New rules in an old tug-of-war

In the messiest way possible—quite literally—America is rethinking and remaking the relationship between government and business. Only the latest example is unfolding in Louisiana. Even as oil laps ashore there after leaking from BP PLC's well, souls are being searched in Washington about why regulators didn't prevent the disaster or have a good answer for coping once it hit.


How about a contingency plan? Both the government and the industry (including BP) should have had contingency plans.

President Barack Obama's announcement Thursday of an extended moratorium on new deep-water drilling and suspension of exploration and lease sales elsewhere is only the beginning of a government re-evaluation of its relationship with the offshore oil industry. A presidential commission soon will put the relationship in full therapy.

I highly doubt that the re-evaluation will be comprehensive; lobbying will see to that.

Mr. Obama declared that the whole relationship has been marred by a "cozy and sometimes corrupt relationship" between the oil industry and government regulators, and there's bound to be much discussion of whether there was too little regulation. The better question, though, isn't about quantity but quality: Were regulations and regulators smart and up to date?

Cozy relationships and rotating-door movements between industry and government os the norm, not the exception, and it is pervasive.

Regulators up to date? C'mon. Between calls of socialism when the government tries to make strong rules that work, and underfunding of governmental agencies accompanied by shouts of fiscal prudency and limited government, how the hell can government agnecies be up to date?

The broader point is that the oil spill is just the latest in a series of traumatic events forcing a rethink of government's relationship with business. Bank bailouts, energy plans, auto-maker rescues, Toyota accelerator problems: All have forced both politicians and average Americans to rethink the proper role of government in a private economy.

Rethink? As in calls of socialism, communism, fiscal irresponsibility from the right?

The job nobody wants

President Barack Obama last week fired his intelligence chief, Dennis Blair, without an immediate successor teed up. People familiar with the matter said the White House had expected Mr. Blair would stick around until a replacement was found. Mr Blair declined.

Expected? Is this any way to run a government? It smells of incompetence. The job of DNI was not properly structured, nor its job description defined, leaving the DNI in governmental bureaucratic limbo. But to fire a symbolically important figure and not have a replacement ready is to hand the opposition a bludgeon, and to look incompetent.

Central Intelligence Agency Director Leon Panetta turned down a White House offer to become the next director of national intelligence. Former Republican Sen. Chuck Hagel, co-chairman of the President's Intelligence Advisory Board, was another, they said. A person familiar with Mr. Panetta's thinking said he "finds the job of CIA director rewarding and challenging, and that's where he plans to stay." Mr. Hagel was traveling Wednesday and couldn't be reached for comment, an aide said.

 In the age of cellphones Mr. hagel couldn't be found? Perhaps he didn't want to be found.

"Anybody in their right mind would turn the job down," Missouri Sen. Kit Bond, the top Republican on the Senate intelligence committee, said Wednesday after speaking to National Security Adviser James Jones about the post. Mr. Bond said the post of director of national intelligence lacks authority and presidential support.


Oops, even a Republican thinks so.

Congress established the job in 2004 as a result of the findings of the 9/11 Commission, which identified shortcomings in the coordination of the country's disparate spy agencies. While the intelligence director enjoys titular authority over all intelligence agencies, in practice past directors have had limited control over budget and personnel and found it difficult to impose their will on agencies such as the CIA. Mr. Blair, a retired admiral, was the third director in five years. Intelligence officials said Wednesday that the director's job description was too vague to attract qualified candidates.

Who knows better?

Lawmakers from both parties, including the top two House Republicans, are pressing in a vote Thursday to add $485 million to the defense budget for a fighter-jet engine that the Pentagon says it doesn't want. The White House and Defense Secretary Robert Gates say the backup engine for the next-generation Joint Strike Fighter is a waste of money that will deplete funds for military priorities.

Provincial concerns cloaked in national defense rhetoric show that "It's another classic example of politics being local," said Rep. Jeff Flake, an Arizona Republican who opposes the engine spending. Mr. Flake said supporting the spending undermines Republicans' description of themselves as the party of fiscal responsibility. "If we can't rein in this type of spending now, how are we going to do it later?" Mr. Flake asked.

Ain't.

Kagan Aimed Sights Higher

Elise Amendola/Associated Press

In 2003, Lawrence H. Summers, center, announced Elena Kagan was succeeding Robert C. Clark, left, as dean of Harvard Law.

Her dealings with Mr. Summers — she persuaded him to abandon an unpopular plan to move the law school, kept her distance when he faltered and made no bones about trying to succeed him when he was forced to resign as Harvard’s president — reveal a woman of intense ambition and deft political skills. Their relationship hints as well at Ms. Kagan’s persuasiveness, and how she might operate on a divided Supreme Court, where persuasion often seems in short supply.



May 25, 2010
At Harvard, Kagan Aimed Sights Higher
By SHERYL GAY STOLBERG

WASHINGTON — One Saturday afternoon in March 2003, Lawrence H. Summers invited Elena Kagan for a private chat in the library of Elmwood, the stately clapboard mansion he occupied as the president of Harvard. The two had been close colleagues, if not close friends, as top aides working for President Bill Clinton. But this was no social call.

Mr. Summers, a brilliant but impatient economist with a bull-in-the-china-shop management style, was looking for a new law school dean. Ms. Kagan, a newly tenured professor, was thin on management experience, and her academic writings were relatively scant.

But she was a faculty favorite — her colleagues viewed her as a leader and consensus builder who held sway with the strong-willed university president. Mr. Summers, aware that she had her sights set even higher, accompanied his job offer with a hint of a warning.

“I would say Elena’s colleagues chose her as much as I did,” he said in a recent interview, adding, “I said to her: ‘Elena, if you accept this job and then you are offered a position like Supreme Court justice or attorney general, I will congratulate you with all my heart and wish you well. But we need you to make a commitment to the law school for a few years before taking any other position.’ ”

Now Mr. Summers is President Obama’s top economic adviser, and Ms. Kagan is the president’s Supreme Court nominee. Her dealings with Mr. Summers — she persuaded him to abandon an unpopular plan to move the law school, kept her distance when he faltered and made no bones about trying to succeed him when he was forced to resign as Harvard’s president — reveal a woman of intense ambition and deft political skills. Their relationship hints as well at Ms. Kagan’s persuasiveness, and how she might operate on a divided Supreme Court, where persuasion often seems in short supply.

“He is not someone you can cajole in any way,” Martha L. Minow, the current Harvard Law dean, said of Mr. Summers. “It’s the merits, evidence, substance. It’s not about charm, it’s not about small talk, it’s ‘Just the facts ma’am,’ and build your case and be unbelievably fair-minded about the other case, because he is going to ask you about the other side.”

In the days since Mr. Obama nominated her, much has been made of Ms. Kagan’s tenure as dean, and her top-to-bottom transformation of Harvard Law School. Far less attention has been paid to how she climbed from visiting professor to possible successor to Mr. Summers, the result of relentless networking and a remarkable ability to navigate the treacherous waters of Harvard’s internal politics.

“She is a strategic and deliberative thinker on all issues — there was always a sense of ‘Let me do my homework,’ ” said one colleague, Prof. Charles J. Ogletree Jr. He recalled how, as dean, Ms. Kagan met with every member of the faculty. “She was willing to work seven days a week, it wasn’t just Monday through Friday, 10 to 5, it was whenever people were available — a baseball game, a student reception, a breakfast, a lunch, a coffee.”

Ms. Kagan had been a close ally of Mr. Summers, but she was noticeably silent when he ran into a public relations buzz saw over his impolitic remarks about women’s aptitude for science — remarks that helped cost him his job. Privately, Ms. Kagan told friends and colleagues that she thought the fracas was overblown. But she also resisted entreaties by allies of Mr. Summers to publicly defend him, according to two people familiar with the situation, speaking on condition of anonymity.

One said friends of Mr. Summers viewed her silence as an act of disloyalty, the other said Ms. Kagan simply did not want to drag the law school into the fray. Her style was one of careful balance, said Dennis F. Thompson, a professor of political philosophy.

“She doesn’t avoid getting engaged in issues that are controversial,” he said. “But she doesn’t herself want to be the object of controversy.”

As a Harvard law graduate, Ms. Kagan was no stranger when she arrived in Cambridge, Mass., as a visiting professor in 1999, the year Mr. Summers became Mr. Clinton’s Treasury secretary. The job was “clearly a look-see” said Carol Steiker, a Harvard law professor and close friend of Ms. Kagan’s, with the understanding that she would get tenure if it worked out.

Professor Kagan was an instant hit with students, demanding and energetic, with a self-deprecating wit. She threw herself into the rhythms of faculty life, attending workshops to comment on colleagues’ writings, advising the law review board, having frequent dinners with colleagues.

Among the most contentious issues then facing Harvard was how to expand beyond the confines of Cambridge. The university had been buying up property across the Charles River in the Boston neighborhood of Allston. When Mr. Summers’s predecessor, Neil L. Rudenstine, suggested that the law school move, the law faculty responded by voting against it, 37 to 1.

“It’s rare that anyone here agrees about anything,” Professor Steiker said, “but everyone agreed we didn’t want our campus moved across the river.”

But when Mr. Summers was installed as president in 2001, he put the Allston move back on the table. With the faculty up in arms, the longtime law school dean, Robert C. Clark, asked Ms. Kagan to head a study committee; he thought she had the potential to succeed him as dean and wanted to give her a leadership role. Ms. Kagan, who had just been granted tenure, would be wading into perhaps the most fractious issue at the university.

She seemed to have an instinctive feel for how to build a case that would work with Mr. Summers. “Her approach was to give a rational basis, instead of just an emotional one, for the faculty’s reaction,” Professor Clark said.

She hired a consultant, and persuaded the university to foot the bill, producing a 101-page strategic plan that considered everything from future growth to dormitory space to the intellectual benefits of remaining near the arts and sciences buildings. She made no explicit recommendation, but the study strongly suggested that Allston was far better suited to the biomedical sciences than the law school. The plan was soon dead, and Ms. Kagan gained folk hero status.

“I didn’t think we had a snowball’s chance,” said Prof. J. Mark Ramseyer, a member of the committee. “Her stock went way up on the reputational grapevine on the strength of that report,” said another law professor, Randall L. Kennedy.

The report came out in November 2002, the same month that Mr. Clark announced he was stepping down as dean. Mr. Summers appointed a search committee to advise him on a replacement. Ms. Kagan had already written an award-winning article in her area of scholarship, administrative law. While Mr. Summers had “real respect” for her, he also had reservations, one person familiar with the search said.

“He wasn’t entirely sure he could trust her to make the right kind of scholarly judgments,” said the person, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss internal matters.

While Mr. Summers interviewed other candidates, including Robert C. Post, now the dean of the Yale Law School, Ms. Kagan, flew off to the University of Texas at Austin to interview for a dean’s position. When Harvard law professors met in small groups for lunch and dinner to discuss the qualities they would like to see in a dean, Professor Ogletree said, she never said that she was interested in the job. “Not once,” he said. “Not even a hint.”

But in the end, Ms. Kagan became Mr. Summers’s choice. He said she had impressed her colleagues — and him — “by the way in which she had reached out and solicited many views, and her consensus-building style.”

In an interview with The New York Times last year, Ms. Kagan sounded grateful to Mr. Summers.

“Quite a number of us who are women and relished working with Larry, and who felt that he had, in some sense, recognized our talents, even when others wouldn’t have, felt that he was given a bum rap and were not shy about telling people so,” she said.

They got on well: their one seeming disagreement — over her decision to briefly bar military recruiters from law school facilities — was really “a set piece,” one colleague said, with Mr. Summers, who did not want to jeopardize Harvard’s federal funding, working with Ms. Kagan to balance the university’s interests against the law faculty’s opposition to the military’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy.

Ms. Kagan did something unusual for a law dean: she forged relationships elsewhere at Harvard, especially with the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, the traditional seat of power. “She made an effort to reach out and build intellectual bridges,” said Thomas M. Scanlon Jr., a philosophy professor who attended a luncheon Ms. Kagan hosted for the arts and sciences faculty.

Those bridges would have been essential for anyone seeking higher office at Harvard. By 2007, with Mr. Summers gone, it was clear that Ms. Kagan aspired to the university presidency, though colleagues say she was careful not to appear to be openly campaigning for the job.

At the law school, professors and students believed she was a finalist for the president’s job. “We all thought she would get it, and we were scared that she would leave and that all the changes she had implemented would no longer be kept up,” said Sarah Isgur, a 2008 graduate, who ran the Harvard Law chapter of the Federalist Society, a conservative legal group.

But the search committee had heard reports that Ms. Kagan had been harsh with her administrative staff, and its members felt her scholarly interests were “too narrow gauge,” said one person familiar with the search, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss private deliberations. And it might have been difficult for a law dean to ascend to the presidency; Derek Bok had done so, but Harvard tended to choose humanists or scientists for the job.

When the historian Drew Gilpin Faust got the nod, law school students threw Ms. Kagan a party. Several hundred of them turned up in “I ♥ EK” T-shirts; The Harvard Crimson reported that Ms. Kagan teared up at the sight.

“Sometimes, you win by losing,” the newspaper quoted her as saying, with her voice breaking slightly as she addressed the crowd. “All of you have made me feel like a real winner today.”

It was February 2007 — the same month that a freshman Democratic senator from Illinois named Barack Obama announced plans to run for the White House. Professor Steiker tried to console her friend by telling her that there was a good chance a Democrat would win in 2008, and there might be bigger things in store.

“I think she was disappointed not to be selected, as anyone would be,” Professor Steiker said. “I remember saying to her, ‘I can understand why you would want this, but what if a Democrat wins the White House? You could be on the Supreme Court.’ She nodded, but it wasn’t like she said, ‘Yeah, I’m really glad I didn’t get that.’ ”

2010’s Debates Still Trapped in the 1960s

Associated Press; Christopher Capozziello for The New York Times - SERVICE Marines in Vietnam in 1967. The war has been part of the political discourse for decades, including this year in Connecticut, where Attorney General Richard Blumenthal’s characterization of his military record has become an issue in the Senate race.

Jack Moebes/Associated Press; Ed Reinke/Associated Press - SIT-INS College students staged a protest in 1960 at an all-white lunch counter in Greensboro, N.C. Rand Paul’s recent comments about the 1964 Civil Rights Act and its integration requirement for private businesses stirred controversy in Kentucky.



May 25, 2010
2010’s Debates Still Trapped in the 1960s
By MATT BAI

You would not think Richard Blumenthal and Rand Paul would have anything in common, aside from the fact that they are both running for Senate.

Mr. Blumenthal, the Democratic attorney general of Connecticut, is a respected, if somewhat colorless career public servant. Mr. Paul, a Kentucky eye doctor and a Republican, is a doctrinaire libertarian like his father, Ron Paul, the onetime presidential candidate. But last week, both men found themselves unexpectedly sucked into the vortex that pulls us inexorably back to the 1960s.

This wrinkle in the political space-time continuum was supposed to have been smoothed out, of course. Barack Obama based his presidential campaign on the notion that the nation needed to step past the cultural chasm of an earlier era, and younger Americans, in particular, endorsed that vision. And yet here we are two years later, arguing over Vietnam and segregation, our politics transformed yet again into a revival of “Hair,” except perhaps that it is not entertaining and never seems to end. (Actually, it is exactly like “Hair.”)

In both cases, the trite and simplistic debate seems mismatched to the more complex conversations that most Americans are actually trying to have.

Mr. Blumenthal’s troubles started when The New York Times reported that he had a pattern of implying (or stating outright) that he had served in Vietnam when he had not. There is a legitimate question of character here, to be sure; politicians ought not to embellish, and Mr. Blumenthal twice apologized. But the controversy, stoked by his Republican opponent, has as much to do with all the 40-year-old emotions around draft boards and deferrals, the lingering bitterness among those who served and the torturous guilt among those who did not, as it does with the straight-up issue of veracity.

This is all well-trod ground for voters who can easily recall the allegations over Bill Clinton and his draft letter, John Kerry and his Swift boat, George W. Bush and his missing time in the National Guard. But in a country where no one under 50 has ever seen a draft notice, it is increasingly irrelevant; to those Americans, we might as well be having an argument over who sunk the Maine.

In the era of the all-volunteer military, there is much less of a class or ideological divide in America between those who honor service and those who might shun it. (Consider that the loudest proponent of a draft now is Charles B. Rangel, the liberal congressman from New York.) Today’s more pressing debates are about how best to use the military in fighting unconventional wars and whether gay Americans should be allowed to serve openly, about the length of a deployment and the quality of body armor and benefits.

Mr. Paul, meanwhile, found himself hurtling into the past when, responding to questions from Rachel Maddow on MSNBC, he expressed philosophical reservations about the 1964 Civil Rights Act, specifically the provision that forced private businesses to integrate. (Later, he amended that position, saying he would have supported the act anyway.)

The ensuing cries of racism probably made perfect sense to those who lived through the ’60s. After all, if a white Southerner in 1964 opposed integration on constitutional grounds, odds were pretty good that bigotry was a motivating factor. And yet the national conversation around racism and its remedies today is considerably more nuanced than it was 50 years ago — or even 10 years ago.

Now Tiger Woods plays annually at Augusta, historically an all-white club. The African-American president of the United States has said that his own relatively privileged daughters should not benefit from affirmative action programs when applying to college. Americans the president’s age and younger are inclined to assume that one can question the responsibilities of government and private entities when it comes to race without necessarily being dismissed as a racist — even if it does make them, as in the case of Mr. Paul, something of an ideological outlier.

Why then, to quote the ubiquitous Bono, is our political debate so stuck in a moment it cannot get out of? In part, it is probably because so many of the Americans most engaged in politics — as well as those who run campaigns and comment endlessly on them — are old enough to remember Altamont. It is your classic self-fulfilling prophecy: the more the ’60s generation dominates the political discourse, the less that discourse engages younger voters, and the longer the boomers hold sway over our politics.

On a deeper level, though, this all probably has as much to do with our basic human tendency toward moral clarity. As much as conservatives may view the decade as the crucible of moral relativism and the beginning of a breakdown in established social order, there remains something powerfully attractive about the binary, simplistic nature of it all, the idea that one could easily distinguish whether he was for war or against, in favor of equality or opposed.

By contrast, war today seems more a question of degrees and limits, while equality seems less about the laws of the land than about disparities in economic and educational opportunities that are subtler and harder to address. The choices of our moment are not nearly so neat or so satisfying as they were a generation ago, which makes them less useful as a basis for one’s political identity, and harder to encapsulate in some 30-second spot or prime-time rant.

In a sense, the discussion of the past week underscores Mr. Obama’s continuing challenge as well. Implicit in the president’s vow to move us beyond the obsolescence of ’60s politics was the idea that he would replace it with something else, that he would reframe the debate of the 21st century in a way that would make our choices as a society seem clearer and more interconnected.

He hasn’t, or at least not to this point. And without that modern framework there is only an absence, the familiar vortex that keeps pulling us back to things we had hoped to leave behind.

Clockwise from top left: Associated Press; Hulton Archive/Getty Images; Luke Sharrett/The New York Times; George Tames/The New York Times

Signature Programs In 1944, President Roosevelt signed the G.I. Bill; President Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964; President Reagan explained his program to lower taxes in 1981, and in March, President Obama signed the health care reform bill.

I still really want to know just how much Ronald Reagan cut taxes


http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/22/business/economy/22leonhardt.html?ref=business
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/22/us/22bison.html?hpw
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/22/world/middleeast/22house.html?hpw
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/22/world/europe/22lepen.html?ref=world
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/22/science/earth/22assess.html?hpw
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/22/nyregion/22bigcity.html?ref=nyregion

May 21, 2010
A Progressive Agenda to Remake Washington
By DAVID LEONHARDT

WASHINGTON

With the Senate’s passage of financial regulation, Congress and the White House have completed 16 months of activity that rival any other since the New Deal in scope or ambition. Like the Reagan Revolution or Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society, the new progressive period has the makings of a generational shift in how Washington operates.

First came a stimulus bill that, while aimed mainly at ending a deep recession, also set out to remake the nation’s educational system and vastly expand scientific research. Then President Obama signed a health care bill that was the biggest expansion of the safety net in 40 years. And now Congress is in the final stages of a bill that would tighten Wall Street’s rules and probably shrink its profit margins.

If there is a theme to all this, it has been to try to lift economic growth while also reducing income inequality. Growth in the decade that just ended was the slowest in the post-World War II era, while inequality has been rising for most of the last 35 years.

It is far too early to know if these efforts will work. Their success depends enormously on execution and, in the case of financial regulation, specifically on the Federal Reserve, which did not distinguish itself during the housing bubble.

Already, though, one downside to the legislative spurt does seem clear. By focusing on long-term problems, Mr. Obama and the Democrats have given less than their full attention to the economy’s current weakness and turned off a good number of voters.

After months of discussion, and with the unemployment rate hovering near a 27-year high, Democratic leaders said Thursday they had finally reached agreement on a bill that would send aid to states and take other steps to increase job growth. Congress plans to vote on the bill next week. But some of the money will not be spent for months and may not be enough to affect voters’ attitudes before November’s midterm elections.

Still, the turnabout since Jan. 20 — the first anniversary of Mr. Obama’s inauguration and the day after Scott Brown, a Republican, won a Senate seat in liberal Massachusetts — has been remarkable. Then, commentators pronounced the Obama presidency nearly dead. Today, he looks more like a liberal answer to Ronald Reagan.

“If you’d asked me about this administration after Scott Brown was elected, I’d have told you it was going to fizzle into virtually nothing,” said Theda Skocpol, the Harvard political scientist. “Now it could easily be one of the pivotal periods in domestic policy.” But, Ms. Skocpol added, “It will depend on what happens in the next two elections.”

The recent period surely will not match the impact of the New Deal. Nothing is likely to, notes David Kennedy,a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian, because the New Deal created much of the modern American government. “These are not as dramatic as the foundational moments,” Mr. Kennedy said, “but they’re significant changes.”

Alan Brinkley, a historian of the Depression, added: “This is not the New Deal, but it’s a significant series of achievements. And given the difficulty of getting anything done under the gridlock of Congress, it’s pretty surprising.”

The last 16 months seem most similar in scope to three other periods in the last 80 years. After World War II, the federal government helped build the modern middle class with the G.I. Bill, housing subsidies, the highway system and incentives for employers to offer health insurance. The 1960s — mostly under Mr. Johnson, but also Richard Nixon — brought civil rights legislation, Medicare, Medicaid and environmental laws. Then Mr. Reagan ushered in a period that continued, more or less, until 2008: tax cuts, less regulation and other attempts to unleash the competitive forces of the market.

Mr. Obama has been trying to reverse the Reagan thrust in some important ways. Although the Reagan administration did not shrink the size of the federal government, it changed the ways that Washington collected and spent its money, by reducing taxes on the affluent, cutting some social programs and increasing military spending.

These policies ended up magnifying income inequality, which was already rising for other reasons. Since 1980, median household income has risen only 30 percent, adjusted for inflation, while average incomes at the top have tripled or quadrupled. Every major piece of the Obama agenda is meant, in part, to push back against inequality. Government may grow, but the bigger change will be how the government is spending its money.

The health bill expanded insurance coverage largely for middle-class and poor families and paid some of the bill by taxing households making more than $250,000 a year. Attached to the final health bill were also education provisions that cut subsidies to banks making student loans, and used much of the money for college financial aid instead.

The financial regulation bill, meanwhile, would take several steps likely to reduce Wall Street’s profits — and Wall Street has created more multimillionaires in recent decades than any other industry. To take one example, certain trades would be forced onto open exchanges. This would hurt financial firms’ ability to act as a middleman, much as Expedia and other travel Web sites have hurt travel agents.

For all these differences, though, there are also ways that Mr. Obama and today’s Democrats have accepted, and are even furthering, the Reagan project. They are not trying to raise tax rates on the affluent to anywhere near their pre-1981 levels. Their health bill tried created new private insurance markets, not expand Medicare.

Most striking, the administration is trying to improve public education by introducing more market competition. To win stimulus funds, about 20 states have changed their rules to allow more charter schools or to evaluate teachers in new ways. On Thursday, Gov. Bill Ritter Jr. of Colorado signed a bill that would reward teachers who received strong evaluations and deny tenure to some who did poorly.

These education changes — combined with increased spending on science research — are meant to lift economic growth. Economists have long considered education and technology to be the main ingredients in growth. In Mr. Obama’s phrasing, the goal is to create a “new foundation,” more solid than the bubbles of recent years.

Even with those bubbles, the nation’s economic output expanded only 20 percent from 2000 through 2009. In the 1980s, it grew 35 percent, and in the 1990s, it grew 37 percent.

Will this new progressive project succeed? There are any number of uncertainties: whether enough charter schools will succeed, whether the new health insurance markets will function well, whether the Fed will learn to become an effective regulator of Wall Street.

Some of those questions won’t be resolved for years. But one issue should become clear much sooner. Mr. Reagan, Mr. Johnson and Franklin D. Roosevelt cemented their changes by retaining enough allies in Congress and serving more than four years in the White House. Mr. Obama has yet to do so.

It's private

An ad on Fox News. Where else?

Was there looking for the Fox "Fair and Balanced" reporting on this gem, from the candidate who states that the Civil Rights Act of 1964 imposes governmental strictures on private businesses by outlawing discrimination (he says that only the public domain, and institutions receiving public funds should be so commanded); his latest pronouncements:

Republican Senate candidate Rand Paul of Kentucky today called President Barack Obama's outspoken criticism of BP after the oil spill "un-American" and accused him of putting "his boot heel on the throat of BP."

That's British Petroleum, not to pick on the Brits. And the presidential boot is hardly on the BP throat; a month after the spill the Administration has given the oil company a deadline to come up with alternative means of dispersing the 75,000 barrels a day (not the 5,000 both the company and the government have been touting).


Paul, a rising star of the tea party movement who beat out a GOP favorite to win Kentucky's Republican primary Tuesday, also defended remarks he made about the Civil Rights Act of 1964, saying he's being "trashed" by Democrats who want to ruin his campaign.

Well, that's politics. If you can't stand the heat, stay out of the kitchen.

After criticizing the president for attacking BP, Paul moved on to reference the April 5 disaster at a West Virginia mine, which killed 29 people and sparked calls for increased regulation. "We had a mining accident that was very tragic," he told ABC's George Stephanopoulos. "Then we come in and it's always someone's fault. Maybe sometimes accidents happen."

Sensitive, too, this candidate.



BP oil spill reaches delicate wetlands of Louisiana - The Guardian - ‎32 minutes ago‎ Thick sheets of crude oil spread through the delicate wetlands of Louisiana today, as the BP oil spill continued to threaten the American coastline. Company must be unable to act, what with the presidential boot on its throat. BP swamped by criticism; spilled oil keeps coming Reuters.

Whose history?

Curiously, the Journal categorizes this story under Politics.

* POLITICS
* MAY 20, 2010

Texas Syllabus: It's History
State Likely to Approve Curriculum Changes That Have Sparked Heated Debate

By STEPHANIE SIMON And ANA CAMPOY


DALLAS—The Texas Board of Education is poised to enact a new social-studies curriculum that portrays America as a nation rooted in Biblical values and promotes the virtues of low taxes, limited regulation and free enterprise. Those standards have provoked heated debate in the state similar to the one that broke out last year when the board overhauled the science curriculum.

Liberal critics have complained, among other things, that the standards excuse the excesses of Sen. Joseph McCarthy's anti-communist crusades; minimize the contributions of ethnic minorities; and give too much weight to Confederacy leader Jefferson Davis's view that the Civil War was about states' rights, not slavery.

Still with this states's rights thing? C'mon.

But conservatives say they're only trying to restore balance to a curriculum they believe has been skewed to the left for far too long. The Liberty Institute, a nonprofit advocacy group in Plano, Texas, is urging the board to stand strong against attempts by "the fringe left" to delay adoption of the new standards.

Curiously, this Institute labels its campaign Tell the Liberal Left… Stop Rewriting History!

The standards, which the board is slated to bring to a vote on Thursday and Friday, will govern classroom instruction for all 4.7 million public-school students in the state. The standards also will influence what goes into textbooks when the state orders new ones, which is not expected for several years, especially in light of the state's budget woes.

Feelings are running strong on both sides of the debate; more than 20,000 comments have flooded into the Board of Education in recent months.

The standards don't provide a day-by-day curriculum for teachers but do set out, in voluminous detail, the concepts, names and dates students are expected to master. Standardized tests and textbooks draw on these guidelines, so they carry considerable weight in the classroom.


Debate about certain provisions has been intense. For instance, one revision would change what first-graders learn about their civic duty. The previous standards, a decade old, defined good citizenship as "a belief in justice, truth, equality and responsibility for the common good." The new standards talk about respect for others, personal responsibility, and the importance of voting and of "holding public officials to their word."

Board member Don McLeroy, who leads the most conservative bloc on the board, said that "responsibility for the common good" does not belong in the standards because it is "a liberal notion" that edges toward communist philosophy. "Most of the great tragedies in the world have been done in the name of humanitarian, utopian ideals," he said.

This is amazing: responsibility for the common good is communism? I thought it was Christian.

Students also are required to learn that America's founding documents were influenced by various intellectual traditions, "especially biblical law," and principles laid down by Moses. The standards also emphasize the superiority of America's free-enterprise system. (The term "capitalism" is no longer being used because it has been tainted, board member Cynthia Dunbar said: "We've all heard the saying 'capitalist pig.'")

The standards reflect multiple views. For instance, they also say students must explain "how institutional racism is evident in American society." Economics students must "understand how government taxation and regulation can serve as restrictions to private enterprise."

I'd say that taxation and regulation also work for the common good, but that is a communist notion, isn't it?


Mavis Knight, who leads a smaller, more liberal faction on the board, said she was disturbed by what she sees as emphasis on American exceptionalism, which posits that the U.S. holds a unique role in shaping the world's destiny. "It seems like braggadocio to me, rather than trying to be factual," she said.

Other critics have included former Education Secretary Rod Paige, who served under George W. Bush. He has joined the NAACP to protest the standards on several grounds—including the board's decision to scratch hip-hop from a list of notable artistic trends. (It was replaced by country-western music.)

Additionally, more than 1,200 historians and college faculty members from across the nation have signed a petition calling the standards academically shoddy.

Historically, California and Texas have been the nation's largest textbook buyers, and requirements in their states influenced textbooks nationally. That made Texas's standards influential beyond its borders. But that has become less the case in recent years, as states and local school districts have become more aggressive about setting their own standards, and desktop publishing has made it easier to customize texts.

Thank goodness for technology.

"It is a bit of an urban myth that the Texas standards will influence curriculum nationwide," said Jay Diskey, executive director of the school division at the Association of American Publishers. The industry has generally declined to comment on the standards-revision process.


The standards are expected to pass, though several amendments remain under debate. Among them: Dr. McLeroy's proposal that students study the United Nations and other international groups to "evaluate efforts by global organizations to undermine U.S. sovereignty."

Oy vay, what a ditz.


The voting comes amid transition for the board. Dr. McLeroy, a dentist, lost his re-election bid this spring. Ms. Dunbar did not run for re-election and her chosen successor also lost in the primary. The entire 15-member board is up for election in 2012.

High-school students would be required to:

"Analyze the unintended consequences" of Great Society legislation and affirmative action.

Ask Rand Paul and Trent Lott.


Identify traditions and people informing the founding of America, "especially biblical law," and including Moses.

Mostesquieu? Bah, French. Socialist, for sure; maybe even communist.

"Explain how Arab rejection of the State of Israel has led to ongoing conflict."

"Understand how government taxation and regulation can serve as restrictions to private enterprise."

cf. Ronald Reagan.

Explain why a free enterprise system grew here, "including minimal government intrusion, taxation and property rights."

Study forces behind "the conservative resurgence of the 1980s and 90s," including the NRA, Heritage Foundation and Phyllis Schlafly.

Printed in The Wall Street Journal, pageA3

Less guv'ment

In order to smooth passage of a high-priority bill, congressional leaders said they would ban any provisions that didn't have something to do with the financial industry. But Sen. James Inhofe has inserted an amendment to address what he sees as problems associated with lead-paint removal regulations. The Oklahoma Republican has drafted language to stall enforcement of an Environmental Protection Agency rule that requires special instruction and certification for contractors who remove lead paint. In Oklahoma, where he lives in a 75-year-old lead-painted house, no such instructors exist. His amendment would delay the rule until every state has training programs. Asked how the amendment was connected with Congress's response to the financial crisis, Mr. Inhofe said, "It's not! That's the point."

You can't make this stuff up; if you did, no one would believe it.

Ban on Pet Provisions Proves Too Much for Lawmakers

By ELIZABETH WILLIAMSON And DAMIAN PALETTA

They said they wouldn't. They tried to stop themselves. But they're doing it anyway.

As they debate a more than 1,500-page bill intended to overhaul Wall Street and prevent the next financial crisis, senators from both parties are inserting pet provisions into the legislation.

Buried among more than 300 amendments to the bill are efforts to keep Social Security numbers off documents processed by U.S. prison inmates; regulate the oil, gas and mining industries; condemn Myanmar for human-rights violations; and control the sale of minerals from war zones.

In order to smooth passage of a high-priority bill, congressional leaders said they would ban any provisions that didn't have something to do with the financial industry.

But Sen. James Inhofe has inserted an amendment to address what he sees as problems associated with lead-paint removal regulations.

The Oklahoma Republican has drafted language to stall enforcement of an Environmental Protection Agency rule that requires special instruction and certification for contractors who remove lead paint.

In Oklahoma, where he lives in a 75-year-old lead-painted house, no such instructors exist. His amendment would delay the rule until every state has training programs.

Asked how the amendment was connected with Congress's response to the financial crisis, Mr. Inhofe said, "It's not! That's the point."

This whole lead paint thing is "a mess," Mr. Inhofe said, "so anything we can put this in, we will."

Sen. Sam Brownback (R., Kan.) and senators from both parties won passage of their amendment reining in the global trade in Congolese cassiterite. The measure would require anyone who buys cassiterite or a half-dozen other minerals abroad to certify to federal regulators that the sale did not directly or indirectly finance or benefit armed groups in the Democratic Republic of Congo that are accused of human-rights abuses.

Mr. Brownback, a conservative with a long record of support for such causes, built a coalition of liberal and conservative lawmakers to back his cassiterite measure. He has framed the amendment as relating to financial issues.

"It is on Congo conflict commodities," he said on the Senate floor this week. "It is a narrow SEC [Securities and Exchange Commission] reporting requirement." The amendment passed the Senate.

Sen. Tom Coburn (R., Okla.) said he hoped his Stop Secret Spending Act would make it into the bill, or that he at least could leverage a deal to reintroduce it down the road. The provision, which his staffers have nicknamed "The If-You-Only-Knew Act," would require lawmakers to certify they have read every bill they adopt by "unanimous consent," a process that doesn't record how they voted.

The process is usually reserved for measures seen as noncontroversial. But Mr. Coburn, a well-known deficit hawk, objects that noncontroversial bills often involve spending, too.

Among those that get his goat: Disease-specific earmarks that call for more research money for certain conditions. Mr. Coburn, a physician, wants legislators to have 72 hours to read those bills and decide them on the merits, not "who has the best celebrity lobbyist for the disease," according to his spokesman.

West Virginia Democratic Sen. Robert Byrd's amendment would "require the disclosure of safety and health conditions at risky workplaces (coal mines, refineries, oil rigs), and to empower the SEC and shareholders to compel disclosure and to seek civil penalties for those who fail to disclose this safety and health information."

"As we seek to make Wall Street more transparent and accountable to investors and Main Street America, I believe it is imperative that workers, investors and the general public receive a more complete and consistent analysis of whether the companies in which they have invested their funds are operating in a safe and healthy manner," Mr. Byrd said in a statement.

Aides to Mr. Byrd are uncertain whether the measure will make it into the overhaul legislation.

South Carolina Republican Sen. Jim DeMint's proposal demanding that the U.S. finish work on the 700-mile border fence between the U.S. and Mexico within a year already has been withdrawn.

Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D., Calif.) and five senators from both parties want to keep prison inmates, many of whom hold data-processing jobs while incarcerated, from gaining access to Americans' Social Security numbers, such as by seeing them on government checks.

"In 2009, more than nine million Americans were victims of identity theft, at an estimated cost of roughly $50 billion a year. These costs flow to financial institutions, retailers and consumers," Sen. Feinstein said in an emailed statement. "I believe the financial reform bill is an appropriate vehicle for this bipartisan amendment."

Printed in The Wall Street Journal, page A4

Depends how you look at it

If climate change research is inexact science that can be disputed and argued, how does political science fare?

On Tuesday there were a few primaries in a handful of states. Expectations in the media were that the Tea Party as a vehicle expressing populist outrage at Big Government, Bailouts, and Taxation would rule the day. Democrats were supposed, predicted, to be on the run. Incumbents would be routed, proof that the Republican Party and the Tea Party were on the ascendancy.

A story in the Wall Street Journal has it this way: One Victory Alters Parties' Calculus.

Of all Tuesday's election results, it's the Democrats' win in a U.S. House contest in Pennsylvania that is causing both parties to re-examine what they thought they knew about the 2010 campaign ... on Wednesday, Democrats celebrated an eight-point victory in the district of the late Democratic Rep. John Murtha. Party officials said the result, along with the outcome of several Senate primaries Tuesday, had shown them a way to talk successfully to the voters who have resisted them most. Republicans were left puzzling over whether they had been too quick to expect outsized gains this fall.

This was supposed to be one of the places the Second Tea Party would be launched. Seems it wasn't.

"It was a pretty significant blowout," conceded former Rep. Tom Davis (R., Va.), who led the GOP House campaign effort from 1998 through 2002. He said the result put in question whether a wave is building that would hand Republicans a House majority.

But let it never be said that conservative pundits let reality stand in the way of making a good assertion. Two of the Journal's favorite blowhards, er, pundits, have it this way:

Rove: A Bad Day for the Obama Agenda
Barnes: Anti-incumbent? Try anti-Obama

Either they didn't read the paper, or I'm in an alternate universe.

Failures

A Senate investigation into the botched Christmas Day bombing of a Northwest Airlines jet found 14 intelligence failures that prevented the government from stopping alleged bomber Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab before he boarded the Detroit-bound flight in Amsterdam. No U.S. government agency sees itself as responsible for tracking and identifying terrorism threats, and information-sharing technology among intelligence agencies "is not adequate," according to a Senate intelligence committee report released Tuesday.

8 years after 9/11 the US government still does not have a streamlined, efficient intelligence service. Billions of dollars have been spent on personnel, hardware and systems, two military wars are being fought, and different bureaucracies within the federal government still will not cooperate with one another to defend the Homeland?

Irrelevant? Consider it done

The Senate approved Monday a measure that could make it harder to deploy U.S. funds in rescuing foreign governments, signaling Congress's unease with the sort of global economic aid recently given to Greece. The measure, adopted by a 94-0 vote as an amendment to the financial regulatory overhaul bill the Senate is considering, would require the Obama administration to certify that any future loans made by the International Monetary Fund would be fully repaid. Absent such as certification, U.S. representatives to the IMF would be required to oppose the lending. The U.S. is a major funder of the IMF, which provided loans to Greece as part of a larger support package.

"American taxpayers should not be involved in bailing out foreign governments," said Sen. John Cornyn (R., Texas), chief sponsor of the amendment. "Greece is not by any stretch of the imagination too big to fail."

"The thrust of the amendment is the correct one," added Senate Banking Chairman Chris Dodd (D., Conn.). "This is a good amendment deserving of our support."

With all the important work that needs doing, with the continued partisan divide, the US Senate once again proves that when it comes to the irrelevant and unimportant, it will unite in doing that and leaving serious work undone. In a way, that's a relief.

Flight of the Intellectuals

Paul Berman’s new book, “The Flight of the Intellectuals,” plural, might as easily have been titled “The Flight of the Intellectual,” singular. It is essentially a booklong polemic against one magazine article: a profile of the Islamic philosopher Tariq Ramadan, written by Ian Buruma, the Dutch academic and journalist, and published in The New York Times Magazine in 2007.

Mr. Berman’s book has already made some noise. Writing in Slate, Ron Rosenbaum compared its stinging ambience, nostalgic to some, to one of “those old Partisan Review smackdowns,” in which Dwight Macdonald or Mary McCarthy cracked some unsuspecting frenemy over the head with a bookcase and a tinkling highball glass. And for sure, everything about “The Flight of the Intellectuals” feels old school, from Mr. Berman’s tone (controlled, almost tantric, high dudgeon) to the spectacle of one respected man of the left pummeling another while the blood flows freely, and no one calls the police.


Those Partisan Review fights got serious, and so does this book. Mr. Berman accuses Mr. Buruma, in his Times Magazine profile, of not scrutinizing Mr. Ramadan’s family, associations or writings closely enough, of presenting him in a respectful light. Presenting him, that is, as the kind of moderate and charismatic Islamic thinker in whom the West might find a useful intermediary.


Mr. Berman’s book, portions of which first appeared in The New Republic, is a patient overturning of the rocks that, he argues, Mr. Buruma failed to look under. He writes about historical figures Mr. Ramadan professes to admire and notes the tiny degrees of separation that link them to Hitler and the Nazis during World War II. He points out Mr. Ramadan’s ambiguous comments about things like 9/11, the stoning of women in Muslim countries and violence against Jews. Mr. Berman detects a kind of seventh-century barbarism lurking behind Mr. Ramadan’s genial smile.

Mr. Berman branches out in his book’s final third to condemn liberal intellectuals (nearly all of them but especially Mr. Buruma and the British historian Timothy Garton Ash) and their house organs, including The New York Review of Books, on another, related, account. He writes that while they have admired Mr. Ramadan, they have been inexplicably critical of Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the Somali-born Dutch intellectual who has become a major critic of Islam and, as a consequence, will probably have a large security detail for the rest of her life. Ms. Hirsi Ali’s critics, who include Mr. Buruma and Mr. Garton Ash, find her personality “strident” and humorless, he writes, and feel she isn’t as important as she might be because having renounced Islam, she no longer speaks to or is in touch with the Muslim hive mind.

Strident? Humorless? And what are they? Self-appointed experts.

About these criticisms of Ms. Hirsi Ali, Mr. Berman is incredulous. “A more classic example of a persecuted dissident intellectual does not exist,” he notes about her. And yet, he writes, she is treated differently from Salman Rushdie, another writer who was subjected to death threats. “How times have changed!” he declaims. “The Rushdies of today find themselves under criticism, contrasted unfavorably in the very best of magazines with Tariq Ramadan,” who had ties to an organization that was known to be anti-Rushdie. “Here is a reactionary turn in the intellectual world — led by people who, until just yesterday, I myself had always regarded as the best of the best.”

He seems disappointed in his former friends.

He is withering about why this might be. Quoting another writer, he calls this “the racism of the anti-racists.” As self-hating Westerners, he suggests, Mr. Buruma and Mr. Garton Ash can be seen “groveling to Ramadan, who berates the West” while attacking the Somali dissident who embraces its values.

Fear is at work too, he says. About the chill in the intellectual climate, Mr. Berman writes: “Two developments account for it — two large new realities that, condensing overhead, have altered the intellectual atmosphere down below, almost without being noticed. The first of those developments is the spectacular and intimidating growth of the Islamist movement since the time of the Rushdie fatwa. The second development is terrorism.”

Liberals are so tiresome at times.

Mr. Berman can be bleakly funny. He criticizes Mr. Garton Ash for pointing out in The New York Review of Books that Ms. Hirsi Ali had been awarded the “Hero of the Month” prize from Glamour magazine, as if this were proof that she couldn’t be taken seriously. Mr. Berman responds, in one of this book’s more memorable utterances: “I can’t help observing that here may be proof, instead, that Glamour magazine nowadays offers a more reliable guide to liberal principles than The New York Review of Books.”
Touché.

“The Flight of the Intellectuals” is anything but diffident, and watching Mr. Berman pursue his philosophical prey is a bit like playing an academic version of a first-person-shooter video game: Modern Warfare: Bandit Pundit Edition. One’s goggles begin to steam up. Being inside Mr. Berman’s head can occasionally grate. As a writer he’s alternately emotive and pedantic, an emo-wonk. He’s self-congratulatory about his coups of reading and synthesis, his turning up of important details in other people’s footnotes. Yet his own book has no foot- or endnotes at all.

Alternately emotive and pedantic.

His litany of charges against the elusive Mr. Ramadan is largely circumstantial, although it must be said that the pile he amasses is plenty damning. Finally, Mr. Berman believes in straight talk and insists that we use words like “fascist” to describe some Islamist ideas rather than “totalitarian.” Why? “It is because totalitarian, being abstract, is odorless. Fascist is pungent. To hear that emphatic f-sound and those double different s’s is to flare your nostrils.”

Mr. Berman’s nostrils have flared before about fascism. He is a liberal hawk who supported the 2003 invasion of Iraq, about which he deployed that particular f-word as well. “If only people like you would wake up,” he wrote in Dissent magazine in 2004, “you would see that war against the radical Islamist and Baathist movements, in Afghanistan exactly as in Iraq, is war against fascism.” He may very well be right. Yet fascism is a radioactive word that requires careful handling. It can lead some people — and here’s my own diffident cough — to impulsive action.

There’s a good deal of inside baseball in “The Flight of the Intellectuals.” Scores are settled that many readers won’t know or care about. But this bracing and volatile book is an important one and devastating in its conclusions about the secret history of some Islamists and especially about the reception of Ayaan Hirsi Ali. “It was obvious that Hirsi Ali had received a dreadful treatment from journalists,” Mr. Berman writes, “who ought to have known better.”

Kirkus Reviews
In this sequel to the groundbreaking Terror and Liberalism (2003, etc.), political writer and New Republic contributing editor Berman analyzes the rise of the Islamist totalitarian movement and the Western media's troubling inability—or unwillingness—to identify and investigate its implications.The author begins with Islamic history as defined by its major players, including Amin al-Husseini, the mufti of Jerusalem, and Hassan al-Banna, the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood. Drawing from documents stored in government archives in the United States and Cairo, Berman untangles the legacies of Islam and Nazi Germany. Al-Husseini's fervent anti-Semitism met neatly with Hitler's campaign, and al-Banna was al-Husseini's most ardent supporter, a camaraderie that would have profound influence on the future of Islam. The bulk of the narrative concerns the effect that these political events have on modern-day Islam—in particular, on well-known philosopher Tariq Ramadan, who is al-Banna's grandson and whose writings are often cited as part of a progressive Muslim movement, yet whose deeper, more conservative meanings often elude the journalists eager to embrace such rhetoric. As a "Salafi reformist," Ramadan openly reveres his forebears yet purports to stand against violence and oppression. Scrutinizing Ramadan's writings and speeches, Berman writes that his "modern rhetorics invariably turn out to be translations, in one fashion or another, of Koranic concepts," and that Ramadan's opinions carefully provide a "double ambiguity" that draws Western admirers even as his Muslim followers view him as a defender of old-world Koranic ideals. Berman identifies one accomplished Western writer in particular, Ian Buruma, whose glossy treatment of Ramadan represents the exact "flight" from intellectualism that the title implies. The author concludes, glumly, that "the spectacular and intimidating growth of the Islamist movement" in the last ten years, coupled with the rise in terrorism, are the culprits, effectively suffocating deep journalism with "squeamishness and fear." Despite the complexity, history and nuance of these subjects, the author probes each issue with elegant, incisive language.A stunning, riveting commentary.First printing of 30,000 Copyright Kirkus 2010 Kirkus/BPI Communications.All rights reserved.

Berman's article: Who's afraid of Tariq Ramadan?

Petraeus: Times Square bomber likely acted alone

On 7 May this item was released by the AP.

Gen. David Petraeus says the Times Square bombing suspect apparently operated as a "lone wolf" who did not work with other terrorists. The general who oversees the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan tells The Associated Press that alleged bomber Faisal Shahzad was inspired by militants in Pakistan, but didn't necessarily have direct contact with them. Authorities say Shahzad told investigators he went to a terror training camp in Pakistan, but they have yet to confirm that. Shahzad is a U.S. citizen, accused of an attempted terror attack nearly a week ago in New York's Times Square. He was caught late Monday night trying to leave the country

Immediately, my question was: how does he know? He's military. Why is he saying that? Does a military get the right to make policy judgments? Is this for future use, if the General decides to run for public office.

Now that the government has said that it is probable that Shahzad had collaborators, what does the General think?

You're okay, you're not

In light of the Arizona law allowing police to ask for identification of of those they might suspect as not being citizens, this item seems curious:

ARIZONA: Speed Cameras Get Hook


Arizona is ending a ground-breaking and contentious program that put speed cameras along Phoenix-area freeways and in vans deployed across the state. The program has been the target of an initiative measure proposed for the November ballot. Gov. Jan Brewer disclosed her intention to end the program in January. That was followed by a nonrenewal letter sent this week to the private company that runs the program.


—Associated Press

Professor Mearsheimer and His Useful Jews

This appeared as an Op-Ed piece was printed in The Wall Street Journal, page A17, written by Daniel Balson. It is worth reading closely. Further, the individual referred to, and his material, also merits attention.

At some point in the early part of the 20th century, the Tsarist authorities deemed my great grandfather to be a "useful Jew." He was a pianist and his musical talents fit nicely with Russia's classical preoccupation with high European culture. And so, under this vulgar appellation, he was issued the necessary documents and permitted to leave the area where men of his caste were kept. He moved to St. Petersburg to teach at a musical conservatory and joined the ethnic Russian population under whose caprice he lived, but to whom he would never truly belong—even after his conversion to Orthodoxy.

Some 80 years later, my family and I left the Soviet Union and moved to the United States where we could define our own identity without the help of paternalistic Tsars and commissars. Had I been born a century ago, I don't know whether I would have qualified as a "useful Jew" or a useless one and, truth be told, until last week I never found the occasion to wonder.

On April 29, University of Chicago professor John Mearsheimer delivered a speech titled "The Future of Palestine: Righteous Jews vs. the New Afrikaners." Mr. Mearsheimer is one of America's more celebrated political scientists. In 2006, he and a co-author wrote an article-turned-book called "The Israel Lobby," arguing that advocates for the Jewish state have manipulated U.S. foreign policy in a way that harms American interests.

In last week's talk, given at the Palestine Center in Washington, D.C., Mr. Mearsheimer explained that "American Jews who care deeply about Israel can be divided into three broad categories." Since I don't know many American Jews who are apathetic about Israel's fate, and since I had no idea that an entire ethnicity could be so neatly compartmentalized, it seemed prudent to continue reading the transcript.

Mr. Mearsheimer refers to the first category as "Righteous Jews." According to him, they include radicals like Noam Chomsky and Norman Finkelstein, as well as more reasonable individuals like New York Times columnist Roger Cohen.

The second category, those that could be described as hawkish on Israel, Mr. Mearsheimer calls the "New Afrikaners." This reference to supporters of apartheid encompasses the Jews that he doesn't like; they include the heads of most American Jewish political organizations as well as right-of-center media figures. He refers to the third category as the "great ambivalent middle," those who are apparently undecided about Israel.

The speech contains a litany of other bizarre and unsubstantiated claims: Zionism's core beliefs are deeply hostile to the establishment of a Palestinian state, many young Israelis hold racist views towards Palestinians, and so on. But it was Mr. Mearsheimer's taxonomy of the Jewish citizens of this country that captivated me the most. I'm not sure where I fall on his rubric. I had always considered myself simply a Jewish-American, but perhaps I truly am "righteous" or alternatively a "new Afrikaner."


Nor am I sure where to place all the other Jews that I have encountered in my life. The ones who so generously helped my family when we arrived in this country as refugees seemed quite "righteous," but they are associated with some of the organizations Mr. Mearsheimer deemed evil, or at least accomplices to it. Such distinctions should be considered beyond the pale. Would a professor get a respectful hearing if he divided black men into "righteous African-Americans" and "Malcolm X types"?


A college friend, born and raised in Canada but of Chinese descent, once remarked to me that the U.S. is so great because it is the country where people are least likely to ask where you're "really" from. Yet Mr. Mearsheimer seems convinced of his ability to divine who one really is. One imagines that the word American wouldn't satisfy his inquiry.


Surely the crude categorization of an entire set of people according to political proclivities has no place in the 21st century. The illiberal political condition of Tsarist Russia enabled cultural arbiters to define minorities any way they pleased. Thank goodness America accords the likes of Mr. Mearsheimer no such right.

Mr. Balson is an M.A. candidate at Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies.

John J. Mearsheimer's website.

Turmoil drives Spain's rival parties together

The Greek disease in not merely Greek: Portugal and Spain, Ireland, and even the UK are suspected of being economically subject to troubles, if not calamity. Last week Spain's credit rating was cut one notch. As much of this is psychological, preventive action is important. An article in today's Journal adresses Spain: its two major political parties have joined in taking preventive action.

As wild fires in the financial markets licked at Spain's door, Prime Minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero huddled Wednesday with opposition leader Mariano Rajoy in an effort to stop the turmoil from further hitting the country.

Maybe we should send Mitch McConnell and Harry Reid to Madrid.

Messrs. Zapatero and Rajoy agreed Wednesday to push ailing savings banks into mergers with stronger peers by June 30. The agreement is important because many of Spain's unlisted savings banks are controlled by regional governments, which in turn are controlled by one of Spain's two main parties. But even this pact doesn't guarantee any bank mergers will happen.

So Spanish political parties own many of the nation's banks. What would US lefties say to that?

Los Suns

Despite what Paul Theroux thinks (Arizona, Show Your Papers? So What!), the backlash against the Arizona law allowing police officers to demand papers of anyone they think might be an undocumented alien continues.

Suns protest Arizona law (from Politico.com)

The Phoenix Suns on Tuesday announced that they will be wearing an alternative jersey identifying them as "Los Suns" during Wednesday's playoff game to voice the team's disapproval for Arizona's tough new immigration law.

Robert Sarver, the team's managing partner, said in a statement that the alternative uniforms will be worn during Wednesday's home playoff game against the San Antonio Spurs in order to voice opposition to the law that Sarver said is not the "right way" to handle immigration reform. The Suns won the first game of the series Monday night.

"The frustration with the federal government's failure to deal with the issue of illegal immigration resulted in passage of a flawed state law," Sarver said. "However intended, the result of passing this law is that our basic principles of equal rights and protection under the law are being called into question, and Arizona's already struggling economy will suffer even further setbacks at a time when the state can ill-afford them."

"Hopefully, it's all going to get worked out and the federal government will step in and there'll be a national solution. I realize that immigration is a problem and we have issues that need to be dealt with. I just don't think this bill accomplishes that," said the team executive. "I don't think it's the right way to handle the immigration problem."

Sarver was joined in his criticism of the law by Suns point guard Steve Nash, who called it "very misguided."

"I think it is unfortunately to the detriment to our society and our civil liberties and I think it is very important for us to stand up for things we believe in," the all-star point guard said. "I think the law obviously can target opportunities for racial profiling. Things we don't want to see and don't need to see in 2010."

The Suns are not the only Phoenix sports team to get pulled into the contentious debate over the new law that grants police officers the ability to request documentation proving citizenship of anyone they suspect to be illegal.

The Arizona Diamondbacks have been heckled during Major League Baseball games over the law, and on Tuesday MoveOn.org called on the league to move the 2011 All-Star game out of Phoenix.

Left, or right?

So I get home after work, and turn on the telly to watch something, relax a bit. Not a good movie on, so I make the mistake of putting on politics and news.

Two big stories are in the ether right now: the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, and the failed bomb in Times Square.

Right wing nuts have started to say that perhaps the radical left caused the spill by sabotaging the platform 30 miles offshore. How that could be done dosn't need to be explained or substatiated, because the purpose of that preposterous statement is to get people who are already extremely displeased with the President and the Democratic Party even more riled up (and if along the way some other people are caught in the net of bombastic stupidity, so much the better).

Now Michael Brown, who was head of FEMA during Hurricane Katrina, is being given air time: he is charging that either the Obama administration is allowing the oil to reach shore for political purposes, or is using the calamity of oil reaching shore to suspend offshore drilling and other policy points part of their strategy to pass cap-and-trade. And if that wasn't preposterous enough, he's charging the Administration with slow response. This is Brownie, who didn't respond to Katrina. Now he's charging that he couldn't respond becuase the federal government, the Bush administration, didn't give him the tools he needed to respond properly.

An arrest has been made in the failed Times Square bombing. The left is extolling the quick response of law enforcement authorities, the right is castigating the fact that the charged perpetrator has been read his Miranda rights. Major General Paul D. Eaton, retired, appeared with Keith Olbermann, and ripped Republicans for undermining the work of police, the FBI and the armed forces. I've not seen him before, but he was angry, and obviously not a rightie. He works for the National Security Network, a left organization: The National Security Network (NSN) was founded in June 2006 to revitalize America's national security policy, bringing cohesion and strategic focus to the progressive national security community.

Earlier, I watched a few minutes of Sean Hannity's show, and was amazed at the depths this twerp plumbs: he has a yahoo,  Aaron Klein, whohas co-authored this book: The Manchurian President: Barack Obama's ties to Communists, Socialists, and other anti-American extremists. Really. Hannity was ecstatic.Aaron Klein has written three other books: The late great state of Israel : how enemies within and without threaten the Jewish nation's survival (2009);  Schmoozing with terrorists : from Hollywood to the Holy Land, Jihadists reveal their global plans-- (2007); this latest tome; and  Deion Sanders, this is Prime Time (1995). He writes for an outlet called World Net Daily (one of its banner ads is for a book entitled The Nazi connection to terrorism).

Time to turn it off, and go read. Oy.

Pentagon in race for raw materials

Associated Press - The U.S. may stockpile lithium, thin pieces of which are shown here at the Center for Lithium Energy Advanced Research lab in North Carolina

Stockpiling Minerals Takes on Greater Urgency as Global Supply Gets Squeezed

The new plan, dubbed the Strategic Materials Security Program by the Pentagon, would give the military greater power to decide what it stockpiles and how it goes about buying the materials. It would also speed up decision making at a time when military technology evolves rapidly, commodity markets swing widely and countries around the world fight to secure access to natural resources.

Right now, the military can't add to the stockpile list without congressional approval, a process that can take as long as two years. The military wants to remove that restriction. It also wants the authority to strike long-term deals with companies or allied nations to provide emergency supplies of materials that the military says are irreplaceable for making weapons, jet engines, high-powered magnets and other gear.

China controls more than 90% of global production of rare-earth elements, which the U.S. military uses in lasers and high-powered magnets. The U.S. in October added several of these elements to its list of materials that it might warehouse.

Jay Leno at White House Correspondents' Dinner

President Obama Remarks at White House Correspondents' Dinner