abortion.

"I never screamed, I never yelled, I never shouted," he said. "My voice was only loud enough so she could hear my questions."

In a statement released Tuesday to the blog Politico, Scozzafava's campaign said the reporter "repeatedly screamed questions (in-your-face-style)," but later issued a statement deleting the accusation.

Today, the campaign leaked an e-mail exchange between Burns and McCormack to the liberal blog Talking Points Memo. Left-wing blogger Markos Moulitsas and the National Review find themselves in a rare moment of complete agreement that the e-mails do nothing to make McCormack look bad (or the Scozzafava campaign look good, for that matter).

The Washington Times editorializes: "Dede's police state"

Senator Lamar Alexander is set to deliver the following remarks on the floor of the Senate in just a few minutes, pleading with the president to take a less adversarial approach in his dealings with Congress, the media, and American industry and banks. "As any veteran of the Nixon White House can attest, we’ve been down this road before and it won’t end well. An 'enemies list' only denigrates the Presidency and the Republic itself," Alexander will say. An excerpt of the remarks follows, and the full text of his floor speech is available after the jump:

According to Politico, the White House plans to “neuter the United States Chamber of Commerce,” an organization with members in almost every major community in America. The Chamber had supported the President’s stimulus package and some of his early appointments, but has problems with his health care and climate change proposals.

The Department of Health and Human Services imposed a gag order on a large health care company, Humana, who had warned its Medicare Advantage customers that their benefits might be reduced in Democratic health care reform proposals—a piece of information that is perfectly true. This gag order was lifted only after the Republican leader, Sen. Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, said he would block any future nominees to the Department until the matter was righted.

The White House Communications director recently announced that the administration would treat a major television network, Fox News, as “part of the Opposition.” On Sunday White House officials were all over talk shows urging other news organizations to “boycott” Fox and not pick up any of its stories. Those stories, for example, would include the video that two amateur filmmakers made of ACORN representatives explaining how to open a brothel. That’s a story other media managed to ignore until almost a week later when Congress decided to cut ACORN’s funding.

The President has not stopped blaming banks and investment houses for the financial meltdown even as it has become clear that Congress played a huge role, too, by encouraging Americans to borrow money for houses they couldn’t afford.

He was “taking names” of bondholders who resisted the GM and Chrysler bailouts.

Insurance companies, once the allies of the Obama health care proposal, have suddenly become the source of all our health care problems—because they pointed out, again correctly, that if Congress taxes insurance premiums and restricts coverage to those who are sicker and older, the cost of premiums for millions of Americans is likely to go up instead of down.

Because of that insubordination, the President and his allies have threatened to take away the insurance companies antitrust exemption.

Even those of us in Congress have found ourselves in the crosshairs:

The assistant Republican leader, Sen. John Kyl of Arizona, said to ABC’s George Stephanopoulos that the stimulus plan wasn’t working. The White House wrote the governor of Arizona and said, “If you don’t want the money, we won’t send it.” Sen. McCain said that this could be perceived as a threat to the people of Arizona.

Sen. Bennett of Utah and Sen. Collins and I as well as Democratic Senators Byrd and Feingold all have questioned the number and power of the 18 new White House czars who are not confirmed by the Senate and have suggested that is a threat to constitutional checks and balances. The White House refused to send anyone to testify at congressional hearings. Sen. Bennet and I found ourselves “called out” on the White House blog by the President’s communications director, Anita Dunn.

Even the president, in his address to Congress on health care, threatened to “call out” members of congress who disagreed with him.

This behavior is typical of street brawls and political campaign consultants. It is a mistake for the President of the United States and the White House staff.

If the President and his top aides treat people with different views as enemies instead of listening to what they have to say, they’re likely to end up with a narrow view and a feeling that the whole world is out to get them. And as those of use who served in the Nixon administration know, that can get you into a lot of trouble.

This administration is only ten months old. It’s not too late to take a different approach – both at the White House and here in the Congress.

Pakistani Taliban in the crosshairs.

The problem with half-measures in Afghanistan.

The long road to indecision on Afghanistan.

Lenny Ben-David has some questions for Jeremy Ben-Ami.

Is Ron Kampeas saying J Street is an obstacle to peace?

It has been a rough couple of months for Human Rights Watch. The organization's reputation has taken so many hits of late— all of its own making—that its founder Bob Bernstein has taken to the pages of the New York Times to voice his serious concern.

I must do something that I never anticipated: I must publicly join the group’s critics. Human Rights Watch had as its original mission to pry open closed societies, advocate basic freedoms and support dissenters. But recently it has been issuing reports on the Israeli-Arab conflict that are helping those who wish to turn Israel into a pariah state.

Bernstein sticks to HRW's disproportionate number of reports on free, democratic Israel's sins versus its light treatment of the rest of the Middle East. He paints a tragic picture of dereliction of duty to the people of the Middle East who could really use HRW's watchful eye on their governments:

Israel, with a population of 7.4 million, is home to at least 80 human rights organizations, a vibrant free press, a democratically elected government, a judiciary that frequently rules against the government, a politically active academia, multiple political parties and, judging by the amount of news coverage, probably more journalists per capita than any other country in the world — many of whom are there expressly to cover the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Meanwhile, the Arab and Iranian regimes rule over some 350 million people, and most remain brutal, closed and autocratic, permitting little or no internal dissent. The plight of their citizens who would most benefit from the kind of attention a large and well-financed international human rights organization can provide is being ignored as Human Rights Watch’s Middle East division prepares report after report on Israel.

Bernstein doesn't mention it, but recent news stories on the organization's senior Middle East employee Sarah Leah Whitson, reveal that she was gathering money in human-rights deficient Saudi Arabia based on the strength of "report after report" on Israel.

Bernstein makes the distinction that HRW has ceased to make between closed and open societies in the region.

At Human Rights Watch, we always recognized that open, democratic societies have faults and commit abuses. But we saw that they have the ability to correct them — through vigorous public debate, an adversarial press and many other mechanisms that encourage reform.

That is why we sought to draw a sharp line between the democratic and nondemocratic worlds, in an effort to create clarity in human rights. We wanted to prevent the Soviet Union and its followers from playing a moral equivalence game with the West and to encourage liberalization by drawing attention to dissidents like Andrei Sakharov, Natan Sharansky and those in the Soviet gulag — and the millions in China’s laogai, or labor camps.

That distinction, which was central to the original HRW mission, was meant to discourage a "moral equivalence game" which closed societies could use to excuse and obscure their own sins even further. Unfortunately, that game is now the favorite past time of many human-rights watchers (You know, when they're not collecting Nazi memorabilia.), and the hallmark of HRW reporting on the Middle East.

Bernstein lays out what is truly at stake for the organization he formed:

Only by returning to its founding mission and the spirit of humility that animated it can Human Rights Watch resurrect itself as a moral force in the Middle East and throughout the world. If it fails to do that, its credibility will be seriously undermined and its important role in the world significantly diminished.

It's worth reading the whole thing to see just how far the organization has drifted from its ethical moorings.

Regarding the large number of senators and representatives who seem to have ended up on J Street's host committee without their knowledge (a not insignificant portion of the dozen or so who have now pulled their names off the list), the group's spokesmen have offered a fairly consistent defense. We saw it again today in Glenn Thrush's report that John Kerry had bailed on what J Street was billing as a keynote address:

“As happens in putting together events like this, the list of hosts changed constantly over several months. Names were added and deleted, and decisions on participation changed regularly,” J Street’s Director of Strategy & Policy Hadar Susskind told POLITICO.

“We made every effort to ensure the accuracy of the list.”

Have they really made every effort? Ben Smith reports that J Street today resent an invitation for their Tuesday night "Gala Dinner" to members of Congress because "the wrong paper was used for the initial printing making it very difficult to read." As Smith notes, "the list, needless to say, includes Gillibrand, Castle, and all the other dropouts." Is it just another self-inflicted wound for J Street, or is it more devious? Probably the former -- the simplest explanation is usually correct.

Cable guy Josh Rogin quoted J Street director Jeremy Ben-Ami last week on the controversy surrounding the group's inaugural conference that kicks off next week:

"We are at the center of debate and controversy after only 18 months, and this is a real impact and a success," he said, adding, "We are winning."

This screen shot shows news aggregation site Memeorandum as of just moments ago. If this is what winning looks like...

The White House battle with Fox News, which Fox's direct competitors have already been forced to cover, has now become a press pool question, via another competitor—ABC.

Helen Thomas, the New York Times and The Nation have all declared the fight a dumb one. But the administration tried to infuse it with strategic importance this morning:

...Most of all, get other journalists to think twice before following the network’s stories in their own coverage.

"We're doing what we think is important to make sure news is covered as fairly as possible," a White House official told POLITICO, noting how the recent ACORN scandal story started because Fox covered it “breathlessly for weeks on end.”

“And then you had a couple days of breast-beating from The Washington Post and The New York Times about whether or not they were fast enough on the ACORN story,” the official said. “And it's like: Wait a second, guys. Let's make sure that we keep perspective on what are the most important stories, and what's being driven by a network that has a perspective. Being able to make that point has been important.”

But some, including Jake Tapper of ABC apparently, have a different take on this strategy:

To some media observers, it’s almost the definition of a “chilling effect” – a governmental attempt to steer reporters away from negative coverage – but the White House press corps has barely uttered a word of complaint.

Here's where Tapper comes in with what might be deemed an uttered word of complaint:—just about nothing (click through for the whole exchange):

Tapper: It’s escaped none of our notice that the White House has decided in the last few weeks to declare one of our sister organizations “not a news organization” and to tell the rest of us not to treat them like a news organization. Can you explain why it’s appropriate for the White House to decide that a news organization is not one –

(Crosstalk)

Gibbs: Jake, we render, we render an opinion based on some of their coverage and the fairness that, the fairness of that coverage.

Tapper: But that’s a pretty sweeping declaration that they are “not a news organization.” How are they any different from, say –

Gibbs: ABC -

Tapper: ABC. MSNBC. Univision. I mean how are they any different?

Gibbs: You and I should watch sometime around 9 o’clock tonight. Or 5 o’clock this afternoon.

Sarah Palin will begin her book tour with an appearance on the O-Lady's show.

A book about the collision between Palin and the media that I happen to like will be out by then, incidentally.

Hat Tip: The Page.

Donald B. Marron writes: "If Congress enacts a $245 billion doctor fix without paying for it, why should anyone believe it would ultimately allow the payment cuts and tax increases included in the health bills?"

That's just a taste of Marron's excellent blog entry on the "Medicare Doctor Fix" over at E21.

You see, Medicare's payment rates are set to decline by more than 20 percent in 2011, and there's no way Congress is about to let that happen. The various House health care reforms restore the cuts completely at a price tag of $245 billion over ten years. The Baucus bill, according to Marron, has a one-year "patch" for $11 billion. But there's a separate Senate bill, sponsored by Debbie Stabenow, which includes a full restoration at a cost of $247 billion.

As Marron points out, while the White House is adamant that health care reform is "paid for," Stabenow's fix is not. "All $245 billion would thus flow straight into our deficits," he writes.

All of which is reason to be skeptical that the Medicare cuts promised under Sen. Baucus's White-House-approved version of health care reform, along with a health bill that actually "bends the cost curve" of Medicare spending, will ever come to pass.

Side Note: E21 is a great clearing-house for research and commentary related to the economic crisis and the future of American economic policy.

The Israeli ambassador has turned down an invitation to speak at J Street's anti-Israel conference because of -- well, "concerns over certain policies of the organization that may impair the interests of Israel." In other words, Oren isn't at all convinced that J Street is pro-Israel. And apparently those same concerns are shared by eleven members of Congress who've asked to have their names removed from any materials associated with the conference. In addition, the organizers of the conference cancelled a panel featuring three poets whose anti-Israel poetry slams even J Street was not prepared to defend. Now Glenn Thrush reports that Senator John Kerry, one of the conferences keynote speakers, has pulled out and will not attend:

J Street, DC’s new left-leaning Israel advocacy group, had hoped to make a big splash with an event in DC next week but the group has been rocked by a wave of defections -- which now includes headliner John Kerry, POLITICO's Meredith Shiner reports....

Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman John Kerry’s name is still is listed on J Street’s web site as one of four keynote speakers at the group’s gala, albeit with an asterisk signifying he was invited but not confirmed.

But he turned down the invitation “weeks ago” due to a prior commitment, according to Kerry spokeswoman Whitney Smith.

“As happens in putting together events like this, the list of hosts changed constantly over several months. Names were added and deleted, and decisions on participation changed regularly,” J Street’s Director of Strategy & Policy Hadar Susskind told POLITICO.

Names have certainly been deleted -- 14 by my count -- but what names have been added? Only one by my reckoning -- General Jim Jones, whom the Obama administration was kind enough to send to the conference in a bid to stop the wave of defections referenced above. Apparently that hasn't worked so well given the fresh wave of dropouts today. Unfortunately for the White House, they were the last ones to board a sinking ship.

The Supreme Court has agreed to hear a plea from Uighurs detained at Guantanamo who are challenging their detention and seeking the right to be released in the U.S. The chain of legal events is as follows.

Last year, a federal appeals court determined that 17 Uighurs were not properly detained at Gitmo. Subsequently, another federal court ruled that they should be freed inside the U.S. The latter ruling was overturned on appeal, meaning the Obama administration had to find another home for them this year, as it has tried to empty Gitmo’s cells. Four former Uighur detainees have since been released in Bermuda. But the attorneys for the remaining 13 Uighurs want the Supreme Court to hear their case. They are arguing that the appellate court’s decision to overturn the order freeing the Uighurs into the U.S. was wrong. They want their clients to have the right to enjoy freedom on American soil.

The Supreme Court will now determine if the courts have the power to free terrorists and terrorist suspects in the U.S.

There are a lot of reasons to be skeptical about the Supreme Court’s ability to get it right here. The principal problem is that this was all set off by a highly flawed ruling by the federal appeals court in Parhat v. Gates.

In determining that Huzaifa Parhat and his comrades were wrongly detained, the court demonstrated not only a fundamental ignorance of Parhat’s particular case, but also his organization as a whole.

Parhat was admittedly trained by a high-ranking al Qaeda terrorist named Abdul Haq. Despite the fact that Parhat and the other Uighur detainees denied any affiliation with al Qaeda, or animosity toward the United States, at least 8 of the 17 who were detained at Gitmo at the beginning of this year admitted that Haq was the head of their group. Haq’s organization is the Turkistan Islamic Party (aka Eastern Turkistan Islamic Movement), which has been designated by both the UN and the United States as an al Qaeda affiliate. The Obama administration subsequently designated Haq as a senior al Qaeda member who sits on al Qaeda’s elite Shura (or consultation) council. Abdul Haq himself has made his allegiances clear.

Despite all of this and more, much of which was known prior to the federal court’s ruling in Parhat v. Gates, the court did not discuss the detainees’ ties to Abdul Haq. There was no discussion of Haq’s al Qaeda ties, or the fact the Uighur detainees were admittedly trained by him and his minions. This training took place at Tora Bora -- a known pre-9/11 stronghold for al Qaeda and the Taliban.

Yet, the Parhat decision is ultimately what set off the chain of events leading to the Supreme Court’s hearing the Uighurs’ case. As a result, al Qaeda-trained terrorists not only have standing to bring suits in American courts, they can also have the most powerful court in this land hear their plea to be freed in the United States.

This is the September 10 mindset -- only worse. Federal courts with no particular knowledge of or expertise in understanding al Qaeda are determining how America’s warriors can fight back. What makes this particularly troubling is that President Obama has cited the courts’ habeas decisions, including the specious Parhat ruling, as a prime reason that Gitmo detainees need to be released or transferred.

We can only hope that the Supreme Court will do a better job than the lower courts have done thus far.

A knotty question. I'd point to their continued support of the Iranian regime's nuclear program, their use of energy reserves to blackmail democratic Eastern Europe, their aggressive export of high-tech weapons to thuggish regimes, disconcerting upgrades to their nuclear forces, chest-thumping assertions of their right to pre-emptively nuke potential adversaries, and -- the icing on the cake -- their surprise invasion of Georgia.

So why, wonders The Huffington Post, do we continue to "poke Russia in the eye" with such appalling behavior as siding with our Georgian ally during the invasion and supporting the fledgling Eastern European democracies?

Here's the bizarre rational: Missile Defense is obstructing Russian support for meaningful UN sanctions on Iran. NATO expansion is betraying our shared interests in stopping the flow of al Qaeda into southern Russian. And supporting Georgia is costing us meaningful Russian cooperation on non-proliferation initiatives. The list of grievances isn't necessarily in that order, but underlined in red is that the current sad state of US-Russian affairs is totally our bad. So much for the reset button.

So in what appears to be an ongoing trend with the online journal, HuffPo allows itself to ignore inconvenient realities: we pulled missile defense unilaterally and received a strong "no" on Iranian sanctions. NATO expansion has largely cooled, not that Russia would ever consider an alliance to jointly combat al Qaeda anyway. They do share intelligence on terrorist targets from time to time, but that has everything to do with their common interest in killing extremists and precisely zero to do with missile defense, NATO expansion, or Georgia. Same goes for non-proliferation initiatives -- they help when it's helpful to them.

This is the same toxic mentality that has polluted this administration's foreign policy from Day 1. If only we concede enough, if only we find the right appeasement calculation, the US and Russia will finally -- after decades of hostility -- become BFFs. It'd be nice if such lofty thinking was grounded, but -- as they say -- reality sucks. Moscow steadily responds to our generous -- if not a bit naive -- goodwill with smug lectures and perfidious lip service to our "common interests." This has been the case since the early days of the Cold War and is unlikely to change. So instead of finding innovative new ways to keel over, the administration should consider a new vector: ditch the reset button. Be strong, purposeful, and -- at times -- hardheaded. It's a proven formula that's worked for every US president (except Carter) since the Truman administration. It'll work for Obama too.

Aside: The author is Gary Hart, who apparently knows as much about the Russians as running a presidential campaign.

On June 3, Rachel Maddow said during her TV show that Rush Limbaugh is the "guy who says the assassin of Martin Luther King, Jr. should get the Medal of Honor."

On Saturday, Sunday, and again Monday, I emailed MSNBC spokespersons asking if Maddow had ever apologized and retracted the remark. (A Nexis search didn't indicate that she had done so.) They didn't reply. Last night, Maddow addressed the issue on the show. An MSNBC spokeswoman emails the transcript from last night (emphasis added):

MADDOW: And finally, a quote falsely attributed to talk show host Rush Limbaugh recently it resurfaced during the debate over whether or not he would or should be part of a group bidding to buy the St. Louis Rams football steam.

On June 3rd, as I was reporting on opposition to then-Supreme Court nominee, Sonia Sotomayor, I was among the people who erroneously referred to the quote if Mr. Limbaugh had said it.

To set the record straight, Rush Limbaugh apparently never said that Martin Luther King Jr.`s assassin should receive the Medal of Honor. And I was in error when we reported that we had. Mea culpa.

THE WEEKLY STANDARD has confirmed that North Carolina Republican Howard Coble has become the latest member of Congress to have his name pulled from the host committee for J Street's inaugural conference. Coble spokesman Ed McDonald said that when Coble was first asked whether he would add his name to the list, he was told it was a "pro-Israel group" and said "no problem." McDonald pointed out that Coble has a "very strong" pro-Israel record and that the district he represents has a sizable Jewish community -- and that community took notice.

"We heard from several of the rabbis back home who called to find out why he was on the list," McDonald said, and "after we learned more about the organization, [we decided] we're uncomfortable with this."

The list of senators and representatives that have withdrawn their names from the host committee now stands at eleven, including both Democratic and Republican members. J Street has also cancelled a panel, rescinding invitations to three speakers whose "use and abuse of Holocaust imagery," first noted on this blog, was deemed potentially "offensive to some conference participants" by J Street director Jeremy Ben-Ami. How many more people will bail on this "pro-Israel" conference before it starts on Sunday?

The full list of members who've pulled their support from J Street:

Sen. Blanche Lincoln (D-AR)
Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY)
Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY)
Sen. Thad Cochran (R-MS)
Rep. Mike Castle (R-DE)
Rep. Mike Ross (D-AR)
Rep. Michael McCaul (R-TX)
Rep. Leonard Boswell (D-IA)
Rep. John Salazar (D-CO)
Rep. Ed Towns (D-NY)
Rep. Howard Coble (R-NC)

My colleague John McCormack called me last night, as I was watching the Phillies-Dodgers game, from his car in a parking lot in Lowville, N.Y. He had attended a Scozzafava campaign event, tried to ask the candidate a few questions -- and the Scozzafava campaign had called the police. John was astonished by this development, as was I -- but of course John cooperated courteously with the police officer, and then wrote up his experience straightforwardly and accurately.

Now the Scozzafava campaign accuses John of “a complete lack of decency” and of behaving in a “reprehensible” way. This is ludicrous. Needless to say, the police found nothing amiss. Moreover, the fact is that John didn’t interrupt a conversation between Ms. Scozzafava and voters -- she wasn’t talking to voters when John approached her. Nor did John “scream,” nor did he get “in the face” of the candidate -- he was at least ten feet away from her in the parking lot, partly because a Scozzafava staffer interposed himself as John tried to ask substantive public policy questions of Ms. Scozzafava. The notion that John intended to “follow her home” is of course risible.

Let me emphasize: I have full confidence in the truth of John’s account. And I won’t allow a desperate campaign to try to tarnish the fine reputation John has built as a fair and accurate reporter -- and, for that matter, a very decent and mild-mannered young man.

As it happens, I was standing near John’s desk in the office this past Friday. The phone rang. It was Scozzafava campaign spokesman Matt Burns, who didn’t like something John had reported, and started yelling abusively at him the moment he answered the phone. We could hear Mr. Burns ten feet away. I gather Mr. Burns called later to apologize. I suppose John would accept another apology by the Scozzafava campaign. But it really would be better not to start down the road of berating reporters for accurately reporting the facts, or of calling the police when your candidate doesn’t like the questions reporters are asking.

No worries. You can finish reading the Baucus bill in just under a week, as long as you read for eight hours a day.

Wah.

Only 34 percent of Californians approve of Pelosi's job performance, which explains why the Cult of Competence presidency put her in charge of crafting his major legislation.

Perhaps the single best thing the Democratic administration has done for the economy thus far.

The Obama campaign and the press, in one Anita Dunn quote: "Very rarely did we communicate through the press anything that we didn't absolutely control," Dunn said.

Murtha challenger is raking in big bucks. (And, they're given voluntarily by private citizens, not siphoned from taxpayer funds via legislative favor-trading.)

The White House is still fighting with Fox.

A run-off in Afghanistan.

No, really. Trust the federal government to run a health-care program efficiently and honestly.

Does Obama believe in human rights?

Landscape shift means more trouble for House Dems.

Lowville, N.Y.
Tonight, Dede Scozzafava, the Republican candidate for the November 3 special election in the 23rd congressional district, spoke to about 100 Republicans at the Lewis County GOP dinner at the Elks Lodge 1605. After a dinner of turkey, mashed potatoes, and stuffing, Scozzafava fended off criticism that she wasn't as conservative as third-party candidate Doug Hoffman and urged her supporters to vote for her in order to keep her Democratic opponent Bill Owens from serving as a rubber stamp for Nancy Pelosi and Barack Obama's agenda in Washington. It was a fairly typical evening--until the speech ended and someone with Scozzafava's campaign called the police. On me.

Earlier today Lindsay Beyerstein reported that Scozzafava responded to an AFL-CIO questionnaire by saying she would support card-check legislation that eliminates the secret ballot requirement for organizing unions. As Beyerstein notes, this contradict statements made by a Scozzafava spokesman in September.

So after the dinner, I asked Assemblywoman Scozzafava if she supports card check. "Yes, yes I do," she replied.

At that point someone from her campaign placed himself between Scozzafava and me and told me I should direct all my inquires to the campaign's spokesman. I nonetheless asked Scozzafava if her signing of the Americans for Tax Reform pledge not to vote to raise taxes means she would oppose any health care bill that raises taxes. "What kind of taxes?" she replied. Then another couple of gentlemen interposed themselves between Scozzafava and me as Scozzafava headed for the door.

I spotted Scozzafava later as she was walking to the parking lot, and asked her: " Assemblywoman, do you believe that the health-care bill should exclude coverage for abortion?" She didn't reply. I asked her twice more. Silence.

After she got into her car, I went to my car and fired up my laptop to report the evening's events.

Minutes later a police car drove into the parking lot with its lights flashing. Officer Grolman informed me that she was called because "there was a little bit of an uncomfortable situation" and then took down my name, date of birth, and address.

"Maybe we do things a little differently here, but you know, persistence in that area, you scared the candidate a little bit," Officer Grolman told me.

"[Scozzafava] got startled, that's all," Officer Grolman added. "It's not like you're in any trouble."

That was good to hear.

But I do wonder if it’s the Scozzafava campaign that’s in trouble--with a candidate who supports card check, who is unwilling to say she’d oppose a health care bill that raises taxes or includes abortion coverage, and who is so reluctant to answer questions that she has someone with her campaign call the cops when she’s questioned by a reporter who is (if I may say so) polite--if a bit persistent.

Why is J Street cancelling an anti-Israel poetry slam at their conference? Could it be White House pressure? According to a statement from J Street director Jeremy Ben-Ami to Ben Smith, the poetry slam was cancelled because,

as J Street is critical of the use and abuse of Holocaust imagery and metaphors by politicians and pundits on the right, it would be inappropriate for us to feature poets at our Conference whose poetry has used such imagery in the past and might also be offensive to some conference participants.

We are sorry for any distraction that this issue may cause for those interested in working with us to advance the cause of peace and security for Israel and the Middle East.

So Ben-Ami apparently wasn't offended by the imagery in Josh Healey's poem Queer Intifada -- it's just that someone else might be offended. Ben-Ami can condemn THE WEEKLY STANDARD, but he can't condemn Richard Goldstone's UN report, and he can't condemn a speaker at his own conference who compares Gaza to Auschwitz.

And who is it at the J Street conference who would be offended? I've yet to hear any complaint from the left-wingers who are scheduled to speak at the event. Maybe, instead, it would be offensive -- or at least embarassing -- to the keynote speaker, General Jim Jones?

Look at the sequence of events: on Friday J Street announces Jones will speak at the conference, an hour later THE WEEKLY STANDARD posts the video of Healey performing Queer Intifada, and by Sunday they'd canceled the event. Or maybe it wasn't Healey but his fellow panelist, Kevin Coval, seen here calling Israel a "whore," that someone was worried about. The "pro-Israel, pro-peace" lobby might have been even more worried about the following video in which Coval, just a few seconds into the interview and out of nowhere, says he wants to "kick Joe Lieberman in the face." I doubt we'd ever find a video of a J Street conference speaker saying he wanted to do violence to the leaders of Hamas or Hezbollah, but Lieberman -- even "pro-peace" has its limits.

Yesterday, in light of Rahm Emanuel’s comments on delaying the decision on troops for Afghanistan, I asked: “Are Sunday talk show declarations by Emanuel and political advisor David Axelrod an appropriate way to announce the considered judgment of the president at this stage of a long Cabinet-level review process? Or is Emanuel end-running the process? Do Secretaries Gates and Clinton agree with Emanuel? Were they consulted before Rahm popped off?”

I’ve now been told by an authoritative source close to Defense Secretary Robert Gates that he had no advance warning that Emanuel would be saying any such thing.

Update: A former government official e-mails:

Sen. McCain and other supporters of the effort in Afghanistan have feared from the beginning of this process that Whie House politicos were trying to get the pesky military out of the policy loop. Now it appears they are bypassing even the SecDef. Its hard to think of another time when the White House chief of staff and politicos were making policy so independently of the national security team, in this case apparently excluding the SecDef, SecState, and the Chairman of the JCS. (The otherwise weak nationanl security advisor retired General Jim Jones serves only one purpose here: to provide a shield for the politicos to reject military advice.)

Maybe it all turns out well in the end, but it's an interesting indication of how this administration runs foreign policy. Hope Hillary and Gates and the Joint Chiefs enjoy the ride.

Jeffrey H. Anderson looks at the Census tables and comes up with a surprising figure:

The Census is the source for the much-cited figure of 46 million uninsured. Yet the very same table plainly indicates that 9 million of those are not US citizens. That leaves 37 million uninsured who are Americans.

But there's more. In the same document, the Census also plainly states that "health-insurance coverage is underreported" in its survey. When it cross-checked its survey results with the official Medicaid rolls, it found that 16.9 percent of those on Medicaid had claimed on their Census forms that they were uninsured. That 16.9 percent amounts to 9 million people.

So the actual tally, according to the most authoritative source we have, is just 28 million uninsured citizens (46 million minus 9 million non-citizens, minus 9 million on Medicaid who were falsely recorded as uninsured).

To be more exact, it leaves 28,157,000 uninsured out of a total of 280,209,000. That leaves us with 90 percent of American citizens covered by insurance, according to the Census.

Anderson's "small bill" alternative to Obamacare, which Ross Douthat linked to in his column today, can be found here.

Close on the heels of his shock over the resolution issuing from the Human Rights Council last week that ignores Hamas’s cowardly barbarity and demands a referral to the International Court of Justice of a non-cooperative Israel, Richard Goldstone materializes in the pages of the Jerusalem Post to explain himself.

First, some background self-adulation: “Over the past 20 years, I have investigated serious violations of international law in my own country, South Africa, in the former Yugoslavia, in Rwanda and the alleged fraud and theft by governments and political leaders in a number of countries in connection with the United Nations Iraq Oil for Food program.”

In every instance, I spoke out strongly in favor of full investigations and, where appropriate, criminal prosecutions. I have spoken out over the years on behalf of the International Bar Association against human rights violations in many countries, including Sri Lanka, China, Russia, Iran, Zimbabwe and Pakistan.

After which, in a pattern that repeats itself throughout, more congratulating of himself and a good deal of blaming of the victim, whose long and unhappy history with the “even-handedness” of the UN he acknowledges in passing before dismissing it: his involvement would have guaranteed a fair hearing for the Jewish State where none had ever come before, but Israel’s refusal to cooperate with his investigation made such impossible:

I was aware of and have frequently spoken out against the unfair and exceptional treatment of Israel by the UN and especially by the Human Rights Council. . . . Israel could have seized the opportunity provided by the even-handed mandate of our mission and used it as a precedent for a new direction by the United Nations in the Middle East. Instead, we were shut out.

In the annals of self-justification Lawyer Goldstone’s “I would have been acting against those principles [of speaking out against violations of international law everywhere] and my own convictions and conscience if I had refused a request from the United Nations to investigate serious allegations of war crimes against both Israel and Hamas in the context of Operation Cast Lead” is not as repugnant as “I was only following orders,” or as nauseating, so to say, as the Stalinist Sartre’s vile Franco-philosophical rationalizing after the Soviet invasion of Hungary. But it’s pretty damn disgusting.

My advice: Go away, now, Mr. Goldstone, and dry your crocodile tears on the sleeve of Khaled Meshaal.

Ross Douthat’s column in the New York Times, titled The Catastrophic Option, got right the purpose of insurance -– to protect people against bankrupting expenses. However his definition of a catastrophic plan as one that “would seek to insure Americans only against costs that exceed a certain percentage of their income” is actually a recipe for high-priced catastrophic coverage -– whether provided by the government or a private insurance policy.

In order for catastrophic coverage to be inexpensive, it needs to be cumulative and paired with a savings component. Imagine a man who was very healthy and never went to a doctor or had a medical expense until the day before he turned 65 and then fell ill and needed $250,000 in treatment.

If a catastrophic plan will pay this bill because it exceeds some percentage of that man’s income on that particular year -- ignoring the fact that he has never paid a dime in medical bills -- the policy will be unnecessarily expensive.

In contrast, if we came to a conclusion that everyone should be required to pay, say, $100 a month toward his own medical care starting at age 18 and our catastrophic policy should cover anything over this $100 a month plus compound interest, the results are startling.

Forty-seven years of compounding $100 a month at, say, 8 percent would give our sick 64-year-old a medical savings account of $621,237.73 to pay his own bill. This not only would keep the cost of catastrophic coverage way down, it would more fairly hold people responsible for reasonable contributions to the cost of their own health care.

Over the weekend, Sen. John Kerry provided some covering fire for President Obama’s dithering about his strategy for Afghanistan, telling CBS News that:

"I don't see how President Obama can make a decision about the committing of our additional forces or even the further fulfillment of our mission that's here today without an adequate government in place or knowledge about what that government's going to be."

Although he reportedly does not support Vice President Biden’s counterterrorism strategy, Kerry also argued that troops alone are not the answer:

"Counting the numbers of troops is not going to define our success here . . . There is no military success ultimately to Afghanistan. The Afghans themselves are going to define what happens here and we have to convince ourselves that we have a strategy in place that empowers them to do that and that is realistic in what our expectations are from them and on what schedule."

It seems that Kerry has joined the ranks of Democrats who were for properly resourcing the war in Afghanistan before they were against it. In a passionate 2006 speech at Howard University, Kerry took the Bush administration to task for its focus on Iraq instead of Afghanistan, saying:

Neither can the Administration pretend that the war in Afghanistan is over or that the peace has been secured. The truth is, we are slipping dangerously backwards by the day.

The central front in the war on terror is still in Afghanistan, but this Administration treats it like a sideshow. When did denying al Qaeda a terrorist stronghold in Afghanistan stop being an urgent American priority? How did we end up with seven times more troops in Iraq -- which even the Administration now admits had nothing to do with 9/11 -- than in Afghanistan, where the killers still roam free? Why is the Administration sending thousands more American troops into the crossfire of a civil war in Iraq but we can’t find any more troops to fight the Taliban in Afghanistan?

You could get whiplash watching the Administration policy on Afghanistan change from day to day. On Sunday, asked which of the 26 countries in the alliance were dragging their feet in Afghanistan, NATO’s top commander General James Jones, a four-star general and former commandant of the U.S. Marine Corps, replied, “All of them.” Tuesday, Secretary Rice said we’ll “pay for it” if Afghanistan again devolves into a terrorist stronghold. But just yesterday the Administration refused to heed its own warnings and refused to send the troops the commanders on the ground said we needed. That is both a tragedy and a scandal. And today? Silence.

The Administration’s Afghanistan policy defines cut and run. Cut and run while the Taliban-led insurgency is running amok across entire regions of the country. Cut and run while Osama bin Laden and his henchmen hide and plot in a lawless no-man’s land. Cut and run even as we learn from Pakistani intelligence that the mastermind of the most recent attempt to blow up American airliners was an al Qaeda leader operating from Afghanistan. That’s right – the same killers who attacked us on 9/11 are still plotting attacks against America and they’re still holed up in Afghanistan.

We need a new policy – the one the president promised when we went into Afghanistan in the first place. Where NATO allies have pledged troops and assistance to Afghanistan, they must follow through. But the United States must lead by example by sending in at least five thousand additional American troops. More elite Special Forces troops, the best counter-insurgency units in the world; more civil affairs forces; and more experienced intelligence units. More predator drones to find the enemy, more helicopters to allow rapid deployments to confront them, and more heavy combat equipment to make sure we can crush the terrorists. And more reconstruction money so that the elected government in Kabul, helped by the United States, not the Taliban helped by al Qaeda, rebuilds the new Afghanistan.

That’s how you win the hearts and minds of the local population, that’s how you win a war on terror, that’s how you show the world the true face of America.

Note that to Kerry, President Bush’s supposed refusal to send the troops his commanders on the ground requested is “both a tragedy and a scandal.” But now the shoe is on the other foot -- President Obama has all of the time in the world to make a decision, and by the way, despite what the commanders tell you, the number of troops isn’t really that important.

This is of course the same John Kerry who, during the first Presidential debate in 2004 accused President Bush of the “colossal error of judgment” of “diverting your attention from the real war on terror in Afghanistan.”

If President Obama decides that reforming healthcare and going into the 2010 mid-terms without a war around his neck are more important than winning in Afghanistan, will Kerry chastise the President for his “colossal error of judgment?”

The most recent book on the senator's reading list? "Twilight."

Despite the overdone campaign criticism of him as old and out-of-touch, McCain's late-night appearances and flair for comedy have always been far, far superior to supposedly hip Obama's.

A press release from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce trumpeting its sudden and surprising flip from opposing to backing climate legislation was too good to check for CNBC and Reuters today.

Last week we noted the appearance of "poet" Josh Healey on the list of speakers for J Street's conference next week. We also posted the video of Healey performing his poem "Queer Intifada," which declares that "Guantanamo is Auschwitz" and "Anne Frank is Matthew Shepard." Healey authored another poem in which he said that Jews were "chosen to recreate our own history," but now "we're the ones writing numbers on the wrists of babies born in the ghetto called Gaza." Suddenly, Healey's name is no longer on the list of speakers at the J Street conference -- disappeared without a trace like the ten members of Congress who dropped off the list of host committee sponsors. And Healey's not the only one who's been disappeared. Kevin Coval and Tracy Soren, the two panelists who were to join him for a session on "culture as a tool for change" have also been dropped from the speakers list.

So an encore performance of Queer Intifada for General Jim Jones -- who apparently won't get to hear it performed live when he gives the keynote speech at J Street's anti-Israel bash next week.

Well, it's not the first time the Grande Liberal Dame of the press corps has had words for the Obama White House, but today Helen Thomas is voicing more unlikely sentiments by telling the White House attack dogs to heel in the Fox News fight.

In an interview with MSNBC, the columnist -- who is promoting her new book on presidents and their campaigns -- also stressed the White House ought to "stay out of these fights."

"They can only take you down. You can't kill the messenger," said Thomas, who has covered every president from John F. Kennedy to Barack Obama.

The New York Times also joined the chorus of folks telling the White House to chill this weekend. The Grey Lady may be in danger of being labeled a "wing of the Republican Party," for using such uncharacteristically sharp language in criticizing the president, but I'm sure they'll scrub the offending parts when the White House rings. In the meantime, enjoy:

Even though almost all the critiques contained a kernel of truth, in each instance the folks who had the barrels of ink, and now pixels, seemed to come out ahead. So far, the only winner in this latest dispute seems to be Fox News. Ratings are up 20 percent this year, and the network basked for a week in the antagonism of a sitting president. ...

It could all be written off as a sideshow, but it may present a genuine problem for Mr. Obama, who took great pains during the campaign to depict himself as being above the fray of over-heated partisan squabbling. In his victory speech he promised, “I will listen to you, especially when we disagree.”

Or not. ...

Tactics aside, something more fundamental is at risk. Even the president’s most avid critics admit he exudes a certain cool confidence. The public impression of him is that if anyone were to, say, talk trash on the basketball court with Mr. Obama, he would not find much space for rent in Mr. Obama’s head. ...

People who work in political communications have pointed out that it is a principle of power dynamics to “punch up “ — that is, to take on bigger foes, not smaller ones. A blog on the White House Web site that uses a “truth-o-meter” against a particular cable news network would not seem to qualify. As it is, Reality Check sounds a bit like the blog of some unemployed guy living in his parents’ basement, not an official communiqué from Pennsylvania Avenue.

The American presidency was conceived as a corrective to the royals, but trading punches with cable shouters seems a bit too common. Perhaps it’s time to restore a little imperiousness to the relationship.

When you've got the Helen Thomas, the NYT, and The Nation lining up against you, it's time to admit defeat, boys. But alas, Axelrod and Emanuel can't help themselves.

A Washington law firm has just issued a press release on its multi-billion dollar class action lawsuit against Turkey regarding domestic property issues in the northern third of Cyprus (aka Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus, or TRNC), which Turkey seized by military force in 1974 and has continued to occupy, currently with 43,000 troops.

It’s unsure how far the case will go--similar cases have been filed before—but, for sure, it has been filed at a sensitive time for Turkey in its glacier-speed accession into the EU. The movement for Turkey's accession has been strengthening lately, but will this case slow down or bring attention to the still-standing complicated issues on property in northern Cyprus?

Furthermore, it’s curious that the case has been filed right after Greece and Cyprus have said that they support Turkey’s accession into the EU. Greece’s new prime minister Georgios Papandreou said in a meeting with government officials in Istanbul that he supported Turkey’s accession, provided that it further reform itself to better align with EU policies. And today, Papandreou started his two-day visit in the capital of Cyprus, Nicosia, and has already stressed his support for the country’s steady but slow-going efforts to reunify the island—and thus, for Turkey’s eventual accession. (One of the preconditions to joining that the EU has set for Turkey is the island’s reunification, which the leaders of both sides of the island have been working toward in steady, but slow-going weekly talks since 2008.)

We'll see how this plays out.

The press release below, in full:

Here's a sharp take on Obama's strange decision to hold off the troop decision until after Afghanistan's runoff election. A Marine Lt Col serving in Afghanistan writes:

We have here a conundrum: sorting out the clear and fair winner of an election, according to the law, is of course the proper thing to do. However, we also need to recognize the practical consequences and understand what is probably going to happen in the interim. In my view, the runoff is going to put the brakes temporarily on strategic progress. The loss of time and momentum will, we hope, be worth the tradeoff if the process and the result is seen as putting a lid on an open question. In another country, the stability of institutions would be enough to carry the people through the period of uncertainty; here, it don't work that way. Not yet.

Also, nothing happens quickly in Afghanistan. Nor should we expect it to. Honestly, could we squat down and shit out a do-over election on any level above the local, in a matter of weeks? I don't think so. These folks can't either. I've seen one news report that hoped for a run-off "before winter sets in." Ha! Forget it. Talk about a "winter of discontent..."

The end result is that we've got a problem. Our proper and correct insistence on a clear and fair process will have an unintended, perverse (hopefully short-term) effect on the stability and security of the people for whom we are seeking the clear and fair results. That calls for leadership and unwavering firmness. As for the latter, I believe that every man on the ground here is ready to keep at it. If you are too, make your voice heard. A lot is at stake.

You can sense the frustration. An elite cadre of professionals is on the ground in Afghanistan, all of whom believe this Afghanistan business is winnable, if they're properly resourced. Now their Commander-in-Chief is dropping lame excuses on the one demographic that knows exactly what "delaying until after the runoff election" means. My Lt Col friend is courteous and diplomatic about Obama's dangerous dawdling, but realistically, Marines shouldn't have to be planning contingency actions for emergencies brought on by disastrous wartime leadership.

The Baucus bill sure does a lot of preserving the status quo we've been hearing has to go. Ross Douthat dreams of a catasrophic insurance option, instead of a government-run one.

Sarah Palin gets....wonky? Believe it.

The green-jobs "economy" in Spain costs shows America would stand to lose nine jobs for every four added under similar structure. Paging Van Jones!

The NYT graphics department is now staffed solely by Lisa Frank.

Uh oh. Even Chris Matthews thinks Bill Maher's crazy.

Hope: Shephard Fairey admits lying to bolster his court case against AP.

An interview with Ayaan Hirsi Ali.

Aww, WaPo endorses its trailing Va. gubernatorial candidate.

Trust in the government to make great health-care decisions: "In a city ravaged by the highest rate of AIDS cases in the nation, the D.C. Health Department paid millions to nonprofit groups that delivered substandard services or failed to account for any work at all, even as sick people searched for care or died waiting."

"It would be reckless to make a decision on U.S. troop level if, in fact, you haven't done a thorough analysis of whether, in fact, there's an Afghan partner ready to fill that space that the U.S. troops would create and become a true partner in governing the Afghan country.” -- White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel, on CNN today

On Rahm Emanuel’s use of the unresolved Afghan election as a reason for the Obama administration delaying its decision on Gen. Stanley McChrystal’s request for more troops:

1. It’s bogus. Emanuel, along with Vice President Joe Biden and many others in the White House, was against sending more troops before the current election controversy. The anti-surge forces lost the argument to substitute Biden’s counter-terrorism approach for McChrystal’s (and Obama’s) counter-insurgency strategy. So now Emanuel is reaching for a new excuse to persuade his boss to avoid a politically difficult choice -- or to rationalize his boss’s having decided to duck a politically difficult choice.

2. It’s faux-surprise. President Obama announced his counter-insurgency strategy in Afghanistan on March 27. Richard Holbrooke and the rest of the administration had months to work on the political and diplomatic fronts to bring about a better election process. They failed. Just before the Afghan election, on August 17, when it was perfectly clear there was going to be lots of corruption and cheating, Obama gave a speech reiterating his commitment to winning this “war of necessity.” Now the administration is surprised that the Afghan election wasn’t a thing of beauty, and that the political/governance situation is complex?

3. It’s presumptuous. Wasn’t the White House just complaining about Gen. McChrystal offering his judgment in public while internal administration debates were ongoing? I suppose one can’t say that Emanuel should have confined himself to privately offering his view up the chain of command -- the only person above him is the president. But are we then to conclude Emanuel was speaking for the president today? Are Sunday talk show declarations by Emanuel and political advisor David Axelrod an appropriate way to announce the considered judgment of the president at this stage of a long Cabinet-level review process? Or is Emanuel end-running the process? Do Secretaries Gates and Clinton agree with Emanuel? Were they consulted before Rahm popped off?

4. It’s stupid. If it’s reckless to commit to 108,000 troops without a reliable Afghan partner, it’s reckless to ask 68,000 troops to fight without a reliable Afghan partner. Furthermore, what’s reckless is further delaying the troop deployment orders. If the president issued the order now, he could always delay or revoke it later, if the political situation seemed truly insupportable. But the longer the president delays now, the longer our troops currently in theater are going to be fighting an under-resourced war, until reinforcements come. In addition, our hesitancy about our commitment now increases the odds of our Afghan partners becoming less reliable rather than more so in the future, and less rather than more amenable to our guidance.

In sum: It was Rahm Emanuel’s comments today that were reckless. Obama will have to make a decision about Afghan troop levels without having full confidence that we have a 100 percent wonderful Afghan partner, however the election situation is resolved. To govern is to choose. To let your staff find excuses for dangerous delay is irresponsible.

The Washington Post runs a depressing piece in Outlook today by Patrick Welsh, an Alexandria, Virginia high school English teacher who is struggling with the academic failures of his “virtually all-black class of 12th-graders.” Mr. Welsh, who may risk being dismissed as a racist by the mafia of bad-policy education formulators, and disciplined by school administrators who are in their thrall, argues that you can throw millions of dollars at the problem, like oil onto flames, but until you get parents—and especially fathers—to care about the education and welfare of their children, nothing you do is going to help.

My students knew intuitively that the reason they were lagging academically had nothing to do with race, which is the too-handy explanation for the achievement gap in Alexandria. And it wasn't because the school system had failed them. They knew that excuses about a lack of resources and access just didn't wash at the new, state-of-the-art, $100 million T.C. Williams, where every student is given a laptop and where there is open enrollment in Advanced Placement and honors courses. Rather, it was because their parents just weren't there for them -- at least not in the same way that parents of kids who were doing well tended to be.

Of course, the story of inner-city school failure is nothing new. Pat Moynihan addressed it inter alia in 1965 in “The Negro Family: The Case for National Action,” describing the “deep-seated structural distortions in the life of the Negro American” as a “tangle of pathology” arising from the absence of men from the family structure, and attributing it to the legacy of American slavery, which he called