The Obama administration seems just as determined as the Bush administration was to making sure that nobody has any legal recourse if they’ve been subject to illegal surveillance. The process is getting pretty Kafkaesque here; the basic shape of things is that you can’t sue the government over secret illegal surveillance because since the surveillance happened in secret, you can’t prove it happened. And you can’t get the documents that might prove it happened, because that would compromise the secrecy.

Personally, I don’t see any way that could wind up leading to abuses.

In Haaretz, Aluf Benn takes a look at Bejamin Netanyahu’s opposition to the creation of an independent State of Palestine:

There are obvious political reasons for Netanyahu’s refusal to demonstrate a more moderate stance: It would cost him his potential coalition with the right-wing National Union and Habayit Hayehudi, and force him into a rotation arrangement with Livni. But his opposition to a Palestinian state is also a matter of principle, one he has held for many years.

Netanyahu says he doesn’t want to rule over the Palestinians, and has no interest in Nablus, Tul Karm or Jenin; they should govern their own lives, as long as they don’t threaten Israeli security, he says. Netanyahu seeks to deny the Palestinians four rights of any sovereign state: control of its airspace; control of its electromagnetic spectrum; the right to maintain an army and to sign military alliances; and, most importantly, control of the border crossings where arms and terrorists could pass. Netanyahu believes Israel must retain all of these. [...]

Netanyahu believes Israel must insist on retaining 50 percent of the West Bank – the open areas in the Jordan Valley and the Judean Desert that are vital as a security zone. In light of statements the outgoing government has made to the Palestinians, Netanyahu’s position is a joke meant to kill the negotiations before they even begin.

In an interview with Lally Weymouth in yesterday’s Washington Post, Netanyahu elegantly avoided the question about two states. Instead of merely saying “No,” he presented a vague formulation: “The Palestinians should have the ability to govern their lives but not to threaten ours.” Such a statement doesn’t explicitly discount the creation of an independent Palestinian state, nor does it address the fine points of control and sovereignty.

Needless to say, an Arab who refused to concede Israel’s “right to exist” would be considered persona non grata in the United States. And I don’t think a Palestinian leader who said he wasn’t opposed to the existence of Israel, he just wanted to disband the IDF, establish Palestinian control over Israeli airspace and EM spectrum, and give Palestine control over all of Israel’s borders would be taken very seriously. As it seems a democratic process has put Netanyahu in office as Prime Minister, he needs to be dealt with. But his current policy should be seen as what it is; an effort to avoid the creation of a sovereign Palestine under any circumstances. Netanyahu seems to be a realist about both his own political interests and his perceptions of Israeli national interest, but that means American policy needs to be aimed, in part, at changing how the calculus of interests looks to him.

For another take on the whole “socialist” thing, it’s useful to look at Rick Hertzberg’s take on Friday’s Krauthammer column:

If Barack Obama succeeds, his joint address to Congress will be seen as historic—indeed as the foundational document of Obamaism. As it stands, it constitutes the boldest social democratic manifesto ever issued by a U.S. president.

Obama sees the current economic crisis as an opportunity. He has said so openly. And now we know what opportunity he wants to seize. Just as the Depression created the political and psychological conditions for Franklin Roosevelt’s transformation of America from laissez-faireism to the beginnings of the welfare state, the current crisis gives Obama the political space to move the still (relatively) modest American welfare state toward European-style social democracy.

Hertzberg remarks: “From your keyboard to God’s ear”

For a more fleshed-out positive take on this, read my former boss Bob Kuttner’s book Obama’s Challenge: America’s Economic Crisis and the Power of a Transformative Presidency. I’m actually not so certain that this “crisis = opportunity” perspective is correct. The opportunity rests in the election results. And the election results are clearly related, in part, to the collapse of the economy. But the opportunity would actually be much greater if the economic problems were much less severe than they actually are. The ideal scenario would have been a panic lasting a few months that turned out to have relatively little real bite. Otherwise, bad times both open the conceptual window and narrow the fiscal window with it being hard to say which will win out in the end.

I would also say that, contra Krauthammer, Obama has been pretty clear about his overall vision since at least the winter of 2007-2008. New investments in education and infrastructure, health care that’s affordable for all, and a move to a more sustainable carbon emissions regime have always been the agenda of all the major Democratic presidential contenders and so the odds of someone winning on platform like that have looked quite good for a long time now, back before most people believed there was any kind of crisis.

Secretary of Defense Robert Gates was clearly reluctant to answer David Gregory’s question about the contrasting leadership styles between President Bush and President Obama. But when pressed he explained that Obama is “more analytical” and goes further out of his way to hear from diverse viewpoints:

GATES: I think that probably President Obama is somewhat more analytical, and he makes sure he hears from everybody in the room on an issue. And if they don’t speak up, he calls on them.

Q: A marked difference from his predecessor?

GATES: President Bush was interested in hearing different points of view but didn’t go out of his way to make sure everybody spoke if they hadn’t spoken up before.

This is a reminder of a point that I think’s been difficult to fully articulate in the Chas Freeman debate. I think there’s truth to the criticisms of Freeman’s hard-bitten strain of realpolitik. But no administration is monolithic, and given the disastrous consequences of our 2002-2006 flirtation with total irrealism I don’t think it’s a bad idea at all to have some Freeman-style ballast on the ship. If Obama seemed to be assembling an entire administration that was unconcerned with human rights abroad, that would be another thing, but that’s not what’s happening here.

Barack Obama has proposed a budget that, among other things, would reduce taxes on over 90 percent of the population and increase taxes on around 2 percent of the population. Flipping through the Sunday talk shows, it’s striking to see how uniformly wealthy media celebrities think it makes sense to characterize this is a “tax increase” or “raising taxes” and to leap immediately to a discussion of what the impact of these “higher taxes” will be. I think that the majority of people whose taxes are set to go down might be more interested in learning about the impact of lower taxes.

But I suppose this is how the world really looks from David Gregory’s chair. A rich person is somewhat like Jeffrey Immelt who earns tens of millions of dollars in salary and bonuses during good years, and in bad years he waives some of what he’s owed, accepting mere millions in new salary, and gets hailed for his generosity. One assumes that with this multi-million dollar annual salary, he also has investment income. The lower classes in this universe are like Chris Matthews and David Shuster and need to host cable shows. And a David Gregory or a Brian Williams—hosting a network television show, to be sure, but not owning the network—becomes a typical middle-class American.