In the least surprising survey result ever, Gallup finds that non-Hispanic whites make up the vast majority of the Republican coalition:

As far as the GOP's political strategy is concerned, I think it's far more important to note the significant advantage Republicans have among older voters; 57 percent of whites age 45 and older voted for John McCain in 2008, and older whites form the vast majority of the conservative grassroots, including -- as we've seen -- the Tea Party. That older voters have a grip on the GOP is reflected in the spectacle of Republican lawmakers defending one government-run health-insurance program (Medicare) from cuts while railing against a market-oriented health-reform package that relies on private insurers and an individual market.

One last thing: If liberals want a sane GOP -- and we should, since they'll have the reins of power in a due time -- then we should hope for a party that doesn't rely on older whites for the vast majority of its voters. As a rule, older whites tend to be much more conservative than their younger counterparts, and without younger whites -- or younger minorities -- to counterbalance the influence of older whites, Republican politicians will continue to pander in that direction, and move the party closer to Glenn Beck and his ilk. By contrast, a GOP that picks up 35 percent of the youth vote might be more willing to work for constructive solutions, or at least, more so than a party that exists to jealously guard the interests of the elderly.

-- Jamelle Bouie

Gabriel Arana says No Child Left Behind has given us a lot of hard numbers -- but we still don’t know what they’re telling us about educational outcomes:

But while rooting out bad teachers and excoriating unions for protecting them has become the cause célèbre of education reformers, this isn’t simply a case of teachers’ unions trying to protect their own. Since the passage of the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) in 2001, schools have been required to test students’ progress on a yearly basis. There’s been an ongoing debate not only about what exactly these tests measure but whether -- and how -- the resulting data should be used to evaluate teachers. For the first time, education-policy experts have a big heap of standardized statistics gathered over several years -- instead of a hodgepodge of sporadically taken samples -- and no one knows quite what to do with them.

KEEP READING …

When you ask an anti-immigration advocate these days why the issue has suddenly demanded such draconian measures as Arizona's controversial SB 1070, the response is invariably that the problem has become so acute that we simply must do something. This is how John McCain explained his flip-flop from sponsor of a comprehensive reform bill to a "complete the danged fence" tough talker. They'll also say that Barack Obama has been ignoring the problem, perhaps because doing so fits in with his larger project of destroying America.

But the truth is just the opposite. As I've pointed out before, the federal budget for customs and enforcement has doubled since 2004, and we now have nearly twice as many Border Patrol agents as we did five years ago. That all started during the Bush administration, but it has continued under Obama. Not only that, Obama has dramatically increased the number of deportations and audits of companies to make sure they aren't employing undocumented workers.

And now, we get this report from the Pew Hispanic Center, showing that the number of undocumented immigrants in the country has decreased dramatically:

Not that we should let facts get in the way or anything.

-- Paul Waldman

Matthew Yglesias says the Obama administration's policy of disengagement has succeeded as spectacularly as the Bush administration's policy of invasion failed:

A perhaps true end for the war is currently scheduled for December of 2011 when all troops are set to be withdrawn. Still, nobody knows for sure what will happen if Iraqi leaders fail to reach a peaceful accord on how to form a new governing coalition. But to the extent to which this "end" to the war is in part a product of political spin, it's also a clear demonstration of the fact that the Obama administration's policy of disengagement has succeeded as spectacularly as the Bush administration's policy of invasion failed.

KEEP READING ...

Yesterday, outgoing Chair of the White House Council of Economic Advisers Christina Romer delivered a speech at the National Press Club, something of a valedictory address before she departs Washington. It's worth reading in full [PDF] but there are a few takeaways:

• This recession is unlike any other post-war decline; it is driven by dynamics that economists don't clearly understand, unlike, in Romer's example, the recession of the early 1980s, which was clearly driven by monetary policy. Not so today. "Precisely what has made it so terrifying and so difficult to cure is that we have been in largely uncharted territory."
• The White House underestimated the international effects of the recession; only in late January and early February 2009 did the global extent of the recession, and how it would hinder American recovery, become clear.


• Romer responds to those who criticize the failure of the administration to predict that unemployment would be as high as it currently is.

  An estimate of what the economy will look like if a policy is adopted contains two components: a forecast of what would happen in the absence of the policy, and an estimate of the effect of the policy. As I’ve described, our estimates of the impact of the Recovery Act have proven quite accurate. But we, like virtually every other forecaster, failed to anticipate just how violent the recession would be in the absence of policy, and the degree to which the usual relationship between GDP and unemployment would break down.

  This is one area where opponents of the stimulus just seem unwilling to think clearly; the concept of benchmarks continues to elude them.

• Congress hasn't done enough to support the economy: "The only surefire ways for policy-makers to substantially increase aggregate demand in the short run are for the government to spend more and tax less. In my view, we should be moving forward on both fronts." She recommends, among other things, the small-business bill currently hung up in the Senate.

With Romer returning to Berkeley for the fall, we're still not sure who exactly will replace her. Jonathan Alter hears rumors that Obama's longtime economics adviser Austan Goolsbee will tale the reins at CEA, while Penny Pritzker, a Chicago businesswoman and longtime Obama ally, will replace former Fed Chair Paul Volcker as the head of the Presidents Economic Recovery Advisory Board (PERAB). You also hear Laura Tyson's name for the CEA job.

-- Tim Fernholz

• So, if I understand National Review senior editor Rich Lowry correctly, Barack Obama should have gone for a "smaller and shrewder" stimulus which "might have been able to get a dozen or maybe more Senate Republicans," and thus provide "political cover" instead of, I don't know, getting the damn policy right in the first place. Instead, Lowry claims Obama had a "theological belief that a lumpy $800 billion sack of payments to individuals and of random government programs is going to be a magical spur to job creation." So the lesson here is that basing policy on short-term politics is the key to wise statesmanship. Another would be that Lowry is clueless about American politics, despite it being the source of his livelihood.
• Is there any group of privileged people who whine as much as the fine Americans who work on Wall Street? Despite crashing the economy and miring the country in a recession that might never end, they have the nerve, amid their own return to profitability, to complain about how the Obama administration's policies are so very unfair to them that they might have to start supporting Republicans. I say good riddance. Democrats shouldn't have to prostrate themselves before these preening narcissists because they need campaign contributions.
• It's quite pathetic to hear libertarian optimism stretched to the point where the case against federal funding for education gets boiled down to "let money stay with taxpayers and allow them to consume education as they would anything else: according to their individual priorities and abilities, which they know better than anyone else." Needless to say, this brave new world of self-empowerment leads straight to Sharron Angle's dystopia where America churns out generation after generation of poor, ignorant children.
• Remainders: Anyone who tells you our political institutions aren't broken doesn't know what they're talking about; John Boehner gets my vote for the Most Cynical Man in Washington; shockingly, Megan McArdle doesn't know what she's talking about; amazingly, Alan Simpson still has a job; I wonder what color the sky is in Peter Kirsanow's world; maybe if the GOP hadn't let the crazy genie out of the bottle they wouldn't have to deal with "troubled perennial candidates"; and an empirical assessment of Michael Steele's gaffes.

--Mori Dinauer

Yesterday, New York Gov. David Paterson signed the Domestic Worker Bill of Rights, a state law passed a couple of months ago that gives domestic laborers almost the same rights most workers have in offices or factories. For many, it's probably true that the protections don't go far enough: It only guarantees nannies, housekeepers, and those in similar positions one day off per week and a minimum of three paid days off after a year of employment.

But it is far better than the status quo. After the Assembly passed the bill, I spoke with Priscilla Gonzalez, director of Domestic Workers United, a New York City group that advocated for the bill. The abuses she cited ranged from the everyday, like parents arriving home five minutes late but not paying overtime, to the really egregious, as when a woman in her 60s was forced to sleep in the basement where the sewage constantly overflowed.

It's worth noting that racism is largely to blame for the fact that domestic workers have been excluded from labor laws -- many housekeepers and nannies in the South were black, and protections for them were left out of New Deal reforms to get Southern Democrats on board. One should also be mindful of the racism that keeps those abuses prevalent today -- many domestic workers are new immigrants and nearly all are women. Mobilizing such a disenfranchised group and securing their rights is a victory in and of itself; protecting them in their workplaces will be even more so.

-- Monica Potts

Today, I have a review up of American Taliban by Markos Moulitsas, founder of Daily Kos. You should read the full thing, but here's the gist:

...ultimately, any similarities are vastly outweighed by incredibly important distinctions and vast differences of degree. I'm no fan of the right wing, but the only possible way it can be "indistinguishable" from the Taliban is if conservatives are stoning women for adultery, stalking elementary schools to throw acid in girls' faces, and generally enforcing fundamentalist religious law with torture and wanton violence.

Taking issue with my review, Digby argues that in my attack on Kos' book, I'm missing the big picture:

The inconvenient truth here is that these people are dangerous because their worldview is dangerous. Lethal even. And somebody has to have the guts and to call them on it in their own terms. This "tired genre" of "our opponents are monsters" has been decidedly dominated by one side and the consequences have been grave. We have a fight on our hands and the only real question left is whether anyone on our side is willing to wage it.

Listen, I have no problem with throwing punches and fighting the good fight against the forces of wealth and regression. And I won't hesitate to attack the conservative movement for its sexism, racial resentment and monomaniacal devotion to enriching the privileged. But there's a vast difference between that, and stressing a moral equivalence between the right and the Taliban. The former is true and focuses our aim for the battles ahead, the latter, as Patrick Appel writes at the Daily Dish, doesn't "accomplish anything besides juicing book sales and temporarily riling up like-minded folk."

Hell, Kos admits as much when he describes the purpose of his book, "Because look, this book, ultimately, is a big 'fuck you' to every conservative who has ever accused us of wanting the terrorists to win." Kos isn't Paul Revere; he isn't warning us about some incipient threat to our safety; he's trying to get back at conservatives who accuse liberals of hating their country. Which, as I said in my review, is fair; Kos has never claimed to be an honest broker for the truth. But the fight for progress doesn't require us to bend the truth or distort our opponents' ideas; we can wage this war as we always have, by fighting for our values and giving the right the rope it needs to hang itself. Sure, "fuck you" feels good, but the moment you turn to smears is the moment you concede the weakness of your own position.

The conservative movement is a perfect example of what happens when you let dishonesty consume your argument. In its drive to demonize liberals, it has become an incoherent mass of rage and resentment, devoid of anything approximating a governing agenda. The right has become so doctrinaire that it has lost its capacity for self-correction. This year's Republicans will win because of high unemployment and poor growth, not because the American people have suddenly become more receptive to conservatism (they haven't).

Granted, hyperbole and distortion has helped the right win elections for almost 30 years, and during that time, they have successfully changed the terms of American politics. But for all its electoral success, the conservative movement hasn't really changed the guiding assumptions of American governance or stopped the expansion of the welfare state. Liberals might be arguing in the house that Ronald Reagan built, but conservatives are still trying to breach FDR's fortress.

-- Jamelle Bouie

(AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana)

Police block the street in front of the headquarters of the Discovery Channel network right outside of Washington, D.C. Police say a gunman has taken at least one person hostage in the building.

This New Criterion piece opposing the construction of an Islamic community center on sacred Burlington Coat Factory ground is, if nothing else, a piece of reactionary pseudo-intellectualism of the kind I've rarely encountered since the days of The American Spectator. That is, it uses words like "tenebrosity" and "turbid" to dress up an argument that could be found on any fourth-rate wingnut blog. But it does accomplish one thing: It provides a handy one-stop guide for a variety of terrible arguments opposing the Park51 project:

• "Poetic justice as fairness":  People who have no objection to Park51, the nameless editorialist allows, cite their support for treating people equally. But wait a minute -- some of these people also support affirmative action, a supposed contradiction.

  Let’s say you are an eighteen-year-old white male Protestant applying to Yale. Are you treated equally -- i.e., the same, i.e., with no regard to your race or sex or religion -- by the admissions office?

  The response to this argument is obvious. Wanting to put people on equal footing would require that admissions officers look at an applicant from a privileged background differently; most people recognize that it is more difficult to excel when one comes from circumstances that constrain opportunities, so succeeding despite obstacles is its own mark of merit. But by false analogy, the New Criterion assumes that if someone supports recognizing accomplishment in the face of adversity, they must also treat religions differently. But at heart, it's not as if they are really interested in this. And if there really is a contradiction, it cuts both ways: Does the New Criterion now have no objection to affirmative action?

Jamelle Bouie argues that it's tempting to demonize conservatives with hyperbolic comparisons, but liberals have an obligation to the truth:

Given the subject matter and his own influence, Moulitsas is sure to find a large audience for American Taliban. This wouldn't be a problem if the book were a careful comparison of populist nationalist movements, highlighting similarities, underscoring differences, and generally documenting points of congruence between the U.S. conservative movement and populist nationalist groups around the world. But it isn't.

KEEP READING ...

This year, in contrast, will likely be the first in which non-Hispanic whites will be a minority among newborns. In part, this reflects an average birthrate of 1.87 for non-Hispanic white women as opposed to 2.99 for Hispanic women, with African American and Asian American birthrates falling in between. Without foreign-born mothers, the U.S. would have below-replacement fertility, like much of Western Europe. ... With each passing year, the cultural mix of the United States is growing more Latin and Asian and black. Non-Hispanic whites are just 56 percent of the under-18 population, a reality reflected in an increasingly pan-ethnic youth culture that seems baffling to older white Americans. Imagine how elderly viewers of Glenn Beck must feel when they accidentally catch themselves watching an episode of Jersey Shore.

The points about demography are well taken, but the Jersey Shore reference is a bit off. Let's see: White ethnics, at once driven by insecurity and extraordinarily proud of their heritage, acting out for attention while reinforcing gender and cultural stereotypes, in front of a broader culture that views them, at best, as entertainment, and at worst, as a sign of social dysfunction? My God, Glenn Beck's viewers are an episode of Jersey Shore!

-- Tim Fernholz

In his new memoir, Tony Blair says no:

One of the most ludicrous caricatures of George is that he was a dumb idiot who stumbled into the presidency. No one stumbles into that job, and the history of American presidential campaigns is littered with the corpses of those who were supposed to be brilliant but who nonetheless failed because brilliance is not enough. [...]

To succeed in US politics, of that of the UK, you have to be more than clever. You have to be able to connect and you have to be able to articulate that connection in plain language. The plainness of the language then leads people to look past the brainpower involved. Reagan was clever. Thatcher was clever. And sometimes the very plainness touches something else: a simplicity that is the product of a decisive nature.

Despite my unabashed love for jokes that make fun of President Bush's intelligence, I never thought he was a dumb man. Blair is right; genuinely stupid people don't go far in American politics, and no one just stumbles into the presidency of the United States.

Jonathan Bernstein made this point a few months ago, but it's a good one, and worth repeating; decades from now, when the history of the Bush administration has been written, we'll find that George W. Bush suffered from passivity, indifference and incompetence, not stupidity or ignorance. As Bernstein notes, the president's main job is to avoid policy disasters, since policy disasters for the nation are political disasters for the president, and capable presidents are most skilled at avoiding political disasters. Yes, Bush was regularly criticized for his politicized White House, but when it comes down to it, he lacked the political skills it takes to successfully manage the presidency. Bush failed for other reasons too, but a big part of it was that he simply wasn't a very good politician.

-- Jamelle Bouie

Tim Fernholz says last night's speech may have felt like an inconclusive end to the war, but it marks a shift in the president's focus to economic policy:

It's hard to imagine a different scenario for the United States' exit from Iraq; our departure depended on the circumstances of our entrance and the murky twists of the changing conflict. The president marked the occasion with a rare Oval Office address not only because it marks the fulfillment of a campaign promise but because it marks an explicit shift in Obama's focus from foreign to domestic policy.

KEEP READING ...

Via Jezebel, Candi Cushman of Focus on the Family, the Christian conservative group, believes that anti-bullying campaigns push a gay agenda because they try to prevent the bullying of, among others, LGTB students.

For Cushman, though, that means an anti-Christian agenda.

'We feel more and more that activists are being deceptive in using anti-bullying rhetoric to introduce their viewpoints, while the viewpoint of Christian students and parents are increasingly belittled,' Cushman said.

Public schools increasingly convey that homosexuality is normal and should be accepted, Cushman said, while opposing viewpoints by conservative Christians are portrayed as bigotry.

Statements like this come from the same point of view as the kinds of statements Dr. Laura Schlessinger made after she berated a black caller asking for advice on racism, and Glenn Beck made when he said we're living in a world just like the '50s but with the races reversed: Asking the white Christian majority to respect the rights of others is somehow an infringement on their rights.

How do anti-bullying programs in schools hurt Christians? It doesn't, unless they're bullies. What many on the Christian right miss, because they're too busy nursing their persecution complexes, is how pervasive, omnipresent, and exclusionary their particular brand of religion is. Say that, though, and you're anti-Christian.

-- Monica Potts

Today's Sarah Palin news is a juicy, gossipy article in Vanity Fair, which gives us stuff like this:

Warm and effusive in public, indifferent or angry in private: this is the pattern of Palin’s behavior toward the people who make her life possible. A onetime gubernatorial aide to Palin says, “The people who have worked for her—they’re broken, used, stepped on, down in the dust.” On the 2008 campaign trail, one close aide recalls, it was practically impossible to persuade Palin to take a moment to thank the kitchen workers at fund-raising dinners. During the campaign, Palin lashed out at the slightest provocation, sometimes screaming at staff members and throwing objects. Witnessing such behavior, one aide asked Todd Palin if it was typical of his wife. He answered, “You just got to let her go through it. … Half the stuff that comes out of her mouth she doesn’t even mean.” When a campaign aide gingerly asked Todd whether Sarah should consider taking psychiatric medication to control her moods, Todd responded that she “just needed to run and work out more.” Her anger kept boiling over, however, and eventually the fits of rage came every day. Then, just as suddenly, her temper would be gone. Palin would apologize and promise to be nicer. Within hours, she would be screaming again. At the end of one long day, when Palin was mid-tirade, a campaign aide remembers thinking, “You were an angel all night. Now you’re a devil. Where did this come from?”

For those of us who find Palin endlessly fascinating, it's a fun read. But does this stuff really matter? After all, there are loads of other politicians who have been known for their tempers -- Bill Clinton's, for example, is legendary. That can certainly create problems with your staff, hurt morale, and end up closing off sources of information -- if you've ever had a boss who had a temper, you quickly learned that the best thing to do is just not tell him or her anything upsetting.

But that doesn't necessarily mean that the fact (or allegation, anyway) that Palin turns into a snarling beast when the doors are closed is, in and of itself, a compelling reason why she shouldn't be president. But did we really need any more reasons?

-- Paul Waldman

My full reaction to President Obama's speech last night can be found here -- basically, in concluding the Iraq War and shifting to a focus on economic policy, the president is marking not only a transition for Americans but also for his national political career, which was sparked by his opposition to the war. One observation that didn't fit into the piece came from this section:

[W]e’re funding a Post-9/11 GI Bill that helps our veterans and their families pursue the dream of a college education. Just as the GI Bill helped those who fought World War II -- including my grandfather -- become the backbone of our middle class, so today’s servicemen and women must have the chance to apply their gifts to expand the American economy. Because part of ending a war responsibly is standing by those who have fought it.

Maybe I'm reading too much into this, but it feels like the references to his grandfather are a coded signal to viewers: I'm an American, not a Muslim, my grandfather fought in the Good War, after all. With half of Republicans living in a fantasy world of symbolic belief*, it seems like a politic notion for the president to work into his speech, but it's come to quite a pretty point where that sort of thing is necessary.

-- Tim Fernholz

*Why is it that myriad real-world problems can't capture the attention of these people? Perhaps the actual threats to our society so frighten them that creating a hysterical fantasy world with an undercover Muslim president is the best coping mechanism they have.

Marc Ambinder reminds us of something in advance of President Obama's Oval Office speech:

We forget how integral Sen. Barack Obama's decision to oppose the Iraq war was to his own political awakening, and how many contortions Hillary Clinton had to untwist in order to justify her own support for the war authority, and how, by the day of the general election, given the success of the surge (or the success of JSOC's counterterrorism efforts), Iraq was no longer a central voting issue. Voters seemed to exorcise that demon in 2006, when they voted Democrats into Congress.

After the recession, and the election, and the health-care battle, and the rise of the Tea Party, the days when we spent all our time arguing about Iraq seem like they were decades ago. And it's safe to say that Iraq wasn't just central to Obama's political awakening, it was one of the half-dozen or so factors he couldn't have been elected without. You may recall that he was alone among the top candidates in having opposed the war from the beginning, which was no small thing at the time.

And when he got elected, I argued that he could become the next FDR if he could do four things: fix the economy, do something about climate change, pass health-care reform, and get us out of Iraq. Two out of four is obviously not enough -- and now, he'll be judged infinitely more on Afghanistan than he will on Iraq, which will always be George W. Bush's war.

-- Paul Waldman

• Ezra Klein quotes the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities: "The revenue loss over the next 75 years just from extending the tax cuts for people making over $250,000 -- the top 2 percent of Americans -- would be about as large as the entire Social Security shortfall over this period." He calls this "How to Fix Social Security in One Graph," which is accurate enough, I suppose. I would have described this as "How Conservatives can Kill two Birds with one Stone." After all, conservatives find redistribution an affront to American Exceptionalism, so what better way to conquer redistribution than to distribute trillions to the very wealthiest Americans and let the elderly poor suffer in their golden years?
• How much do you want to bet that the following details about Barack Obama's Oval Office makeover will be thoroughly ignored in the ensuing right-wing media firestorm? "The makeover was not done at taxpayer expense; the White House said the costs were covered by the White House Historical Association, a nonprofit group, through a contribution from the committee that paid for Mr. Obama’s inauguration." Item one for investigation in John Boehner's Congress next year.
• Remember when Meghan McCain was a ubiquitous presence in the political media, guiding us through the early days of the Obama administration? Now, more than ever, we need McCain's keen insights into our contemporary political logjam, and I'm afraid she has decided to look back, not forward, publishing a tell-all book about campaign trail '08 and dishing on the former governor of Alaska, who for some bizarre reason is able to command enormous sums of money for talking about God knows what.
• Remainders: Orrin Hatch does the right thing; Jonathan Bernstein takes down the absurd (and insulting) notion that Democrats need their own "mama grizzly"; Dave Weigel explains why Tom Coburn hates Newt Gingrich; Adam does his best to figure out what the hell Reihan Salam is talking about; The Washington Post's excuse for sloppy editing and basic fact-checking is not convincing; the Cato Institute is not above ignoring libertarian principle to combat temporary unpopularity; and graphing the probability that health-care reform will be repealed.

--Mori Dinauer

(AP Photo/Gerald Herbert)

Former McCain campaign manager Steve Schmidt and the former presidential candidate. Today, Schmidt told Sam Stein of the Huffington Post that gay marriage was on its way to becoming a conservative cause.

Click here to listen
That's a radio ad that Democratic Senate candidate Rep. Kendrick Meek will start airing tomorrow in multiple media markets around Florida. The last line is definitely the big take-away his campaign wants people focused on as he vies to win the bulk of Democratic voters and as many independents as possible to make his electoral math turn out right. The press has already picked up on the efforts of Crist's opponents to portray him as a flip-flopping opportunist, and if Crist's wild repositioning on health-care reform (for it and against it in the course of an afternoon) is any indicator, they won't have to work too hard.

The real question for Meek's strategy is whether Republican enthusiasm will lead to a huge turnout for Marco Rubio, his conservative opponent. While Meek has a path to victory -- rounding up a plurality of votes from a Democratic-trending electorate -- a big advantage in Republican turnout could negate his plans, making get-out-the-vote efforts key to Florida's Senate race.

-- Tim Fernholz

At dusk today, terrorists shot and killed four Israelis on the main West Bank highway south of Hebron. News reports identified the victims as residents of the nearby Israeli settlements of Beit Hagai and Kiryat Arba. Hamas -- the ultra-nationalist Islamicist group locked in conflict with both Israel and the Palestinian Authority -- quickly took responsibility for the attack. The Hebron area is known as a Hamas stronghold, and Hamas bitterly opposes the direct peace talks between Israel and the PA that are scheduled to resume in Washington on Thursday.

The logic behind the murders is obvious: As has happened many times before, extremists want to stop diplomacy by igniting a new cycle of attack, crackdowns, rage, and more terror. In this case, the killers seek to discredit the Palestinian Authority and its efforts to prevent violence. Most Israelis and Palestinians already appear pessimistic about the talks, but hard-liners are desperately afraid that the negotiations might just bring compromise and a peace agreement. If the Israeli public can be convinced that the PA is either soft on terror or complicit in it, the fragile foundation for negotiations will crumble.

While the killers likely came from one of the nearby towns under PA control, the Israeli army is responsible for security on the road where the shooting took place. The murders on the Hebron highway represent a joint Israeli-PA security failure. The way to deny the terrorists a larger political victory is to move ahead with the negotiations, without a round of recriminations between Israel and the PA, without delays.

-- Gershom Gorenberg

Some coffee shop owners aren't very happy about the droves of people who use their establishments mainly to do work and only occasionally drink coffee:

Hers is one of a growing number of coffee bars that have opened recently around the country, particularly in New York. Instead of idling at a chair, customers at these establishments stand or perch on a stool to down a cappuccino or an iced coffee at the counter. By doing away with the comfy seats, roomy tables and working outlets that many customers now seem to believe are included in the price of a macchiato, the new coffee bars challenge the archetypal American cafe.

As someone who frequently exchanges money for coffee and space to use my laptop, I think it's pretty much the case that coffee shop owners don't consider their facilities a product in the same way they consider their coffee a product. Most coffee shops wouldn't give you a free refill on a cup of coffee, but they will allow unlimited use of their bandwidth for as long as you please. At present, I can walk into nearly any coffee shop, purchase a single cup of drip coffee, and then use the chairs, tables, power outlets, and wifi indefinitely. On rare occasions, the bathrooms are reserved for customers. Smart owners would tie wifi use to high-dollar purchases -- you can only use the internet if you've spent at least X dollars -- and implement a data cap, so that you are forced to re-up with coffee or something else at set intervals.

Americans love their coffee houses and will continue to use them as non-work places to get work done. Instead of finding ways to keep customers from lingering, they should actually price their leisure space and use that lingering to their financial advantage.

-- Jamelle Bouie

As part of an article highlighting Ruth Bader Ginsburg's accomplishments as a litigator -- and exploring the extent to which they enabled the rise of female public figures like Sarah Palin who claim the mantle of feminism while rejecting virtually all of its substantive commitments -- Dahlia Lithwick reminds us of the social context in which Ginsburg was bringing her landmark lawsuits:

Those who like to believe they have picked themselves up by the bootstraps sometimes forget that they wouldn't even have boots were it not for the women who came before. Listening to Palin, it's almost impossible to believe that, as recently as 50 years ago, a woman at Harvard Law School could be asked by Dean Erwin Griswold to justify taking a spot that belonged to a man. In Ginsburg's lifetime, a woman could be denied a clerkship with Felix Frankfurter just because she was a woman. Only a few decades ago, Ginsburg had to hide her second pregnancy for fear of losing tenure.

One could add other examples from the world of the Supreme Court here. For example, Sandra Day O'Connor, after graduating third in a Stanford Law School class led by William Rehnquist, was offered only secretarial work by a single law firm. And the reluctance to hire women as law clerks went on long after Felix Frankfurter retired in 1962. In a major stain on an otherwise admirable career, William Brennan was notoriously unwilling to hire women as law clerks for much of his tenure on the Court.

It is implausible to think that the effects of this kind of systematic discrimination have completely vanished -- even if they have attenuated. Today, no Supreme Court justice would refuse to consider hiring a woman as a law clerk, but women continue to remain underrepresented among Supreme Court clerks -- and on the federal courts as well. Even in private practice, they continue to face discrimination. Child-rearing is often blamed for this underrepresentation -- even though nobody seems to wonder how Antonin Scalia managed to have a successful career as an academic and judge while having nine children. These kinds of disparities remain prevalent not just in the legal profession but throughout society.

The feminist achievements of the 1970s and 1980s were a beginning, not an end. And with the Republicans about to take over at least one house of Congress, it's worth remembering that progress is hardly set in stone. We need feminists who don't eschew feminism. That's to say, we need Sarah Palin's brand of "feminism" like a fish needs a bicycle.

-- Scott Lemieux

Boston University's Isabel Wilkerson has written a new book on the mass migration of African Americans from the South to industrial cities in the North and Midwest:

Ms. Wilkerson makes a case that people who left the South only to create hometown-based communities in new places are more like refugees than migrants: more closely tied to their old friends and families, more apt to form tight expatriate groups, more enduringly attached to the areas they left behind. She argues that these people, among them her Georgia-born mother and Virginia-born father who raised Ms. Wilkerson in Washington, D.C., were better educated and more closely tied to their families than other scholars have assumed.

As someone who comes from a family of black Southerners, albeit one that didn't migrate, I'm excited to read this book, if only to broaden my understanding of what life was like for African Americans in the Jim Crow South. What's more, I just think it's important to highlight any good scholarship that relates to the Jim Crow South.

As the Glenn Beck revival aptly demonstrated, Americans have a piss-poor understanding of history, especially as it relates to the century-long period of anti-black apartheid. As most Americans understand it, Jim Crow consisted of segregated schools, water fountains, and shitty seats on the bus. If there's anything I worry about, it's that whatever public memories we have of the real Jim Crow -- the lynchings, the murders, the economic isolation -- will fade as we lose the men and women who experienced them. It's easy to laugh at Beck's attempt to appropriate the civil-rights movement, but I can easily imagine a near future where the mass of America has no real idea of the evil that prompted black Americans to fight for their rights in a huge, unprecedented way, and it terrifies me.

It's why I value things like the FBI's civil-rights-era Cold Case Initiative; it hasn't been very successful, but that's almost irrelevant. The simple act of documenting racial terrorism is powerful enough. Books like Wilkerson's are important for the same reason; as the survivors of Jim Crow pass on, it's vitally important for our understanding of our country that we document their experiences for posterity.

-- Jamelle Bouie

More from today's depressing poll results, from Newsweek we learn that not only do many Americans think Barack Obama is Muslim (24 percent in this one), but majorities of Republicans not only think Obama is favoring Muslims over other Americans, he's also sympathetic to al-Qaeda's goals. I made a couple of charts:

Yes, that's right: Fully 52 percent of Republicans think Obama "sympathizes with the goals of Islamic fundamentalists who want to impose Islamic law around the world." Sigh.

-- Paul Waldman

A few weeks ago, Utah state Sen. Daniel Liljenquist caused a commotion when he suggested the state should try to rein in Medicaid spending by cutting reimbursements for epidurals and elective Cesarean sections. The outcry, of course, was deserved: Suggesting poor women should experience pain during childbirth to save money is ridiculous.

But if I can be real for a second, it's not crazy to think about curbing some elective C-sections. Rates have been climbing for some time and now stand at more than 30 percent of births. Humans have a uniquely difficult time giving birth -- it's the price we pay for walking upright -- but more and more, studies show the increase in C-sections has nothing to do with more women needing interventions and everything to do with doctor impatience and patient preference. That would be alright if the increasing number of C-sections that aren't medically necessary weren't also associated with post-natal problems for both the mother and the infant.

The increased use of C-sections highlights one of the problems with the American medical system: the tendency to think everything new is inherently better. If we're trying to spread insurance coverage to more people, we have to consider whether we're using unnecessary procedures too often. This doesn't mean that Medicaid should stop covering C-sections, but doctors should be encouraged to rethink their approach -- and patients should be better informed. That's not what Liljenquist was saying about C-sections, but it's worth knowing that a sane reassessment of health insurance in the U.S. might reach a similar conclusion.

-- Monica Potts

So the next generation of House Republican leadership has a new book (their actual preview video was too big to embed, but the video above is a close approximation). Republican Whip Eric Cantor, Chief Deputy Whip Kevin McCarthy, and Ranking Budget Committee Member Paul Ryan are the key Republicans who set the tone for the party's efforts to take back the House, shoring up weak spots in leadership and at the House Republicans' political arm, the National Republican Congressional Committee.

The book is part of their midterm rollout, and while it doesn't appear to spend much time setting a specific agenda for House Republicans, the promise of a vigorous alternative to John Boehner, Mike Pence, and other older Republican leaders will probably aid the GOP's electoral quest. In fact, this book makes me think we won't see Speaker Boehner next year regardless of the election's outcome. Recall that Newt Gingrich made the jump from opposition whip to speaker in 1994; few would be surprised to see Cantor make the same move -- with McCarthy ending up as whip or majority leader and Ryan setting the tone for a year of negotiation with the Obama administration as chair of the Budget Committee.

The real question, though, is which one is the Emilio?

-- Tim Fernholz

If this new Gallup poll is any indication, liberals will soon be able to complain about Speaker John Boehner, and possibly Majority Leader Mitch McConnell:

According to Gallup, this Republican lead is greater than any previous midterm advantage in Gallup's 60-year history of tracking the generic ballot. Barring a miracle, Republicans are very likely to win the House in November, and there's a good chance they'll pick up the Senate, too. In addition to driving President Obama's agenda to the right, GOP gains virtually guarantee a scandal-ridden 112th Congress.

Earlier this summer, Jonathan Bernstein wondered aloud about the lessons House Republicans drew from the years 1995-2000. Did they see the "scandal and investigate" strategy as a success (in the same way the rejectionist strategy "worked" in 1993-1994), or did they see that period as a failure, since Bill Clinton won an easy re-election, and Republicans lost seats in the 1998 midterm elections. Now that Republicans are about to make huge gains after another successful use of the rejectionist strategy, my guess is that House Republicans intend to give scandal-and-investigate another go. Indeed, last week, Politico reported that "Republicans are planning a wave of committee investigations targeting the White House and Democratic allies if they win back the majority."

At this point, it isn't a matter of "will they investigate," as much as it is a question of "how far will they go?" If House Republicans view 1995-2000 as a success, then we should expect another round of pointless investigations and ridiculous witch hunts.

-- Jamelle Bouie

The International Monetary Fund has announced a new lending facility designed to combat global financial crises. This should worry us because it suggests further international economic crises are on the horizon, and their new facility is probably not the best way to combat them. At least, though, the institution tasked with attacking these problems is doing its best to get ahead of the curve.

So what exactly are we talking about? When countries face problems with currency reserves or sovereign debt, as Greece did earlier this year, other countries, the IMF, or both provide emergency loans to see the suffering state through the crisis. Generally, these loans require the country in question to meet a series of conditions for future fiscal probity, making IMF packages -- austerity in exchange for bailouts -- very controversial.

Sometimes, though, you see countries that have few fundamental problems with their economic policy (Spain is a good current example) that become victims of a financial panic, not mismanagement -- like a global bank run, but with countries. In order to protect these countries, officials in the late 1990s came up with an idea for Flexible Credit Lines (FCLs) so that states whose policies were preapproved by the IMF were also preapproved for loans in the case of a crisis. The IMF finally implemented this program after the 2008 crash, giving aid to Mexico, Poland, and Hungary. For a broader explanation of these issues, I suggest you read my story on Lael Brainard, the top U.S. official who manages these issues and who helped propose FCLs in the first place.

Today's news is that the IMF has decided that FCLs don't go far enough. Now, they're willing to commit IMF funds to countries that are just so-so in the economic policy department. This puts more of the global emergency reserve at risk, but it is the kind of proactive step that could halt a run. Here's the problem: While throwing enough money at these problems may work, sometimes it doesn't, as we saw throughout the Asian financial crisis in the late 1990s; lenders eventually get paid off but the economic damage in victim countries tends to last. Instead of bailing out creditors, some scholars and practitioners think a better idea is creating a process to restructure a country's debts, with a haircut for lenders, so that the country has a reasonable chance of paying them off. Imagine a bankruptcy process for a country.

This is called a "Sovereign Debt Restructuring Mechanism" or, more euphemistically, a "bail-in." It doesn't currently exist except informally; the U.S. and the IMF helped restructure Brazil's debt to end the 1990s financial crisis. At one time that was easy -- when most sovereign creditors were major banks and it was possible to more or less get everyone in a room. Now, with lenders coming from the less-supervised capital markets and with the rise of securitization, figuring out who can actually take that haircut is very hard. That, however, ought to be the impetus for reforming our international financial institutions to do a better job of handling global crises. Did I mention you should read my story about the U.S. role in the current international turbulence? If the IMF foresees trouble ahead, you're going to want to know what's going on.

-- Tim Fernholz

Paul Waldman looks at re-emergent anti-intellectualism in the GOP:

We probably shouldn't make too much of this -- they're just having a bit of fun, after all. But embracing Palin in all her nincompoopery must, in the words of the former Alaska governor herself, "stab hearts" -- at least some of them -- at a magazine that is supposed to have some sort of commitment to ideas. When you make a slip of the tongue (or the brain), you can say "oops," or you can celebrate your own ignorance. Because after all, wouldn't the later irritate people who value things like education and clear thinking? You know, liberals?

KEEP READING ...

Gershom Gorenberg argues that conditions on the ground belie optimism for the Middle East peace talks in Washington on Thursday:

Since taking office, President Barack Obama has sought to revive direct talks between Israeli and Palestinian negotiators. Thursday's ceremonial reopening of the talks is the culmination of that effort. Afterward, negotiations are to move to Middle East locations. The administration is confidently talking of reaching agreement on a two-state solution within a year. It's very hard to share that optimism. Without an Israeli commitment to renew the settlement freeze, there is a fatal imbalance built into the diplomatic process.

KEEP READING ...

Gawker has given us a fascinating collection of military recruiting ads from around the world, and like much culture these days, they show a strong American influence while nevertheless retaining their local character.

The Indian, French, and Australian ones essentially follow the American template: Join the military, and you will do a bunch of badass things yet also learn about computers and set yourself up for a great career once you're done (although the French soldier pauses from badassery long enough to make out with a beautiful girl -- hey, he's French -- and even hold his newborn baby). The Swedish one is highly weird, saying to Swedish girls, you can either go and be an au pair for a crazy American family, or you can drive a tank.

But the most compelling ones have to be the British and Lebanese ads. The first half of the British ad seems to be saying, "Join the military, and you'll have heavily armed, extremely agitated foreigners yell at you in a language you don't understand." Things turn out well in the end, but it's a rather subtle pitch, appealing not to the recruit's desire for action but to his interest in gaining a nuanced understanding of human psychology:

The Lebanese ad is interesting, coming from a country with such a long history of civil war and internal strife. It says that if you join the military, you will gain not just respect but the gratitude of Lebanese from all walks of life. It's actually quite moving:

And then there's the Singapore ad, in which a battleship transforms into a giant robot and fires a missile, while people walking on the dock seem not to notice. But maybe Singaporeans find that kind of thing tremendously persuasive.

-- Paul Waldman

• Consider the following: If Republicans had been allowed to pursue their own response to the recession, both the jobs and deficit picture would be worse. The public, on the other hand, prefers government spending on job creation over deficit reduction by a 20-point margin. Despite this, the administration has been anything but bold on joblessness and weak growth. Yes, I'm happy when the president calls out Republicans for obstructionism, but he needs to first promote something big and then remind people that the GOP is refusing to play ball.
• As we get closer to Election Day, we'll be able to evaluate various predicative models on the merits, but I thought this one was a good example of how the "wave" election would play out. It forecasts the Democrats losing the House on the order of 50 seats, similar to 1994. The key, as the model's authors see it, is identifying whether the historical pattern of the out party getting a late spurt of support from uncommitted voters holds true for this election. If it does, Republicans win big. If the generic ballot stays close, Democrats likely retain the House.
• As readers of the Prospect know, all politics is identity politics, but where you get into trouble is when you make broad assumptions about the public's ideological leanings. I can't disprove, for instance, that there are "millions" of voters who are motivated chiefly by the desire to limit government, but to claim they are "sporadically potent" in an election isn't exactly a ringing endorsement. Or that "so many voters" are giving the GOP one last shot at competent governance, after which "everybody" is going to start looking for a "third party."
• Weekend Remainders: Another reason Harry Reid might survive November; as all Real Americans know, freedom bombs are the best way to win the hearts and minds of our Muslim friends; Lisa Murkowski will not have the option of running as a libertarian in Alaska; another good reason to abolish the Air Force; another reason to be skeptical of Scott Rasmussen's motives; I have no idea what the latest NYT public editor is talking about; and don't Media Matters (and Think Progress) have better things to do than file a "report" that -- gasp! -- Glenn Beck is "diametrically opposed" to Martin Luther King Jr.?

--Mori Dinauer

Hurricane Katrina as seen from space. From Aug. 25 to Aug. 29 in 2005, Katrina ripped through cities across the Gulf Coast, causing over $150 billion in damage.