A group of powerful House Democrats—Steny Hoyer, Howard Berman, Ike Skelton, Silvestre Reyes, Henry Waxman, Gary Ackerman, and Robert Wexler—have sent Barack Obama a letter seeking to draw limits around his proposed policy of engagement with Iran. Specifically, they state that Iran “must verifiably suspend its uranium enrichment program within at most a few months of the initiation of the discussions” and calls for a variety of sanctions ot be leveled if Iran fails to do so.

I think the real meat of this is not so much in the call for an expedited time frame, but in the framing of the goal. It’s one thing to demand that Iran verifiably not build a nuclear weapon. It’s another thing to demand that Iran verifiably not engage in uranium enrichment. Iran is not obliged to eschew enrichment under the Non-Proliferation Treaty and a number of countries around the world in good non-proliferation standing—Japan, Germany, etc.—are in the position of having demonstrated that kind of know-how. But they’re considered non-nuclear weapons states because they don’t have nuclear weapons. Thus, adopting the more aggressive goal as a red line combined with the more aggressive time frame is basically a way of making it more likely that talks break down.

The perspective reflected in this letter is the ideas that the Israeli government and its proxies in the United States have been pushing for some kind. I appreciate that many members of congress wish to be seen as tough on Iran and as friends to Israel, but I hope members will give deeper consideration to the issues in play here. This approach makes Iranian acquisition of a nuclear weapon more likely. It also makes more likely an Israeli preventive military attack on Iran that will do more to diplomatically isolate Israel and the United States than it will to deter Iranian acquisition of military nuclear weapons.

The progressive movement is in a weird place on climate change because the steps necessary to forestall catastrophic climate change are not steps that seem especially likely to win approval in congress. The conservative movement, conversely, is in a weird place on climate change because they’re eager to attack cap-and-trade as bad for the economy, but they don’t have any alternative ideas about how to fend off disaster. Consequently, there’s a boom market in goofy rationalizations for inaction. Thus, via DDay we get this remarkable performance from Rep. John Shimkus:

SHIMKUS: It’s plant food … So if we decrease the use of carbon dioxide, are we not taking away plant food from the atmosphere? … So all our good intentions could be for naught. In fact, we could be doing just the opposite of what the people who want to save the world are saying.

It would be strange indeed if environmentalists and the world’s scientists had never considered this issue during their years of advocacy and research around this issue. And, of course, if there was no carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, that would have dire implications for the world’s plants. But even if there were no carbon dioxide emissions in 2010, that would still leave plenty of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. The point about our CO2 emissions is that the rate at which fossil fuel use puts new carbon into the atmosphere greatly exceeds the rate at which plants remove it. The aim is not to eliminate the CO2 from the atmosphere but to stabilize the amount of CO2, which means curtailing emissions to a level much closer to the rate at which plants consume it. It also means minimizing the extent to which we destroy the plankton, rain forests, and other plant life that take carbon out of the air.

When posting the other day about the arrival of a new neocon think tank, the Foreign Policy Initiative, I made a reference to the fact that cockroaches could, or at least so I was told as a kid, survive a nuclear war. Jamie Kirchick saw this as a sly reference to the Hutu Power movement’s anti-Tutsi slogans. I want to assure people that that’s not what I had in mind and that nobody is suggesting that Bill Kristol or Dan Senor or any member of the Kagan family deserves to be killed. I’m just suggesting that neocon ideology is remarkably durable in the face of failure.

Matt Duss was on the Rachel Maddow show last night to talk about this and avoided any cockroach analogies:

If you want to learn about the Rwandan genocide, I recommend We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will be Killed With Our Families by Phillip Gourevitch.

The search for the kind of Palestinian non-violent resistance movement that would almost certainly be more effective than all the rockets in the world at forcing Israel to seriously contemplate a just resolution of the Palestinian issue is a bit of a staple of left-wing Jewish thought. But Gershom Gorenberg executes the genre with uncommon verve and affecting power. And perhaps most notably of all, he does it in The Weekly Standard where one isn’t accustomed to reading such things:

But even if patronizing, the question remains valid: Sainthood can work. Britain abandoned India; Montgomery’s buses were desegregated.

As an Israeli, to imagine Nasser a-Din al-Masri is disturbing for another reason: This is a fantasy of a political savior who comes from the adversary’s side because one’s own has no answers. Israeli politics has become a junkyard of broken ideologies. The outgoing government of Ehud Olmert succeeded neither in negotiating peace nor in bringing quiet to the Gazan border with military force. Meanwhile, settlement construction continued, deepening Israel’s entanglement in the West Bank. In February’s election, a majority of Israelis voted for parties that offered no expectation of an end to the conflict. We have failed to manufacture hope. Let the Palestinians do it.

I would emphasize that it’s not just that sainthood can work. Given the right circumstances, non-violent resistance is harder to commit oneself too—it requires enormous self-discipline—but it’s likely to be more effective. It’s not as if the civil rights leaders of the 1950s and 60s were just doing white America a favor by eschewing violence; they were taking a harder road to stick to precisely because it worked better. If southern blacks had launched a campaign of terrorist violence against their white neighbors, presidents Eisenhower and Kennedy would have wound up mobilizing the national guard to protect Jim Crow’s perpetrators rather than its victims.

Which isn’t to say there’s no non-violent protest in Palestine—there’s quite a lot. But the leading faces of Palestinian resistance in the eyes of Israelis and the West are Hamas and Hezbollah and their indiscriminate violence. That, in turn, does wonders to help maintain the political and diplomatic viability of unjust Israeli policies.

It’s interesting how, in the hands of a mildly talented PR department, just about any management decision whatsoever can be spun as a defense of shareholder interests:

The financial giant Goldman Sachs spent tens of millions of dollars to bail out two senior executives last fall who were short on cash, according to the bank’s proxy statement filed on Friday.

In an unusual move, Goldman bought back stakes in some internal investment funds from Jon Winkelried, the bank’s co-chief operating officer, and Gregory K. Palm, its general counsel.

Both executives are among the largest shareholders in the bank, owning more than a million shares each, and directors were concerned that a large sale of Goldman shares by the two men would alarm investors during a period of market turmoil, according to a person briefed on the matter.

An alternative strategy would have been to just let the executives sell their shares and then have Goldman allocate the tens of millions of dollars to share buybacks or other direct means of using cash to reassure investors. But that wouldn’t have produced a personal windfall for powerful managers, so it didn’t happen. Alternatively, if you’re in the grips of the neoclassical faith then it must be the case that this is Goldman acting responsibly rather than its managers looting during a crisis from a firm that would be going out of business absent government intervention.

CAP’s got a nifty interactive map showing the rising unemployment on a state-by-state basis. You can’t interact with the image below, but it’s here for illustrative purposes. Click over to see the growth over time:

Michigan continues to have the highest unemployment rate in the nation at 12.0 percent, followed by South Carolina (11.0 percent), Oregon (10.8 percent), North Carolina (10.7 percent), and Rhode Island and California (10.5 percent). February’s unemployment rate was above 7 percent in 31 of 50 states as well as in the District of Columbia.

It’s interesting that South Carolina, one of the states suffering the most from this crisis, is governed by a man so sociopathic that he seems to be spending the bulk of his time figuring out ways to impressive the conservative intelligentsia by refusing to accept federal efforts to help his states’ citizens.