Marty Peretz on the Gaza attacks:

Message: do not fuck with the Jews.

I think that’s exactly right, and also incredibly idiotic. To people who feel besieged and impotent to resolve the political paralysis afflicting their country, something like sending the message “do not fuck with the Jews” must feel incredibly cathartic. But you have to ask yourself which Palestinian having lived through decades of Israeli occupation and all sorts of different ups-and-downs of Israeli policy and all manner of retaliatory strikes and cease-fires is really unaware that Israel doesn’t like being fucked with? The psychology of catastrophe is that one wants (a) to improve the situation, and (b) to lash out at a bad guy.

Under the circumstances, the temptation to decide that you can best accomplish (a) by doing (b) is overwhelming and so you respond to 9/11 by invading Iraq. But already the number of Israelis killed by Hamas rockets has increased (from a baseline of zero) since the retaliatory attack that was supposed to prevent such killings.

Steve Clemons has a smart post on the Hamas-Israel mutual bombardment as the “test by crisis” moment Joe Biden was talking about before the election:

Part of what is going on today with Israel Defense Minister Ehud Barak’s unleashing of massive Israeli airpower against Hamas offices in Gaza is a test of Obama’s America. Hamas’s decision to end its “lull”, or temporary ceasefire with Israel, also has a lot to do with testing the U.S. and seeing what the outlines of Obama’s policy will be.

Barack Obama cannot afford to allow his presidency and its foreign policy course to be hijacked by either side in this increasingly blurry dispute.

I think that for a lot of people on the transition, the instinctive response to this is going to be to cause people to flinch from the idea of a serious effort at peacemaking. It’s a stark reminder that getting there wouldn’t just involve a nice meeting where you ask everyone to be reasonable. But I think you’d have to consider that kind of retreat to caution to be a flunking of the test.

Ari Berman has a very nice piece in The Nation about Howard Dean and his legacy called “the prophet.” Here’s a taste:

It almost feels like ancient history, but “four years ago the Democratic Party was in a very different condition,” Doctor Dean says at the beginning of his talk at the Y. Republicans had just retained the White House, gained four seats in the Senate and three in the House, and held twenty-eight governorships. Bill Frist was Senate majority leader, Dennis Hastert was House Speaker, George Bush’s approval rating was at a healthy 50 percent and Karl Rove planned a “permanent Republican majority.” It was “not a fun time to be a Democrat,” Dean cracks.

How quickly things change. Four years later Democrats elected Obama with 67 million votes. They picked up seven seats in the Senate (with Minnesota still pending at press time)and twenty-one in the House, and they hold sixty of ninety-nine state legislative chambers. Obama’s extraordinary campaign and Bush’s remarkable mishandling of the country’s domestic and foreign policies deserve much of the credit for the Democratic Party’s resurgence, but so does Howard Dean. Before virtually any major politician, Dean not only sensed that the era of Republican ascendancy could be stopped but also how to do it, first through his trailblazing though unsuccessful presidential campaign of 2004, and then through his forceful stewardship of the party as DNC chair since 2005. “Dean gave the party a mission and a focus,” says Paul Tewes, a top Obama strategist who ran day-to-day operations at the DNC during the general election. “That’s a big deal when you’re out of power.” DNC member Donna Brazile calls Dean “one of the unsung heroes of this moment.”

As he prepares to step down as DNC chair in January, giving way to Obama’s handpicked successor, Dean has cemented his legacy as a prophetic, if underappreciated, visionary in the party [see Berman, "The Dean Legacy," March 17]. When pundits saw the country hopelessly divided between red and blue–with the blue part of the map restricted to the West Coast, the Northeast and an increasingly embattled Midwest–Dean argued that the party had to compete everywhere. After the epic meltdown of his presidential campaign, punctuated by the endlessly looped “Dean scream” after the Iowa caucus, Dean took one of the most thankless jobs in Washington and turned it into a laboratory for one of the most exciting experiments in modern Democratic Party history. He radically devolved power away from Washington by cultivating a new generation of state political organizers and lending support (and money) to long-forgotten local parties, bucking the Beltway establishment and enabling grassroots activists. He rehabilitated his party, and his image, in the process. Dean’s fifty-state strategy, as it came to be known, “fertilized the landscape” for Obama’s fifty-state campaign, Brazile says. If his strategy is extended during the Obama administration, we’ll find out what a true fifty-state party looks like.

I think that’s all right. Looking back on the past five years, it’s clear to me that the white secular governor of a small New England state isn’t really the person who’s best-suited to spreading the progressive message to the largest possible audience. That’s not the worst thing in the world — my biography makes me even less well-suited than Dean to the task — but it really is a crippling flaw in a would-be president. Barack Obama with his rhetorical skills, his enormous charisma, and his fascinating life story is a better leader. But at the time Dean stepped onto the national stage, there wasn’t anyone else to do it. John Kerry, longtime foreign policy guy and highly decorated war veteran, could have been the guy. And after the 2004 election, Kerry really did become the guy (go back and read his underrappreciated 2008 convention speech) but that wasn’t him in 2004. Nor John Edwards. Most of the people who seemed like they’d make good presidential candidates hopelessly compromised themselves on the war. Someone was needed, and Dean was that guy.

I think a substantial phased increase in the federal gasoline tax of the sort called for by The New York Times would have been great, forward-thinking policy if adopted 20 years ago. And if I were, say, appointed to fill a vacant Senate seat I’d certainly be willing to vote for one. But given what we’ve learned about the risks of catastrophic climate change, it also seems like a concept that’s been somewhat overtaken by events. A carbon tax, or a cap on greenhouse gas emissions with auctioned permits, would constitute a tax on gasoline among other things. And there’s no particular reason that burning fuel in a car should be disfavored versus other carbon-intensive activities.

This article in the Post on country budget issues, falling home prices, and soon-to-be-rising tax rates in the DC area is quite informative. But near the end they get around to the fact that the situation is much worse in outer ring areas (Loudon, Prince William) than in inner suburbs (Arlington) or District, and I don’t think the piece offers a very clear explanation.

But one main factor is simply that values shouldn’t fall nearly as much in a place like Arlington as they will in a place like Prince William. Prince William County is the kind of place people move because it was too expensive to afford a house in Arlington. Thus, as prices in Arlington fall, buyers who during the boom would have bought in Prince William instead take advantage of the lower prices and buy in Arlington. That both cushions the fall in Arlington and accelerates the decline in Prince William. Nobody can be completely insulated from a broad, nationwide decline in home values that’s intertwined with a global recession but high-value downtowns and inner suburbs will weather the storm better than sprawly exurbs whose raison d’être was the unaffordability of the center.

The other slice of this is infrastructure. Per-home infrastructure costs are lower in more densely-built areas than they are in less-dense areas. It’s a basic efficiency/economy of scale issue. We have some misguided policies in place that lead to the greater cost of low-density living not being wholly internalized by residents of low-density areas. But the high-density to low-density subsidy is, thankfully, not so large (ideally it would be zero or even go in the other direction) as to wipe out this disadvantage. Consequently, when there’s a need to plug a hole in revenues you wind up having a higher per person burden.