It doesn’t get much attention, but the Employee Free Choice Act, slated to be on the Democrats’ legislative agenda in the new congress is one of the most important realistically achievable pieces of legislation for the short term. Also, “With the Democrats capturing both houses, labor and its allies voice confidence that the bill will pass in the House, but they fear a formidable battle in the Senate, where some foresee a Republican filibuster.”

Remember the Gang of 12 and the “nuclear option?” Liberals should have just seized the opportunity to ditch the filibuster forever. Recall that for all the Dems’ filibuster-preservation efforts, they actually wound up confirming all the rightwing judges anyway. Basically, in exchange for nothing at all, they preserved the GOP’s ability to block vital progressive legislation. Given the way the Senate overrepresents conservative areas of the country, it’s extremely difficult to get 60 votes for liberal causes.

Well, waddaya know, I agree with Charles Krauthammer — there isn’t proof up to the standard of criminal liability and never will be, but the odds seem overwhelming that Vladimir Putin was responsible for killing Alexander Litvinenko. At best, it’s somewhat plausible that he didn’t issue any specific orders on this subject, but just set up some kind of political opponent killing apparatus that does this stuff without forwarding the details to the boss. That said, I’m not totally sure why Putin’s sins mean we’re now all supposed to become super-credulous about whatever a Putin opponent says or does.

Here’s Krauthammer: “Litvinenko claimed that the Russian government itself blew up apartment buildings in Moscow and elsewhere in 1999, killing hundreds of innocent civilians, in order to blame it on the Chechens and provoke the second Chechen war. Pretty damning stuff.”

Sure, I mean, damning if true but the fact that some shady ex-KGB dude and his corrupt sugar daddy say it’s true hardly does make it true. I’m not going to claim a great depth of knowledge on this subject (on the merits, the 9/22/99 Ryazan incident seems suspicion, but the “false flag” theory of the apartment bombings also has many of all the marks of a conspiracy theory in the worst sense), but it seems odd that this account is so widely endorsed by the very same people who are so at pains under normal circumstances to tell us all that we need to take Islamist terrorism more seriously. I mean, I doubt Krauthammer is especially impressed by 9/11 conspiracy theories holding that the whole thing was a Bush administration false flag operation.

In another context (“Violence and Islam,” December 6, 2002) Krauthammer was happy to believe in Chechen terrorism: “On the northern tier of the Muslim world, even more blood flows — in Pakistani-Kashmiri terrorism against Hindu India, Chechen terrorism in Russian-Orthodox Moscow and Palestinian terrorism against the Jews. (The Albanian Muslim campaign against Orthodox Macedonia is now on hold.) And then of course there was Sept. 11, 2001 — Islamic terrorism reaching far beyond its borders to strike at the heart of the satanic ‘Crusaders.’” Basically the approach is that whichever interpretation of the Russia-Chechnya conflict better suits the promotion of American hegemony will be adopted on any given day.

Tom Friedman’s more-or-less just a figure of derision in the blogosphere, but in real life unless I’m mistaken he’s the most influential foreign affairs writer in America by some margin, so it really matters when he starts writing ledes like this:

The brutally honest Baker-Hamilton assessment of the Iraq morass implies that we need to leave Iraq if the factions there don’t get their act together, but it also urges a last-ditch effort to enlist the help of Syria and Iran to salvage something decent. Both are good suggestions, but they will only have a chance of being effective if we go one notch further and set a fixed date — now — for America to leave Iraq.

He makes good on his earlier “ten years or ten months” column and calls for us to set a fixed date about ten months in the future for our troops to be gone.

Workers getting pay raises, Federal Reserves contemplates slamming on the breaks. Same old, same old.

It seems to me that this business almost invariably goes missing in mainstream discussions of inequality in America. Meanwhile, the most powerful economic policy institution in America has spent the past 25-30 years consistently viewing its mission as trying to prevent typical wage earners from seeing increases in pay. While hurting the interests of wage earners, this policy also manages to advance the interests of (relatively wealthy) net creditors over those of (relatively poor) net debtors. Meanwhile, during Alan Greenspan’s long tour in office, he used his informal power to try and entrench the rule that larges budget deficits were okay when caused by tax cuts for wealthy people, but even small deficits are unacceptable when caused by progressive social outlay.

Meanwhile, we’re supposed to believe that the hegemonic run of such policy just so happens to have coincided with a period of “skill-biased technologic change” that is the real source of growing inequality in America.