Pretty exquisite timing by the Israeli government. They waited for Vice-President Joe Biden to show up in town, book a dinner with Prime Minister Netanyahu and in the best of tradition of BOTH major political parties to vow total, unconditional support for Israel to basically drop trow and shout my departed mom's favorite Yiddish phrase: Kish mir in tuchas! In Italian, roughly, vafanculo. See photo for English translation.

Just as Biden said the White House was pushing for a re-start of the moribund Israeli-Palestinian peace talks, the Israeli foreign ministry announces the total deal breaker that it is authorizing the construction of 1600 new settlement units in occupied East Jerusalem.  You know you are dealing with an out of control Israeli government when the ultra-right wing PM Bibi Netanyahu gets outflanked by his own Interior Minister, a religious fundamentalist who authorized the new construction.

Biden, who has never criticized Israel in a meaningful way, was forced to "condemn" the new move-- tough language for an ally.

The New York Times has a pretty conventional round-up of reaction to the Israeli snub.  There's one intriguing nugget in the Times collection: a pointed mini-essay from Palestinian reporter Daoud Kuttab who argues that, as big a slap as this to Obama, he has no one to blame but himself, starting from when he buckled to Netanyahu last fall:

When they met in New York last Sept. 20, President Obama blinked first, leaving the embarrassed Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, hanging on the tree.

In his public statement the U.S. president scaled down from his (and Secretary Clinton’s) previous calls for a settlement “freeze” to accepting Israel’s offer of a settlement “restraint.” Once it became clear that the Americans will not stand up to Israel on settlements, everyone knew their place in this relationship.

Despite the White House’s latest protestation of the embarrassment meted to Vice President Biden, the Obama administration has only itself to blame.

Israel’s announcement March 9 to build another 1,600 units of housing in East Jerusalem, to be added to 112 units approved for a settlement outside Bethlehem a few days earlier, as well other announcements made since that September standoff, all are a result of the American president’s weak knees. The sliding slope that began that day in September has continued and will ultimately derail America’s goals of bringing peace to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

The Palestinian leadership’s refusal to have direct talks until there is a true freeze on settlements in all areas occupied in 1967 shows that the authors of U.N. Security Council Resolution 242 were right by stating in the preamble of that resolution the “inadmissibility of the acquisition of territory by war.”

All attempts to appease and reward Israel for its acquisition by war has resulted in pushing peace away. If President George W. Bush truly believed, and President Obama truly believes — as they both publicly stated — that an independent, viable and contiguous Palestinian state is in the “national interest” of the United States, Washington must resolve once and for all that any Jewish settlement built on Palestinian territory forcefully taken in 1967 will not be tolerated.

Once America regains its resolve in this area, the peace train can proceed to its destination.

Don't hold your breath for a new departure schedule to be announced. On this issue, the entire U.S. political class is in the tank and that train is far, far off-track.  The big winner in this dust-up by the way isn't Israel. It's Iran.

I just finished watching Dennis Kucinich on MSNBC and I cannot honestly tell you I am stunned or even mildly surprised. I'm more like somewhere between amused and disgusted. He categorically told Lawrence O'Donnell that he will absolutely vote NO on the Senate health care bill that must clear the House if we want as much as rumor of reform.  With that statement, Kucinich joins the ranks of the nabobs ranging from every right-wing Republican to every right-wing obstructionist Democrat like the aptly named Bart Stupak.

Kucinich firmly stated he will  go thumbs down on any bill that does not include a "robust public option."  Nice idea. Too bad the option does not have enough political support to get through Congress. Hell, we don't know yet if there's enough votes to even get the watered-down Senate bill that Dennis opposes through a Democratic House where all you need is a simple majority.

Indeed, the nose counting in these final days before a showdown vote is so razor-close that it just might be Kucinich's naysaying which could block the legislation.

Kucinich's intransigence has prompted some to declare that Kucinich could become "the Ralph Nader of health care."

But such a statement is an insult to Nader.

My readers know that I supported Nader in 2000 (being the premature anti-Liebermanist that I was).  In 2004 I editorialized that he should not run, in part, because he had failed to build on his earlier run. Not to mention that he had gotten in bed with cultists like Leonara Fulani. And I wrote that Nader's 2008 "campaign" was tragi-comic.

But I always defended and would defend his right to run, precisely because presidential politics is NOT a zero-sum game. When you are offered three or four or six choices then you have a real option. Your conscience may lead you to vote for one among many without "taking away" a vote from someone else who you do not or cannot support. It's an open-ended choice.

This is not the case in Congress. Here we have the ultimate zero-sum equation. There are no choices except up or down, yes or no. If you don't vote for a bill, you are voting against it. Period. You are not taking a third position by opposing a less than perfect reform. You are literally joining forces with all of its opponents.

I have always been skeptical of Kucinich not because he is too far left. But because he is too far detached from effective politics. I saw his primary "campaign" up close and personal in Iowa in 2004 -- the ultimate venue for ground-level retail politics-- and he did virtually nothing. Late in the game, he hired a single staffer for the entire state. The point being he squandered the energy and political capital invested in him by naive supporters. I can honestly say he did little, nay, he did nothing to build any movement out of his campaign other than to move his face in front of the cameras of the televised debates.

Here we go again. We now have a black and white choice. Either we pass a flawed health care bill that provides access to private insurance for 30 million Americans without it. Or we do nothing. And in so doing, let the Republicans pick up another 15 or 20 seats beyond the 25 or so they are already destined to win in November.

Dennis Kucinich is no Ralph Nader. He might as well be another John Boehner.

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How Much Longer?

I spoke at quite an offbeat public event last night organized by my colleague and supreme journo K.C. Cole and, inevitably, I ran smack dab into the usual gaggle of full-time hand-wringers, wearing their knuckles thin over all the wonderful, enlightening, irreplaceable marvels we are on the brink of losing as newspapers fold into obscurity.

Do they mean crap like this?  Where column space of one of the supposedly most influential papers in America splays itself wide to carry an endorsement of Liz Cheney's stomach-turning gutter McCarthyism? While it simultaneously pats the Bushie pro-torture lawyers on the back?

Gag me with a spoon, please. This is, of course, all performed in the name of objectivity, fairness, non-partisanship, neutrality, presenting both sides and yada yada yada.

I have a simpler characterization of it: pro-torture propaganda.

Remember this sort of crap the next time someone comes up to you weeping over all that we are losing in the Digital Age.

Could we please lose it just a bit faster?

Here's the fascinating duplicity of modern American journalism. On the one hand, we are told that this is no job for amateurs. That only highly-trained, hard-nosed, highly skilled professionals can dig up facts, assemble them and interpret them. And then we are told, heavens no, it would be unethical for these same geniuses to actually draw any conclusions. In the world of he said/she said everybody's equal. And nobody's ever guilty.

Cancel my subscription to the resurrection.

Sit Down At Cat State Northridge -- 7 Arrests

We have the most comprehensive, even exhaustive coverage of the March 4 protests against cuts in California public education at Neon Tommy.

Here's just a few of our higlights:

A running blog with dispatches, photos and slideshows.

Hundreds of photos from our live Flickrfeed.

A compilation of protest videos.

A slideshow and a report from protests at UCLA.

A slideshow from the protest in Pershing Square -- Los Angeles

A report from Cal State Northridge.

A slideshow of the large protest at UC Irvine.

An audioslideshow from UC Riverside.

A report with video from UC Santa Cruz.

A round-up of protests across the country.

An analysis of challenges facing the student movement.

And much much much more still coming in through the night.

It's nice to see some 0ne other than the tea baggers start coming out into the streets to protest the economic situation. A surging movement of tens of thousands of students, teachers and public education staff -- centered in California but spreading now into more than 30 states--will be out in tomorrow defending that nice, old idea notion of decent public education. You know, the kind of schools we are spending a trillion dollars to supposedly build in Iraq and Afghanistan.

At our USC-based Neon Tommy publication we will be field a dozen or so reporters and photographers throughout the day and aggregating reports from across the state and country. Make sure to follow us.

Here's some maps we have posted on events around SoCal and across the country.

Here's our round-up of students gearing up for the protests including a live Twitter feed from the activists.

And as we used to say in the Old Days, this could also be A Field Day For The Heat.

Stay with us through the day and night tomorrow. And follow the Neon Tommy twitter feed as well.

Here's the excellent text version from reporter Gigi Graciette.

There were still scattered reports of looting Tuesday evening in Chile and social tension remains inflamed and volatile as mounting criticism of relief efforts focus on its tardiness.  Thousands more troops were deployed throughout the country today to begin distributing basic food items. But tens of thousands remain without shelter, foodstuffs and medicines.  And 18 hour a day curfew had been clamped down on the city of Concepcion, the hardest hit by the quake and home to 600.000.

Most reliable reports estimate that with the death toll hovering for the moment at around 800, somewhere around 1000 people are still missing.

Foreign aid began trickling in today, in part because of an unwisely prideful decision by the Chilean government to not make an urgent relief plea. Only reluctantly and slowly did the government of President Bachelet make such a call.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton made an extremely brief foray into Chile today. And in a surreal scene, personally delivered the first batch of American aid in the form of 25 satellite cell phones. Thirty-five more have been promised along with other quite modest relief supplies.

Can someone please explain this from either end of the equation?

Here's the rest of a stunning Times photo montage.

Here's one eerie similarity between the disasters in New Orleans and Chile.  Just as more people died in Katrina not from the hurricane but from the broken levees, it may turn out that as many or more Chileans died from an under-reported tsunami than they did from direct damage from the quake.

And the Chilean Navy may bear some responsibilities in this by not having adequately warned those living along a 100 mile stretch of national coastline that a huge wave was headed their way.

John Dinges, former NPR news manager and someone who has followed and reported the Chile story for the last 4 decades has the details here.

Meanwhile, nearly 72 hours after the quake the social crisis in Chile seems to be mounting instead of abating. Basic services are being restored but there's no clear answer how to offer relief for the approximately 2 million people who have been affected.

Sporadic looting by the poorer half of Chile has flashed in several cities and the vivid class hatreds that have fueled Chilean politics for so many decades are starting to resurface.

I've been increasingly alarmed by the vitriolic name calling on Twitter where too many Chileans have been too quick to write off all those involved in the sacking of goods as "delinquents...criminals...animals..scumbags" and worse. Calls are being made for the Army to shoot them down like rabbits. Others have called for a military coup.

It's all so damn predictable.  On that subject, here's a relevant post from News Junkie which argues that in times of catastrophe survival always trumps social order.  That's without repeating one more time that much of what passes for daily social order is, in any case, nothing but legalized looting

Six cops for six diapers. Quite logical.

The above is a well-translated clip of a Chilean television report from earlier on Sunday. It's shot in the quake-stricken city of Concepcion as a local supermarket was being looted.  I saw the rest of the report on a live stream, which does not appear here and there is a lot missing. In that part that is missing the reporter says over and over again "this is a very complex situation."

Indeed.

So let's get a few untidy but contextual facts out of the way right off the bat. While this sort of pillage has led to a declaration of virtual martial law in several Chilean cities, the handing over of police powers to the Army and the first impositions of nightly curfews since the Pinochet period, we are also reading one Tweet after another of how "legal" businessmen are gouging quake-stricken Chileans by jacking up prices on milk, bread, gasoline and pay-by-the minute cell phones. That is looting of the worst kind.

But back to the supermarket stuff.  I don't think anyone wants to advocate anarchy and mob-rule especially in times of catastrophe.

A couple of these looted markets, however, were closed. Their owners clearly found it too risky to put up basic foodstuffs and  medicines for sale in an orderly way without it, in fact, turning into a mob scene. So thousands of desperate people whose houses collapsed, who had their water and cooking gas supply cut off and who were poor to begin with, broke into the markets and grabbed what they could.  Is this great social policy? No. It is, nevertheless, quite predictable and would happen anywhere.

The security forces have an obligation to intervene and impose some modicum order. The footage of people being tear-gassed and hosed down with armored water cannons as their city lay in rubble around them, is a stomach-turning vision.  Put a few cops in front of the store and fire a few shots in the air. Maybe.

I say maybe because what the Chilean government should have done was to send in those troops IMMEDIATELY after the quake, confiscate the supermarkets, hand out the supplies in a rational fashion and later compensate the owners (maybe).

By doing nothing, by not even forcing the stores to open for business, the resulting chaos was more or less guaranteed.  Indeed, starting tomorrow -- a day too late-- the government will be giving families free relief packages in some sort of deal worked out with market owners.

A lot was also made about how, gasp, the looters were also taking TV's and other consumer goods. Well, of course!  Again, this is not recommended social policy but it is inevitable that it takes places once those stores were broken into and after the government failed to make sure that they were both open and protected and that some system of material relief was in place. It has and would happen anywhere. We live in a system based on and motivated by personal greed. Some folks rob you with a fountain pen (or a Wall Street hedge fund, others do it more opportunistically with a crowbar. Sometimes it's legal and sometimes it isn't).

That said, looting per se cannot be tolerated. But to impose curfews and militarize the most hard-hit cities is not a pretty picture and is a make-shift, repressive response that could have been pre-empted. Further, a mother and/or father have a moral obligation to secure the basic needs for their offspring in times of emergency whether or not the owners of a food store feel or don't feel like opening for business.

------

A few words now about Chile versus Haiti. Much has been written about how Chile suffered so fewer casualties because it supposedly has such a superior building code and is so experienced in anti-earthquake construction.  Only partially true. ANY PLACE in the world has better building codes than Haiti -- which is marginal to the Fourth World. Further, the Haitian quake was centered much, much closer to a much larger metropolitan center. The epicenter of the Chilean quake was 22 miles below the surface. In Haiti it was only eight miles below ground.

I have lived in Chile and while, no doubt, modern, high-end residences are built with earthquakes in mind, millions of working class residences are little but wooden shacks or cracker box apartments. Please note that, in fact, the common term for a Chilean shanty town home is "media agua" -- which means half-water because they are so open to the environment and so full of holes. If this quake had been centered in Santiago, or worse, in the picturesque but rickety-built port of Valparaiso, I shudder to think what the body count would have been. Tens of thousands for sure.

Further, the single biggest building to collapse in this quake is a BRAND NEW 15 story apartment complex in Concepcion which fell over on its side and in which several dozen people were still trapped as of Sunday night.  What was that about superior seismic construction (see photo)?

Also, take a look at the video below. It was shot in the working class suburb of Maipu on the outskirts of Santiago, hundreds of miles from the epicenter. These sort of ticky-tacky housing developments are as common in Chile as rashes on a baby's bottom. Hundreds of thousands of Chileans live in these sort of structures in a working class belt that surrounds and penetrates the capital city.  Again, imagine if the epicenter had been near Santiago,

I point this out not to trash Chile. On the contrary. I am deeply moved and upset by what has happened there not to mention that I have dozens of cousins and a mother-in-law living there. But beginning with Pinochet and his ultra-nationalist clap-trap, Chile has suffered from a pronounced case of triumphalist self-delusion.  The succeeding twenty years of civilian rule have done little to abate that malady.

Official Chilean dogma is that it has left the Third World behind and is now in a small circle of prosperous, economically developed and advanced countries. This is poppycock. Millions of Chileans have been lifted out of abject poverty in the past two decades but they remain poor. Or, at best, about a half-inch above water.

Wages are miserably low. Labor law is untouched from the days of the dictatorship. The educational system is broken and terribly class-biased. The economic elites live in luxury unthinkable to the other 14 or 15 million of their countrymen. A sick consumerism --beyond the country's real means-- has further distorted the economy. Common items such as tennis shoes are sold on 12 month installment plans with an effective 30% interest rate.  And while Chile is, in many ways, much better off than its closest neighbors, its economy is NOT developed. Chile prospers primarily by selling off and exporting its NON-RENEWABLE natural resources ranging from copper to irreplaceable hardwood forests to a depleted stock of salmon (plus some replaceable fruit harvested at shameful wages).

All this might explain why the government has awkwardly danced around the issue of almost out of hand rejecting foreign assistance to deal with the earthquake. It's a laughable notion that it doesn't need outside support. Several million Chileans, some in my own extended family, could have used some of that help BEFORE the quake. Indeed, every month my wife and I must decide who, among the relatives, will get wired some money to pay for this month's prescription drugs, tuition payment or whatever.

A natural disaster like this one, as painful as it might be, always offers the opportunity of reordering priorities and doing some hard re-thinking about where a society is at. Doesn't always happen. Just ask the folks in the lower 9th Ward of Nawlins.

Anyway, here's that video of the housing complex in the suburbs of Santiago. You can drawn your own conclusions. There is no audio.

Since the moment the monster quake hit in Chile I sort of self-appointed myself as a translator/aggregator for Chile-related Twitter activity.  You can find my long list of tweets here. I'm a former translator to Chilean president Salvador Allende and have been married into a Chilean family for 36 years so it's a place I know something about.

Now,  I'm going to take a few minutes out to offer at least a bit of a deeper analysis.  There have been a lot of absurd and sometimes self-serving if not subtly racist ovations to Chile for suffering --- so far-- only about 750 deaths compared to the tens of thousands in Haiti.

Pointless twaddle. Haiti is the poorest nation in the hemisphere and we expect it to collapse when hit. The Haitians are not dumber or more irresponsible. They are poorer.

Chile is also a third world country, but a more developed one and with a superstructure light years ahead of Haiti.  Yet, the expectation that Chile was going to hit by the seventh strongest quake ever recorded, that a thousand or perhaps more were going to die, that a fifth of the country was going to have their lives deeply damaged, and yet somehow all was going to be peace and love and stiff upper lip demonstrates just how damn delusional people can be.

Even the Chilean government participated in this fantasy by initially saying it didn't need foreign aid. Fortunately, it has reversed this ridiculous notion.

It is impossible this early on and from this far away to make any serious judgment on the response of the Chilean government.

But in the days to come there are a few points we have to keep in mind.

First, this is a full-on catastrophe that would rend the social fabric of any society.

Second, Chile is by far not the poorest place around but it does have one of the most UNEQUAL economies in the world.  It suffers from the deepest of class and regional divisions with a not so subtle thread of apartheid-like racism laced through the whole thing. And the region hardest hit by the quake is precisely the poorer, darker southern half of the country for whom much of the capital's elite have open scorn. The elites have plenty of epithets they love to toss around in referring to their inferiors: "rotos, rotos de mierda, indiocitos, and the worst of all, "ordinarios." Broken ones, shitty broken ones, little Indians, and..... "the ordinary."

Immersed in Twitter as I have been for 48 hours, I can say that Chileans in general have demonstrated an admirable humane-ness and compassion.  But as soon as the sacking of supermarkets began, the predictable venom comparing the poor to "delinquents" and worse began to sprout (some of that rage expressed by the Good People of Santiago might be better focused on the war criminals and torturers who still populate their golf courses and country clubs).

I don't think anyone is comfortable watching mobs tear apart supermarkets. But no one should be comfortable watching thousands sleeping in the streets and wondering from where they will get any food and water.

The Chilean government has a responsibility to maintain social order. Yet, its deployment of riot police, tear gas, water cannons, army troops and the imposition of dusk to dawn curfews does not seem the best of responses.

I doubt seriously if Chile will now descend into social chaos. People are too busy figuring out where to sleep rather than to go out and riot.

I just as much doubt, however, that this episode is going to be just some passing and unfortunate moment. Economic and social frustration has been mounting for years, creating great dissatisfaction with the centrist and timid administration of the last 20 years which has been loathe to radically reverse the free market policies of the Pinochet era.  Four years ago when President Bachelet was elected she was almost immediately met by a massive student rebellion protesting the deplorable state of public education in Chile.

Indeed, though Bachelet remains personally popular, her ruling coalition lost last month's presidential election and conservative billionaire Sebastian Pinera assumes the presidency in a few weeks. People wanted change and they wanted it bad enough to elect someone least likely to give it to them.

Pinera has, nevertheless, promised jobs, jobs, jobs. Well, he certainly will have that opportunity in trying to rebuild a devastated land.  The environment he will be operating in, however, will be quite volatile to say the least.

He's going to have to come through and come through big time given the current circumstances as there is no room, time or margin for error.

The only good news for Pinera is that he doesn't come in to power for another ten days or so. And between now and then, who knows what will happen?

I watched and listened enough to today's heath care "summit" to conclude who won the prize as A-hole of the day. And the answer is the smarmy House Republican Whip Eric Cantor.

Here he is at what is supposed to be bi-partisan round table during which one is supposed to at least pretend to want to seriously discuss whatever common ground both parties just might find on a crucial issue affecting us all and this asshole shows up with the 2400 page Senate bill stacked up on his desk. I don't like calling people assholes.

But I call them as I see them.

Three points for Obama for openly, physically scorning this little twerp and for denouncing the stack pf papers for what it is -- "a prop."

What the hell difference does it make how many pages the bill is?  Should someone stack up 4,000 gold stars on their desk next time a rival who supported the war in Iraq speaks?  That just might be a tad more relevant number than the length of a landmark legislative bill.

Second place for A-hole goes to a bitter and brittle John McCain for whom my pity has turned to disgust. I just loved the way McCain lied and lied some more, deliberately obscuring the legality and morality of a so-called "reconciliation" vote on the legislation -- a vote which in plain English is called a "MAJORITY VOTE," as the President scolded him.

So, here's what it seems is going to happen.  The health care bill is NOT going to be passed by reconciliation.  From what I can see tonight, the House will pass by a majority vote the Senate version of the bill that was already passed by 60 Senators.  Then a second bill of "fixes," which broadly falls under the category of budget matters, will be passed by both houses, indeed, by a simple majority vote.

The Republicans will cry bloody murder but the deed will be done.  Either that, or the Democratic Party can pack up its tatters and quietly disappear.

I'm traveling over the weekend to the usual sort of mind-numbing conference. Let me know how it all turns out.

Some of my students let me sit in as a guest on their Politically Indirect Podcast today. We talk health care summit. Give it a listen.

Check out my other blog of Reporter War Stories.

Also, follow me on Twitter.

Every morning I awake excited and enthusiastic to work with young journalists at USC. I am not among the hand-wringers who fret over the future of public information. Indeed, count me among those who literally can't wait for the Old to be replaced by the New. We will lose nothing and gain much.

I had that thought re-enforced today when I saw the front page of Politico which I reproduce in part above. Politico might be primarily an online publication but it's run by former newspaper guys and it is a reliable font of hoary conventional wisdom [sic].

Just take a look at the photo above.  You can see it is a "composite." In other words, it was consciously constructed by a photo editor and then approved by a front page editor.

The left hand panel shows about 1,500 pages of paper.  The President's plan, which is referred to, is actually less than 20 pages. It's not what we see in the pic.

To be fair, the Senate bill which Obama is basically supporting does, indeed, total to more than a thousand pages. So friggin' what?  Anybody here know how long an average bill stacks up to be? Does it matter?  As a matter of fact it does. The first Bush bank bailout giveaway was based on a three page bill. Another 997 pages of details and conditions could have only improved that act of corporate welfare.

More importantly, is the inherent and rather blatant bias demonstrated in the photo. It clearly implies that Obama is imposing a very negative and bureaucratic burden on the nation.  By contrast, that photo could have been some artful representation of 30 million benefiting from new health care insurance. But that would be biased, no?

Continuing with the poker analogy I used in last night's posting, we now know the hand that Barack Obama is holding, It's not Pocket Rockets but it's the next best thing.

The plan the  Obama White House  unveiled today is far from bullet-proof, it is not perfection by any means, but it is, in fact, genuine and significant health care reform that will, slowly, improve the lives of tens of millions of Americans.

The implied strategy is that Obama will use the full force of his congressional majority and, after letting the Republicans posture and bluff this coming Thursday, he will bring it all home in a simple up/down vote in Congress -- a 50% plus one "reconciliation" vote that sidesteps a Republican filibuster.

He's looking down at Pocket Kings. Cowboys.  A monster hand.

He's had it the whole time. At least since his election and that of an overwhelming Democratic majority in November '08.  Some like to "slow play" -- to disguise your big hand with moderate, cautious bets trying to sucker in your opponent.  The danger here is that you allow your opponent, for a cheap price, to play the flop -- the next three community cards that hit the table. That means that if some donkey has called your small camouflaged bet with a cruddy suited 10-2, he stands a slight chance of hitting two pair or a flush draw on the flop and wiping out your Kings.

That's exactly what we have seen in the last year.  When Obama sat down at the table holding all the big cards, his weak play allowed the Republicans cheap entry into the game and they have hammered him with everything from filibusters to whining about deficits, socialism, death panels and tea parties. He has let crap hands eat away at his big stack of political capital.

Now, hopefully, he's had enough. Time to shift gears, to mix up the play as they say.  You take your strong hands and you play them very aggressively. Let the other guy think he can bluff you out but you suck him in for every nickel he has. You bet like you're holding Kings and then let the other guy gasp when you actually have them.

Obama never lost his cards. He has just yet to play them forcefully. Will he now raise the stakes and bust out his less talented opponents?  I'm hoping against hope.

I pretty much agree with the always insightful E.J. Dionne that this week and what comes or doesn't come out of the Thursday health care summit is make or break time for the next three years of our political life.  If the Democrats and Obama don't bust up the furniture and roll over the Republican boulders with a reconciliation passage of health care reform then we are doomed to years of do-nothingism coupled with economic stagnation. No exactly a formula for reform.

If you think the last the last few months of total political paralysis --especially since the election of Scott Brown-- is something passing, you better get yourself a bottle, a big effiin' bottle of Xanax. What you see is what you get. The intransigence of the Republicans is total and irreversible. They've made it abundantly clear that their entire strategy is now leveraged on blocking any and all reform legislation -- virtually anything that comes from the Democratic majority.  It's not difficult to read through their bullshit rhetoric.  Nor is it coincidental that their conservative flank has entered a state of near permanent collective psychosis, picking black helicopter pilot Ron Paul in their presidential straw poll.

The only variable in this formula for complete political asphyxiation is whether or not the Democrats are going to continue to be the enablers in this very, very sick political marriage of the two major parties.  You know things are edging toward a full-on Code Bue situation when a group of tepid Democratic governors start to get publicly anxious i.e. PRIVATELY HYSTERICAL.

Even the most lumbering, stupid and blind among barnyard animals can sometimes sense their imminent extinction. And that is, indeed, what we are talking about here.  If the Democrats stay their current course they run the palpable risk of losing both houses of Congress back to the brain-dead Republicans. It's one thing to be whipped by smart, clever and powerful opponents. It's quite another to get bested by moronic bumblers.  Then again, who said the Democrats are much smarter?

There's enough concern among them, however, to even re-ignite the spark of a public option.  I wouldn't place any money on that bet, but I am willing to be surprised. Indeed, my money --unfortunately-- remains stuck on the suicide option with which most Democrats seem to be most comfortable.

Reaching the conclusion, as I did a few weeks ago, that we are most likely headed for even deeper paralysis, I have been forced to re-examine my views of Obama. I continue to think of him as extraordinarily intelligent and someone who, unlike say Bill Clinton, has an authentic moral center. He was a great campaigner. He's been a mediocre president further saddled by a number of catastrophes he inherited from a gang of chumps who deserve to be tossed off some cliff. I am not blind to Obama's weak spot for Wall Street nor his more cynical connections to Chicago machine politics, beginning with his odious chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel.

But I am going to stick to my fantasy, at least for the time being, that the Man is better than his Party, And that means, in consequence, that the only hope he has of salvaging his limping presidency is to put his foot down on its neck. And the only way her he can do that is to first dispense with the Republicans and the continuing fairy tale about bi-partisanship. We already have bi-partisan agreement -- to do nothing.

Dionne is correct in identifying, in part, what Obama's strategy is underlying Thursday's summit. He wants to publicly call the bluff of his Republican opponents. Believe it or not, we poker players also call this a showdown. You force your opponent to go all the way down to "the river" --the last card-- and then force him to make a big bet and then you call it, forcing him to show his cards or fold and muck them when he sees yours. It's a bracing power play -- if you win. And quite humiliating if you're called out and then have to show everybody the crap hand you've been bluffing with. But you can't beat nothing with nothing as is said at the tables. If you're gonna force the showdown, as Obama seems intent on doing Thursday, you better damn well have a strong hand yourself -- at least one that crushes your opponent.

It's time to crush or fold. If Obama does the latter, you can forget about anything happening politically until November when the GOP sweeps.

P.S. For fun, please keep an eye on my Reporter War Stories blog. My latest chapter is about "drunkest ever." With Oliver Stone.

Click on photo to see interview.

As I have noted, I have been taking advantage of this lull to catch up with the past. I'm piece by piece reconstructing some of my own personal, professional archives -- at least the most memorable war stores I can reassemble-- over at this new blog I started.

In this latest entry, I detail some of our highjinks with the Salvadoran guerrillas and some silly stuff about CBS as well.

Take a look at the whole entry.

Meanwhile, I've popped the slideshow portion of it out to the front page here. You'll have to follow the link above, however, to get the full context.

First things first:

I've updated my latest post on my Repoter War Stories blog and have finally gotten to my meeting Idi Amin and getting strafed by the Israelis. Read it or Idi will eat you.

Now, on to the real news. One year after its passage, today is the Official Let's Pretend to Debate the Obama Recovery Program Day.

Like any good pol, Obama is making the most of it and --more or less correctly claiming-- that the $1 trillion program kept us from going into a new Depression and that government spending probably saved a couple of million jobs. That's probably mostly true, if unsatisfying.  Unemployment is still hovering at 10% and is likely to remain there for a couple of years. But, even an idiot would have to concede that the financial markets have become relatively stable, the freefall in job loss has stemmed, the housing market has begun to slowly rise and we are showing some modest growth instead of contraction.

In other words, Obama didn't save the world or bring instant prosperity but probably did about a B or B minus job in administering emergency care to an economy that was mutilated and strangled by 30 years of Reaganite magical belief in markets.

The Republicans, meanwhile, seem disappointed that things aren't even worse than they currently are so their rhetorical case that Obama is responsible for our current state of affairs and that his recovery is a failure wouldn't be such an obvious, cynical and hypocritical laugher.

Can anyone here remember what the GOP jobs program was over the last year? What exactly did the Republicans propose that didn't get done that would have made things any better?

If anything, the Obama program fell short. Not enough was invested. Not enough was spent. Not enough sacrifice was demanded from those who drove us into the ditch to begin with.

No doubt, this will lead to a great Republican victory in November.

And this is why a majority of eligible Americans don't vote.