It’s like the sum of all wingnuts:

A report by the Washington Institute for Near East Policy said that if talks fail to persuade Iran to abandon its nuclear program, forward deployment of the F-22 could neutralize the threat. “Only the F-22 can survive in airspace defended by increasingly capable surface-to-air missiles,” said retired Lt. Gen. Mike Dunn, Air Force Association president. [...] “Forward deployment of the F-22 could restore the credibility of the military option by indicating that it remains alive,” the report said.

I keep waiting for someone to make the case that war with Iran would be stimulative.

The Israeli government has taken the drastic, if understandable, step of deciding that it should construct a physical barrier to keep Palestinians from infiltrating into Israeli territory. But instead of building the wall on the border demarcating where Israeli territory ends and Palestinian territory begins, they decided to snatch a bunch of Palestinian land and put it on the Israeli side of the fence. Thus, you get protests:

Peace activists with the International Solidarity Movement said Tristan Anderson, of the Oakland, Calif., area, was struck in the head with a tear gas canister fired by Israeli troops. The military and the Tel Aviv hospital where Anderson was taken had no details on how he was hurt.

“He’s in critical condition, anesthetized and on a ventilator and undergoing imaging tests,” said Orly Levi, a spokeswoman at the Tel Hashomer hospital. She described Anderson’s condition as “life-threatening.”

The protest took place in the West Bank town of Naalin, where Palestinians and international backers frequently gather to demonstrate against the barrier. Israel says the barrier is necessary to keep Palestinian attackers from infiltrating into Israel. But Palestinians view it as a thinly veiled land grab because it juts into the West Bank at multiple points.

In fairness, it would be better for the protesters to stick to true non-violence and not throw rocks. But still, common sense says that you don’t defend Israel’s legitimate territorial claims by building a wall designed to encompass illegitimate claims.

Precisely paralleling an argument I had yesterday with a colleague, Jagdash Bagwati makes the case for seeing a linkage between support for free trade and support for the Employee Free Choice Act.

Bagwati’s basic point is that among the competing visions for how you could have a more egalitarian economy is, on the one hand, the idea that we need to sharply restrict imports. On the other hand, though, there’s the idea that we could remain open to trade and let the economy undergo its structural shifts while bringing more widespread unionization to the service sector. It’s not a fact handed down from god that the unionized firms are mostly in the manufacturing sector, it’s just that manufacturing was big during the period of time when U.S. labor law was friendly to union organizing. EFCA could create a new era of organizing-friendly labor law, and an opportunity to shift to an economy that features more decent jobs in the sectors that aren’t import-competing.

Larry Summers is not a great orator or even a competent one. But he gave a speech today at Brookings that I thought made a lot of good points. For example, this one about why the impulse to try to solve problems by re-inflating bubbles is wrongheaded:

We have seen housing prices reach unsustainably high levels and credit spreads reach unsustainably low levels in the middle of this decade. And we saw bubbles in technology in the late 1990s.

Bubble driven economic growth is problematic because of disruption and dislocation – affecting those who took part in the bubble’s excesses and those who did not. And, it is not entirely healthy even while it lasts. Between 2000 and 2007 – a period of solid aggregate economic growth – the typical working-age household saw their income decline by nearly $2000. The decline in middle-class incomes even as the incomes of the top 1% skyrocketed has a number of causes, but one of them is surely rising asset prices and the fact that financial sector profits exploded to the point to where they represented 40% of all corporate profits in 2006.

Confidence today will be enhanced if we put measures in place that assure that the coming expansion will be more sustainable and fair in the distribution of benefits than its predecessor. That is why the President has priorities that go beyond the immediate goal of containing the downturn and promoting recovery.

One of the things you see is that the voice of the top 1 percent usually speaks with orders of magnitude more volume in politics, and even more volume than that in the media, but sound policy requires you to keep it all in perspective.