Hot off the press from the White House. . .

Bills signed into law by the President today, Friday, 29 January 2010:

H.R. 1817, which designates the facility of the United States Postal Service located at 116 North West Street in Somerville, Tennessee, as the "John S. Wilder Post Office Building,"

H.R. 2877, which designates the facility of the United States Postal Service located at 76 Brookside Avenue in Chester, New York, as the "1st Lieutenant Louis Allen Post Office,"

H.R. 3072, which designates the facility of the United States Postal Service located at 9810 Halls Ferry Road in St. Louis, Missouri, as the "Coach Jodie Bailey Post Office Building,"

H.R. 3319, which designates the facility of the United States Postal Service located at 440 South Gulling Street in Portola, California, as the "Army Specialist Jeremiah Paul McCleery Post Office Building,"

H.R. 3539, which designates the facility of the United States Postal Service located at 427 Harrison Avenue in Harrison, New Jersey, as the "Patricia D. McGinty-Juhl Post Office Building,"

H.R. 3667, which designates the facility of the United States Postal Service located at 16555 Springs Street in White Springs, Florida, as the "Clyde L. Hillhouse Post Office Building,"

H.R. 3767, which designates the facility of the United States Postal Service located at 170 North Main Street in Smithfield, Utah, as the "W. Hazen Hillyard Post Office Building,"

H.R. 3788, which designates the facility of the United States Postal Service located at 3900 Darrow Road in Stow, Ohio, as the "Corporal Joseph A. Tomci Post Office Building;" and

H.R. 4508, which extends the authorizations of certain Small Business Administration programs until April 30, 2010.

And Bill said, "I'm a law!" (and a post office name)

-- Steve Clemons

This is a guest note by Ralph Gomory, one of the nation's leading thinkers about technology, innovation, and the productivity health of national economies. Gomory previously served as IBM's Senior Vice President for Science and Technology and subsequently as the immediate past president of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.

This essay first ran on The Huffington Post.

A Time for Action: Jobs, Prosperity and National Goals

Here in the United States, we talk endlessly about the importance of free trade and of government not interfering with the market.

But while we are talking, other nations are busy subsidizing and building up key sectors of their economies, and in this process destroying key sectors in our own economy.

These nations have grasped the obvious: that a country which leads the world in the most productive sectors of the economy will be rich, while countries that are confined to what is left will be poor. And while this is going on we continue to pursue more "sophisticated" but misleading ideas like comparative advantage.

We have too many people today who see in the destruction of our key industries by well-organized and highly subsidized actions from abroad nothing more than the effect of free trade and the operations of a perfectly free market. This is a delusion and a dangerous one. We also have an elite industrial leadership that too often sees itself with no other duty than maximizing the price of their company's stock, even if that means offshoring the capabilities and know-how for advanced production to other nations that have no free markets themselves.

Our Nation's Failure

Although I have just named foreign subsidies and American corporate leadership as part of the problem, the heart of the problem is the lack of leadership from our own government. Despite the importance of economic progress, our government, unlike many others, has no clear economic goals for our nation. But economic progress is essential, and to make that progress in today's world we need economic goals that we steadily pursue and support.

I believe that our government should visibly and clearly adopt two national economic goals:

(1) To be a productive nation steadily growing a large per capita Gross Domestic Product (GDP).

(2) To share widely the prosperity made possible by that productivity.

Both are essential and measurable goals. By adopting and pursuing these goals our government can visibly align itself with the interests of the American people.

The Role of the Corporation

The principal actors in attaining these economic goals must be our corporations. But today our government does not ask U.S. corporations, or their leaders, to build productivity here in America; much less does it provide incentives for them to move in that direction. Rather, our government, captured by the delusion that they are watching free trade and free markets at work, has too often simply stood by and allowed one-sided destruction to go on.

They do not realize that the corporate goal of profit maximization at all costs does not serve the interests of the nation. They do not realize that the fundamental goals of the country and of our companies have diverged.

The sole focus on profit maximization, which leads to offshoring and holds down wages, does not serve the nation. This must change. And it must change before the damage to our economic ability is irreversible. And, in light of the recent Supreme Court decision on campaign financing, we must also act before the increasing influence of global corporations on our government becomes irresistible.

We must act to realign the goals of company and country.

Reward Productivity and High-Wage Jobs

I am not suggesting that our government step in and run our industries. What I am suggesting is that we need economic goals. Then, given those goals, we should reward those corporations that, acting freely and competitively, contribute strongly to those goals, productivity in America being high among them.

Our government should not pick companies to favor; I do not think we have the history or inclination to do what some countries can do successfully, which is to pick and sustain national champions. Rather we should use traditional means to directly serve national goals.

For a long time we have used the corporate income tax rate to spur R&D in any company. Building on that familiar approach we could, for example, use the corporate income tax rate to reward any corporation, large or small, that maintains high-value-add-per-U.S.-employee.

These companies are the strong contributors to GDP per capita. Many variations on this approach are possible, including many that are revenue neutral, but the essential point is to use corporate tax rates to reward the corporations whose actions support national goals. We do not select national champions; rather, we reward any entity that contributes strongly to the national goals. If we can agree on goals, enunciate them, keep them in mind and measure them, we will find many ways to provide rewards to corporations that contribute to those goals.

Some nations target the growth of specific industries that are productive. But let us go one better and make our country a place where any productive entity is rewarded. Much of manufacturing has the high productivity that will earn it incentives under this approach. We should clearly reward productive manufacturing and end this endless discussion about whether we do or do not need manufacturing. But we should also reward intelligent users who use tools and ingenuity to become more productive in whatever they do.

We should make sure that in our country productivity and high-wage jobs in the United States become the path to profitability.

Balance Trade

One unpleasant aspect of reality is that we cannot have success with any real economic policy, if we do not balance trade. Foreign governments can be extreme in their quest for dominance in specific industries. And we see every day the destructive effect of their actions.

By balancing trade we guarantee that any inflow of goods is matched by an equivalent export of goods made here in the United States. Balancing trade, coupled with rewarding productivity, will move us a long way toward ending both the one-sided destruction of industry by subsidized competition with its consequent loss of jobs, and the growth of our indebtedness to other nations. And this indebtedness leads to a diminution of our actual independence and of our ability to control our own future.

There are many ways to approach the balance of trade.

Many measures have been discussed. Prominent in these discussions is the need to obtain a realistic exchange rate. Clearly, major movement in that direction would serve our national goals. However, other nations - China is the best example - see it in their interest to have their currencies undervalued and hence their products underpriced.

Years of talks with China with no results should make clear to us that the exchange rate is something we do not control. We should realize that the approach of trying to "level the playing field" may simply not apply when we are dealing with countries that work hard to keep the playing field slanted in their direction, and when they have many ways beyond the exchange rate to do just that.

We may very well need to tackle the trade issue in the direct and head on way that Warren Buffet suggested in his insightful Fortune article in 2003. In this article he described his Import Certificates plan. The Buffet plan is something that we can carry out without the agreement of other nations, and it is something that would actually balance trade. The time has come to take this plan seriously in place of the endless talk that only postpones the day of reckoning.

The Moral Dimension

And let us not neglect the moral dimension. Let us make it right and admirable for corporations to consider high wages for Americans as part of their job, and for outstanding products to be something in which they take pride. Those who cannot remember may think I am dreaming, but I am not. Until the 1980's the dominant view of the role of corporations was the stakeholder view, which included, along with profits, all the considerations I have just named and more.

Conclusion

The time has come for us to shake ourselves free from the delusions that shackle us; let us act before it is too late.

Let us urge government to visibly announce and then support and measure goals of productivity and widespread prosperity. Let us reward those who provide high-wage employment in the United States. Let us urge on our government the necessity of balanced trade, and let us do that in spite of the cries from those who currently find it more profitable to participate in and develop unbalanced trade.

Let us all in our various ways start to clarify the role of the American corporation and find ways for our companies to serve not only shareholders, but also their employees, and the nation.

Let us act before it is too late.

-- Ralph Gomory

Neocon chronicler Jacob Heilbrunn, who like many realist foreign policy mavens supported President Obama's candidacy, is unsure of what President Obama actually wants to achieve at this point. What are his priorities? What is he really gambling assets to achieve?

Read the entire piece (which admittedly does quote a line of mine).

Heilbrunn starts:

What does Barack Obama want? That is the central question of his presidency that he has not answered. And he didn't answer it last night, either, in his first official State of the Union address. Sometimes presidents have their mission forced on them, which is what happened to George W. Bush, who was floundering before September 11. Other times, as in the case of Ronald Reagan, who had the twin goals of reviving the free enterprise system and defeating communism, they've been preparing for it their entire life. Obama came into office championing what he was not: not George W. Bush, not Dick Cheney. He was hope personified. He would unite the warring factions inside the Beltway.

Last night he spoke before a Congress that is more divided than ever and held out the fig-leaf of monthly meetings with Democratic and Republican leaders.

Fine. But it still doesn't really answer the question of what his program is for the next year. Consider health care. Obama said, "Do not walk away from reform. Not now. Not when we are so close. Let us find a way to come together and finish the job for the American people. Let's get it done. Let's get it done."

But Obama never explained what plan he endorses or how he envisions the House and Senate working together to achieve that goal. It's incredible that Congress devoted an entire year to health care, which, by the way, forms a big--too big--chunk of the economy, and may well come up with nothing. Unlike Reagan, who barnstormed the country pushing for his economic program of tax cuts, Obama himself has been largely missing in action on health care. When he doesn't say what he wants, then the public begins to wonder if he knows it himself, and finds him wanting as president.

The rest. . .

-- Steve Clemons

A DC insider close enough to Secretary of the Treasury Timothy Geithner shared with me a vignette in which someone suggested to him that he find a way to diversify the "image" of his relationships with the economy community and broaden it to include people like Elizabeth Warren.

This person implied that someone had suggested Geithner consider Warren for a Treasury Deputy Secretary position.

Elizabeth Warren is the Leo Gottlieb Professor of Law at Harvard Law School, Chair of the Congressional Oversight Panel created to investigate the U.S. banking bailout (TARP), and first developed the notion of a Consumer Financial Protection Agency.

Geithner's alleged response: "Wall Street wouldn't like it."

No kidding!

On Tuesday night, Warren put it all out there on Jon Stewart's show. She's so sober and sensible. Watch the clip above, but here are some of her best zingers:

"Well, these guys really do get it." Warren told Stewart -- the CEOs, bankers, and people in power -- "They get it. And they work best behind closed doors." If the decisions are in their hands, she said, "Nothing, nothing will change. You know, I want to turn to these guys sometimes, and I want to say: what part of 'we bailed you out' do you not get? These are people who would not have their jobs because they would not have their companies."

"The chips are all on the table," Warren added. "We are going to write what the American economy looks like for 50 years going forward. And right now the CEOs have any real change bottled up in the Senate."

-- Steve Clemons

Former Senator Chuck Hagel's strong statement made in a Brookings speech some years ago that the United States could not afford a false choice between our strong relationship with Israel on one side and Arab and Palestinian interests on the other continues to be the sensible frame through which I look at the region and US policy.

But there are many Congressmen and Senators who allow their own false choices to dominate, when their should be balance.

A new start-up political action committee, called a New Policy PAC, has just issued this morning a scorecard of House Members which the organization states is "based on their support for an American foreign policy in the Middle East that best serves the national interest and brings a swift end to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict."

115 Members of the House of Representatives score at least one point in the new survey.

Heading the roster are Reps. Keith Ellison (MN), Brian Baird (WA), Stephen Lynch (MA), Jim McDermott (WA), Nick Rahall (WV), Raul Grijalva (AZ), and Barbara Lee (CA).

The entire roster can be reviewed here in pdf format.

Ultimately, scorecards can be slippery things and depend entirely on the legislative actions through which Congressional Members are being screened.

The New Policy PAC folks admit as much but share their four measured items:

1. House Resolution 34, which passed on January 9, 2009

The resolution passed during Israel's invasion of the Gaza strip and at the height of international criticism as well as domestic public outcry decrying Israel's human rights abuses during the invasion that resulted in the death of more than 1400 Palestinians in the span of three weeks. House Resolution 34, essentially, assured Israel of its right to defend itself and lay the blame for the death of civilians squarely on Hamas, absolving Israel of any responsibility during the bombardment. There was no mention of Israel's illegal use of cluster bombs and white phosphorus in the highly dense Gaza strip.

The voting for House Resolution 34 was given double the weight of House Resolution 867, another vote used to score Congressmen on this issue, due to the large amount of pressure that AIPAC and other pro-Israel lobbies put on Congress, as well as, the small number of dissenting lawmakers. The five Nay votes were given four points, the 38 Congressmen who abstained or voted present were given two points, the 390 Yea votes were given zero points.

2. House Resolution 867, which passed on November 3, 2009

House Resolution 867 demanded that President Obama's administration "oppose unequivocally any endorsement or further consideration of the 'Report of the United Nations Fact Finding Mission on the Gaza Conflict' in multilateral fora."

The text of the resolution was so full of factual errors and misrepresentations of the Goldstone report that both Congressmen Keith Ellison and Brian Baird felt compelled to write critiques of the resolution. Richard Goldstone, the South African judge who authored the report, took the unusual step of issuing a paragraph-by-paragraph response to the report, addressing its inaccuracies and willful omissions. The 36 who voted Nay were given two points, the 52 who voted present or did not vote were scored 1 point, while the 344 Yea votes were given zero points.

3. Congressional visits to Gaza

While largely a symbolic action, a few Congressmen visited the Gaza strip since the invasion by Israeli in January of 2009. These visits show an interest in the plight of the Palestinians living in dismal conditions in Gaza for more than a year now, where little is allowed to enter the strip, including basic necessities such as medical supplies and building material.

Due to the meaningful significance of this gesture, the Congressmen who went to Gaza in the name of human rights, equality, freedom, and justice are recognized in this report. Although as many as 8 members of the House might have made the trip to Gaza in the past year, ANewPolicyPAC was only able to confirm 4 members due to the reluctance of others to announce their plans to visit the strip. Congressmen Keith Ellison, Brian Baird, Stephen Lynch and Bob Inglis were all given four points for making the trip to Gaza.

4. Open Letter to End the Siege on Gaza

The Congressional letter to end the siege on Gaza was signed by 54 members of the House and was addressed to President Obama, stating that "the unabated suffering of Gazan civilians highlights the urgency of reaching a resolution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and we ask you to press for immediate relief for the citizens of Gaza as an urgent component of your broader Middle East Peace." The letter was a clear indication by a still small but determined minority in the House of Representatives to push for real reform in America's foreign policy in the Middle East and to finally implement our longstanding positions on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The 54 Congressmen who signed the letter were each given two points for their brave stance, while the leaders of the initiative, Congressmen Keith Ellison and Jim McDermott, received 4 points.

As the scorecard authors point out, there are a lot of ways to measure the geostrategic seriousness of a group of legislators, and there may be better, perhaps less subjective, ways to see how a gaggle of Congresspersons think about the region.

My own hunch is that there are significantly more Members who are not "false choicers" than this survey indicates -- but this is a start.

-- Steve Clemons

In case you haven't seen it yet, Anand Gopal, who has reported from Afghanistan for the Wall Street Journal and the Christian Science Monitor, has just written a disturbing and important piece for Tom Dispatch on night raids and "black" prison sites in Afghanistan.

The piece also appears on The Nation's site.

The use of night raids by ISAF and non-ISAF American forces are among the most controversial aspects of the war effort in Afghanistan, because they sometimes result in the deaths or imprisonment of innocent Afghans.

And while NATO has recently put in place new rules for night raids that are intended to prevent accidental deaths and cause less anger among Afghans, the raids will likely continue. As Gopal points out, many of the raids are carried out by American Special Operations Forces, who operate outside of NATO command and often with little oversight.

And even as we have already shut down secret prisons around the world and move toward closing Guantanamo Bay, detainees in Afghanistan lack the rights to challenge their imprisonment and stories of secret prisons where abuses occur continue to surface.

Gopal notes that while the detention situation has improved and become more transparent since President Obama took office, allegations of mistreatment and disappearances to secret prisons continue. But more than the immediate anger and confusion caused by night raids and abuses, Gopal notes the long-term effects of these abrasive counterterrorism tactics:

If night raids and detentions are an unavoidable part of modern counterinsurgency warfare, then so is the resentment they breed. "We were all happy when the Americans first came. We thought they would bring peace and stability," says former detainee Rehmatullah. "But now most people in my village want them to leave." A year after Rehmatullah was released, his nephew was taken. Two months later, some other villagers were grabbed.

It has become a predictable pattern: Taliban forces ambush American convoys as they pass through the village, and then retreat into the thick fruit orchards that cover the area. The Americans then return at night to pick up suspects. In the last two years, 16 people have been taken and 10 killed in night raids in this single village of about 300, according to villagers. In the same period, they say, the insurgents killed one local and did not take anyone hostage.

The people of this village therefore have begun to fear the night raids more than the Taliban. There are now nights when Rehmatullah's children hear the distant thrum of a helicopter and rush into his room. He consoles them, but admits he needs solace himself. "I know I should be too old for it," he says, "but this war has made me afraid of the dark."

Even as we improve our counterinsurgency effort in Afghanistan, practices continue that could permanently hamper our ability to gain the popular support needed to push back the Taliban. And even if these practices were stopped tomorrow, I fear that the memory of past mistakes and horrors will not fade from the minds of the people whose support we so desperately need.

-- Andrew Lebovich

I can't help it. I've always been partial to Bill Burton who I think did and continues to do an outstanding job in the communications operation of the Obama political franchise.

He only got on my annoyed side once when the Obama campaign summarily executed Rob Malley, one of the most important and thoughtful American deal-crafters in the Middle East, who was advising the Obama campaign on Israel/Palestine matters. As part of Malley's "real job" at the International Crisis Group, Malley had met Hamas leader Khaled Meshal.

Bill Burton then said not only that Malley was no longer advising the campaign, but "would never advise Obama."Ouch. That was running the bus over Malley and backing it up and running over him again.

But despite that glitch given the fact that I know Rob Malley is back giving informal advise here and there to the administration, Bill Burton reminded me today why we should all appreciate him.

I liked this exchange at the end of a press gaggle on Air Force One today just before noon while flying with President Obama to Florida:

Q Is President Obama planning on hugging Charlie Crist? (Laughter.)

MR. BURTON: I haven't talked to him about the specific greeting, but we look forward to seeing all the Florida officials who will be there when we get on the ground.

Q Do we know what the delay was in leaving this morning?

MR. BURTON: It just is one of those deals where Rahm wanted to speak to the President and everything sort of slowed down a little bit.

Q Did Rahm get fired?

MR. BURTON: This is awkward, but, yes, I'm announcing right now that -- (laughter.) No.

Thank you, guys.

We need to see more of Mr. Burton at these press gatherings.

-- Steve Clemons

Update: The New York Times' Jeff Zeleny filed this update on the Obama-Crist hug question in his pool report:

President Obama landed at MacDill Air Force Base, Fla., at 12:00 p.m.

A few minutes later, he was greeted on the tarmac by a handful of Florida officials, including Gov. Charlie Crist. There was no ho hug this time, only a handshake, but it lingered about 27 seconds, according to your pool's count. The president tightly gripped the governor's hand and clutched his arm. Vice President Biden gathered close for a tight photo of the three - in case Marco Rubio's campaign is so inclined to use it.

-- Steve Clemons

Patrick Doherty is deputy director of the New America Foundation/American Strategy Program.

For a moment last night, watching President Barack Obama's first state of the Union address, I got excited. Here was that moment:

From the day I took office, I've been told that addressing our larger challenges is too ambitious; such an effort would be too contentious. I've been told that our political system is too gridlocked, and that we should just put things on hold for a while.

For those who make these claims, I have one simple question: How long should we wait? How long should America put its future on hold? (Applause.)

You see, Washington has been telling us to wait for decades, even as the problems have grown worse. Meanwhile, China is not waiting to revamp its economy. Germany is not waiting. India is not waiting. These nations -- they're not standing still. These nations aren't playing for second place. They're putting more emphasis on math and science. They're rebuilding their infrastructure. They're making serious investments in clean energy because they want those jobs. Well, I do not accept second place for the United States of America. (Applause.)

For the first time since his inauguration, President Obama talked about solving the really big problems facing America. But last night he went further. Last night, the president actually identified a key element of the global reality facing the United States: China, India, and Germany, among many others, have outpaced America in the race to anchor the next global economy; and they are playing for keeps.

That next global economy will not be some mechanistic regime that can be defined by its geographic centers. The next global economy is fundamentally going to be about solving the twin global challenges of our generation: economic inclusion, or, how to bring 4 billion new consumers into the formal sector of the global economy - and ecological sustainability, that is, how to make the developed world and the developing worlds sustainable before we crash the systems that enable our global economy, like climate, freshwater, forests, fisheries, etc.

Engendering that new global economy requires discrete choices by our government; it requires aiming the reconstruction of our domestic economy decisively at inclusion and sustainability. Our economy, not our military or diplomacy, must do the strategic heavy lifting in the coming era. And the State of the Union is the proper place for announcing that kind of new American agenda.

So it should come as no surprise that I felt the wind go our of the president's sails when his priority program after such a good set up was...drum roll please...financial reform.

The cart, financial reform, was placed squarely in front of the horse. That's because while financial reform is absolutely necessary, it is also a subordinate policy framework. Here's what Nobel Prize-winning economist Joe Stiglitz said here at the New America Foundation just last week:

Our country faces a large number of challenges going forward - demographic problem, changing the structure of our economy from a manufacturing to a service sector economy, the problem of dealing with climate change.... If we had a vision of where we wanted to go, we would have been able to use more of the stimulus, more of what we did and the money we were pouring into the banks to restructure our institutions, our economy, to meet these long range challenges. Instead, what we did is wound up with a bigger deficit, a bigger national debt, so that we have less resources available to deal with these looming problems that we will have to deal with in the coming decades.

America first needs to decisively reshape our economy around a vision of sustainable growth that creates space in the global economy for the inexorable entry of 4 billion more producers and consumers. Then, based on that design, we need to build a regulatory framework around the financial sector that gives Wall Street the incentives to make that economy thrive.

President Obama clearly recognizes that the lost decade has put America at a strategic disadvantage that threatens our prosperity, security, and independence. Even his discussion about the need to encourage American innovation demonstrated the absence of a strategic vision: he conflated solar cells (strategic) with cancer cells (not strategic) and he led off the talk about clean energy with nuclear power plants, offshore drilling, and clean coal.

America can have the prosperity we deserve, and the lifestyle we want but we cannot have it if we continue to prop up the economic engine of the mid-20th Century. China knows that, India knows that, and Germany knows that. The sooner America figures it out, the better.

-- Patrick Doherty

World War II. Beaches, Troops. Challenges.

Feel sorry for me -- crappy circumstances. Tough economy. Tough national security position. FEEL FOR ME.

For troubled Americans -- with children -- Some are frustrated, some are angry.

People are tired of partisanship. Why won't Wall Street make things better?

"I have not been more hopeful than I am tonight."

[Congressman and Senators stand up -- but comment falls flat on my crowd watching.]

What unifies Republicans and Democrats -- "We all hated the bank bailout".

Editorial -- You might have hated it, but Summers and Geithner did not hate it. Bob Rubin sent you a "thank you card."

Joe Biden looks great -- only one in the "team of rivals" whose cork has risen.

"Millions of Americans have more to spend" -- but actually, they are saving, because they are fearful about their future.

This is not a speech that recognizes what has gone wrong. This is not a speech that senses that they have confused tactics and strategic goals.

I want Obama to succeed. I do. But this speech -- thus far -- does not push me in his direction.

The economy is growing again -- BUT NOT IN JOBS!

"Jobs must be our number one focus in 2010."

Show me. Make me believe it. Fire your Econ team and show me you have someone who understands job creation.

Now he wants to give $30 billion from banks that paid back loans to save the community banks that were not gambling. Yahoo...! (Joking)

Obama says he is visiting Tampa, Florida to visit high rail project -- like ones all across the country. Where? My partner took about 12 hours to go to Montreal today via New York and Boston. Where are the high rail commitments happening??

I want a "jobs bill on my desk right away". Really?? You had one in your first stimulus package -- and the jobs saved were at Goldman Sachs and Citibank.

"China is not waiting to revamp its economy. Germany is not waiting."

We need to do more. "I do not accept second place for the United States of America."

But that is what you are doing!!!!!

"It's time to get serious about the issues that are hampering our growth."

I agree -- but show me in any serious policy proposal how you are changing the game.

Your economic team -- particularly Larry Summers, Tim Geithner, and your economic consigliere Bob Rubin -- believe that anything that robs from Wall Street's unfettered growth and dynamism hampers growth.

Energy, energy, energy -- nuclear, off shore, renewables, clean energy/climate change legislation. Checking off the boxes.

We will double exports....and we are going to have a national export initiative! Only way to make it work is to force the Chinese yuan higher.

Make trading partners play by the rules -- a line stolen from every President since trade agreements came into play.

"We need to invest in the skills and education of our people." I agree -- but does Obama really have a sense of what is happening in this country in education. It has not turned around. He needs to get deeper into the muck.

"Students can no longer depend on where they live -- versus their merit." Where do your daughters go in DC??

Obama says "we need health insurance reform." But at what cost?

I'm taking a break...this is frustrating. I'm chatting with other journalists online about the speech, what it means, how it ranks, and whether or not it is connecting with Americans.

My friend Marc Ambinder really thinks that this is an intersting speech.

I am frustrated by it. It's a check off the box speech -- not an "I'm changing the game speech."

There is a deep part of my mind and psyche that really likes Barack Obama. I am mesmerized by his oratorical skills and framing, but the guy who knows how to move legislators, businesses, labor unions, militaries, and so on -- is seated behind him; Joe Biden.

Biden has his hiccups -- but somehow the combined package of Obama and Biden is not yielding the real changes in the domestic and social contracts America holds that we should have.

I want Obama to get this right. He just checked off the boxes on immigration and Don't Ask Don't Tell. Good to mention. Better to get to getting these things done.

The part of Obama's speech about how hard change is is very good. Change is hard. i get it. But he is a brilliant man -- a great man, I think. But he is not winning and he needs to know from those who care for him and his success that the fact that politics is tough is no excuse for not getting the nation moved forward.

His Chief of Staff has none of the humility or introspection that Barack Obama is exhibiting tonight. He needs to make sure Rahm reads this speech -- again, if he wants to help Barack Obama and the U.S. to succeed.

Speech done -- I need to go think about what it all means.

The biggest thing that stands out is how long the speech was. I feel like Obama is warning the Senate that he can out filibuster all of them.

But I am filled with doubts still -- but to be fair, I heard some of what I wanted to hear from Barack Obama about priorities and the economy - but until I see a change in his personnel choices and policy decisions, I don't find his confessions about mistakes compelling.

More later -- more tomorrow. I hope I have a less bleak read when i step back from this, but to be honest -- as I listen, I feel that this was not a game-changing address, and that is what he needed.

-- Steve Clemons

This is a guest note by Leo Hindery. Hindery's take first appeared at The Huffington Post, above the fold, top of the column

Leo Hindery, Jr. chairs the US Economy/Smart Globalization Initiative at the New America Foundation. He is the former chief executive of AT&T Broadband and other major media and telecom companies.

THE SORT OF SOTU I WISH PRESIDENT OBAMA WOULD GIVE

If I was helping draft the 2010 State of the Union speech, I would start off by talking about the workers of Ohio, whose enthusiastic embrace of Candidate Obama in November 2008 is, I believe, what truly put him over the top and made him our nation's 44th President. And of course you don't get to give State of the Union speeches without first being elected.

It was only when Ohio (which John Kerry did not win), as well as traditionally Republican Iowa and Indiana, came aboard on Election night -- and when Michigan and Pennsylvania stayed Democratic -- that we knew that middle class Americans had finally, after eight tortuous years, found their champion-to-be in the White House.

And because I believe that the women and men of Ohio and elsewhere voted for Senator Obama mostly because of his promises regarding fixing our then-already beleaguered economy and his promise of a new type of economic leadership, in my draft for President Obama I would have him talk about JOBS, JOBS, JOBS exactly as he talked about them when he was Candidate Obama.

In a speech on July 2, 2008 to United Steelworkers, when he was seeking the Union's formal endorsement, Barack Obama introduced himself to the crowd by saying up front:

The reason I moved to Chicago and became an organizer after college was to help lift up neighborhoods that were devastated when a local steel plant closed. And it was the best education I ever received -- because it taught me that together, ordinary people can do extraordinary things.

He immediately went on to point out that the so-called "ownership society" of President Bush had left the nation with: "more than 3.5 million manufacturing jobs lost; more than 40,000 factories closed down; wages that are stagnant; and, more often than not, the few jobs being created paying less than the ones we're losing".

And then, as only he can, Candidate Obama once and forever defined himself for America's workers by saying that:

Change is knowing that for trade to work for America, it has to work for all Americans; that we have to stand up to countries that are manipulating their currency or flooding our markets with subsidized goods; that it's wrong to have a "one-size fits all" trade policy that treats countries as different as China and Mexico as if they were the same; and that our job ends not when a trade deal is signed, but when it's enforced.

Change is ending tax breaks for companies that ship jobs overseas and giving them to companies that create good paying jobs here in America; it's putting people to work -- members of your union -- making the materials we need to rebuild America.

Change is a President who welcomes you into the White House; and who will finally make the Employee Free Choice Act the law of the land.

These three comments quite literally brought the house down -- I was watching -- and I am convinced that it was this message, which he used almost every day thereafter, that helped propel him to victory four months later in Ohio and in Indiana, Iowa, Michigan and Pennsylvania.

Candidate Obama closed his remarks that hot, sun-brightened day at the USW Convention in Las Vegas by saying:

Politics didn't lead me to working people; working people led me to politics. The reason I'm running for President is because I don't want to wake up one day many years from now and see that we're still standing idly by while even more plants are shut down, and even more jobs are shipped abroad, and even more workers are denied the good benefits and decent wages they deserve.

This is our moment, Steelworkers. If you keep marching with me and organizing with me, then I promise you this: we will win the general election and then -- you and I -- together are going to change this country, and change this world.

As an informal economic advisor to the Obama for President Campaign and long-time friend to the Steelworkers, I actually had something to do with drafting that July 2008 speech, but when it was given, it was absolutely only Obama's. And as I said, it was a zinger!

So my recommendations today to President Obama for his 2010 State of the Union speech are to go back to being Candidate Obama and to remind the nation and Congress that few others understand so personally the current plight of the American worker and the middle class. Then, he needs to speak forthrightly about the real unemployment and economic problems confronting the nation -- in Ohio, Indiana, Iowa, Michigan and Pennsylvania; in Virginia, New Jersey and Massachusetts, where citizens have recently been voting; and in each of the other 42 States.

'Real unemployment' in the United States is stuck at around 19% instead of the 10% being reported by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. And the economy is short a staggering 22.4 million jobs in order to have an overall full unemployment rate of 5%.

President Obama should precisely tell the American people, as if they didn't know already, that the modest economic recovery we're in is, at least today, a "jobless" one: one that already involves the largest absolute number of unemployed American workers ever; one that may well see another half million or so jobs lost before we truly bottom out; and one in which it will take years to recover the millions of jobs lost in the last two years and to add the millions of additional jobs we need in order to get back to real full employment.

Main Street knows the bleak employment situation just by looking around, just as the 159 million workers in America know firsthand that the meager GDP growth in the last two quarters is no indication at all that "the recession is over", as Larry Summers, the President's senior economic advisor, recently told the nation and would have them believe.

People hate being misled, especially when contrary evidence is slapping them in the face every day, and they know that the small GDP growth which is being lauded isn't coming from the reemployment of Main Street -- heck, total unemployed workers have increased 5.7 million just since December 2008 and 13.6 million since the recession officially started in December 2007.

The "economic recovery" in the last few months, if we feel we have to call it that, has really only come from, on the one hand, resuscitating Goldman Sachs and the other large Wall Street financial institutions, which pretty obviously are "back" because they are back paying absurdly excessive compensation and bonuses, and, on the other, from stimulus-driven government hiring and the hiring of short-term 2010 Census workers.

In his 2010 State of the Union speech, the President needs to talk about what he believes the voters in New Jersey, Virginia and Massachusetts have been saying. Then he needs to revisit the solutions that made so much sense back in 2008 in Las Vegas, when we already knew that the economic sky was falling.

Much of what Candidate Obama proposed still makes sense for President Obama, and he needs to repeat his demands for:

• An all-of-government manufacturing and jobs policy aimed at doubling the number of manufacturing jobs in the medium term and at immediately creating millions of new jobs overall.

• Trade, especially with China, that is free of currency manipulation and other illegal subsidies.

• "Buy-domestic" requirements related to federal government procurement that mirror and last as long as the programs of our major trade competitors.

• A major long-term public investment program to upgrade and rebuild our nation's major infrastructure, to include a new National Infrastructure Bank.

• New tax incentives to encourage businesses of all sizes to invest in new and modernized manufacturing facilities and equipment and in domestic jobs-based R&D.

And I think President Obama should then end his first State of the Union speech with a line paraphrased from Russell Crowe's exhortation in the movie Gladiator:

And so my fellow Americans, 'on my signal, [we will now] unleash hell' on every investment banker, commercial banker and corporate executive whose actions brought our nation's economy to its knees and have taken away the livelihoods of more than 30 million American workers.

(OK, I know he probably won't use it -- but you have to admit, it would be a sweet and memorable line to end on. And in light of the President's calls last week to - finally! - go after every bad bank and every bank's crazy compensation practices, heck, maybe he will use it!)

-- Leo Hindery

Video streaming by Ustream

The New America Foundation is hosting a cocktail reception this evening featuring New America Foundation/Markets, Enterprise, and Resiliency Initiative Director Barry Lynn, who will discuss his new book, Cornered: The New Monopoly Capitalism and The Economics of Destruction.

Lynn's book traces the manic deregulation policies of the past 25 years that have facilitated unprecedented consolidation in almost ever sector of the American economy. He shows how "too big to fail" applies not only to banks but to many giant mega-firms that control vast swaths of our economy.

The event will run TONIGHT from 5:30 pm - 7:00 pm and will STREAM LIVE here at The Washington Note.

-- Ben Katcher

Barack Obama's plan to unveil tonight a non-defense discretionary spending freeze for the next three years will essentially forfeit America's growth future to China.

China has been massively investing in its high speed rail, its science labs, its educational system, its roads, its energy grid an its information super-duper highway. It has been obsessed with job retention and job creation. It has been building a mind-boggling number of every kind of power plant imaginable -- natural gas, high end coal, low end coal. It's investing in next gen renewable energy projects on a scale larger than the United States. It has been subsidizing all of this with a neo-mercantilist currency policy, pumping exports which it finances to consumers not only in the US but all over the world. China flaunts a robust "Buy China" requirement in its government and semi-private industrial procurements and contracting.

And the President of the United States, one year into his job, and still dealing with the tail winds of the worst economic disaster in global markets and the US economy since the Great Depression, is saying that he is going to freeze spending on virtually everything but the wars we have on hand.

America needs to invest in itself.

This economic crisis we continue to flounder in with effective unemployment higher than 19%, according to Leo Hindery's valuable monthly head-knocking reminders, requires leadership and decisive, large scale action to make the investments in America and its manufacturing and innovation base that create recurring returns to the nation over time.

Obama's team, content to have bailed out Wall Street, seem to now run the rest of the economy on a cash accounting basis. That's bad, self-defeating policy.

What needs to be run on a cash accounting basis -- that is not -- is the part of the budget Obama seems not to want to rein in.....a huge, runaway bill to pay for Iraq and Afghanistan. In 2010, the cost of America's Iraq engagement will still run more than $150 billion. And add to that $100 billion plus for Afghanistan.

One QUARTER OF A TRILLION DOLLARS is what the US is spending on two nations, Iraq and Afghanistan that together have a COMBINED GDP of just $23 billion.

That is lunacy. Americans have a US President who is going to say tonight -- we cannot afford our future, we cannot afford investment in ourselves, but we can afford to bail out Wall Street financiers, and we can afford to pump $250 billion into two small countries abroad, but we can't afford to do the right things by American working families -- who deserve far better.

There are parts of what the President's team is doing -- particularly what Jared Bernstein, Paul Volcker and Austan Goolsbee have been working on -- that I do support.

But the broader issue that we are going to cease deep investment in the US in a way that is big, significant and consequential -- while China does everything the reverse that we are doing and reaps the rewards is a sign of America's collapse, not America rebuilding itself.

-- Steve Clemons

One of the reasons that the New America Foundation and I worked to get America and the World: Conversations on the Future of U.S. Foreign Policy with Zbigniew Brzezinski, Brent Scowcroft and David Ignatius published is that it was supposed to be a primer for the Obama team to look at the plethora of challenges ahead through a Nixonian, realist portal.

Michiko Kakutani picked the book as one of her top ten favorites of 2008.

I think for a while, this strategy worked -- as Obama did tilt toward a realist course in foreign policy. He recognized that like Nixon he had under his stewardship a constrained and limited presidency given the damage during the Bush years.

Only problem was that Obama's realists don't do realism so well -- and many on his team are not sold on the discipline and importance of national priority-setting that a realist, or progressive realist, approach requires.

Walter Pincus has a nice piece in today's Washington Post looking back at "Nixon the Political Scientist" and finding many lessons the Obama team better learn quickly.

Pincus starts off:

"In the final analysis, elections are not won or lost by programs. They are won or lost on how these programs are presented to the country, and how all the political and public relations considerations are handled."

That could have been President Obama after the Massachusetts special Senate election last Tuesday. But President Richard M. Nixon wrote those words to his White House chief of staff, H.R. Haldeman, on Nov. 22, 1970, commenting on staff memos he received about "problems ahead" as they looked forward to his reelection effort, then two years away. The 30-page memo was among the 280,000 pages of documents from the Nixon Library released last week.

Beyond the domestic challenges the Obama White House faces and which have gotten worse rather than better since they took the helm is a grim foreign policy plate.

Nixon changed the way global gravity worked by engineering an opening to China -- and Obama, more than anything else, needs to refashion his vision and get the backbone to do the same kind of gravity-curving work on Israel-Palestine matters, Cuba, Russia, China and Iran if he wants to reinvent American leverage and regain momentum.

For those interesed in Nixon, an interesting site to check out is "The New Nixon".

Here is the link to the Richard Nixon Library & Museum and the release of materials mentioned in the Pincus article.

-- Steve Clemons

This is a guest note by Josh Meah, an intern alum with the New America Foundation's American Strategy Program. He blogs occasionally at The Washington Note.

Note to White House: It's the Economy, Stxpxd!

Whatever President Obama says about global affairs--on virtually any issue--is not going to matter unless he starts leading a long-term recovery at the source of America's power: the economy.

2009 was a year where al-Qaeda again dominated thinking in the executive office and distracted from a sensible design of America's priorities. America played defense in preventing the worst of the financial crisis and offense against al-Qaeda in South Asia.

2009 was the year when America tried to put up a smokescreen to hide the limits of American power. Lots of trips abroad, a non-binding compact to get something done about climate-change, a decision to replace the G-8 with the G-20, a superficial declaration to Israel to stop building settlements, and a speech to the Muslim world to essentially stop worrying about American policy changed what TWN's publisher Steve Clemons has called the "optics of power," but they did not and cannot independently change real power.

Military power and soft power are manifestations of economic power, and America needs to harness its economic power over the coming years to remain competitive and active in key areas of global leadership.

Today, superpowers face real limitations regarding the prospect of using massive militaries to reap large economic rewards. Were military power to necessarily still translate back into economic power, then America would be receiving far more favorable outcomes in the bidding process for Iraqi oil.

But in today's world, economic power will be the gold standard for victory in power politics--plain and simple. It is people, not politics, that undergird economic power, and the rise of Asia and the supposed decline of America and all of the corresponding security concerns are first and foremost economic in nature.

Furthermore, the source of the American way of life and American economic power comes from America's manufacturing prowess, schools, modern infrastructure, entrepreneurship, technological superiority, and protection of property rights, and, most importantly, culture.

As those sources of American power are continually neglected, America's global posture will steadily erode.

As the Obama administration begins the next year, it would do well to remember that Obama's most critical speech was held in neither Oslo nor at West Point. It was at the Brookings Institution, where he outlined a plan to get America back on track economically.
The achievement of the goals in that latter speech should be the paramount objective for the Obama administration in 2010.

If Obama isn't careful, he'll become a one-term, irrelevant president -- a flash in the pan of global history and the real overseer of America's decline. No one wants that, not least the once mesmerized people who elected him.

-- Josh Meah

It's too bad we won't see that race in Delaware. I have great respect for Beau Biden, the incumbent Attorney General of Delaware who is politically savvy and policy smart, but he has decided not to run for his father's former US Senate seat.

After just a year in office, the Obama/Biden team in the White House is not faring well, and to say that the Democratic Party is in disarray would be an understatement.

What I hope that Obama figures out soon is that one of his only players whose contributions have been on target on economic policy, on Iraq, on nuclear and other WMD issues, on relations with Russia and China, and even on Afghanistan has been his own Vice President. Everyone else seems to be flailing around (well, mostly everyone -- there are some good standouts). Biden, in contrast, weighs in when he is given the chance with solid policy alternatives and keeps his powder dry otherwise.

I don't believe in supporting either political party unconditionally - and gladly support a number of Republican and Independent public officials.

House Representative for Delaware (the whole state) and now Senate candidate Mike Castle is one of these -- and though I would have liked to see Beau Biden run for the seat and probably would have supported his candidacy, I'm going to support Castle in Beau's absence.

Mike Castle is a centrist, sensible, main street Republican who believes in science, rationality, and thoughtful policy debates. I don't agree with Castle on everything -- but he won my support for his challenge to the Bush/Cheney regime on stem cell research.

Mike Castle was also President of the Republican Main Street Partnership -- an alternative to the flat earth, pugnacious crowd evolving over the last decade and a half in the Republican caucus. Amo Houghton, who was perhaps my favorite Republican Congressman in years past, founded the group that Castle took over.

So, while Dems will take a hit on their roster, Castle represents a breed of sensible, pragmatic Republicans that we need more of in the Senate and House.

-- Steve Clemons

I am often asked by readers where they might direct support if they want to help the forces working towards a two state solution in the Israel/Palestine standoff.

One option is a new political action committee called "A New Policy PAC".

This new Arab-American aggregator of political contributions was recently founded by a good friend Sama Adnan, who moved back to Washington last year after receiving his doctorate at UCLA.

A quick roster (see more here) of the organizing focus of A New Policy PAC is:

A swift end to the Gaza siege.

An immediate freeze of Israeli settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem.

An end to Israel's occupation of the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem.

The establishment of a Palestinian state next to a secure Israel.

The resolution of all Arab-Israeli disputes.

An end to nuclear proliferation and a nuclear-free Middle East.

So, if you are so inclined to help out a new group and an important cause -- this could be an option for you.

-- Steve Clemons

Part of the path that America must take to regain leverage in global affairs is addressing the moral lapses that occurred during the last administration -- ranging from domestic spying authority to the torture and abuses that took place at Abu Ghraib, Bagram and Guantanamo.

Closing the detainee facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba was a marquee pledge of President Obama during his campaign -- and Wednesday evening when the President offers his "State of the Union" thoughts in a joint session of Congress, Obama will have to admit that he has not only failed to close the facility -- he is continuing some of the worst human rights abuses of the Bush administration.

Putting his personal seal on the indefinite detention of prisoners there is antithetical to everything Obama was supposed to be about.

After a number of discussions with senior White House staff about GITMO, I have learned that as long ago as nine months ago, there were dispensation plans for every single detainee at GITMO and that the Illinois "Thompson Facility" had been identified three months into the Obama administration.

What was missing was political will to proceed.

Rahm Emanuel, ever watching the currents and mood of election-fearful Congressmen and Senators, convinced Obama to step away from his own GITMO pledge.

There was no effort that Rahm Emanuel would authorize to push for the appropriations to make GITMO's closure work -- and would not do the arm-twisting and political work to overcome the predictable concerns about bringing detainees into federal prison facilities and inside the borders of the United States.

So, the story of GITMO is not one in which those handling the portfolio failed to perform -- it is rather a President with sincere convictions and insincere follow-up, a failure to fight for the strategic benefits of closing that facility.

Rahm Emanuel is the architect of the failure to proceed on GITMO, but the President was complicit in the decision.

-- Steve Clemons

What follows is a powerful snapshot of the moral and political dilemma progressives face today. President Obama and his team bailed out Wall Street, richly depicted in Arnaud de Borchgrave's commentary "Bonus Pool Party" below.

I recommend the entire piece, but this will get you going:

In his classic "Bonfire of the Vanities," Tom Wolfe's Masters of the Universe were thinly disguised Wall Street megalomaniacs suffering from gluttonous edacity. Today, there is no longer any need for disguise. They flaunt it openly before congressional committees, oblivious to growing public anger about what retired Master of the Universe investment banker Peter G. Peterson calls their "carnivorous, animalistic greed." This time, the race to the trough supersedes party labels. Democrats and Republicans slurped in almost equal measure.

The total bonus pool at the end of 2009 for the nation's six biggest banks was $130 billion. (Goldman Sachs' alone was $23 billion.) Chief executives plead the need to pay staggering amounts to partners so they won't be poached by rival houses. Yet about 200,000 jobs were lost in financial houses during the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, including those of many senior executives. Others compare themselves to movie and sports stars, candidly confiding that they also have to maximize their peak earning years.

Treasury estimates that total bank repayments of Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) money, drawn from U.S. taxpayers, should exceed $175 billion by the end of this year. That would cut total taxpayer exposure to the banks by three quarters. But Wall Street's captains are in high dudgeon over a government levy on the banking industry for losses Treasury says it will incur in the melee, or minus $120 billion to the taxpayer on the $700 billion in TARP lending to 21 financial institutions. Some of the major houses - e.g., JPMorgan, Morgan Stanley and Bank of America - have long since repaid everything with interest.

Michael J. Boskin, one-time economic adviser to President George H.W. Bush, says investors no longer trust economic and fiscal statistics and are "increasingly inclined to disbelieve them." To base decisions on misleading, biased or manufactured numbers, Mr. Boskin says, is "dangerous." Cynicism over official statistics is growing.

The lobbyists in orbit around Capitol Hill are making sure that whatever comes out of Congress to curb the Obama administration's levy appetite will also be a no-lobbyist-left-behind act, including the 3,000 (out of 13,200) who suddenly became consultants rather than face more elaborate reporting requirements - and potential criminal liabilities. It is now a crime for lobbyists to buy meals for or provide gifts to lawmakers or their aides.

Meanwhile, the ranks of the unemployed and underemployed and those whose jobless benefits expired were around 27 million. These days, low-pay-no-benefits jobs are considered good deals.

The widening gap between "les miserables" and what looks like the old Soviet caricature of America's ubercapitalist, chomping on a Havana cigar and flashing a pinky diamond, doesn't seem to bother high-powered executives testifying before congressional committees. Some Wall Street CEOs even admitted their mistakes were partly responsible for the worst economic and financial conditions since the Great Depression.

The rest here.

-- Steve Clemons

Iraq government authorities released word a few hours ago that General Ali Hassan al-Majeed, aka "Chemical Ali" and Saddam Hussein's cousin, had been executed over the weekend.

Ali had received four death sentences from Iraq's courts.

It's interesting to remember that Ali had been pronounced dead before with Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Richard Myers, and others at US Central Command saying that in April 2003 General Ali's body had been found.

-- Steve Clemons

(Alongside U.S. Army officers, a Civilian Response Corps member from the Office of the Coordinator for Reconstruction & Stabilization, center, participates in discussions with Pashtun tribal leaders in Khost Province, Afghanistan. photo credit: Department of State)

This a guest note by Jeffrey Stacey, an International Engagement Officer in the Office of the Coordinator for Reconstruction and Stabilization (S/CRS) in the Department of State. Stacey previously served as a Franklin Fellow in this same office while simultaneously serving as a professor of political science at Tulane University.

-- The Washington Note

In a world of over forty failing, failed and post-conflict states and another twenty or so fragile states--some newly so because of the global financial crisis--the need for pre- and post-conflict stability operations is steadily increasing, and not likely to ebb any time soon.

As the demand side of the equation increases the global effort to build sufficient capacity on the supply side to mount these operations must keep pace.

At the U.S. Department of State, the Office of the Coordinator for Reconstruction and Stabilization (S/CRS) is working overtime to help get the supply side right, not only by building and deploying the Civilian Response Corps of the U.S. Government, but also by working with partners around the world to build the capacity we need to prevent conflict and stabilize conflict-ridden countries.

That this effort is vital goes without saying, for it is no longer a choice whether or not to do so-called "complex operations." By now the debate is over: either you get in the civilian trenches to prevent instability, vacuums, and fertile ground for insurgencies, or you pay a far higher price to fight additional wars and mount costly counter-insurgency efforts.

Personally speaking I have found these goals noble yet practical enough that after doing a fellowship at State this year, I have decided to join up and work in an office of over 150 highly skilled and dedicated individuals.

Right now we have 80 Civilian Response Corps stabilization experts ready to deploy around the world on short notice. Before long this number will rise to 264 active component members and a far larger number in the standby component--who are ready to deploy from their government jobs on longer notice.

Recognizing the benefits that come from international collaboration, for some time S/CRS has been actively engaging other government and multilateral organizations who have committed serious resources for mounting stability operations. This fall we brought together fourteen governments and four multilaterals -- UN, EU, OSCE, and World Bank--for four days in Washington for a workshop on Reconstruction, Stabilization, and Peacebuilding. These partners agreed to work toward achieving the goal of comprehensive interoperability (CINT) -- the ability down the road to mount joint stability operations -- and an international working group that will bring the technical specialists in our various offices together to make this happen.

CINT is critical to getting the civilian supply right, for no single government is building sufficient individual capacity to mount these operations on its own; nor politically would it be wise to try to do so. "Comprehensive" is a horizontal term, not a vertical term, that refers to foreign policy tools that range across the spectrum, including stability operations that employ the hard tools of military power and the soft tools of long term development. Improved coordination among actors can lead to better stability operations and better outcomes for the recipient nations.

Several weeks ago I gave a speech at NATO in which I discussed how the military mission of the alliance can no longer be fully achieved without performing essential civilian tasks as well. As part of its Comprehensive Approach NATO could usefully add a small force of stabilization experts to bring about "initial stabilization" -- governance (creating conditions for consensus), police (keeping opposing groups apart), and rule of law (getting the legal system operating again) -- before handing the baton to the UN, EU, or a group of bilateral actors.

The EU has the foremost experience in the world in mounting stability operations, and we at S/CRS have much we can glean from the EU's experience. Hence, we are actively engaging the EU and will soon be working closely with our counterparts in Brussels.

The UN of course has the foremost experience in the related area of peacekeeping, and we are also actively engaging the UN as it is doing more and more peacebuilding these days. There are also numerous governments that have robust stability capabilities or have begun to build their own capacity, leading to a growing contingent of governments and multilateral organizations that recognize the need for civilian stability operations.

Essentially, we'll know when the supply of global stability capabilities is sufficient when global actors can interoperate successfully and the following scenario presents itself: if country X has become unstable and is rapidly headed for conflict, all stabilization capacity partners can convene a meeting and determine which partners should mount a joint mission together. For example, if the EU were to have multiple operations at the time and the UN's resources were similarly overtaxed, the U.S., UK, Canada and other bilateral or regional actors could agree to deploy a combined mission together.

As S/CRS continues to engage its partners around the world, right here in Washington we are helping our own government's principal policy makers become fully familiar with the new soft power tool they hold in their hands. Our capability is so new that we are still identifying all the different ways that policy makers can deploy our growing force of CRC personnel.

Deploying the CRC either alone or with our partners will help the U.S. to meet its core national security interests. Already, the departments of Treasury, Justice, Homeland Security, Commerce, Health and Human Services, Agriculture, and USAID via S/CRS are involved in U.S. foreign policy in a new and fairly revolutionary way.

This "whole of government" approach is as novel as it is important, and other governments around the world are recognizing our example and adopting similar approaches.

For the good of our own citizens and those of numerous conflict prone countries around the world, may we and our partners succeed.

-- Jeffrey Stacey

While neither the European Union nor Turkey lived up to its end of the EU-accession-process bargain last year, in my view Europe deserves more of the blame for the processes' steady downward trajectory.

Despite understandable skepticism among officials in Ankara given the slow pace of the negotiations, Turkish leaders have reiterated time and again that their ultimate objective is for Turkey to join the European Union.

Unfortunately, the same cannot be said for some of Europe's leaders. Angela Merkel suggested an ill-defined 'privileged partnership' as a possible alternative to accession while Nicolas Sarkozy said in 2008 that Turkey is "not part of Europe."

Fortunately, as I noted in an earlier post, there are signs that French and German attitudes are softening as their respective leaderships digest the consequences of alienating a country as strategically significant as Turkey.

The latest good news is that since assuming the European Union presidency this month, Spain has vigorously promoted Turkey's accession prospects. Spanish Foreign Minister Miguel Angel Moratinos reiterated that support today.

According to Reuters:

[Moratinos said today that] to admit candidate Turkey could be successfully completed if it met the so-called Copenhagen criteria - covering such areas as democracy, human rights and the rule of law - which is required for membership.

"It would bring Europe more advantages than drawbacks. There may be difference of opinions between EU member states (over Turkish membership), but all have agreed to wait and watch the negotiations," Moratinos told Germany's Welt am Sonntag newspaper.

Spain, which holds the EU presidency until the end of June, hopes to open accession talks with Ankara in four new policy areas and see progress in a dispute between Turkey and Cyprus which is blocking Ankara's bid.

"Turkey is a part of the European family of peoples. It is better to have Turkey inside the EU than to leave it standing outside," Moratinos said.

He added that the EU considers Turkey a partner of high strategic importance, specifically mentioning its diplomatic network in the Middle East and central Asia.

While it remains to be seen what Spain can do over the remaining five months of its presidency to provide momentum for the negotiations, setting the discourse on a more constructive path is a necessary precursor to rebuilding popular support on both sides of the Dardanelles.

-- Ben Katcher

I am in Chestertown, Maryland this morning enjoying a bit of a break from DC -- planning a retreat to discuss alternative US policy options in Afghanistan.

Chestertown is an old colonial American town with great character and characters. About an hour and a half outside of Washington and two hours from Philadelphia, this eastern shore spot which George Washington frequented in the early days of the nation is a great place to think and refresh. If you visit some day, check out the programs of the C.V. Starr Center for the Study of the American Experience at Washington College. It's one of the best institutional American cultural and historical provocateurs in the nation.

For those of you who someday want to visit, the town "living room" is a great coffee shop, "Play it Again Sam". Just learned that the shop owner's cool wife, Liz, is from Bartlesville, Oklahoma where a chunk of my own family is from. Small town meet small town.

On other fronts around the world. . .

~ The UN has released figures on the official number killed by the Haiti earthquake: 111,000.

~ Air America Radio is done, kaput, no more.

~ Defense Secretary Bob Gates, returning from Pakistan, relaxed by watching the film "Seven Days in May," about an attempted military coup against the President of the United States. This happens to be Senator Lindsey Graham's favorite film. (see above)

-- Steve Clemons

This is a guest note by Constanze Stelzenmüller, a Senior Transatlantic Fellow at the German Marshall Fund in Berlin and former defense and international security editor at the German weekly, Die Zeit. This piece first appeared at the "GMF Blog" of the German Marshall Fund and is part of a larger piece she is preparing for the Brussels Forum paper series.

Obama, one year on: So he's human. He made mistakes. But he got the important things right.

BERLIN -- One year after taking office, President Obama's polls have plummeted, unemployment is at 10 percent, the loss of Ted Kennedy's Massachusetts Senate seat endangers the administration's health care reforms, and Iran has rejected a deal that would allow it to enrich uranium abroad. All of that is bad news. But this is not the catastrophic bursting of an Obama Bubble. It's the end of a hyperinflation of expectations. And about time, too.

"The nation I'm most interested in building is our own," Obama said in his speech on Afghanistan last December. But his main focus was on domestic policy from the outset, as Americans had wanted. The economy, energy independence, banking, infrastructure, housing, jobs, education, health care, and tackling the effects of climate change, the status of immigrants, and social inequalities: Obama deserves credit for his courage in offering a complete and coherent diagnosis of the problems besetting the country. Nonetheless, even from Over Here in Europe, it is difficult not to conclude that the President and his team underrated the challenges of getting to yes on health care reform and other domestic policy issues: a fractious left wing of the Democratic Party, a wounded Republican Party, a deeply polarized and anxious electorate.

But when Obama took office, the world was on the brink of economic collapse, and could have taken America down with it. Obama's team (together with the Fed, and building on what the Bush administration had done) led the salvage work: rescuing banks, a $787 billion stimulus package, coordinating the reactions of the G-20, pushing for re-regulation of the international financial markets. A disaster was averted, and the recession was staved off -- not just in America.

Against this grimly urgent economic backdrop, Obama's foreign policy achievements in his first year are actually remarkable. Shaking a bobby's hand outside 10 Downing Street, bowing to the Japanese emperor, assuring the Muslim world of America's respect: these were gracious gestures which did a great deal to reestablish his country's soft power in the world. His speeches re-set standards for public discourse about international affairs to a level of civility and seriousness not seen in a long time.

Obama's policy of the outstretched hand stands for a doctrine that prefers cooperation over coercion in an increasingly multi-polar world - not out of naïve idealism, but because it husbands resources and asks others to do their share in responding to the world's challenges. It is also an astute opening move in a carefully-considered strategy. It morally disarms anti-Americanism. It undermines conspiracy theories cooked up by authoritarian elites afraid of their own citizens. It puts unresponsive leaders on the defensive. And, yes, it provides legitimacy for moving beyond cooperation when that offer is rejected. As the President said in Oslo: "Yes, there will be engagement, there will be diplomacy, but there will be consequences when these things fail." It looks as though Iran might become the first test of the doctrine. Afghanistan, at any rate, proves that this President is not afraid to use hard power when he has to.

Of course, Obama has made mistakes. Some of the issues he has tried to tackle may simply prove intractable even for an American president. But what matters is that he got some key things just right. Even with flaws revealed, he remains one of the most gifted politicians of our age. There are too few leaders of his stature - in America or in Europe, for that matter - to indulge in the luxury of dismissing him now when so much of his work is still undone.

-- Constanze Stelzenmüller

Last week I attended an in-house foreign policy discussion with New America Foundation Schwartz Senior Fellow Peter Beinart, who provided a tour of 20th century American foreign policy and introduced me to Walter Lippmann's concept of "solvency."

The solvency concept - which implies that a country's foreign policy is "solvent" when its overseas commitments do not exceed its national resources - caught my attention as particularly relevant to the United States' strategic position today, in which we seem to be overextended, thus contributing to a situation of what Lippmann would have called 'insolvency.'

I have been investigating this concept to determine whether it can provide insight into the United States' recent difficulties with its allies and specifically its relationship with Turkey.

In the course of my research, I came across an essay by Samuel Huntington from a 1987 volume of Foreign Affairs called "Coping with the Lippmann Gap."

Toward the end of the piece, Huntington outlines several steps that the United States must take to preserve its position in the international system.

I was struck by how relevant these prescriptions remain today.

Here is what he said:

First, there is the need, as everyone recognizes, to resolve the fiscal crisis and reduce the federal deficit. This means a firm and possibly lower ceiling on defense spending, cuts in domestic programs and entitlements, and increased revenues, which could come from a variety of possible taxes, some of which might have positive effects on investment and economic growth.

Second, the United States must, as again almost everyone recognizes, do what Britain failed to do: adopt national policies to promote higher-quality education, more rigorous standards, more widely available technical training programs, research and development, and public, corporate and individual investment in promising technologies and industries. In the longer term only programs such as these will result in increased productivity, technological innovation and beneficial economic growth. Creating these requisites of a sound economy is essential both to restore U.S. economic competitiveness vis-à-vis Japan, Europe and the newly industrializing countries and to create the economic and technological base for American military security.

Third, movement toward deficit reduction and economic renewal will in large part depend upon development of a more comprehensive and balanced approach to the problems of national security and economic development than has existed in recent years. In the aftermath of World War II, in which U.S. industrial capacity was decisive, there was widespread awareness of the close interconnection between the economic and military dimensions of national security. Early national security planning documents, such as NSC 68 of 1950, devoted much attention to the economic underpinnings of security. Questions of industrial base, economic mobilization and technological innovation were central to the discussion of security issues. Government agencies concerned with security made significant contributions to industrial development, those of the intelligence agencies to the computer industry being only the most dramatic. Over time, however, as the experience of total war faded into the background and after the emergence of a distinct defense industry or military-industrial complex following the Korean War, the connection between economic policy and national security began to weaken. National security planning documents tended to focus increasingly on purely military strategy.

The National Security Council was created in 1947 to be the forum for integrating the various elements of security policy. Its legislative mandate was and is to advise the president on "the integration of domestic, foreign, and military policies relating to the national security." Economics became, however, the weak sister and often the absent partner in the national security policymaking process. The result was less attention than should have been given both to the trade-offs between policies to promote economic strength and those designed to promote military security, and to the types of policies that may constructively contribute to both economic and military security. Reestablishing the link between these two should be high on the agenda of the next administration.

Sadly, those words could have been written today. 23 years later the United States remains saddled by an enormous debt burden, ineffective industrial policies, and a disturbing disparity between its overwhelming military power and its underwhelming economic and moral standing.

-- Ben Katcher

On the book jacket/inside flap of Nobel Laureate Joseph Stiglitz's Freefall: America, Free Markets, and the Sinking of the World Economy, Nobel Laureate (too) and New York Times opinion leader Paul Krugman calls Stiglitz an "insanely brilliant economist".

On the other end of the praise spectrum, Krugman, in a stinging rebuke of President Obama's policies and leadership, states that Obama is not "the one" we have been waiting for.

At his New York Times blog, The Conscience of a Liberal, Krugman writes:

Health care reform -- which is crucial for millions of Americans -- hangs in the balance. Progressives are desperately in need of leadership; more specifically, House Democrats need to be told to pass the Senate bill, which isn't what they wanted but is vastly better than nothing. And what we get from the great progressive hope, the man [Barack Obama] who was offering hope and change, is this:

I would advise that we try to move quickly to coalesce around those elements of the package that people agree on. We know that we need insurance reform, that the health insurance companies are taking advantage of people. We know that we have to have some form of cost containment because if we don't, then our budgets are going to blow up and we know that small businesses are going to need help so that they can provide health insurance to their families. Those are the core, some of the core elements of, to this bill. Now I think there's some things in there that people don't like and legitimately don't like.

Krugman finishes on a powerful, foreboding note:

I'm pretty close to giving up on Mr. Obama, who seems determined to confirm every doubt I and others ever had about whether he was ready to fight for what his supporters believed in.

My sense is that most of the major pillars of progressive work in the US -- on the foreign policy and domestic fronts are really distressed by President Obama's policy and personnel choices.

I'm getting close to where Krugman is and think it may be nearing the time to "bust Obama's brand" as one liberal Hollywood actor friend of mind recently said.

If Obama sees his "brand" in real trouble, he may correct things just in time by dumping Rahm Emanuel, Lawrence Summers and some others, confessing his decisionmaking sins to those who supported him, and inspire some confidence in the actions of changing course.

-- Steve Clemons

(Official White House Photo by Chuck Kennedy)

GlobalPost's John Aloysius Farrell has a fascinating survey up of perspectives on Obama's year in foreign policy.

Read the entire piece, but I've put some of the zinger quotes below -- including my own.

What stands out is that perhaps for the first time I can recall, Danielle Pletka of AEI and I are basically on the same page.

Over at the Carnegie Endowment, Jessica Tuchman Mathews gives Obama the best grades for performance -- though she worries that Afghanistan could break the back of the administration.

Carnegie's Robert Kagan, who is with Pletka a leading figure in the neoconservative camp, also gives Obama good marks for being more trigger-comfortable with drones than the Bush administration was and for upping the ante in Afghanistan.

But Carnegie's Paul Salem, who runs the endowment's Middle East Center, agrees with Pletka and me.

Carnegie's Douglas Paal calls it basically down the middle, applauding some of the tactical, low hanging fruit choices of the Obama foreign policy team -- but agreeing with Pletka, Clemons and Salem that Obama made no significant strategic leaps.

Some lines from the Farrell essay:

Steve Clemons

The administration "has taken no strategic leaps in any area."

Danielle Pletka

The president suggested in the campaign that once he was able to bring all the countries we had alienated back into our order of influence ... that in fact they would be willing to step up and do more. What we discovered is nope, they're not,"

"On foreign policy ... he has done an amazingly lackluster job."

Steve Clemons

Obama met stunning failure in his handling of a key ally in the Middle East. Israeli leader Benjamin Netanyahu called Obama's bluff when the president pressured Israel to abandon settlements on the West Bank, and the administration's plans for a breakthrough were stymied.

"They put themselves into a box. Whether it was right to start with the settlements or not, they went at it in an amateurish way," said Clemons. "You figured they must have had something else planned or they would never have done so stupid a thing" but "they had no alternative plan."

Jessica Tuchman Mathews

"I think he's gotten it about right," "And we just have to be smart in this country to not define success as perfection."

Robert Kagan

Obama has matched Bush as a warrior. "They have ramped up the military aspect of the war on terror. They've increased the forces in Afghanistan; they've substantially increased the drone attacks in Pakistan," said Robert Kagan, a senior associate at Carnegie.

"There's a lot of kerfuffle in the United States about what happens to captured terrorists when they enter the American legal system. The Obama administration, to some extent, is obviating that problem by assassinating them more frequently than the Bush administration was."

Jessica Tuchman Mathews

"I fear ... that Afghanistan could easily become the defining issue of Obama's presidency and if that happens, it's likely to be a tragedy,"

Robert Kagan

"There were no good choices," Kagan said. But "the alternative -- that somehow we could sort of basically wash our hands in Afghanistan -- I think was really not workable. So he was in a bind and I think he made a fairly courageous decision."

Paul Salem

"He did engage, but he was not successful," said Paul Salem, the director of the Carnegie Middle East Center, who offered Obama a C-minus or D-plus grade for his diplomacy there. "No breakthroughs; no real progress."

Douglas Paal

Obama's ambitions to save the planet from global warming and nuclear proliferation also met with recalcitrance abroad. A new nuclear arms treaty with Russia was delayed, and the Copenhagen climate summit was anything but a smashing success.

"It didn't blow up in his face, but it was a very muddy outcome ... a not very strong outcome," said Douglas Paal, an expert on Asia at Carnegie. "We've seen some tactical adjustments that are kind of low-hanging fruit, and I would applaud most of them." But "the big strategic issues" like "what does the U.S. do about the rise ... of China?" are "still an open question."

-- Steve Clemons can be followed on Twitter @SCClemons

This is a seven minute clip of a high substance, politically significant exchange with Nobel Economics Laureate Joseph Stiglitz -- who hopes that Obama's economic team will soon -- finally -- learn from the serious mistakes they have made.

Stiglitz says that there is a major battle of ideas underway. He said that the belief that markets were self-correcting, efficient, and no need for government was completely wrong. He said that regulation is vital.

Stiglitz also said that the first stimulus package was badly designed, deployed, and inadequate in size. He said that there will need to be another stimulus package -- mostly focused on helping the states manage their state budget implosions. Stiglitz said that states face a collective $200 billion shortfall in 2010 and that the employment and program slashing states will do is very de-stimulative.

Stiglitz also said that the bank bailout schemes perversely bailed out the banks that made profits through gambling and did virtually nothing for the smaller community and regional banks that made loans and profits in normal ways. Stiglitz lamented that many of these good institutions that did nothing wrong were the ones allowed to go under.

Joe Stiglitz is worth spending a lot more time than 7 minutes with -- and one can do that here by watching a longer presentation with him followed by questions and answers from a New America Foundation audience.

Or, better yet, read his new book, Freefall: America, Free Markets, and the Sinking of the World Economy -- which is #81 on Amazon's list as I write this.

Suffice it to say that the course of ideas that Stiglitz has been advocating are what many who supported Barack Obama thought they would be getting from the administration, but instead of Stiglitzianism, America got Rubinism -- not from a team of rivals but from a "team of Rubins."

-- Steve Clemons

I just received the seriously disturbing news that FDIC chair Sheila Bair, one of the few national economic leaders who worked hard to curb the excesses and corruption of Wall Street and stand by middle class interests, may have run into some conflict of interest problems.

According to a release from the Huffington Post Investigative Fund's Keith Epstein and David Heath:

Sheila Bair, one of the chief regulators overseeing Bank of America's federal rescue, took out two mortgages worth more than $1 million from the banking giant last summer during ongoing negotiations about the bank's bailout and its repayment. In the weeks between the closings on her two mortgage loans, Bair met with Bank of America's chief negotiator in the bailout talks.

To avoid conflicts of interest, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp., which Bair heads, prohibits employees from participating in "any particular matter" involving a bank from which they are seeking a loan. Bair did not seek or receive an exemption until last week, when her agency gave her a retroactive waiver from the rules after an inquiry by the Huffington Post Investigative Fund.

Bair has been in a tug of war on a number of policy issues with Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner who tried to have her dumped when the Obama team took the keys to the White House. He didn't succeed, and she stayed.

I hope that her retroactive waiver keeps her out of a mess that could distract her from her more important responsibilities. But I also hope she does an immediate review of other personnel at the FDIC who may have had similar problems given the flood of bank messes out there that the FDIC had to deal with while employees, like other Americans, may have had to rejigger and reorganize their mortgage circumstances.

They should be shown the same leniency that she received.

And it must be said that given the millions Lawrence Summers took in while moonlighting with various financial services firms, the tax hiccups of Timothy Geithner when he came in, Bair's mortgage trip should clearly not keep her off a short list of people who could succeed Geithner at Treasury.

-- Steve Clemons

(Jonathan Guyer for The Washington Note)

-- The Washington Note

Columbia University Professor and world renowned economist Joseph Stiglitz will be speaking today at a New America Foundation/Economic Growth Program public policy forum about his new book, Freefall: America, Free Markets, and the Sinking of the World Economy.

Stiglitz is one of those economists, along with Nouriel Roubini and others, who warned of the dangers that "too big to fail" banks, enormous trade imbalances, and lax financial regulation pose and predicted the financial crisis of 2008 and the subsequent economic recession.

In his new book, Stiglitz is very critical of what he refers to as the Obama administration's "reshuffling of the chairs on the Titanic" approach to our present economic situation, and offers a vision of a more sustainable and equitable American political economy going forward.

Today's event will run from 12:15 pm - 1:45 pm and will STREAM LIVE here at The Washington Note.

-- Ben Katcher

The New America Foundation and Slate Magazine are co-hosting a special public policy forum today to discuss the context and consequences of Google's threat to pull out of China.

The event will run TODAY from 9:30 am - 11:00 am EST and will STREAM LIVE here at The Washington Note.

For a couple of interesting perspectives on this issue, I suggest Zachary Karabell's piece in Time Magazine as well as Daniel Gross's latest article for Slate.

Steve Clemons also penned a post for this blog on the topic.

A list of today's panelists follows below.

featured Speakers
Evgeny Morozov
Contributing Editor, Foreign Policy Magazine
Yahoo! Fellow, Institute for the Study of Diplomacy, Georgetown University

Rebecca MacKinnon
Fellow, Open Society Institute
Co-Founder, Global Voices Online

Tim Wu
Schwartz Fellow, New America Foundation
Professor of Law, Columbia Law School
Contributing Writer, Slate

Alec Ross
Senior Advisor for Innovation
Office of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton

moderator
James Fallows
Board Member, New America Foundation
National Correspondent, The Atlantic Monthly

Also, later today, between 12:15 and 1:45 pm, Steve Clemons will be hosting a discussion with economist Joseph Stiglitz -- and that too will stream live here at The Washington Note.

-- Ben Katcher

(photo credit: Official White House Photo by Pete Souza)

I wrote this article today for Salon.com reviewing President Obama's performance over the past year.

I hope you'll read the entire piece -- but here's the intro plus a bit more:

Great Challenges Make Great Leaders
Yes, Obama inherited a presidency in bad shape. But he's yet to deliver the "change" he promised
By Steven Clemons

Expectations of Barack Obama's presidency perhaps have been unfair -- expecting him to deliver to a better place an America that had seen its military, economic and moral preeminence badly shattered during the preceding tenure of George W. Bush.

But great challenges are actually what make up the stuff of great leaders, and regrettably, Barack Obama -- though mesmerizing on many levels -- has demonstrated thus far more of an ability to deliver policy outcomes generated by inertia and incrementalism rather than changing the laws of political gravity, which is what he must do if he is to succeed in office.

Barack Obama can't be measured by the same stick as most American presidents. He must be better and do more. We are at a time of historical discontinuity in U.S. history -- a point at which America's global social contract with other of the world's stakeholders must be renegotiated and when America must reinvent itself, its economy and its relationship with citizens on the domestic front. As Walter Russell Mead recently proclaimed at a New America Foundation event grading Obama's performance, "Being president is really hard."

Obama has failed to realize that the kind of "change" he promised during his campaign is actually the kind of change the nation needs. During the global financial crisis, he elected to ally himself with the architects of the previous financial order -- Robert Rubin, Lawrence Summers and their followers. And these neoliberal practitioners delivered a financial recovery course that helped Wall Street and yet again sacrificed the interests of the American middle class, just as they did in the past.

When it has come to correcting the disaster of the national security portfolio he inherited from the Bush White House, Obama talked up a good vision of changing the way gravity was working in the Middle East -- reaching out to problematic world leaders, establishing a workable course in Palestine-Israel relations, helping to create a credible vision of better opportunity for frustrated youth in the underdeveloped world. But when it came to action, his administration has been as paralyzed worse than the last.

Now I need to tune in to see what's happening in Massachusetts. Perhaps by feeling the pain of this Senate race, Obama will get to changing up his team faster than he otherwise would have.

-- Steve Clemons

I'm down blogging today at the Hard Bean Coffee & Booksellers Cafe in Annapolis, Maryland on what is a beautiful day to think about Martin Luther King, Jr. My hunch is that if the great reverend were around on his own day, I think he'd be tearing down other walls of discrimination, particularly Don't Ask Don't Tell prohibiting military service by "out" gay men and women.

But driving out here from Washington, I was impressed with the quality of roads and "the look" of Highway 50. I have a couple of places I hide in Maryland -- one in Chestertown, Maryland on the Chesapeake Bay's Eastern Shore and another way at the tip of the opposite end of the state in McHenry, Maryland near Deep Creek Lake.

These hideaways are on completely different ends of this state, but the roads are fantastic, and the greenery is well tended between those two ends. I bet there are folks reading this know pot holes or bad roads that frustrate them -- but sorry, Maryland really does a great job taking care of its infrastructure compared to many other states I have visited.

Maryland's public schools have also been ranked this last week by Education Week as the best in the nation -- highlighting Maryland's ongoing commitment to fully funding education and raising teacher salaries despite the severe economic conditions today.

Maryland Governor Martin O'Malley deserves a great deal of credit for this. I razz him sometimes -- but he's one of the few governors I know who works hard at public policy and thinks things through.

One of the recent areas of action by O'Malley that has won him praise from most quarters is taking action to restore the oyster beds in Chesapeake Bay. I heard about this from none other than Obama National Security Adviser General Jim Jones and his wife Diane who clearly prefer their time at their home on the Chesapeake Bay to the Washington scene. They are thrilled that O'Malley is working to get the oyster beds back in shape -- and I am too.

Healthy environments, healthy communities, healthy schools, healthy people -- I think that's how it goes.

I've been privileged to sit in on one of the Governor's policy salon dinners that asked tough questions about how to make Maryland a bigger player in climate change policy -- and how to deal with the business community in a fair, square way in reaching those goals. Those around the table were as eclectic as the challenge -- and the Governor and his wife were really into the discussion. So was former presidential candidate and Colorado US Senator Gary Hart for whom O'Malley was once an advance man.

I have no idea if anything lurks in Martin O'Malley's past that would preempt a run for the White House. We seem to want a purity of spirit and behavior in our elected officials that seems completely unrealistic to me -- but that said, what I can say is that O'Malley is of the policy caliber and demonstrates a rare management excellence over a large and effective state bureaucracy that makes him a very credible candidate for the US presidency.

Blue T-shirt wearing gun freedom advocates, of Maryland Shall Issue, who want to deter crime by everyone carrying around a pistol in a visible holster have descended on the Annapolis State House today -- and some are in the coffee shop now. They seem like nice folks other than that I think they are a bit off on gun proliferation -- but O'Malley seems to manage the competing factions on handguns, environmental regulation, gay rights, education, and health care very well without selling his soul.

President Obama should spend some time in Annapolis checking in with Martin O'Malley and his operation here.

O'Malley should have the President to a policy discussion in the Governor's Mansion (and invite me). With all due respect to President Obama who is working these issues hard, I think he might learn some things about how both to achieve policy results while keeping a base of reasonable centrists and progressives on board.

-- Steve Clemons

I haven't watched the Senate race in Massachusetts all that closely. I was impressed with the smart policy work, particularly in foreign policy issues, that Alan Khazei's campaign put out. Khazei touched on a lot of issues that the better known but more issues mum Martha Coakley put out.

However, it's clear now that one of the most liberal states in the country is ill at ease with Barack Obama's health care reform agenda. Obama and Rahm Emanuel have so irritated the progressive wing of the party with what he has forfeited to get a deal with the health care industry and with Senators Joseph Lieberman and Ben Nelson that many are either staying home -- or they are actually voting for the Republican.

I ran into one of Washington's top lobbyists yesterday -- a stalwart Democrat who made his mark as one of the key managers of Congressional machinery -- and he doubted that Coakley was going to win. On the lighter side though, he said that the decision by Obama's team to campaign for her meant that they thought he could possibly make a difference and that there was a chance. He would not have chased a lost cause.

But a test of the disdain some key players on the left have of Obama now is captured in this strong piece by Massachusetts' own Robert Kuttner who wrote:

How could the health care issue have turned from a reform that was going to make Barack Obama ten feet tall into a poison pill for Democratic senators?

Whether or not Martha Coakley squeaks through in Massachusetts on Tuesday, the health bill has already done incalculable political damage and will likely do more. Either way, the Massachusetts surprise should be a wake-up call of the most fundamental kind.

Obama needs to stop playing inside games with bankers and insurance lobbyists, and start being a fighter for regular Americans.

The health care battle is beginning to look a lot like Afghanistan -- a pit into which America pours a never ending stream of rationalizations, compromises, resources and effort, looking paralyzed and neutralized in the process -- generating consequent weakness, inattention and impotence on virtually every other policy front.

-- Steve Clemons

I took this photo while flying from Dubai to San Francisco, and it reminded me of the rock gardens at Ryoanji in Kyoto.

Hope some of you enjoy it. Always interested in the great pics you take from your own windows.

-- Steve Clemons

I am glad President Bush is joining forces with President Clinton to marshal American resources to help earthquake-stricken Haiti.

Clearly, he has a different crowd of followers than Bill Clinton who may be motivated by his "just send your cash" appeal complete with grin (?). I know Bush is sincere about this aid effort, so I'm not going to knock his style.

This next YouTube clip shows Hillary Clinton and US AID Director Rajiv Shah arriving in Haiti.

It's good that both Clintons, Rajiv Shah, George W. Bush, Barack Obama, Brazil's Lula, Cuba and its many doctors, Venezuela, the French, and many other leaders, nations, and NGOs are focused on providing as much quick assistance to Haiti as possible.

But the real trick is gong to be keeping a focus on support of Haiti reconstruction once the bright lights of CNN and the BBC are gone. That's when we'll be able to measure the effectiveness of Presidents Bush and Clinton -- as well as the sincerity of our collective actions now.

-- Steve Clemons

Senator Carl Levin, just back from a trip to Afghanistan and Pakistan which he took with Senator Al Franken, sees significant gains in America's position in Afghanistan.

But how can that be? The only substantive differences between the highly bleak assessments of the Afghan scene in leaked reports authored by Commanding General Stanley McChrystal and US Ambassador to Afghanistan Karl Eikenberry on the one hand and Senator Levin's very rosy assessment of progress offered this week are Barack Obama's West Point speech and the deployment of a 1500 person Marine infantry unit and approximately 500 or so other troops from other corners of the DoD.

On Wednesday, January 13th, Senate Armed Service Committee Chairman Carl Levin held a media conference call from the Dubai International Airport. It was about 10:30 at night for him -- and the Committee Chairman walked us through his general impressions of things in Afghanistan. He didn't speak for Senator Al Franken, who was not to the best of my knowledge on the call.

Levin reported that he and Franken had spent three days in the region -- the first day in Pakistan followed by two days in Afghanistan. He said that they had met with General Stanley McChrystal, General William Caldwell and General David Rodriquez -- who was the operations commander on the ground, according to Levin.

Levin said "we went to places away from Kabul today. We saw real partnering with Afghans." He continued, "it's reassuring to see that happening...."

Senator Levin stated that he was in Afghanistan last September and that, compared to then, he had seen "a significant increase in optimism about possibility of success in Afghanistan."

He did add that the situation is "still very complicated, still far from certainty of success."

He said that the confidence level of our leaders in the region and of Afghan leaders that we are "making progress" is higher today.

Levin continued, "Our counterinsurgency strategy may be taking hold. We are offering terms of security better than the false security offered by the Taliban."

Senator Levin said that key to success of our current strategy is that there is close partnering or coalition troops and the Afghan army. Levin said that he believes that Afghans need to step up and take responsibility for their own security if this effort is going to succeed -- and he saw evidence of that happening.

Levin emphasized the critical task of training Afghan troops, and that there are not enough trainers there to deal with the growing numbers of Afghan recruits.

General Caldwell reported to Levin that President Obama's West Point speech and the mention of July 2011 as a drawdown point when a reduction in US forces would begin, had a "very positive effect on the Afghan leadership." He said that after that speech, the Afghan political and military leadership was focusing its energies on building a larger base of recruits for their armies. Caldwell, according to Levin, reported that the "numbers of recruits were stunning" in the aftermath of Obama setting the July 2011 date.

Caldwell also said that they couldn't handle the surge of recruits in the days after Obama's speech.

According to Levin regarding the large surge in recruits, "the reason that that happened was that Afghan leaders realized that President Obama was serious and meant business -- that commitment here [in Afghanistan] is not open ended and that we would be decreasing troops in July 2011."

According to Levin, the only shortfall in the area of partnering is not the lack of American combat troops to partner with afghans in the field, but rather the number of trainers. He said that there are "more than enough troops to handle the true shoulder to shoulder partnering." He continued, "What we learned, to our dismay, is that in the early training, during the first eight weeks, in the preliminary kind of skills given to recruits -- there is a significant short fall in personnel to train."

Levin reported that we have only 37% of the trainers that we need. He said that ISAF coalition partners should really step up to plate and offer more trainers, particularly the partners who are not sending combat troops.

AFTER SENATOR LEVIN'S OPENING REMARKS, I asked him how his rather positive assessment could be true.

What accounted for the dramatic change in circumstances between Senator Levin's quite bright portrayal of trends in Afghanistan -- as offered in part to them by General Stanley McChrystal's tour guides -- and McChrystal's own quite bleak read just a few months ago?

I noted that there had been virtually no new troop increases yet and that the only thing that had really happened was President Obama's West Point declaration of his new AfPak strategy.

Levin stated that there had been some increase in troops, and he was correct. I called the Department of Defense and learned that a 1,500 person Marine Infantry unit had deployed shortly after the President's speech and that about 500 others from "here and there" had gone in by this point. About 1,000 more are expected over the next month, according to Department of Defense sources.

But even then, having 2,000 of the 40,000 troops requested and the 30,000 agreed to by Obama could not be enough to swing "hope" and "security deliverables" so dramatically -- unless increased troops are actually irrelevant to the conditions on the ground in Afghanistan.

In response to my question, Senator Levin did state that he opposed the deployment of more combat troops to Afghanistan and felt that they were not necessary.

But he continued that what seemed important to the Afghan leadership was Obama showing a commitment to Afghanistan. He reiterated again that he would not have sent more combat troops, that there are "a number of ways of showing commitment -- better equipment, etc." He said that the best way to demonstrate commitment was to "show Afghans that the security they crave can be provided by their own security services."

Levin repeated himself yet again that he would have done things differently than the President but "that commitment was important to be made -- had an impact positively on the Afghan people."

Levin essentially said that this is about confidence -- building confidence of the Afghan citizenry in their own government and military and security services, and regardless of the US troops committee, what Obama had kickstarted was the beginning of that rebuilt confidence.

I respect Senator Levin for sharing his thoughts and for frequently showing great leadership in matters of national security policy, but he must scratch his own head, as I am, wondering if that this is all about confidence building (con game or not?), how could the picture he was presented by the McChrystal-Caldwell-Rodriguez team on this trip be so at odds with the picture they painted during the President's strategic review process?

It can't all be about an Obama-led "confidence multiplier."

If it is, then the question really is why not stick with the oratory and current levels of deployment and forego the 30,000 additional troops and extra $33 billion a year price tag?

-- Steve Clemons

The threat by Google to pull out of China because of Chinese espionage efforts to hack into the gmail accounts of human rights activists has captured enormous attention. Of course, anyone who has paid any consistent attention to China and its massive growth would know that the Google revelations are really nothing new. What is new, perhaps, is Google's willingness to turn an economic battle into one that looks like a moral stand.

My friend Zachary Karabell has an outstanding snippet on the Google China mess in Time Magazine titled "Silicon Valley is No Longer King." Karabell is also author of Superfusion: How China and America Became One Economy and Why the World's Prosperity Depends On It -- but to some degree his article, excerpted in part below, argues that there is less fusion between the US and China than there is that China is eating our lunch on a lot of fronts.

His piece starts:

The furor surrounding Google's bombshell announcement that it was contemplating withdrawing from business in China has centered on long-simmering issues of privacy, government control, and censorship. Google, a company whose DNA dictates that it "do no harm," is particularly well-cast in the role of defender of western values of freedom of expression and open access to information against a Chinese system that brooks no political dissent and reserves the right to forcibly prevent certain types of information ranging from political expression to porn.

But there is another story here, more prosaic but no less important to the future arc of global business and the global balance of power. Google has not been doing all that well in China, as many have noted in recent days, badly trailing the domestic Chinese search company Baidu. But it isn't just that Google has struggled. All of the New Economy western companies in the media and information business have failed to establish themselves in China. Before Google, eBay and Yahoo both made investments of years and millions upon millions of dollars to tap the fast-growing Internet generation in China, and like Google, they could not gain traction. Both companies ended up pulling the plug on their China ventures, with eBay losing out to domestic Chinese auction company Taobao, and Yahoo ceding its operations for an ownership stake in Alibaba.com (which also controls Taobao).

The failure of these New Economy players in China is in stark contrast to the success of brick-and-mortar companies. Consumer stars like Nike, food franchises like Kentucky Fried Chicken, industrial giants like General Electric and United Technologies, and technology behemoths ranging from Microsoft to Intel to IBM have prospered in China. In fact, mainland China has been the most impressive growth market for hundreds of global companies for the past decade. So how did Google stumble so badly?

On Wednesday next week, the New America Foundation is teaming up with Slate for an event on Google, China and Internet Freedom (register here if you would like to attend) featuring Open Society Institute fellow Rebecca MacKinnon, Foreign Policy contributing editor Evgeny Morozov, Columbia Law School professor and Slate contributor Tim Wu, and Clinton's senior adviser for innovation Alec Ross. Atlantic Monthly correspondent and New America board member James Fallows will moderate.

I have been saying for some time that America's challenge versus China is that the latter, in a national sense, has looked like Google -- full of promise and growth in the future and thus China has been given a political weight that its substantive realities in real time today don't justify. America, in contrast, looks like a large, well-branded, underperforming asset -- like Xerox or General Motors.

Clearly, no matter what the outcome of this standoff, I think China looks less like Google now and perhaps more like Goldman Sachs -- which I'll explain another day.

-- Steve Clemons

Gregory Craig -- deal maker on Ted Kennedy's endorsement of Barack Obama's presidential campaign, key architect of Obama's "engage everyone -- even the bad guys" position in the campaign, and the conscience of the the national security staff in Obama's White House who said that the public really needed to know that American officials waterboarded prisoners 183 times -- had his last formal day as Counsel to the President on January 3rd.

Reports are that Greg Craig is now unplugging a bit, relaxing and having a good time "on an Alp" somewhere in the Swiss Alps.

We have just learned that Craig will be added to an already strong roster on the President's Intelligence Advisory Board (PIAB) whose members were recently announced by President Obama.

The roster currently includes attorney and former SEC Commissioner Roel Campos; former House International Relations Committee Chairman and Wilson Center Director Lee Hamilton; national security expert, attorney, and philanthropist Rita Hauser; Former Under Secretary of Defense and technology expert Paul Kaminski; Stimson Center President Ellen Laipson, former USAF general and NASA Advisory Board member Les Lyles, and Kissinger Associates President Jami Miscik.

This is a strong group -- which will be enhanced by Greg Craig's defense and foreign policy credentials and his deep knowledge of the agendas, conflicts, strengths and weakness of key players in Barack Obama's national security bureaucracy.

Brent Scowcroft was a former Chairman of the President's Intelligence Advisory Board during George W. Bush's tenure but was "not asked to another term" in January 2005 after Scowcroft's critique of America's course during the Iraq War. Scowcroft felt "fired" at the time -- and this helped lay the groundwork for a more substantial criticism of the Bush administration by the "realist" wing of the US foreign policy community.

Today, the co-chairs of Obama's PIAB are "national security realists" -- former US Senator and Atlantic Council Chairman Chuck Hagel (R-NE) and former US Senator, Governor and University of Oklahoma President David Boren (D-OK).

-- Steve Clemons

This week I chatted with Arab American Institute President James Zogby on his program Viewpoint about Pat Robertson's hateful comments about Haitians in the aftermath of staggering tragedy.

To remind, Robertson said that Haiti was a cursed nations because Haitian slaves rebelling against their slaveholders and French control did a deal with the devil. I told Zogby that when Israel Prime Minister Ariel Sharon was felled by a massive stroke, Pat Robertson made a similarly idiotic and offensive comment that Sharon was cursed for "dividing God's land". Sharon had recently ordered unilateral withdrawal from Gaza.

Zogby notes that Pat Robertson has made enormous political donations to Republican candidates over the years. Why are there few if any calls for these politicians to return the money?

We also briefly discuss President Obama's efforts in the Middle East and my sense of Envoy George Mitchell's poor performance. My recent visit to Dubai was on the menu too.

-- Steve Clemons

Tom Kutsch is a research associate at the New America Foundation/Middle East Task Force.

In a year end report by the Israeli NGO Gisha assessing the Gazan infrastructure after last year's war in Gaza, a particularly eye-opening stat jumped out on the still bleak situation in Gaza:

- Reconstruction funds pledged at the Sharm el-Sheikh Summit: Some $4.5 billion.

- Number of months the international community negotiated with Israeli government over a mechanism for transferring reconstruction funds and materials: 9 months.

- Implementation of mechanism for transferring reconstruction funds and materials: None.

Given all the attention that was lavished upon Gaza by the international donor community (including Secretary of State Clinton's high profile effort to secure over $900 million from the U.S. Congress for Gaza reconstruction) in the aftermath of the Operation Cast Lead last January, it seems curious that action has been so out of sync with the widespread rhetorical assurances.

One year on, reconstruction of homes and buildings has barely begun, economic development has stagnated, and the humanitarian situation facing the Gazan population remains dire. The status quo remains rooted in insecurity and uncertainty, and not just for the 1.5 million Gazans directly affected by this state of affairs.

Indeed, recent moves by the Egyptian government to build a wall in hopes of battling the Gazan smuggling economy, and Israeli attacks in Gaza in response to mortar fire from groups opposed to Hamas' de facto cease-fire, demonstrate the extent to which stability remains illusory.

The implications for US policy and Israeli and Palestinian security, if the status quo is allowed to continue are particularly worrisome for an Obama administration that has talked in the new year of its desire to reinvigorate the peace process after its inability to get the parties into resumed negotiations in 2009 (yesterday, Marc Lynch had an interesting post on his Foreign Policy blog on how the administration can link ending the humanitarian disaster in Gaza to its renewed peace push).

To flesh out these and other issues related to the bleak picture in Gaza, and the wider consequences that it has for Palestinians, Israelis, and for U.S. interests in the region at large, the New America Foundation/Middle East Task Force will be co-hosting an event with the Brookings Institution/Wolfensohn Center for Development today from 1:00pm - 3:00pm.

Middle East Task Force co-Directors Daniel Levy and Amjad Atallah will be joined by speakers including Rep. Keith Ellison (MN-5), former president of the World Bank James Wolfensohn, and Brookings' President Strobe Talbott to discuss, among other things, the economic prospects for Gazans and the implications for U.S. policy going forward.

The event will be covered by CSPAN and can be viewed live on its website.

-- Tom Kutsch

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Last night, I had a good chat with Rachel Maddow on the mechanics of smart power in the context of the Haiti disaster. A lot of our conversation focused on the role of the U.S. Agency for International Development, or US AID, which plays a vital role coordinating not only the combined US government response in a crisis playing out now on this Caribbean island but also coordinates with other governments.

I am hoping the US is smart enough in this case to get over its Cold War-fashioned anachronistic Cuba allergy and actually begins to work with Cuba's well-trained, natural disaster-focused medical corps which are going to be in Haiti helping as well.

One thing I tried to emphasize with Rachel Maddow is that US AID, which was under extreme attack by former Senator Jesse Helms and House Speaker Newt Gingrich in the 1990s, is one of America's most vital yet under-resourced federal agencies that everyone respects in a time of crisis and neglects when things calm down. This isn't smart strategically -- and trying to change this boom and bust approach to international development and aid is a key priority of the Obama administration -- one I support.

-- Steve Clemons

Steve Clemons will be on MSNBC's Rachel Maddow Show tonight at about 9:25 pm EST talking with her about America's foreign policy institutions, smart power, and state building.

-- Ben Katcher

When I was last in Haiti, I learned how ignorant I was of some of the missing building blocks for national wealth creation in that poor island country.

As part of the deal for securing independence from the French, the Haitians were forced in 1825 to play 150 million French francs -- valued at about $21 billion today -- to France. To accomplish this, the island was denuded of trees. Valuable minerals in the soil and land eroded nearly immediately out to sea -- and thus a once richly fertile island became one of the real hells in the Caribbean.

I realize, of course, that there are many other reasons why Haiti has been a political and economic tragedy, but the island nation that struck an early deal for independence from colonialism certainly had a rough start.

This New York Times piece captures both the surge of support currently underway for Haiti, as well as the trauma and chaos there.

Help, if you can -- but Haiti has needed deep assistance far before this earthquake made a miserable situation a thousand times worse.

I will have some other thoughts posted soon on soft power collaborations to help Haiti after an oped I have done runs.

-- Steve Clemons

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Last night, I chatted with MSNBC Countdown's Keith Olbermann not only about the predictable fear-mongering from the Cheney wing of America's national security establishment but about the importance of President Obama trying to replace torture chambers and the Kafkaesque detention nightmare crafted by Cheney and his team with rule of law.

As Keith Olbermann pointed out last night, recent polls show that Americans are increasingly immune to Cheney's fear-mongering and a majority are supportive of Obama's actions after the attempted Northwest Airlines bombing by an Al Qaeda operative.

My colleague and friend Steve Coll had a superb piece in The New Yorker this week titled "Threats" that should be read in full. (Coll also writes the "Think Tank" blog at The New Yorker.)

I paraphrased Coll's comment below that Cheney's fear-mongering is as predictable as the penultimate scene in a slasher movie.

Here is a clip from Coll's piece:

Compounding this impression, at least on the cable news channels, has been the resurrection--as predictable as the penultimate scene in a slasher movie--of the Cheney World View. Its principal proponent took time off from composing his memoir to issue a statement to Politico that was so lacking in dignity and restraint that it hinted at the presence of a sinister franking machine. On President Obama:

He seems to think if he has a low-key response to an attempt to blow up an airliner and kill hundreds of people, we won't be at war. He seems to think if he gives terrorists the rights of Americans, lets them lawyer up and reads them their Miranda rights, we won't be at war. . . . But we are at war.

Apart from its construction on a false premise ("Now let me be clear: we are indeed at war with Al Qaeda and its affiliates," Obama declared last May; "We are at war," he said again last week), the statement, and the attention it received, suggested that American discourse on counterterrorism policy remains frozen in 2002.

I also very much liked Steve Coll's reference of a line in a speech Barack Obama gave in May 2009 at the National Archives:

From Europe to the Pacific, we've been the nation that has shut down torture chambers and replaced tyranny with the rule of law. That is who we are. And where terrorists offer only the injustice of disorder and destruction, America must demonstrate that our values and institutions are more resilient than a hateful ideology.

Obama deserves a lot of credit for moving forward a "rule of law package" that is replacing the inhumane detainee operations that violated both American and international law. Former White House Counsel Gregory Craig, who left his post on the 3rd of January this year, deserves great praise and much credit for these gains.

-- Steve Clemons

Tonight, about 8:15 pm EST, I will be chatting with Keith Olbermann about Afghanistan, terrorism, and Republican leadership attempts to undermine trust in Obama's management of America's security.

McConnell's operation in the Senate has been distributing talking points in the wake of his return from an Afghanistan visit that say that soldiers are "dangerously preoccupied" with the rights of detainees and confused by Obama's leadership.

Only problem for Mitch McConnell is that polling shows that the public strongly supports Obama's management of the "underwear bomber" terrorist attempt and the steps he has taken since.

A new CBS poll shows that 57% of Americans approve of the way Obama has responded to the nearly disastrous Christmas day bombing.

-- Steve Clemons

Opinions are mixed on whether Timothy Geithner will hold his position as Secretary of the Treasury much longer. While I have always liked Geithner personally (he's an old Asia hand), his leadership in the eyes of many is uncompelling.

The recent revelations that staff members of his at the New York Fed advised AIG to hide material matters from regulators may be the final trigger leading to his departure.

Obama needs to change up his economic team anyway. The President took the advice and counsel of Robert Rubin, Lawrence Summers, Timothy Geithner, and Ben Bernanke and resuscitated Wall Street by pumping hundreds of billions of tax dollars as guarantees and bailouts into the financial sector.

We now have a high stock market but disturbingly job openings today are 50% lower than in 2007. Obama has said that 2010 is going to be a year of focusing on job creation and more serious infrastructure investment.

In my view, jobs and national infrastructure should have been the President's priorities in 2009 -- when he actually had the mandate and financial resources to make deep job-creating infrastructure investments that recurring returns to the American economy and workers over the next generation. But Obama is late to the cause, and future results are in doubt.

To convince American voters and working families he is serious about job creation and more sensible economic policies than he has thus far pursued, he can't keep Lawrence Summers, Romer, Geithner, and the overwhelmingly neoliberal members of his White House econ team.

Obama can't expect us to believe that the same team members that he has had working out global macroeconomic deals are the same who can focus on microeconomic issues in specific industries and on the nation's pathetic jobs portfolio. Leo Hindery throws out some ideas on Huffington Post today on how to get the jobs machine going again, but I can't imagine Obama's current team seriously pursuing the Hindery action plan.

Jared Bernstein, chief economist to Vice President Joe Biden, is practically the only one with any serious background in infrastructure and jobs-focused economic policy.

So Obama needs to change the team.

I've been asking people to give some thought to who should run the Department of Treasury if and after Timothy Geithner departs. I've asked a wide variety of people privately -- from the heavy labor to financial to high tech sectors -- to share with me (off the record) who should take the helm of America's economic policy shop.

The suggestions are quite varied, but I wanted to open up the discussion more publicly at The Washington Note and at Huffington Post.

Knee jerk, silly answers can always be fun -- but they aren't serious.

We need someone who can think carefully about changing the economic policy course of the country, who is as economist James K. Galbraith just shared with me "incorruptible", and who can run a big government operation, and instill national and global confidence in his or her leadership.

I have some good and interesting names -- but I'd like to hear from all of you.

Who should be America's next Treasury Secretary?

-- Steve Clemons

This is a guest "note" by Chas Freeman, President of the Middle East Policy Council and former US Ambassador to Saudi Arabia as well as former Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs. This clip appeared as part of a private email exchange, and The Washington Note secured permission from Freeman to run this segment that offers interesting insights into America's current challenges with terrorists in Afghanistan and on a Northwest Airlines flight.

Non-State Actors Now Competing Competently with States

. . .That would certainly appear to be the case with the al-Qa`ida operation that Humam Al-Balawi just spearheaded to revenge the assassination of the Taliban's Baitullah Mehsud.

Quite aside from the mythic status he has now achieved and the recruitment value this has to al-Qa`ida, this operation involved the carefully planned deployment of a triple agent over an extended period to entrap the key CIA personnel engaged in planning the assassination of al-Qa`ida's leadership cadre. It came off like clockwork, demonstrating a level of tradecraft, professional skill, and capability comparable to that of the superlatively competent Staatssicherheit [Stasi] establishment in the late, unlamented DDR.

One must laugh at the attention being lavished on the pathetically unsuccessful "underpants bomber" (successful as he was in sowing panic, which is after all the objective of terrorists) when the death of seven CIA operatives and associated security staff so convincingly demonstrates how our enemies are evolving to match us.

Those involved in the struggle to "defend their faith and its homelands" against "the Crusaders and Jews" are getting much cleverer, more competent, more sophisticated, more united, more diverse, and able to operate more effectively on a global scale and over longer time frames.

Whether we and the Israelis wish to take credit for this evolution (as is our due) or not, we should be very concerned at the phenomena that our callously ignorant policies in the Dar al-Islam are birthing.

Non-state actors are now, for the first time, beginning to compete in competence with states.

-- Chas Freeman

(photo credit: Marc Pachter)

There is something intriguing to me that the long-time, now former director of the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, Marc Pachter, took this picture of Ronald McDonald in Bangkok.

Pachter, who oversaw the brilliant renovation and upgrade of DC's home base for official portraiture which now anchors the popular Penn Quarter, has now moved from that sort of officialdom, even applied in the avant-garde, to moving around the world without all the pretense and living life on his own terms -- without regard to politics, funders, or obligations to who he officially "was."

But yet -- he still took this great photo, and I'm having a blast with him seeing New York city in a way that I hadn't before.

Our mutual friend, Adam Goodheart, wrote this terrific New York Times profile of Pachter in 2002 starting with the line, "Marc Pachter can't find Dorothy's ruby slippers." Pachter was was then acting Director of the National Museum of American History in addition to tending the stable of great portraits of US American presidents.

His crowning achievement and swan song at the National Portrait Gallery was agreeing to hang Stephen Colbert's portrait at the gallery -- but only on Pachter's terms.

Colbert was pleased to see his portrait, self-lugged into the Museum, hanging near Gilbert Stuart's iconic George Washington -- but was bemused by its placement in the alcove of the Gallery's bathrooms.

When Colbert, on a subsequent program, asked Pachter whether anyone had come to see it, Pachter answered "Oh yes, it's like a urological emergency. There are long lines to the bathroom."

Pachter tells people that he's writing nothing, but he actually has some thoughts on why museums lack a sense of humor about themselves.

One of my favorite encounters with him was at a brilliantly whacky John Waters interpretation of Cy Twombly's work -- but the cool part was that Pachter, dressed in white tie and tails, was heading off after Waters' performance to the Gridiron Dinner where VP Joe Biden spoke and stole the show -- and I convinced him to be my mole.

That was the night Biden said Obama thought Easter was about him.

I did note that though Pachter, dressed to the nines, probably looked like the only person who might be possibly cast in a John Waters movie, the filmmaker found it 'unsurprising' that someone would show up in white tie and tails at his deal.

We need more irreverence just about everywhere -- but particularly in Washington.

-- Steve Clemons

I normally don't buy chachkis, but I couldn't resist this one. It will be a priceless relic someday of this era's destructive hyperventilation and fear-mongering.

I landed in New York this morning and stopped in one of the greatest stores I've ever been to -- the Pearl River Mart on Broadway.

I paid $7.95 for this "Savin' to Fight Terrorism" bank -- but you can get yours easily online here at BlueQ.com!

"It's hero time. . .put your man hat on!"

-- Steve Clemons

The Washington Note is posting this monthly update from business executive Leo Hindery, who has been focused like a laser over the last year on the fact that the administration has been underperforming on job creation and has been engineering a GDP recovery rather than a recovery plan focused on deep infrastructure investments and jobs. Hindery is Managing Partner of InterMedia Partners and former CEO of the Yankee Entertainment Sports Network and AT&T Broadband. He was a senior economic adviser to both the John Edwards and Barack Obama presidential campaigns and now Chairs the US Economy/Smart Globalization Initiative at the New America Foundation.

Dear Friends,

As you read the economic news, it will be important to remember, first of all, that blips - occasional good numbers, signifying nothing - are common even when the economy is, in fact, mired in a prolonged slump. Such blips are often, in part, statistical illusions...caused by an inventory bounce" [from businesses rebuilding inventories after slashing them].

-- Paul Krugman, January 4, 2010

Using its Current Population Survey of non-farm jobs, the Bureau of Labor Statistics announced this morning that in December "U.S. employers cut [non-farm] payrolls by 85,000, and that the unemployment rate remained at 10%." It went on to say that there are now 15.3 million unemployed workers, and that since the recession began [in December 2007] employment has decreased by 8.4 million.

However, as we have been noting, the monthly BLS announcement regarding unemployment notably:

· uses a survey of households rather than actual payroll data, which is much more accurate;

· excludes changes in employment among the nation's 11.2 million farm and self-employed workers, even though these two categories of employment represent more than 7% of the civilian labor force; and, most important,

· does not take into account the 15.1 million workers who are part-time-of-necessity [9.2 mm], marginally attached [2.5 mm], or out of the labor force because they are "discouraged" [3.5 mm].

Our Summary of U.S. Real Unemployment makes these three adjustments; it also identifies average weeks unemployed, job openings, and the jobs shortfall.

I should note that December is when the BLS revises all past numbers, and this year was no exception. Accordingly, a number of the historical figures in this latest Summary are changed from prior versions that we have sent you.

With the adjustments made:

· The number of employed workers in all three categories - non-farm, farm and self-employed - decreased by 589,000 in December instead of BLS's reported decrease of 85,000 in only the number of non-farm workers.

· The real unemployment rate is 19.1% instead of BLS's announced rate of 10%.

· The number of real unemployed workers in all four categories - BLS, part-time-of-necessity, marginally attached, and discouraged - totals 30.4 million instead of BLS's single category figure of 15.3 million.

· The number of real unemployed workers has increased by 13.6 million since the start of the recession instead of BLS's decline in employment of 8.4 million. (In contrast, we should have been creating a net 2.6 million new jobs in the past 24 months just to keep up with the natural growth of the labor force of 108,000 workers per month.)

· The economy is short about 22.4 million jobs in order to have a real unemployment rate of 5%, which would generally be considered "full employment".

(Most of the national press now uses our real unemployment numbers one way or another, except inexplicably some of them leave out discouraged workers despite the fact that this is a huge category and arguably the most effectively unemployed of the four categories of unemployment.)

The average number of weeks unemployed for all workers is now at least 29.1 and the number of workers unemployed at least a half year is at least 9.6 million [BLS's figure of 6.1 mm plus the 3.5 mm discouraged workers].

(Note: These two numbers are critically important measures of real employment health because of the over-reliance each week on the rolling four-week average of initial unemployment claims, which is right now around 460,000 workers. This average is in fact a very small snapshot of the economy, and it does not focus at all on those 9.6 million workers who have been out of work for a half year or longer: i.e., the 4.8 million workers who have used up the 26 weeks of benefits provided by states and are now receiving extended benefits paid for by the federal government, plus the other 4.8 million workers who are discouraged or otherwise.)

Kindest regards,

Leo Hindery

The clip above is one of several excellent news clips done by Al Jazeera English's Clayton Swisher. As i was watching this, I realized that Americans hardly see images form the field and front lines in Afghanistan.

Americans don't feel directly the financial costs of the war. They don't pay a direct tax to support the more than $100 billion a year effort (after the surge is in place), and the US still has a volunteer army -- so the impact that might have been felt by society from a large scale draft is not there.

America is engaged in big time, significant, long wars with a light footprint on the American psyche.

I think that Swisher's video clips are a small but important corrective. We need to see more of what is happening in Afghanistan.

We need to pay for wars we engage in -- not just leave the debts of conflict to the next generation. We need to feel the real sacrifices involved with what has become for too many a casual game.

-- Steve Clemons

Update: Here are video clips from Swisher's series on Afghanistan following the one above.

Marines Hunt Elusive Foes in Helmand:

Afghan Training a Challenge for US Marines:

Transporting US Wounded in Helmand:

-- Steve Clemons

Here is a challenge to those of you who want to give me some counsel on an essay I am doing on Obama's team of rivals.

It's clear that Obama wanted to employ a team of political, ideological and policy diversity in his White House, but some of the battles between these players have been vicious.

The outgoing White House Counsel Gregory Craig whose last formal day of work is this Sunday, the 10th of January, comes to mind.

Who do you think has risen and succeeded on Obama's team -- and who has fallen?

Who is just treading water? and why?

Has Rahm Emanuel added value or raised costs for Obama team? What of political advisers David Axelrod and Valerie Jarrett?

-- Steve Clemons

Business Week recently published Eurasia Group's "Top Global Risks of 2010."

I am always impressed with Eurasia Group President and Foreign Policy blogger Ian Bremmer, who provided a tour de force of global events at the New America Foundation last year.

As for the "Top Global Risks," mostly familiar faces and countries here, but a couple of surprises.

Back in April, Bremmer said that the U.S. Congress represented the single biggest political risk to the global economy. Now the U.S.-China relationship is #1.

Iraq is listed as a "red herring." Eurasia Group's analysis is very sanguine. They say that

Compared to what we've seen before--and what might have happened--the overall story is remarkably positive. For the markets, Iraq is suddenly an opportunity. Institutions are becoming legitimate (even with the unresolved Kurdish issue), the army is starting to function, and most important, political leaders from all communities are beginning to recognize the value of Iraq's tremendous natural resource base from which all can benefit if they make compromises to maintain the country's stability. For all the basic governance problems, there's very little chance of Iraq becoming a failed state at this point. As recently as a year ago, that constituted a meaningful risk.

Iran, "fiscal divergence" in the Eurozone, U.S. financial regulation and Japan (another surprise) round out the top 5 political risks.

Somehow neither 'Al Qaeda" nor "international terrorism" made the list.

Turkey was chosen as the tenth greatest political risk. Eurasia Group sees Turkey drifting further from Europe. I am hoping Germany and France will prevent this from happening, but we'll see.

You can view the slide show here.

-- Ben Katcher

It is ironic that foreign affairs analysts (and international investors) seem to be more sanguine about Turkey's political and economic outlook heading into 2010 than they have been in years, but at the same time Turkey's prospects of joining the European Union remain mired in a steady decline.

It is refreshing then to see Hugh Pope, one of the West's most astute observers of Turkish political developments, argue in Today's Zaman that the German-French cold-shoulder that has stifled Turkey's accession process for the last several years may be warming, if only slightly, to Turkey.

Here is part of what Pope says

On his return from an ice-breaking trip to France in October, Turkish President Abdullah Gül was happy to state that the French leadership did not mention "privileged partnership." In fact, although President Nicolas Sarkozy may not have changed his own mind, his politicization of Turkey's EU membership during his election victory in 2007 has unexpectedly mobilized Turkey's supporters in France. Left-wing newspapers now debate the merits of the country, whereas a decade ago they mainly picked apart Turkey's then poor human rights record....

The change is more subtle in Germany, where the idea of "privileged partnership" originated and was a key part of Christian Democrat leaders' rhetoric during the last election in 2004. After the 2009 elections, the Christian Democratic Union (CDU)-Christian Social Union of Bavaria (CSU)-Free Democratic Party (FDP) coalition agreement is still stiff with suspicion of Turkey, underlining that the negotiating process should be open-ended, include no date or automatic or guaranteed right of entry and specify strict obligations to meet EU criteria.

But it makes no mention of "privileged partnership," saying that only if membership negotiations fail for any future reason, the policy should be to bind Turkey "as closely as possible to European structures to develop her privileged relationship with the EU." Beyond the linguistic step back from confrontation, this official postponement of any decision is an important change that keeps Turkey's road open and no longer betrays decades of EU promises of possible membership.

The efforts of key EU states like Germany and France to achieve a more respectful relationship with Turkey gives some hope that the bleak "down" cycle of EU-Turkey hostility between 2005-2008 is entering a new "up" cycle -- just as the EU-Turkey near-death experiences of 1987 and 1997 were eventually overcome. With the Lisbon Treaty in place and fears of economic meltdown receding, the EU is regaining self-confidence.

You can read Pope's entire article here. Time will tell whether Pope's guarded optimism is deserved.

Clearly there are a number of issues that will determine whether Turkey joins the European Union this decade - not least of which is Turkey's own domestic political reform program - but it is refreshing to see at least some positive sign, however small, that France and Germany may be reconsidering their counterproductive Turkey policies.

-- Ben Katcher

Graeme Wood has a fascinating piece in the current edition of Foreign Policy about his travels in the "limbo world" of unofficial or unrecognized states. These statelets, which control territory and have at least passably functional governments, range from those teetering on the edge of irrelevance--like Somaliland and Nagorno-Karabakh--to international flashpoints like Palestine and Iraqi Kurdistan.

Wood writes that these faux states are united by certain characteristics, and that, "totems of statehood are everywhere in these wannabe states: offices filled with functionaries in neckties, miniature desk flags, stationery with national logos, and, of course, piles of real bureaucratic paperwork designed to convince foreign visitors like me that international recognition is deserved and inevitable."

Yet of all the non-states that Wood visits, only one is now less sure than ever of the utility of independence: Kurdistan.

Kurdistan is perhaps the most official of the non-official states, with long-standing autonomy, strong security forces and a growing revenue stream. But as Wood points out, Kurdistan and the Kurdish Regional Government (KRG) have benefited from their leverage and autonomy within the Iraqi state; Kurdistan has established itself within the Middle East as a safe place for investment and a potentially large market for the import of goods and the export of oil. In fact, Turkey, despite its large and historically restive Kurdish population, has emerged as a key economic partner for Kurdistan. The ruling Turkish AKP party sees a viable Kurdish region as a way to tie Turkey into the world's oil market while also maintaining a buffer against a potentially unfriendly or unstable Iraq. And as an International Crisis Group (ICG) report from November 2008 argued, the AKP now hopes to get help from the KRG against the Kurdistan Worker's Party (PKK), which has engaged in sporadic terrorism in Southern Turkey for the past 30 years. This potential cooperation comes less than two years after Turkish forces invaded northern Iraq in a bid to wipe out PKK sanctuaries, and even as Turkey sporadically bombards Iraqi Kurdistan.

Wood also intimates that independence no longer holds as much sway as it once did with Kurds, as many realize the benefits of a strong Kurdistan within an Iraqi state. And in an off-the-record briefing I attended last month several Kurdish officials sought to confirm this view, consistently affirming their desire to be a part of a democratic Iraq (albeit a federated one with strong regional administrations and generous revenue sharing).

And at the moment, the KRG has achieved grudging acceptance of its autonomy from the Iraqi central government. Despite previous efforts to blacklist any oil companies who signed contracts with the KRG, this past spring the Malaki government began allowing the KRG to export oil from two fields, providing needed revenue to the central state and helping integrate Kurdistan more thoroughly into Iraq's economic and political structure.

Furthermore, Kurdistan's current relationship with its neighbors and the rest of Iraq are to the KRG and Kurds' benefit. A landlocked independent Kurdistan, even with the revenue from the disputed city of Kirkuk's massive oilfields, would aggravate tensions with neighboring states while still remaining dependent on these same states for trade and protection.

But it is unclear how long this tenuous calm might last, as several unresolved problems could upset Kurdistan's delicate balance and lead to future conflict or an irredentist resurgence.

The ICG's Joost Hiltermann, an Iraq expert, has argued that despite a realization among Kurdish leaders that independence is not viable, Kurdish nationalist aspirations live on and are in fact focused on the city of Kirkuk. However, the recently-passed Iraqi election law failed to deal with the status of Kirkuk or the long overdue (and constitutionally-mandated) census of Kirkuk, instead putting these issues off until next year. And despite progress in exporting oil and gas from Kurdistan, Iraq still has no agreement governing hydrocarbon revenue sharing, an issue to which the final status of Kirkuk, with its estimated 13% of Iraq's proven oil reserves, is central.

Moreover, the planned 2011 departure of American combat forces from Iraq continues to loom large; as Iraq's army grows stronger (in part due to an influx of American equipment) there is a greater risk of confrontation between Kurdish forces and the Iraqi army, as occurred in 2008 in parts of Diyala province as well as Kirkuk, where the Iraqi Army has strengthened its presence. And unlike 2008, American forces might not be around next time to keep tensions between the opposing sides from escalating.

Unsteady but real progress has been made in Iraq, as Kurdistan continues to integrate itself into Iraqi state institutions while maintaining partial autonomy from the central government and control over its resources. But care must be taken in the coming months and years, lest Kurdistan fail in its transition from limbo to province.

-- Andrew Lebovich

Now, this has to be one of the strangest round-ups of organizations I have seen in a long time -- organizations considered by Iran's Ministry of Intelligence to be trouble-makers inside Iran and thus "blacklisted." Here is the Iranian source -- as well as a comprised list of translated organizations from Laura Rozen and Neo-Resistance. (hat tip to Enduring America)

My shop, the New America Foundation, where I run the foreign policy/national security group, has the dubious distinction of being listed TWICE.

What's strange about this is that in my own writing and commentary, I have continued to be a proponent of engagement with Iran, despite its electoral convulsions, though I have also stated strongly that the people in the streets deserve our respect and the support of American civil society, if not explicit support from the US government -- which I think would be a mistake.

My colleague, Flynt Leverett, who publishes the Race for Iran blog, has been a stronger proponent than I have of serious US-Iran engagement and was among a number of Americans who had dinner with President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad when he was in New York at the UN General Assembly in the fall of 2009.

Others who comment on Iran within the shop I run are Parag Khanna, Afshin Molavi, and occasionally Steve Coll. Molavi generally disputed Leverett's assertion that Ahmadinejad clearly won the election fairly, and both he and Khanna described the summer protests as more than just a fleeting moment that will pass quietly -- and Steve Coll is extremely judicious and balanced, hearing all sides of the debate about Iran's electoral mess and the significant US national security priority of working to get Iran off a nuclear weapons track.

Here is the roster of the top 60 blacklisted organizations. I want to thank the Iranian Intelligence Ministry for making sure that the New America Foundation was in good company on this roster. It's probably a good list to be on -- but it won't affect my shop's view that we must still configure a serious, new strategic approach with Iran, something the Obama team has as of yet failed to do.

Here is the roster:

1. Soros Foundation -- Open Society 2. Woodrow Wilson Center 3. Freedom House 4. National Endowment for Democracy (NED) 5. National Democratic Institute (NDI) 6. International Republican Institute (IRI) 7. Institute for Democracy in East Europe (EEDI) 8. Democracy Center in East Europe (CDEE) 9. Ford Foundation 10. Rockefeller Brothers Foundation 11. Hoover Institute at Stanford University 12. Hivos Foundation, Netherlands 13. Menas, U.K. 14. United Nations Association (USA) 15. Carnegie Foundation 16. Wilton Park, U.K. 17. Search for Common Ground (SFCG) 18. Population Council 19. Washington Institute for Near East Policy 20. Aspen Institute 21. American Enterprise Institute 22. New America Foundation 23. Smith Richardson Foundation 24. German Marshall Fund (US, Germany and Belgium) 25. International Center on Nonviolent Conflict 26. Abdolrahman Boroumand Foundation 27. Yale University 28. Meridian Center 29. Foundation for Democracy in Iran 30. International Republican Institute [again --- see 6] 31. National Democratic Institute [again --- see 5] 32. American Initiative Institute (?) 33. Institute of Democracy in Eastern Europe 34. American Aid Center (?) 35. International Trade Center 36. American Center for International Labor Solidarity 37. International Center for Democracy Transfer 38. Community of Democracies (?) 39. Albert Einstein Institute 40. Global Movement for Democracy 41. The Democratic Youth Network 42. Democracy Information and Communication Technology Group 43. International Movement of Parliamentarians for Democracy 44. ??? 45. RIGA Institute 46. The Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School 47. Council on Foreign Relations 48. Foreign Policy Committee, Germany 49. Middle East Media Research Institute (described as an Israeli institute) 50. Centre for Democracy Studies, U.K. 51. Meridian Institute [again --- see 28] 52. Yale University and all its affiliates [again --- see 27] 53. National Defense University, U.S. 54. Iran Human Rights Documentation Center 55. American Center FLENA (active in Central Asia) 56. Committee on the Present Danger 57. Brookings Institution 58. Saban Center, Brookings Institution 59. Human Rights Watch 60. New America Foundation [again --- see 22]

Note to Iran's list-makers. You forgot the Heritage Foundation, the Cato Institute, the Hudson Institute, and CSIS -- which I figure all probably want to be added to the list.

You can give New America's extra slot, well, to CSIS.

Seriously, this kind of roster is an idiotic gesture by Iran's not so intelligent intelligence establishment as it is implied that Iranians in contact with these organizations will be committing criminal offenses. Let's remember that President Ahmadinejad himself spoke at the Council on Foreign Relations two years ago.

-- Steve Clemons

(A giant tree at Musgrove, the family estate of Smith Bagley and the Arca Foundation -- photo credit: Steve Clemons)

In Dubai a day and a half ago, I was sitting on a bus next to well known Clinton family friend and adviser Lanny Davis who was chatting with me about the widest possible array of fascinating and simultaneously disturbing topics (about the political judgment of some others). The New Yorker's brilliant social and political guru Hendrik Hertzberg was there, as was former New York Times correspondent and Full Court Press blogger Charles Kaiser. Sitting in front of Lanny and me was former New York Times national security correspondent and Fox News commentator Judith Miller and just across the aisle, so to speak, was Marie Brenner of Vanity Fair.

They were there for the launch of a new annual meeting called the Dubai Forum, which was sponsored by "Brand Dubai" and focused this year on architecture and sustainability.

It was an odd bed fellow bus ride -- in Dubai, which makes sense on a number of levels.

But then Lanny Davis' face went ashen -- and he leaned over to me and said, "Smith Bagley has just died."

It was an odd, completely weird moment to hear such tragic news about the passing of one of America's great political players and philanthropists. I was stunned. And Lanny Davis, who is not the most loved attorney in liberal circles, was clearly upset -- but we were stuck on a bus with a wildly eclectic assortment of type A personalities. Lanny spoke to me a lot about his memories of Smith Bagley -- and I shared my own encounters with this giant of human beings.

It's hard to overstate the significance of Smith Bagley to liberal and progressive causes in America. The grandson and an heir of R.J. Reynolds, the tobacco tycoon, Bagley early on committed himself to advancing racial civil rights, promoting liberal Democratic Party candidates, promoting global human rights, ending the US-Cuba embargo, and helping to create a climate of sensible justice and fairness inside the United States that focused on helping those with little sustain themselves and promulgating policies that sought to reverse the erosion of the American middle class.

When Jimmy Carter was elected President of the United States in 1976, Bagley offered his family estate to Carter to assemble his likely cabinet and closest advisers before formally assuming office in January 1977. The home is full of pictures of that Carter clan retreat -- and an important Norman Rockwell painting of Carter hangs on the second floor loft of one of the estate's great rooms.

I first met Smith Bagley at a private home some years ago when Hillary Clinton was running for the Senate. He was dressed in jeans and a pretty ratty sweater and was just completely unpretentious on the surface.

I didn't know who he was -- but he had views, strong ones, which he would occasionally whisper to me, while we sat together, on the hearth of a big fireplace as I recall. He seemed completely unaffected by the power players in the room; he seemed like a big time farmer or lumberjack -- very down to earth, but deeply irritated by the Bush administration's course and by the "lack of humanity" in politicians on the right, and the left.

Bagley headed the Arca Foundation, which has been a major funder of progressive causes around the country -- supporting both sophisticated policy development and advocacy work within the DC policy community as well as enlightened grass roots organization and outreach activities. Last year, I had the great privilege of speaking at the annual board meeting of the Arca Foundation at the Musgrove Estate in Georgia, which was part of the massive land holdings of the R.J. Reynolds estate.

Smith and two of his daughters, Nicole and Nancy, were there -- and you could feel palpably their collective commitment to smart progressive philanthropy inspired by the old world, giant oak surroundings of Musgrove. Some of the work of my organization has been supported by Arca, but my views about Smith Bagley and his family are independent of that support.

Lanny Davis sent a very warm email immediately to Elizabeth Bagley, who is a former US Ambassador to Portugal and now is now the State Department's first Special Representative for Global Partnerships, and I only wish I could have as well.

Bagley had been felled in recent years by a stroke -- but the Smith Bagley I saw as recently as the Clinton Global Initiative gala dinner a few months ago still had a fiery furnace of political views and ambition.

Frankly, his money and his advocacy of fairness and civil rights helped push political and policy needles, and like the great, massive, history-laden trees at his old family estate of Musgrove, Smith Bagley will be impossible to replace in the pantheon of contemporary progressive political leaders and funders.

He will be greatly missed by progressive policy practitioners like myself -- and condolences to his family and to the board and staff of the Arca Foundation.

-- Steve Clemons

Jon Weinberg is a research intern with the New America Foundation/Middle East Task Force.

The Iraqi constitution stipulates that there be "a referendum in Kirkuk and other disputed territories to determine the will of their citizens, in a period not to exceed (the thirty first of December two thousand and seven)." Two years after that deadline, the fate of Kirkuk has yet to be determined.

In an interview with the Council on Foreign Relations' Bernard Gwertzman, which was published yesterday, Jane Arraf, Baghdad Correspondent for the Christian Science Monitor points out that "[t]here were to have been referendums, and there were to have been agreements. But those deadlines have passed, and one of the problems is that the constitution that was put through under U.S. pressure delayed the question of what to do about Kirkuk."

In describing the situation in Kirkuk, Arraf may be touching on something more profound and far-reaching: the consequences of imposing U.S.-style constitutionalism on Iraq.

In the United States, we try to adhere to our constitution as a sort of secular bible. As such, it may seem only natural that we promote our brand of constitutionalism in Iraq. Yet, while this may be well-intended, it is not clear that Iraq was ready to draft and adopt a supreme, all-encompassing constitution in 2005.

Nor is it clear now. That is not to say that Iraq should not have any type of constitution. Far from it. Rather than using a single document which delineates every component of popular sovereignty, basic law coupled with an uncodified constitution may still be more suitable for Iraq until the country's many ethnic and religious groups can agree upon a more equitable and durable codified constitution.

An uncodified constitution, like those of the United Kingdom and New Zealand, allows for laws to be built over time, putting an emphasis on precedent rather than whether individual laws are constitutional or unconstitutional. In keeping with maintaining popular sovereignty, the Parliament may change the constitution by passing new Acts of Parliament. This is a far more flexible process than the current prerequisite for amendments, which includes the following troubling provision: "In case of a contradiction between regional and national legislation in respect to a matter outside the exclusive powers of the federal government, the regional authority shall have the right to amend the application of the national legislation within that region." Secession, anyone?

All told, as an alternative model, an uncodified constitution is still inherently imperfect (many in the United Kingdom still question its merits), but makes far more sense in a fledgling state that has yet to solidify its governance.

In any event, the suitability of Iraq's current legal structure is certainly something to keep in mind during the months and weeks leading up to the parliamentary elections scheduled for this coming March.

-- Jon Weinberg

Anya Landau French is director of research for the New America Foundation/U.S.-Cuba Policy Initiative.

Normally I say my piece and I let it go. But sometimes, the point bears repeating, especially when it deals with serious national security questions. It also bears repeating when Eugene Robinson takes it up on the op-ed page in today's Washington Post.

Under new rules prompted by the failed Christmas Day terrorist attack, airline passengers coming to the United States from 14 nations will undergo extra screening: Afghanistan, Algeria, Cuba, Iran, Iraq, Lebanon, Libya, Nigeria, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen. For our first quiz of the new decade, which country doesn't fit with the others?

The obvious answer is Cuba, which presents a threat of terrorism that can be measured at precisely zero. Cuba is not a failed state where swaths of territory lie beyond government control; rather, it is one of the most tightly locked-down societies in the world, a place where the idea of private citizens getting their hands on plastic explosives, or terrorist weapons of any kind, is simply laughable.

There is no history of radical Islam in Cuba. In fact, there is hardly any history of Islam at all. With its long-standing paranoia about internal security and its elaborate network of government spies and snitches, the island nation would have to be among the last places on Earth where al-Qaeda would try to establish a cell, let alone plan and launch an attack. Yet Cuba is on the list because the State Department still considers it -- along with Iran, Sudan and Syria -- to be a state sponsor of terrorism.

Really? Despite the fact that the U.S. Interests Section in Havana was one of the few American diplomatic posts in the world to remain open for normal business, with no apparent increased security, in the days after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks?

Robinson thinks that President Obama should take Cuba off the list once and for all.

Granted, the president already has plenty on his plate. He may be reluctant to introduce yet another variable. It's not hard to imagine a senator or a group of House members holding, say, health-care reform hostage over Cuba policy.

But it's difficult for me to believe that Obama fails to see how insane our current policy really is. He needs to change it -- and he can begin by ceasing to pretend that looking for al-Qaeda terrorists on flights from Cuba is anything but a big waste of time.

Now that I have "predicted" the opening of this debate, allow me to predict that embargo proponents are sure to pile on Robinson, and claim he's offering the Castros the keys to the castle (or at least the lifting of the embargo). But that simply isn't the case. The U.S. embargo is a huge tangle of laws and regulations built up over more than four decades - most of the economic sanctions that would normally go away with taking any country off the terrorism list would still stay in place with respect to Cuba thanks to the late Jesse Helms (author of the 1996 Helms-Burton Act, which significantly tightened the embargo on Cuba).

If removed from the terrorism list, Cuba would still not be able to import or export most anything to or from the U.S., nor receive private or public credit terms, nor receive U.S. foreign assistance . . . you get the point.

So the real benefit of taking Cuba off of the terrorism list goes to the United States itself. Removing the one country everyone believes no longer belongs there could increase the credibility and impact of such a list. And so long as we lack a clear and consistent standard for why one country is on the list and another one isn't (there is broad consensus that Cuba remains on the list for domestic political reasons), the rest of the world may take our fight against terrorism that much less seriously. Worse, it causes us to waste precious resources we need focused on the real threats to our country.

So, yeah, what he said.

-- Anya Landau French

(President Barack Obama meets with John Brennan, Assistant to the President for Counterterrorism and Homeland Security, in the Oval Office, Jan. 4, 2010. Official White House photo by Pete Souza)

While assessing President Obama's first year in office many analysts have insisted that there is something different and better about Obama's foreign policy compared to that of his predecessor, but have struggled to identify a single policy shift or achievement to justify that claim.

I would argue that President Obama's most significant foreign policy accomplishment in his first year in office was the "de-securitization" of the United States' counter-terrorism efforts.

The 'securitization' of foreign policy has been described in this way, "By labeling something a security issue, an actor claims a need for the use of extraordinary means, emergency measures and other actions outside the boundaries of normal political procedures. (Rabia Karakaya Polat, "The Kurdish Issue: Can the AK Party Escape Securitization? Insight Turkey, Vol. 10, No. 3, (2008) p. 77)

The concept of "securitization" is often used to describe Turkey's foreign policy for most of its history, and particularly in the 1990s. In the Turkish context, the literature suggests that Ankara engaged in a "securitized" foreign policy as a result of the political power of the military, which benefited directly from its indefinite and extra-legal battle with the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) throughout the 1990s.

Peter Baker, in his fascinating new article for the New York Times Magazine on Obama's approach to what his predecessor called the "Global War on Terrorism", demonstrates that while President Bush managed to simultaneously exude over-confidence and press the 'high-fear' button, President Obama has sought relentlessly to identify the balance between "acknowledging danger and projecting confidence."

Whether justifying additional troops for Afghanistan or addressing last week's domestic terrorist threat, Obama has deliberately refrained from attempting to hijack the domestic debate by stoking fear, by claiming that more is always better, or by arguing that his political opponents are unpatriotic.

I know that some are dissatisfied with the delay in closing Guantanamo Bay and the continuation of some of Bush's constiutionally questionable legal practices, but President Obama's refusal to use fear for his personal political advantage is his administration's most significant foreign policy accomplishment thus far.

-- Ben Katcher

(The Burj Khalifa -- previously the Burj Dubai -- on opening night, 4 January 2010; photo credit: Steve Clemons)

Here is a farewell pic from Dubai -- a picture of the new tallest building in the world, the Burj Khalifa (which until a few hours ago was known as the Burj Dubai).

Word is Jeddah wants to have the next tallest building in the world.

I'm off to San Francisco -- which is a fantastic city even without anywhere near the tallest buildings in the world. But for sizzle, it does have the Golden Gate.

-- Steve Clemons

(photo credit: Steve Clemons)

A stunning fireworks show and water dance ensemble opened the latest claimant to tallest building in the world in Dubai tonight.

I watched a Reuters reporter work hard to try and convince our hosts for this event to leak him the exact height of the building, which has been a very closely held secret.

But then midway through a video extravaganza about Dubai, its Ruler, the region and what was then known as the Burj Dubai, a wild countdown began of numbers. They stopped at 828 meters, and journalists, bloggers, and tall tower watchers all began telegraphing the revealed height to friends and news bureaus all around the world.

I had the privilege, thanks to extraordinary hospitality, to sit up in the VIP section on the front row couch just to the left of Dubai's Ruler Sheikh Mohammed and his allies and retainers. I was just about five seats over and down a half step from UAE's Foreign Minister Sheikh Abdullah bin Zayed Al Nahyan -- who I think is one of the most intellectually agile and interesting foreign policy practitioners in the region. I tried to say hello but a very tall guard wasn't impressed with me at all -- and was unable to connect.

But the night was amazing, the fireworks spectacular, and little dreariness or stress evident among those who might have some exposure to the Dubai government's economic strains.

In the surprise of the night, the Burj Dubai was officially "renamed" by Dubai's ruler as the "Burj Khalifa" -- named after the UAE President Sheikh Khalifa bin Zayed. Optimists and loyal Dubai and UAE patriots think that the name change was evidence of the Dubai ruler's magnanimity, appreciation for the leadership of the UAE's president who is also a relative, and a sign of the Emirates' federation coming closer together.

Cynics and realists think that the name change reflected the political realities that Abu Dhabi helped bail out Sheikh Mohammed's debt-ridden holding company, Dubai World.

I wonder if the web address "http://www.burjdubai.com/" will change to "http://www.burjkhalifa.com/".

Just tried it -- doesn't work yet...though someone has just recently acquired the websites for both "burjkhalifa.com" and "burjkhalifa.net".

Regardless of what inspired the renaming gesture, the night was great -- but I have to sleep now as catching a plane in a few hours to San Francisco.

More on Dubai when I get to California -- where I'm going to chat to a bunch of folks about the State of California's political reform challenges and how new media might play a role in connecting new and diverse audiences to those questions. If you have thoughts on that front, email me.

-- Steve Clemons