Representative Jane Harman (D-CA) is resigning her House seat in favor of succeeding Democratic foreign policy icon Lee Hamilton as the next president of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars.

For Harman personally, this may be great news.

The job running the Wilson Center is one of the premier foreign policy/national security spots in Washington, and I think Jane Harman has a balanced understanding of the realist and idealist forces swirling around many of the key problems facing the US and the international system today.

But I am a bit disheartened on other fronts by her likely departure from Congress.

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Third Way, the Wall Street oriented think tank, is apparently feeling newly emboldened now that one of its board members, Bill Daley, is President Obama' chief of staff. Last week it sent out an "infographic" that purported to show why Social Security needed to be fixed.

The punchline was its warning of a $44 trillion shortfall in Social Security over its 75-year planning horizon. Referring to "trillions" of dollars over some long future horizon is a good way to scare people, but not to have serious conversations on the budget or Social Security. It would be much more meaningful to people to describe the projected shortfall as a share of future income. This number, 0.6 percent, can be easily found in the Social Security trustees report. Of course that is not quite as scary.

In honor of Third Way's Wall Street ties, CEPR compared the projected Social Security shortfall to the $66 trillion that could be raised over the next 75 years through a financial speculation tax. That also makes the Social Security shortfall seem considerably less scary.

"The dramatic events of the recent period make it necessary for us to take the Israeli-Palestinian conflict off the regional agenda," Shimon Peres told the 11th annual Israeli security conference yesterday. "We must do this as soon as possible because the conflict is being exploited to the detriment of all sides."

Here are the makings of a peace plan--a preview from next Sunday's New York Times Magazine, providing the definitive account of what came out of Abbas' and Olmert's 36  meetings. Our only hope is an American president willing to embrace their achievement, bridge the small gaps, and rally the world to an American package.

Current events in Egypt and Tunisia have the entire region and beyond glued to their television sets. The all-too-spoken-about Arab street has risen, seemingly from the dead. But while it is satisfying to see a dictatorial head of state being ousted by his own people, it is far too early to rejoice.

What we are witnessing is the removal and replacement of leaders, not an upgrading of the political systems that allowed someone like the Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak to remain in power for 30 years and then have the audacity to position his son to succeed him, while the Egyptian people sank into deepening poverty. Unrest across the region will force these reactionary regimes to make some minimal changes, such as introducing term limits, which should have been done decades ago. But these knee-jerk legislative changes are solely aimed at persuading the demonstrators to go home.

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The Republican vote to repeal the new health care law is purely symbolic. But there's one provision of the law that Republicans are likely to try to defund, and they may have the public with them on this. It's the so-called "individual mandate" - the requirement that everyone purchase health insurance, or pay a fine. According to a recent poll, 60 percent of the public opposes it. They just don't like the idea of government telling them they have to buy something.

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The federal budget is $3.8 trillion.

The Republicans have just come up with their plan to cut the federal budget. They've found $32 billion of cuts.

Their fiery campaign rhetoric, fierce determination, righteous indignation, and bloviated anger have summoned forth a hairball.

What happened to John Boehner's $100 billion budget-cutting commitment? What became of Paul Ryan's big ideas? Where did all the roaring and raging on the right during the 2010 election go?

This is embarrassing.

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I was primed to issue a rant but you would all profit much more by reading this interview with Noam Chomsky.

My only thought is that the events in Egypt ought to induce the sickening feeling that the regime whose face is being exposed has been a U.S. client for decades and is only one of many such clients. Moreover, the behavior on exhibit is not a new experience for the people of Egypt, nor for those oppressed by other U.S. stooges around the world.

That the U.S. is not truly hated around the world is a testament to the understanding and restraint of the suffering, benighted peoples of the world. And if anything can put to rest the fantasy that the "West" is in the business of upholding freedom and human rights internationally, it should be the events of the past week.

Much more good stuff at the Democracy Now! website.

When I lampooned here yesterday the enthusiasms, "wisdom," and real motives of neo-conservatives who are pontificating about democratic upheavals in Egypt and other Arab states, I presented them as false prophets and knew better than to offer myself as a true one. Hannah Arendt filled that bill, somewhat, at the end of the post.

But Arendt is long gone (she died in 1975), and the writer who best explains now what's truly at stake in the present crisis has just posted a terrifically clear, concise, compelling assessment. It's a prophecy in the best sense -- not a "prediction" -- and it takes more into account, in Egypt and in the West, than anything else I've read.

We need to discuss this piece's implications for American policy and politics. But I'll do no more here now than give the floor to the man who has written what my subjects of yesterday couldn't have given us even had they tried. If anything, yesterday's post just tried to clear away a mess of brambles and underbrush to get us to this.

In the Washington Post this morning, George Soros describes very well America's equities in Egypt's current political struggle. America is not all powerful and does not have a magic wand to turn totalitarian regimes into well-functioning democracies, but there are times when the balance in America's strategic relationships must shift toward the vital importance of popular self-determination and will.

Soros opens:

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President Mubarak announced yesterday that he would not be seeking reelection, telling the world what it already knew. What was more interesting about the announcement was the way it was foreshadowed by the actions of the American administration. Obama has decided that he wants to be part of what's next, clearly, but siding with the crowds against Mubarak right now is not exactly going bold.

If he really intends to capture the imaginations of the young people in the crowds, from Tunis to Amman, he will have to signal powerfully that he is intent on building a new Middle East with them and live up to the promise of his Cairo speech. This means making clear that he will not be toyed with by the Netanyahu government. Many will jump to the conclusion that the fall of Mubarak is proof that Netanyahu was right all along, that his neighborhood is tough and unstable. But the wisdom of the crowd is that the occupation of Palestine has been the toughest and most destabilizing reality in the neighborhood for the last 40 years.

It would be folly for Obama to move on the Palestinian issue if a peace deal were not capable of being envisioned. Obama should not dare to present a plan that is implausible just to pander to Egyptian protesters, and he will certainly not sacrifice Israel's essential security interests. But what if a deal is not only possible but more or less worked out?

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Every century seems to have its revolutions and their progenitors. Often, the gap between the idea and its political effect can be 50 years or more. The first volume of Marx's Das Capital was published in 1867, but it wasn't until 1917 that a Marxist Revolution in Russia occurred. When we look back on the revolutions taking place across the Arab world in the winter of 2011, we may find that the ideas of one man may have unintentionally brought down governments across the Mid East. His name was Alan Greenspan, and he began changing our world in 1987, when President Reagan made him Chairman of the Fed, the most powerful banking institution in the world.

Grouping Marx and Greenspan will certainly displease the Ayn Rand crowd, but stick with me for a minute. What was the initial spark that set off the bonfires consuming the Arab world? In a word--Inflation. The revolt in Tunisia was called "The Hunger Revolution", because it was sparked by the dramatically rising cost of grains across the country. A Chinese economist, Andy Xie, has just published a remarkable article outlining the long term effect of the low interest, easy money policies the Greenspan fostered (and Bernanke followed). While I don't agree with all of Xie's thesis, he makes many important points. Cheap money only helps people with assets. It does not help the Egyptian bread seller. It inflates asset prices (stocks and real estate), and causes radical income inequality. It inflates the casino economy of Wall Street, but does nothing to help foster a real productive economy. Here is Xie.

Moreover, as global GDP doubled in dollar terms, far outstripping the output growth of grain or energy, their prices have surged. The FAO global food-price index rose by 138% in the decade, and the Brent crude price rose to about $100 per barrel now from an average of $20 in the 1990s. Even if the average income rose by 90% in dollar terms as the economic data suggest, the outsized price increase in food and energy could have offset that for a big chunk of the global population. A sizable portion of the global population may be worse off today than 10 years ago.

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David Brooks and Leon Wieseltier, whom I'll politely call "historically neo-conservative" commentators, are singing Kumbaya and shouting whatever is Arabic for "Right on!" to Egyptians who are pressing bravely for democracy and Hosni Mubarak's departure.

At least one might think so, reading Brooks in the New York Times and Wieseltier in The New Republic. They aren't actually there in Cairo with the demonstrators, of course. But they do sound amazingly like liberal Times columnist Nicholas Kristof, who is in Egypt praising the movement for democracy. All agree that Obama hasn't done enough to oust Mubarak and hearten the people.

Huh? This from Brooks and Wieseltier, who've long countenanced Mubarak and his regime without a murmur? If it was just them, it wouldn't matter. But they're exemplars of a mindset that endangers Egypt, Israel, and the United States, especially when it's opportunistically on the side of what's best in all three.

Egyptians, Brooks informs us piously, are no different than Russians, Ukrainians, and South Africans in their quest for dignity. True. Yet Brooks seems bizarrely out of character, as if he were channeling The Young Rascals: "All the world over, it's so easy to see, people everywhere just wanna be free!"

Wieseltier, less rapturous, decides that Obama is hesitating because he's still recovering from Liberal Iraq-War Syndrome and We Unjustly-Overthrew-Mossadegh Syndrome and is taking the wrong lessons from history. Although "the rebellion [in Egypt] is still maddeningly obscure, and [Obama] must be careful," that only makes his "support for the democratizers of Egypt more urgent," Wieseltier advises us.

He even quotes Kristof quoting demonstrators craving American support. Tahrir Square is Tienanmen; all it needs is a visit from the real Statue of Liberty, instead of a Chinese demonstrator's poignantly hoisting a model. But I am not making light of the upheavals in the Arab world. I am observing the upheavals in neo-conservatives' minds.

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I'd like to thank Charles Johnson for his excellent essay, The New Tribalism. In my book, Blowing Smoke, I found myself searching for a word to describe the vague web of race, religion, culture, and politics that the right wing has used to construct and exploit a new collective identity. I called it a new class-consciousness, but I think that Johnson's term tribalism more aptly captures the jumble of racial and social bonds that the right has used to mobilize white, Christian conservatives as a political bloc.

If you read below the fold of Johnson's article, you'll notice a number of vitriolic comments from readers. These commenters are not TPM regulars. They have been stalking Johnson around the Internet for years, literally. The one called diaryofdaedalus has tried to register at Johnson's blog under at least a dozen different aliases. He has his own blog that alternates between bashing Johnson and exposing the "myth of Serbian genocide." Apparently, he even chose the name Daedalus because Johnson used Icarus as a stage name in his former musical career.

Why such obsession? It's a bitter example of what happens when conservatives like Johnson challenge the bigoted rhetoric of the right wing. The explanation requires some back story.

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Daniel Levy of the New America Foundation, one of the sharpest thinkers on all matters Middle Eastern, does not buy the idea that President Hosni Mubarak ever was a force for "stability" in the region.

On the contrary, according to Levy's latest piece in Foreign Policy's Middle East Channel "Mubarak's heavy-handed security and intelligence apparatus probably created more terrorists than it intercepted."

Nor does Levy believe that Mubarak helped advance peace. All he did was advance Israel's short-term interests in preserving the status quo.

The regional utility that Mubarak's Egypt maintained became more narrowly focused on the short-term interests of the Government of Israel. Some have described Mubarak as a cornerstone of U.S. efforts to resolve the Israeli-Arab conflict, but that is inaccurate. Mubarak's Egypt became the cornerstone of something far-less worthy: an effort to maintain a farcical peace process that sustained Israel's occupation and settlement expansion, that sustained an image of Egypt's usefulness as the indispensible peace-builder, and that allowed the US to avoid making hard choices.

Levy believes that it is critical to both countries that the Israeli-Egyptian peace treaty be maintained. But, he says, that does not give the U.S. or Israel the right to "demand that Egypt continue to be the loyal servant of a thoroughly discredited peace process. The US should be careful not to view transition in Egypt too much through the prism of Israeli demands."

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First, I want to thank Michael for inviting me to participate in this book club, and for the kind words about me in Blowing Smoke.

"Persecution politics" is an excellent way to frame what's happening in the GOP and the right wing these days, and I'd like to bring up another important factor that helps make persecution politics such an effective defense mechanism: tribalism. Not just the atavistic racist tribalism of a small section of the far right base, but a new kind of widespread mainstream tribalism enabled by modern technologies.

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