This Thanksgiving essay was originally written for the Huffington Post.

I know it sounds really corny, but this Thanksgiving, I'm grateful that George Washington was our first President -- and that Barack Obama who like GW can be austere and seemingly distant from common folks but yet is smart and chameleon-like in his ability to forge compromises can still get a great deal right in his presidency.

Reading Ron Chernow's excellent Washington: A Life, I realize how different our world would have been had someone like Tom DeLay or Aaron Burr been America's first president. We might have ended up with someone who never wanted to leave the position as Washington did.

Or among the early founding fathers, if John Adams had come first, or Jefferson - the consolidation of a single political faction's control over the machinery of government at such a fragile stage might have meant civil war far earlier than the one America eventually got.

In Tokyo for a couple of days, and this was a pretty nice way to get acclimated when I arrived. Beautiful gardens here outside my window.

North Korea's leaders need to spend some time in gardens like these -- and cool out a bit. Seems to me that North Korea's attack, despite the violence uptick, is a typical call for attention and an extortionist demand for more resources.

Information has reached me that some USAF personnel have been put on 24 hour deployment alert with regard to North Korea. I don't know how regular or irregular that is -- but know that despite a lot of tension in the country since 9/11, my sources have not been put on such alert before. The USAF has denied that it has changed its alert status in comments to other journalist friends of mine -- but the actual personnel beg to differ.

More soon.

-- Steve Clemons

This is a guest post by Anya Landau French, who directs the New America Foundation/U.S.-Cuba Policy Initiative. This post originally appeared at The Havana Note.

Politico's Ben Smith reports that incoming House Foreign Affairs Chairwoman Ileana Ros-Lehtinen worked to shut down a potential warming of Cuban-Israeli relations after Fidel Castro made a surprise defense of the Jewish people earlier this year. (Castro questioned Mahmoud Ahmadinejad for his failure to recognize the holocaust, and said that "no one has been more slandered than the Jews.")

According to Smith, Israeli officials saw Castro's uncharacteristic remarks as an opportunity.

Israeli leaders reacted warmly to an unexpected defense of Jews and Israel, and criticism of Iran, from Cuban leader Fidel Castro in an interview with Jeffrey Goldberg. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu praised Castro's "deep understanding" and President Shimon Peres wrote in a warm letter to Castro that the comments were "a surprising bridge between the hard reality and a new horizon." Israeli officials, I'm told, saw the moment as an opportunity to widen a fissure in the hostility of the global left for Israel.

Alan Berger, at the Boston Globe, would probably agree (h/t to the Atlantic's Goldberg). After Goldberg publicized Castro's comments, Berger argued that Castro himself sought to moderate some of his allies with his comments.

"Whatever his personal feelings about the matter, Castro was drawing a bright line between himself and Ahmadinejad. At the same time, he was giving a lesson to his foremost student, Chávez, in the putative difference between progressive and reactionary values. Chávez has tolerated and even promoted virulent anti-Semitism in Venezuela. But a day after Castro's condemnation of Ahmadinejad's anti-Semitism, Chávez said he would meet with Jewish community leaders and declared: "We respect and love the Jewish people.''"

This is the same sort of logic that many more centrist and conservative Latin Americanists, particularly those worried about the polarizing influence of Hugo Chavez in the hemisphere, have espoused as one more excellent reason for President Obama to engage Cuba. A 2009 Senate Foreign Relations Committee report prepared by Carl Meacham of Ranking Member Richard Lugar's staff put it this way:

"Certain Latin American leaders, whose political appeal depends on the propagation of an array of anti-Washington grievances, would lose momentum as a centerpiece [U.S. restrictions on Cuba] of these grievances is removed."

In other words, constructive engagement with Cuba could well serve a more conservative ideology, one which Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (who will become Chair of the House Foreign Affairs Committee this January) might be expected to embrace. Except she didn't. Ben Smith explains:

A Cuban exile and fierce Castro foe, she made her displeasure known to the Israelis -- and even received an apologetic call from Netanyahu, which appears effectively to have squelched the unlikely dialogue with Cuba.

"I just said look, this guy has been an enemy of Israel, just because he said something that a normal person would say--after 50 years of anti-Israel incitement it's one phrase from an old guy who doesn't even know where he's standing," Ros-Lehtinen told me of the exchange.

-- Anya Landau French

This is a guest post by Sean Kay. He is professor of politics and government at Ohio Wesleyan University and an associate at the Mershon Center for International Security Studies at The Ohio State University. He is also the author of the forthcoming book Celtic Revival: The Rise, Fall, and Renewal of Global Ireland (Rowman & Littlefield, 2011).

Just three years ago, Ireland was hailed as a model of economic progress in the "Celtic Tiger". In 2005, Tom Friedman of the New York Times lauded Ireland - saying that: "I do get a little lump in my throat when I see countries like China, India, or Ireland adopting a pro-globalization strategy, adapting it to their own political, social, and economic conditions, and reaping the benefits. Mr. Friedman saw Ireland as: "One of the best examples of a country that has made a huge leap forward by choosing development and reform retail of its governance, infrastructure, and education." In the 2008 presidential campaign, Sen. John McCain laid out Ireland as a model for America to emulate.

So confident in their way of doing things were Irish leaders that when some Irish economists began warning of the Irish housing and construction bubble in 2007, the former Prime Minister Bertie Ahern said to an applauding audience that he did not understand why people who were talking down the economy - "cribbing and moaning" - he said - "I don't know why people who engage in that don't commit suicide."

It's good to go back every once in a while and get a refresher course on high octane Chalmers Johnson.

-- Steve Clemons

Next week, Foreign Policy magazine and its editor-in-chief Susan Glasser will be releasing its 2nd annual roster of the world's greatest thinkers and doers in foreign policy. I have seen the list -- and it's impressively creative and eclectic.

There is one name that is not on the FP100 who should be -- and that is Chalmers Johnson, who from my perspective rivals Henry Kissinger as the most significant intellectual force who has shaped and defined the fundamental boundaries and goal posts of US foreign policy in the modern era.

Johnson, who passed away Saturday afternoon at 79 years, invented and was the acknowledged godfather of the conceptualization of the "developmental state". For the uninitiated, this means that Chalmers Johnson led the way in understanding the dynamics of how states manipulated their policy conditions and environments to speed up economic growth. In the neoliberal hive at the University of Chicago, Chalmers Johnson was an apostate and heretic in the field of political economy. Johnson challenged conventional wisdom with he and his many star students -- including E.B. Keehn, David Arase, Marie Anchordoguy, Mark Tilton and others -- writing the significant treatises documenting the growing prevalence of state-led industrial and trade and finance policy abroad, particularly in Asia.

Today, the notion of "State Capitalism" has become practically commonplace in discussing the newest and most significant features of the global economy. Chalmers Johnson invented this field and planted the intellectual roots of understanding that other nation states were not trying to converge with and follow the so-called American model.

Johnson for his seminal work on Japanese political economy, MITI and the Japanese Miracle was dubbed by Newsweek's Robert Neff as "godfather of the revisionists" on Japan. Neff also tagged Clyde Prestowitz, James Fallows, Karel van Wolferen and others like R. Taggart Murphy and Pat Choate as the leaders of a new movement that argued that Japan was organizing its political economy in different ways than the U.S. This was a huge deal in its day -- and these writers and thinkers led by the implacable Johnson were attacked from all corners of American academia and among the crowd of American Japan-hands who wanted to deflect rather than focus a spotlight on the fact that Japan's economic mandarins were really the national security elite of the Pacific powerhouse nation.

In the 1980s when Johnson was arguing that Japan's state directed capitalism was succeeding at not only propelling Japan's wealth upwards but was creating "power" for Japan in the eyes of the rest of the world, Kissinger and the geostrategic crowd could not see beyond the global currency and power realities of nuclear warheads and throw-weight. The revisionists were responsible for injecting the economic dynamics of power and national interest in the equation of a nation's global status.

To understand China's rise today, the fact that China has become the Google of nations and America the General Motors of countries -- the US being seen by others as a very well branded, large, underperforming country -- one must go back to Chalmers Johnson's work on the developmental state.

Scratch beneath these Johnson breakthroughs though and go back another decade and a half and one finds that Chalmers Johnson, a one time hard-right national security hawk, deconstructed the Chinese Communist revolution and showed that the dynamic that drive the revolutionary furor had less to do with class warfare and the appeal of communism but rather high octane "nationalism." Johnson saw earlier than most that the same dynamic was true in Vietnam. His work which was published as Peasant Nationalism and Communist Power while a UC Berkeley doctoral student launched him as a formidable force in Asia-focused intellectual circles in the U.S.

Johnson's ability to launch an instant, debilitating broadside against the intellectual vacuousness of friends or foes made him controversial. He chafed under the UC Berkeley Asia Program leadership of Robert Scalapino whom Johnson viewed as one of the primary dynastic chiefs of what became known as the "Chrysanthemum Club", those whose Japan-hugging meant overlooking and/or ignoring the characteristics of Japan's state-led form of capitalism. Johnson was provocatively challenged graduate students in the field to choose sides -- to work either on the side where they acquiesced to a corrupt culture of US-Japan apologists who wanted the quaint big brother-little brother frame for the relationship to remain the dominant portal through which Japan was viewed or alternatively on the side of those who saw Japan and America's forfeiture of its own economic interests as empirical facts.

When Robert Scalapino refused to budge despite Johnson's agitation, Johnson who then headed UC Berkeley's important China Studies program abandoned the university and became the star intellectual of UC San Diego's School of International Relations and Pacific Studies. There is no doubt that Johnson but UCSD's IRPS on the map and gave it an instant, global boost.

But as usual, Johnson -- incorruptible and passionate about policy, theory, and their practice -- eventually went to war with the bureaucrats running that institution. Those who had come in to head it were devotees of "rational choice theory" -- which was spreading through the fields of political science and other social sciences as the so-called softer sciences were trying to absorb and apply the harder-edged econometrics-driven models of behavior that the neoliberal trends in economics were using.

Johnson and one of his proteges, E.B. "Barry" Keehn, wrote a powerful indictment of rational choice theory that helped trigger a long-running and still important intellectual divide that showed that rational choice theory was one of the great ideological delusions of the era. I too joined this battle and wrote extensively about the limits of rational choice theory which I myself saw dislodging university language programs, cultural studies, and more importantly -- the institutional/structural approaches to understanding other political systems.

Johnson once told me when I was visiting him and his long-term, constant intellectual partner and wife, Sheila Johnson, that the UCSD School of International Relations and Pacific Studies no longer either really taught international relations or pacific studies -- and that a student's entire first year was focused on acultural skill set development in economics and statistics. To Johnson, this tendency to elevate econometric formulas over the actual study of a nation's language, history, culture and political system was part of America's growing cultural imperialism. Studying "them" is really about "us" -- as "they" will converge to be like "us" or will fall to the way side and be insignificant.

It was that night that Chalmers Johnson, Sheila Johnson and I agreed to form an idea on had been developing called the Japan Policy Research Institute. Chalmers became President and I the Director. We maintained this working relationship at the helm of JPRI together for more than 12 years and spoke nearly every week if not every other day as we tried to acquire and publish the leading thinking on Japan, US-Japan relations and Asia more broadly. We became conveners, published works on Asia that the official journals of record of US-Asia policy viewed as too risky, and emerged as key players in the media on all matters of America's economic, political, and military engagement in the Pacific. Today, JPRI is headed by Chiho Sawada and is based at the University of San Francisco.

However, this base of JPRI gave Chalmers Johnson the launch pad that led to the largest contribution of his career to America's national discourse. From his granular understanding of political economy of competing nations, his understanding of the national security infrastructure of both sides of the Cold War, he saw better than most that the US had organized its global assets -- particularly its vassals Japan and Germany -- in a manner similar to the Soviet Union. Both sides looked like the other. Both were empires. The Soviets collapsed, Chalmers told me and wrote. The U.S. did not -- yet.

The rape of a 12 year-old girl by three American servicemen in Okinawa, Japan in September 1995 and the statement by a US military commander that they should have just picked up a prostitute became the pivot moving Johnson who had once been a supporter of the Vietnam War and railed against UC Berkeley's anti-Vietnam protesters into a powerful critic of US foreign policy and US empire.

Johnson argued that there was no logic that existed any longer for the US to maintain a global network of bases and to continue the occupation of other countries like Japan. Johnson noted that there were over 39 US military installations on Okinawa alone. The military industrial complex that Eisenhower had warned against had become a fixed reality in Johnson's mind and essays after the Cold War ended.

In four powerful books, all written not in the corridors of power in New York or Washington -- but in his small home office at Cardiff-by-the-Sea in California, Johnson became one of the most successful chroniclers and critics of America's foreign policy designs around the world.

Before 9/11, Johnson wrote the book Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire. After the terrorist attacks in 2001 in New York and Washington, Blowback became the hottest book in the market. The publishers could not keep up with demand and it became the most difficult to get, most wanted book among those in national security topics.

He then wrote Sorrows of Empire: Militarism, Secrecy and the End of the Republic, Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic, and most recently Dismantling the Empire: America's Last Best Hope. Johnson, who used to be a net assessments adviser to the CIA's Allen Dulles, had become such a critic of Washington and the national security establishment that this hard-right conservative had become adopted as one of the political left's greatest icons.

Johnson measured himself to some degree against the likes of Noam Chomsky and Gore Vidal -- but in my mind, Johnson was the more serious, the most empirical, the most informed about the nooks and crannies of every political position as he had journeyed the length of the spectrum.

Chalmers Johnson served on my board when I worked at the Japan America Society of Southern California. He and I, along with Sheila Johnson -- along with Tom Engelhardt one of the world's great editors -- created the Japan Policy Research Institute. Johnson served on the Advisory Board of the Nixon Center when I served as the Center's founding executive director. We had a long, constructive, feisty relationship. He helped propel my career and thinking. In recent years, we were more distant -- mostly because I was not ready, as he was, to completely disown Washington.

Many of Johnson's followers and Chal himself think that American democracy is lost, that the republic has been destroyed by an embrace of empire and that the American public is unaware and unconscious of the fix. He may be right -- but I took a course trying to use blogs, new media, and a DC based think tank called the New America Foundation to challenge conventional foreign policy trends in other ways. Ultimately, I think Chalmers was content with what I was doing but probably knew that in the end, I'd catch up with him in his profound frustration with what America was doing in the world.

Chalmers and Sheila Johnson saw me lead the battle against John Bolton's confirmation vote in the Senate as US Ambassador to the United Nations -- but given the scale of his ambitions to dislodge America's embrace of empire, Bolton was too small a target in his eyes. He was probably right.

Saying Chalmers Johnson is dead sounds like a lie. I can't fathom him being gone -- and with all of the amazing times I've had with him as well as the bouts of political debate and even yelling as we were pounding out JPRI materials on deadline, I just can't imagine that this blustery, irreverent, completely brilliant force won't be there to challenge Washington and academia.

Few intellectuals attain what might have been called many centuries ago the rank of "wizard" -- an almost other worldly force who defied society's and life's rules and commanded an enormous following of acolytes and enemies.

Wizards don't die -- and I hope that those who read this, who knew him, or go on reading his works in the decades ahead provoke, inspire, jab, rebuke, applaud, and condemn in the way he did.

In one of my fondest memories of Chalmers and Sheila Johnson at their home with their then Russian blue cats, MITI and MOF, named after the two engines of Japan's political economy -- Chal railed against the journal, Foreign Affairs, which he saw as a clap trap of statist conventionalism. He decided he had had enough of the journal and of the organization that published it, the Council on Foreign Relations. So, Chalmers called the CFR and told the young lady on the phone to cancel his membership.

The lady said, "Professor Johnson, I'm sorry sir. No one cancels their membership in the Council in Foreign Relations. Membership is for life. People are canceled when they die."

Chalmers Johnson, not missing a beat, said "Consider me dead."

I never will. He is and was the intellectual giant of our times. Chalmers Johnson centuries from now will be seen, I think, as the intellectual titan of this past era, surpassing Kissinger in the breadth of seminal works that define what America was and could have been.

My sincere condolences to Sheila, to others in his extended family -- particularly among all of his students and colleagues who were part of the Johnson dynasty -- and to his friends in San Diego who were a vital part of the texture of the Johnson household.

-- Steve Clemons

This is a guest note by Leo Hindery, Jr. Hindery is Chairman of the US Economy/Smart Globalization Initiative at the New America Foundation and a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. Currently an investor in media companies, he is the former CEO of Tele-Communications, Inc. (TCI), Liberty Media and their successor AT&T; Broadband. He also serves on the Board of the Huffington Post Investigative Fund.

"Guilty of political malpractice in the first degree." That's what Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-NY) said the other day about President Obama allowing himself to be negotiated in early 2009 into an economic stimulus package that was "far too small."

The proof of this conclusion is found all over the November 2, 2010 election results. Of the 41% of voters who say their financial situation is worse, Democrats won just 35% of them and the GOP won 65%. Just two years ago, Democrats won this group 75% to 25%.

I will always believe that the administration's decision to turn over the economy to an economic team led Larry Summers and Tim Geithner preordained the 2010 election debacle more than any other action. When Karl Rove indicts, as he did just before the election, President Obama's "incoherent closing argument" for completely missing the fact that "the economy and jobs [were] the No. 1 issue in every poll" and then lauds the Republicans for "drawing attention to lackluster job growth and the failed stimulus", you just want to cry.

As Michael Hirsh wrote in Newsweek, President Obama arrived in office perceived by many as the second coming of Franklin D. Roosevelt. Yet rather than acting like FDR, he "presented himself as completely unprepared to address the broken economy and financial system and faithfully channeled Summers and Geithner and their conservative approach to stimulus and reform", while putting health care reform above all else.

To this point, just a week ago, on November 8, President Obama very mistakenly said that he and his administration "didn't do what Franklin Delano Roosevelt did, which was basically wait for six months until the thing had gotten so bad that it became an easier sell politically." The truth is that FDR took office on Saturday, March 4, 1933, called Congress into special session to meet five days later on March 9th, and by June 15th, at the end of the "Hundred Days", had seen almost all of the early New Deal financial legislation passed.

The Obama economic team, all of whom were once acolytes of Clinton Treasury Secretary Bob Rubin, who was the champion behind much of the financial deregulation and the unfair free trading which have brought our economy to its knees, gave the President a too-small and misdirected stimulus package, with way too much going toward transfer payments and way too little to job-producing public works and infrastructure. Larry Summers said that unemployment would peak at 8 percent in 2009, and then at the team's urging, the President claimed the package as the greatest early-term achievement ever by a first-term President, which immediately turned Bush's Great Recession irretrievably into Obama's.

As James Galbraith has written, "the original sin of Obama's presidency was to assign economic policy to a closed circle of bank-friendly economists and Bush carryovers...who had no personal commitment to the goal of an early recovery, no stake in the Democratic Party, no interest in the larger success of Barack Obama."

So when voters saw unemployment rise a lot further - there are now 5.2 million more real unemployed Americans than in December 2008 - there was no one left for the electorate to blame but Democrats.

Then the team, in this case led by Tim Geithner, let Wall Street off the hook by resisting and arguing against virtually every tough amendment to the proposed financial reform legislation. Behind his back and sometimes to his face, Geithner sabotaged the recommendations of Paul Volcker, especially his idea of barring commercial banks from indulging in heavy risk taking and proprietary trading. By letting his team win against Volcker and the likes of Rob Johnson and the Roosevelt Institute, President Obama lost his capacity to harness the justified anger of voters and gain the support of the disaffected.

In a blog I wrote back in March, I drew contrasts among: (1) President Roosevelt's abiding commitment to workers, economic justice and a vibrant middle class that grows from the bottom up; (2) Candidate Obama's amazing speech on July 2, 2008, to the United Steelworkers in which he said that, "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"; and (3) President Obama's seeming inattention until just this past Labor Day to actually fixing real unemployment and improving workers' rights.

And by committing his administration to a too-small stimulus package early last year, now that John Boehner is soon to be the Speaker of the House, President Obama may have foreclosed achieving the only major remedy left to the nation to bring unemployment down and economic growth up, which is more and better-directed economic stimulus. By effectively conceding the argument over the role of government in a deeply depressed economy, the Obama economic team essentially left for now only the Fed and its imprecise quantitative easing to jumpstart the economy.

The Obama economic team also fell prey to the President's and his most senior advisors' belief that, in their own words, Mr. Obama won the 2008 election "because of character, not issues." In fact, nothing could be further from the truth.

The administration's almost complete failure to connect with voters on the jobs front - despite unflinching efforts on jobs creation by Nancy Pelosi in the House and by Sherrod Brown (D-OH), Debbie Stabenow (D-MI) and their comrades in the Senate - is just one example of voters' disillusionment. The 2008 election was very much about "issues", and everyone who voted in it had a strong sense of how Mr. Obama would govern and with what priorities, because his campaign promises were so precise. The story is often told of the man found weeping when Franklin Roosevelt's funeral train went past, who when asked if he had known the President, replied, "I didn't know him, but he knew me." And frankly, we all thought Mr. Obama knew us.

Chris Lehane, an esteemed veteran of the Clinton White House, says that Barack Obama ran such an "aspirational campaign" that "if you were a centrist, or if you were a progressive, you projected that he was the kind of president you wanted."

So, if your focus was health care reform, you envisioned the very precise reform that the Obama Campaign advanced, not the bill that was eventually passed. If you are gay or lesbian, you thought you had a President committed to all of your civil rights, including your right to help defend our country - instead, regarding the latter, the President called for a study of what he said he already fully understood, a study that is not even due until this coming December 1 when all the impetus in the House has shifted to the Republicans and the progressive majority in the Senate has been emasculated. And if one's desire was to see workers have the unfettered opportunity to join unions and have their benefits and rights protected, well forget that too.

We hear from sources within the White House that the President and his closest advisors have concluded that the "electoral thrashing" we all just saw had more to do with larger economic forces and strategic decisions about health care and economic stimulus than with the particular operations of the White House. In their very own words, "it wasn't that the White House did things wrong, but that it did the wrong things."

How can the administration say on the one hand that it "did the wrong things" and then on the other hand exonerate itself by saying that "it wasn't that the White House did things wrong?"

President Obama did attempt to advance some job-creation initiatives - albeit not nearly large enough or the ones I would have recommended as his first actions - and he was obstructed at every turn by Republicans, even his initiatives based on policies supported by the GOP in the past. But when the President got push back, he seemed to give up, without following the example of FDR who engaged the American people by telling them that "your government has unmistakable confidence in your ability to hear the worst without flinching and losing heart."

A staggering 55 million voters who voted for Members of Congress in November 2008 didn't vote for any Member in November 2010, and the critically important independent voters chose Republicans this year by a staggering 18-point margin. As I contend was also the case in 2008, the November 2010 election was again mostly about jobs and the economy - there is simply no hiding the dismal real unemployment figures, which show an unemployment rate of 18.7% (not the 'official" figure of 9.6%), 29.9 million unemployed workers (not the 'official' 14.8 million figure), and a "jobs gap" of 21.9 million in order to be at full employment in real terms.

And now, because of this disaffection, come January, for only the second time in eight decades and for the first time in more than six, the House will have fewer than two hundred Democrats in it. And sadly - and ironically - the American people, who are unconvinced by vague promises of "green jobs" and even vaguer studies showing that offshoring creates two jobs in America for every one lost overseas, just rewarded the Republicans who not only opposed the stimulus but also blocked even the extension of unemployment benefits.

Yet even now, no one in the White House seems to have an economic plan or growth agenda to create these needed jobs. Nor does anyone seem able to explain and justify the President's stimulus, health care, and financial regulation initiatives in ways that relate to workers or that eliminate the uncertainties which have been keeping American businesses 'sitting on their [investment] wallets'.

You really do have to wonder what happened to the laser focus on the economy that Candidate Obama promised would be the hallmark of his administration. Instead, all we've really seen is a promise to double gross exports over the next five years, which would add a meager 2.5 million jobs (the administration's own figure) when we need to find 22 million today and which ignores the fact that the only exports figure that really matters is net exports (namely, our balance of trade). This exports agenda of the President's, which he described on November 5 on the eve of his post-election trip to India and elsewhere as "how we'll create jobs, prosperity and an economy that's built on a stronger foundation", is so short of what's really needed to create millions of American jobs that I want to cry again.

The point - and the ongoing problem - is the sharp contrast between FDR's actions and Candidate-cum-President Obama's promises and actions. President Obama needs to feel in his core what the two Roosevelts felt, and remember how to talk with angry working-class people. He needs to pursue jobs creation with the same priority, focus and determination that characterized his health care reform efforts. And then he needs to propose concrete initiatives to create jobs and rebalance incomes, whether the Republicans agree or disagree.

When he does these three things, his own promises will have turned into actions and the nation will again believe that he and his administration deeply care about and are working diligently to alleviate the plight of America's workers and the middle class.

-- Leo Hindery

I have been chatting up Pete Dominick on his Sirius/XM program Stand up with Pete Dominick for a long time, but I never had any idea what the guy looked like. Same with Rachel Maddow for years until we finally met at the Democratic National Convention. But like Rachel, Pete's sorta worth getting a camera on. CNN has figured this out.

Well, today at about 5:30 pm EST, I'll be chatting with Pete about the showdown brewing on the START Treaty.

So, I'm renaming his show "START Up with Pete Dominick" at least for today.

For those following START, here are some of my views on the stakes of the debate for the Obama administration that appeared today in the Financial Times. Here too is a blog post telling incoming Senators to leave the prerogatives of incumbent Senators alone. Also a great slam by Republican Senate Foreign Relations Committee icon Richard Lugar against many in his own party -- who he implies will be responsible for enormous degradation of US security if they succeed in blocking START.

-- Steve Clemons

A handful of newly elected Republican US Senators have written to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid trying to undo the Constitutional authority of other elected incumbent US Senators.

That's right. Even the so-called strict constitutionalist Rand Paul is engaged in lobbying that would impose illegal burdens on incumbent elected representatives violating the word and spirit of the United States Constitution.

According to the 20th Amendment to the US Constitution, the respective terms of US Senators and US Representatives ends at noon on January 3rd.

AMENDMENT XX

Passed by Congress March 2, 1932. Ratified January 23, 1933.

Note: Article I, section 4, of the Constitution was modified by section 2 of this amendment. In addition, a portion of the 12th amendment was superseded by section 3.

Section 1.
The terms of the President and the Vice President shall end at noon on the 20th day of January, and the terms of Senators and Representatives at noon on the 3d day of January, of the years in which such terms would have ended if this article had not been ratified; and the terms of their successors shall then begin.

Section 2.
The Congress shall assemble at least once in every year, and such meeting shall begin at noon on the 3d day of January, unless they shall by law appoint a different day.

Senators "elect" Roy Blunt (R-MO), Ron Johnson (R-WI), Rob Portman (R-OH), Rand Paul (R-KY) and Marco Rubio (R-FL)** have written to Senator Reid stating, as reported by Joshua Rogin:

On Election Day we were elected to represent the constituents of our respective states in the Senate. Out of respect for our states' voters, we believe it would be improper for the Senate to consider the New START Treaty or any other treaty in a lame duck session prior to January 3, 2011.

Too bad guys!

You are not yet elected and the incumbent Senators seating in seats they "won" previously have ALL the powers embedded in their positions until 12 noon, January 3rd.

Your efforts to impose your will beforehand are extralegal, irresponsible, and unconstitutional.

Rand Paul -- you owe many of your supporters a note of regret for having agreed to sign on to this letter giving your strict Constitutionalist views.

Rob Portman -- an old friend, and someone I respect for his sensible Republican pragmatism -- you too should know better than try to disrupt the operations of our government before your time has clicked in. De-sign this letter please.

Roy Blunt -- this was clever, but you know it was wrong. Dial down please.

Ron Johnson and Marco Rubio** -- don't follow the leader so quickly.

This is an inappropriate request of Reid, and the US Senate should move post haste to whatever issues its elected body agrees to move to -- including the START Treaty.

-- Steve Clemons

** Editor's Note: The original piece by Joshua Rogin included the name Senator Mark Kirk as one of the signers of the letter and did not include Marco Rubio. I do not know if Mark Kirk removed his name or never agreed to sign -- but good for him in either case. I have added Senator Marco Rubio to the list.

Senate Foreign Relations Committee Ranking Member Richard Lugar is on fire -- telling his colleagues that the failure to ratify START will be enormously consequential to the 'real' national security interests of the United States.

This is an enormously important, inspired, passionate demand to pass START -- and I am in total agreement with Senator Lugar.

-- Steve Clemons

Some of the fellows and the author at Frida Kahlo's Blue House in Mexico City.

This is a guest post by Andres Martinez, who directs the Bernard L. Schwartz Fellows Program at the New America Foundation.

A group of New America Foundation Bernard L. Schwartz Fellows seized upon an opportunity recently to visit one of our nation's most overlooked strategic partners - Mexico, the one next door (I know, I know, Canada, you feel the same way--maybe next year). We were invited to an impressive TED-like conference in Puebla called "Ciudad de las Ideas" put on by Grupo Salinas featuring the likes of Malcolm Gladwell, Richard Dawkins, Chris Anderson and Jarred Diamond, but were also able to tack on a couple of whirlwind days in Mexico City to meet with leading senators from the three major parties, business leaders, prominent media, the deputy chief of mission of the U.S. Embassy in Mexico City, and President Felipe Calderon's national security adviser.

This is a guest post by Mark Leon Goldberg, a correspondent for UN Dispatch, who is attending the NATO Summit. This post was written for UN Dispatch and The Washington Note. Among many previous avocations, Goldberg used to work with Steve Clemons at the New America Foundation.

As I write this I am en route to Lisbon, Portugal, courtesy of the Atlantic Council for which I am attending the NATO summit as part of their Young Atlanticist Network.

The Lisbon summit is shaping up to be one of the most important NATO meetings in many years. For one, NATO is at a turning point in Afghanistan. There are some 100,000 American troops and 50,000 troops from NATO countries on the ground. In Lisbon this week, President Obama is set to unveil a new Afghan strategy that pushes away from the July 2011 drawdown date to a plan that foresees American troops in Afghanistan until at least 2014. It remains unclear, however, how structured the July 2011 to 2014 draw down will be, what forces will remain, for how long and for what purpose? In the meantime, a number of NATO members are growing weary of this decade long war. Canada and The Netherlands, for example, are set to withdraw combat troops next year.

Beyond Afghanistan, the NATO summit is an opportunity for NATO to engage in a moment of self-reflection about its goals and purpose. NATO has not updated its strategic guidance in over a decade, and for the past year a group of experts led by Madeline Albright has worked on a new strategic guidance for "NATO in 2020" and beyond. Most press reports suggest that the draft guidance will strongly resemble the final version to which NATO heads of state will agree this week. That would mean a new focus on non-conventional threats like cyber warfare; a ballistic missile defense system to deter a potential attack from Iran; and a new focus on looking beyond the North Atlantic to forge new strategic partnerships with emerging powers.

Throughout the week, I will be given fairly intimate access to newsmakers who will be participating in a meetings arranged by the Atlantic Council. This includes people you know well - though I am not sure that the schedule is public yet so I will have to keep it a tease for now. I'll be posting regular updates throughout the week, and hope to parlay my access into a number of scooplets.

In the meantime, I owe it to readers to lay out some of my own biases going into this meeting. I'm strongly skeptical of both the current United States-led counter-insurgency strategy in Afghanistan and of the underlying assumption that deploying large numbers of troops in Afghanistan is necessary for securing the American mainland. On top of that, I am becoming increasingly unconvinced that the extraordinary financial costs of maintaining this posture--$100 billion last year alone - are a worthy investment for American national security.

That said, anyone who follows my writing knows that I have a deep and abiding fidelity to human rights and morality in international relations. We - the United States, NATO, and the world--have an obligation to the Afghan people. We cannot let the Taliban return. We must protect gains in human rights and women's rights that have been made over the past ten years. We have to invest in the long term economic development in Afghanistan and support international efforts to build Afghanistan's governing institutions.

And finally, we must maintain this commitment long after Afghanistan fades from the headlines. Unfortunately, the United States has a poor track record on that account. It is worth noting that the same month that the United States announced that combat operations in Iraq were over, a $367 million United Nations appeal for Iraqi refugees and internally displaced was only 18% funded, with the United States contributing about $17 million. We have to do better than this. We owe it to the Afghan people.

That said, I am entering this meeting with an open mind. I hope to have my biases challenged by both my fellow Young Atlanticists and by the many dignitaries, soldiers and diplomats with whom we will interact throughout the week.

This brings me to my last point. Because of the access I've been given by the Atlantic Council, I will have the opportunity to put questions to some top officials in NATO and NATO member countries. Please send me a note on twitter @undispatch or via email--undispatch-at-gmail-com if you have any burning questions or provocations that you would like to see raised during the summit.

In the meantime, you should check out the Young Atlanticist blog and Facebook page for regular updates.

-- Mark Leon Goldberg

Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-TX) needs to read up on some things -- like learn some facts and stuff. . .and use those facts to stop illegals from taking land that is not theirs. You know those Israelis are taking land that is not theirs from Palestinians who are stealing land too, just like those nasty Mexican drug thugsters. And we need the entire country to intervene, like the Chilean government did with those miners, because a Mexican drug investigator was killed at Falcon Lake and beheaded and Fox News totally agrees with me, but I say we should cheer on those people stopping Palestinian land grabbers. . .and by the way, those gay soldiers just can't stop their raging homosexual hormones. I know it. They can't. Done deal.

For more absurdity from Congressman Gohmert, here is the Fox News clip connecting Chile's miner rescue to law and order problems in his district (from Gohmert's own home page) -- and here is the most absurd statement on Palestinian-Israeli territory disputes ever uttered on the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives:

GOHMERT: The only good news I see out of that is that for so long, I've been greatly concerned with the hypocrisy of this administration telling Israel, "Just let Palestinians build illegal settlements and take over areas that are not theirs. Just let 'em take over." And I thought, "How hypocritical for our U.S. administration to tell Israel, 'just let people take over areas of your country they're not authorized to takeover,' cause we would never allow that here in the U.S." Which brings me to the only good thing about violent illegal alien drug smugglers taking over American soil: At least we're not hypocritical anymore when we tell Israel just to let people take over land that's not theirs. Because now this administration can say, "Look, Israel, we're doing it here. We're letting people take over American soil that they shouldn't. So you can do it, too."

And on those raging uncontrollable homosexual hormones that we can't let on the battlefield, have some fun.

It would be lovely to hear Fox News chat with Representative Gohmert in a serious way about any technical issue within his portfolio as a Member of the House Judiciary Committee.

From Gohmert's website, the role and function of this committee is defined well:

The Committee on the Judiciary has been called the lawyer for the House of Representatives because of its jurisdiction over matters relating to the administration of justice in Federal courts, administrative bodies, and law enforcement agencies. The Committee has oversight responsibility for the Department of Justice and Homeland Security, civil and criminal judicial proceedings and Federal courts and judges, issues relating to bankruptcy, espionage, terrorism, the protection of civil liberties, constitutional amendments, immigration and naturalization, interstate compacts, claims against the United States, national penitentiaries, Presidential succession, antitrust law, revision and codification of the statutes of the United States, state and territorial boundary lines and patents, copyrights and trademarks.

Given his backwards statements on Palestinian land issues and gays in the military, one wonders how much of the above he may get backwards as well.

-- Steve Clemons

This is a pretty amazing, articulate, important plea by a young student to a local school board defending his teacher Jay McDowell, disciplined for actions he took to prevent anti-gay bullying at Howell High School in Howell, Michigan.

The "content of character" of this young man is off the charts. Let's hope that the Howell School Board has the same degree of character that this young man showed and which is unfortunately so rare.

-- Steve Clemons

Just back from Abu Dhabi where I met all sorts of interesting folks, discussing national security and foreign policy issues amidst the backdrop of the 2010 Abu Dhabi Grand Prix.

I will be sharing tomorrow -- but wanted to note that I was back in Washington -- and have had an incredible set of experiences there. Much to reflect on.

-- Steve Clemons

National Public Radio's Ari Shapiro did a great piece this morning taking a look at the traditional and new in President Obama's foreign policy attentions.

With the NATO Summit coming up very quickly, Shapiro asked what the links were between President Obama's trip to major ascending economies like India an Indonesia and the convening of NATO's stakeholders.

I think it's an important question because we are increasingly seeing the inadequacy of old arrangements and power structures when applied to new emerging problems. In my view, the NATO commitments 5000 kilometers out of theater to Afghanistan are part of this trend.

I shared this and other thoughts in the segment which you can listen to above or read here.

-- Steve Clemons

Hillary Clinton just met with Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and here is the pro forma "read out" of the meeting which the State Department distributed:

Prime Minister Netanyahu and Secretary Clinton had a good discussion today, with a friendly and productive exchange of views on both sides. Secretary Clinton reiterated the United States' unshakable commitment to Israel's security and to peace in the region.

The Prime Minister and the Secretary agreed on the importance of continuing direct negotiations to achieve our goals. The Secretary reiterated that "the United States believes that through good-faith negotiations, the parties can mutually agree on an outcome which ends the conflict and reconciles the Palestinian goal of an independent and viable state, based on the 1967 lines, with agreed swaps, and the Israeli goal of a Jewish state with secure and recognized borders that reflect subsequent developments and meet Israeli security requirements." Those requirements will be fully taken into account in any future peace agreement.

The discussions between the Prime Minister and the Secretary focused on creating the conditions for the resumption of direct negotiations aimed at producing a two-state solution. Their teams will work closely together in the coming days toward that end.

This kind of statement that appears to say that the US and Israel agreed on some principles about direct negotiations leading to a two state outcome really says almost nothing.

Nonetheless, Israel-Palestine "is" a defining challenge for the Obama administration.

I'm in Abu Dhabi now and have had a number of conversations in less than a day here in which UAE government officials have emphasized that the fastest and most efficacious way to constructively confront Iran's growing power in the region is for the US to pull off a real breakthrough in the Israel/Palestine two state standoff.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is giving this peace process some of her considerable muscle -- but to be blunt, she has done nothing yet that reflects a change in strategy, personnel, inclusion of negotiating participants, or anything from what was underway before her involvement and earlier failures.

General Anthony Zinni once told me that the real weakness of the State Department is that it rarely gamed out scenarios and didn't do what the Department of Defense did in considering a lot of different strategies that consider various key inputs in a war game simulation. Zinni may be on to something.

DoD scenarios allow virtually every kind of option to be considered. A DoD style scenario exercise would consider various strategies to either put Hamas on a track that would lead to inclusive negotiations or would consider through a cost/benefit calculation how to make the isolation of Hamas less beneficial to their obvious growing power and legitimacy. A DoD scenario would consider the economic, strategic and political factors in trying to either undermine Netanyahu and his government, move closer to it, or provide a mixed approach.

Hillary Clinton would be smart to assemble a group of people with whom she does not agree on Israel/Palestine and engage in some real simulation discussions of alternative tracks to get Israel and Palestine to "yes" on a two-state arrangement. The room should include the folks who have been part of the infrastructure of the past but should also include those who have strong disagreements with the current policy -- and various scenarios should be played out with the Secretary listening and learning.

My sense is that this has not yet happened and needs to. When I heard recently that Andrew Shapiro's policy guidance to Hillary Clinton on Israel/Palestine matters had not changed from what he gave her in the US Senate to what he feeds her today at the State Department, it became clear to me that the cocoon Secretary Clinton is on Israel/Palestine issues needs some new inputs.

-- Steve Clemons

The publicists of George W. Bush's memoir, Decision Points, have not put me on their distro list so I don't yet have the book. I may wait until it gets really cheap on Amazon's used bookseller list, but in the mean time, i leafed through a copy that someone on my Abu Dhabi bound plane had.

I saw this passage that just seemed to be part of Bush's typical reckless swagger:

In 2000, our October Surprise had come in the form of the DUI revelation. In 2004, it came from Osama bin Laden. On October 29, the al Qaeda leader released a videotape threatening Americans with "another Manhattan" and mocking my response to 9/11 in the Florida classroom. It sounded like he was plagiarizing Michael Moore. "Americans will not be intimidated or influenced by an enemy of our country," I said. John Kerry made a similar statement of resolve.

W's easy slide into comparing policy activist Michael Moore to Osama bin Laden is really gross and demonstrates how little George W. Bush ultimately respected the rights of American citizens to question their leaders and yes, to doubt their own government and its course in the aftermath of 9/11. Bush and Vice President Cheney did more to undermine the system of checks and balances in the US government than any other leadership team in modern American history.

I think that the work Michael Moore does is vital and helps the nation see beyond what a homogenized political and media culture feed it.

George W. Bush wasn't all bad, and I really do need to read and review the book, but he was bad in too many ways. This Michael Moore/Osama bin Laden slime helps to remind of much that Bush got wrong.

I learned that Michael Moore will be on Larry King Live and Real Time with Bill Maher tomorrow and will be interesting to know if this comes up.

-- Steve Clemons

This was sent in by a TWN reader in Japan. It just kind of sticks with you. This dog is not my kind of dog -- and I'm really not into the whole samurai scene.

That said, I think that this pup could have his own TV show some day.

-- Steve Clemons

(April 1, 2008 - Photo by Mark Wilson/Getty Images North America)

Over the years, this blog has expressed admiration for some of the principled issues that John McCain stood by when his Republican Party was off course. He was gay friendly then and had lots of gay staffers in his campaign. He was backing serious efforts in campaign finance and broad election reform. He was the epitome of a "radical centrist" when he was the straight-talk express John McCain.

If John McCain had beaten George Bush in the 2000 primary, I would have strongly supported his campaign.

But something has happened. He has become more mean, more rigid, an angry Senator who seems bent on destroying his own considerable legacy by doubling down against the normalization of gay rights in the country.

I don't understand why he is doing this. I've known and respected him for years and have always felt that whether it came to national security policy with regard to North Korea, or leading on normalization of relations with Vietnam, or believing that we needed to fundamentally change the dynamics of the corporate takeover of the nation's election machinery, McCain has been a great leader. I haven't supported his views on Iran, think he oversells "the surge" in Iraq - but reasonable people can debate these important matters in a civil and respectful way as I have tried to do with the Senator on many fronts for years.

Some of his closest, long term advisers and friends are well respected gay lawyers and politicos. He knows that the military is packed with honorable gay men and lesbian women serving their country. I've personally heard him express appreciation for their service.

But now he's the lead opponent in the US Senate of efforts to end Don't Ask Don't Tell -- and McCain who is probably in his last term in the US Senate is going to scar his legacy badly by making himself into one of those Senators who voted against the Civil Rights act or who supported racial segregation and upheld an infrastructure of bigoted law in America's past.

I want the straight-talking John McCain back -- a McCain that is going to be relevant to our nation's future, not one that we have to always express shame about as we look back at his legacy because he was the person who 'delayed' the normalization of gay rights in this country and in the US military. Strom Thurmond eventually remade himself and found ways to demonstrate that he had dropped his once raging bigotry, but John McCain at the current point of his career is possibly going to end on a very dark note.

As the intrepid John Aravosis has pointed out today, John McCain's wife will not join him in his anti-gay crusade.

Aravosis writes:

John McCain is leading the filibuster against the "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" "repeal" legislation in the Senate (it's not an actual repeal, but we'll leave that for another time). Today, Cindy McCain joined a number of celebrities in a video about gay youth suicide and bullying.

Mrs. McCain's part of the video condemned DADT and then accused our government of sending bullies a message that what they do is okay.

The woman basically accused her husband of sharing the blame for gay kids killing themselves.

I'm astonished. And impressed as hell.

CINDY MCCAIN:

Our political and religious leaders tell LGBT youth that they have no future.

They can't serve our country openly.

VARIETY OF SPEAKERS:

What's worse, these laws that legislate discrimination teach bullies that what they're doing is acceptable.

CINDY MCCAIN:

Our government treats the LGBT community like second class citizens, why shouldn't they?

I want to express thanks to Cindy McCain for this brave and much appreciated message to bulliers everywhere and for her support of the gay men and women serving this nation and risking their lives in military engagements thousands of miles from home.

I can't imagine to know or understand the contours of their marriage. That is their private affair.

But I can't help wondering whether Cindy McCain misses her straight-talking, do-the-right-thing husband as much as I do.

-- Steve Clemons

China ,Germany, Japan, Saudi Arabia, and Russia have been placed on a new Watch List for countries that have excessively large current account surpluses and for not taking adequate corrective measures. Check out the full list.

Ahead of the G-20, President Obama rightly stated that all countries, surplus as well as deficit economies, have a responsibility to help rebalance the global economy. For too long, current account deficit economies have borne the major burden of adjustment to the detriment of world economic growth.

In recognition of the negative impact chronic surplus economies have on global demand, the Economic Growth Program at the New America Foundation has launched the Current Account Surplus Watch. The Surplus Watch is the first comprehensive measure of economies with large current account surpluses that also takes into account the policies economies take to stimulate demand or otherwise offset their surpluses.

Unlike the simple numeric current account targets that U.S. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner has proposed, the Surplus Watch takes into consideration the policies countries pursue to increase domestic and international demand through fiscal expansion, exchange rate appreciation, and international development assistance. The Surplus Watch also divides surplus economies into two lists, Manufacturing Economies, which mainly export manufactured goods and Resource Economies, which mainly export energy commodities.

In many economies, surpluses remain elevated and are projected to rise more in the years ahead, threatening a sustainable world economic recovery. Leaders must pay attention to their rise and also the measures they can take to address these surpluses.

-- Sam Sherraden