Juan Cole at Informed Comment has a meditation in defense of the recent essay regarding pro-Israel lobbies in the US, authored by John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt and published in the London Review of Books. They argue that the collective power exercised by those lobbies has had the effect of suppressing Congressional opposition to, and enhancing support for, Israeli policies that subvert U.S. interests.

Lance Knobel notes today that former Clinton labor secretary Robert Reich has become, so far as Knobel knows, the first cabinet secretary to start a blog. He’s been at it for slightly less than a month, but he’s got the hang of it already.

Remember, remember always that all of us, and you and I especially, are descended from immigrants and revolutionists.
–Franklin D. Roosevelt
I happened to be in LA on Monday for the demonstrations—in fact one of my meetings was canceled because it was close to the downtown courthouse (near the demonstrations)and I wouldn’t have been able to get [...]

Chris Hitchens launched one of his patented “Sherman’s stagger to the sea” attacks on University of Michigan professor and sometime pundit Juan Cole yesterday. In it, he accuses Cole of poor scholarship, inflated academic credentials and being an apologist for the Iranian regime and in particular, Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

Tony Blair’s Labour party got beaten like a borrowed mule in local UK elections this week, and some of his cabinet ministers are paying the price. The party lost several hundred seats, including many in overwhlemingly Labour districts, and including some to the nativist British National Party.

Sadly, since she started working for Time magazine, not so much. Case in point is this meta-whine in which she lays in to bloggers for not being sufficiently blasé about L’Affaire Colbert.

Two weeks ago, blogger Lance Dutson was served with a multi-million dollar lawsuit by the PR firm running Maine’s tourism campaign. Yesterday, after a concentrated pushback from the Media Bloggers Association (disclosure: I’m a member), other bloggers and a few committed lawyers, the firm dropped the suit just as a prominent Maine legislator called for suspending the firm’s contract with the state and investigating its use of Maine tax dollars.

A Massachusetts company has developed a system allowing cell phone users to send text messages to large television screens in public places. The technology, dubbed “Wiffiti” by developer LocaModa, is designed to “extend and empower public expression and creativity in a socially responsible way, fostering an open and strong sense of citizenship and community.”

Slate columnist Christopher Hitchens on Tuesday called University of Michigan professor Juan Cole an apologist for Iran’s president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. The basis of the claim was that Cole, in an email to a colleague, said that a phrase in a recent Ahmadinejad speech had been widely mistranslated as a call to wipe Israel off the map.

How dumb would Hayden CIA nomination be?

I’m inclined to say “spectacularly dumb”.

Tristero over at Hullabaloo has deconstructed Bush’s seemingly inscrutable statement to a German reporter last Friday that the best moment of his presidency was the time he caught a seven-and-a-half pound fish.

I never tire of enumerating the evils of advertising. That must mean I really have a secret love for it. Before the movie, I discussed with other posters the machine that is Tom Cruise. Since TAPS, Cruise has perfected himself into an animal hardwired to project itself as our ideal. Even if he’s also endowed [...]

t is more in sorrow than in anger that I denounce Christopher Hitchens as an apologist for terror. And not just any terror: he accuses the US of fomenting terror, and enthusiastically endorses the practice.

Slate’s John Dickerson pilloried House minority leader Nancy Pelosi yesterday for mentioning investigations into the Bush administration as a likely outcome of a Democratic victory in November. Thanks to Pelosi’s frankness, he intones, “[t]he GOP congressional majorities may now be secure.”

Attorneys for Steve Rosen and Keith Weissman, the two former AIPAC officials indicted for receiving classified information from former Pentagon official Lawrence Franklin, are preparing to subpoena several current and former Bush administration officials.

When Joe Scarborough tees off on a Bush administration domestic surveillance program, you know the tide is coming in. On his MSNBC talk show last night, Scarborough described the newly revealed National Security Agency program aimed at collecting complete calling records on customers of AT&T, Verizon and BellSouth as “so widespread, it is so random, it is so far removed from focusing on al Qaeda suspects that the president was talking about today, that it‘s hard to imagine any intelligence program in U.S. history being so susceptible to abuse.”

I wrote yesterday that AT&T, BellSouth and Verizon customers should strongly consider switching wireless, long distance and internet accounts to Qwest in the wake of revelations that the former three firms provided tens of millions of customer calling records to the National Security Agency. Today, I want to add a pair of caveats while stressing that punishing the three companies cooperating with the NSA is still a very good idea.

That portion of the Democratic party self-described as “centrist” is suffering an outbreak of ‘roid rage leading them to confuse bluster with strength and sanity with weakness.

Two items of interest in the continuing investigation into the outing of CIA agent Valerie Plame Wilson, one highlighting Dick Cheney’s involvement and the other, a report that Karl Rove was indicted Friday on at least two counts in connection with the case.

If the report that Karl Rove was secretly indicted on Friday is true, we have a bit of advice for The Architect: throw Momser from the train. Give up Dick Cheney.

President Bush has told Mexico’s Vicente Fox that any deployment of National Guard troops along the US-Mexico border will be “on a temporary basis.” Bush is expected to announce the deployment in a speech tonight. White House spokeswoman Maria Tamburri said Bush made the assurance when Fox called Bush to voice concern over reports of the move.

Cynics would see this speech tonight as a diversion—pragmatists as further incompetence. Perhaps both. I find it somewhat ironic that those so obsessed with ‘securing the borders’ and protecting ‘our way of life’ care so little for their own boundaries and the decisions that actually undermine that way of life in far more subtle and effective ways.

Karl Rove told the American Enterprise Institute today that president Bush’s approval ratings are down only because Iraq is a mess. By the same token, as Philip Klinkner notes, “if it weren’t for the Alps, Switzerland would be flat.”

President Bush couldn’t have been clearer: his amnesty proposal for illegal immigrants with local roots and clean records is not an amnesty proposal. All he lacked was one of his famed ‘message’ backdrops printed with “Not An Amnesty.”

Six months ago, Department of Homeland Security chief Michael Chertoff dismissed the idea of deploying National Guard troops to the Mexican border. Chertoff told Fox News talk show maven Bill O’Reilly that dragooning the Guard into border duty “would be a horribly over-expensive and very difficult way to manage this problem.”

The White House press corps gave Tony Snow rock star treatment for his first televised press conference today. It was standing room only.

Today during the White House briefing I asked Tony Snow this question: There have been news reports this week that the FBI is using the Patriot Act to obtain phone records of journalists without their knowledge and without judicial oversight. As a former journalist, are you at all concerned about this sort of intrusion on press freedom? Tony denied the allegation…

NBC News says reports that Marines fighting in Iraq killed more than a dozen civilians in the aftermath of a firefight appear to be true. The killings in the western Iraq city of Haditha, a hot spot of the insurgency, were first reported the day they occurred in November of last year. Military officials told NBC News that photos from the scene show, among other horrors, “a mother and young child bent over on the floor as if in prayer, shot dead.”

Senator Jeff Sessions (R-AL) said Monday that new immigration legislation will allow as many as 200 million legal million immigrants to enter the US in the next 20 years. At present the US admits about 1 million legal immigrants annually; Sessions says that number would increase to between 5 and 10 million annually if the legislation passed by the Senate yesterday becomes law, with most of the new immigrants arriving from Mexico and points south.

Treasury secretary John Snow did something Tuesday that would have cost him his job a year or two ago: he told the truth. When asked by Knight Ridder reporters if tax cuts paid for themselves, Snow responded that they didn’t, and “also acknowledged that economic growth and stock market gains were strong in the late 1990s, when the capital-gains tax stood at 20 percent and dividend income was taxed at rates as high as 38.6 percent.”