Marc Lynch reviews the 2009 UN Arab Human Development Report, writing that “What emerges is a coherent narrative that links the authoritarianism of Arab states -– and the chaos produced by international military interventions -– to the failure to achieve acceptable levels of human development”:

Rather than an abstract discussion of democracy, the report opts for a detailed analysis of the many ways in which security-oriented states violate the security of their citizens. It criticises the abuse of states of emergency and martial law, the violation of the right to life by torture and mistreatment, and the practice of illegal detentions. The report gives particular attention to the problem of executive-branch infringement on judicial independence, and to the threat posed by “security and armed forces that are not subject to public oversight”.

The report is scathing about the corrosive effects of the “war on terror” -– showing clearly how Arab authoritarian regimes reconfigured and expanded their repressive power at precisely the time when the Bush administration spoke the loudest about its “Freedom Agenda”. The authors do not need to resort to discussing Guantanamo to make this point brutally clear. They describe the anti-terror laws passed in many Arab countries, in which “imprecision and ambiguity form a threat to basic freedoms”, and note that states have clearly “failed to find the required balance between the security of society and the preservation of individual rights and freedoms”. It is this legacy that Arab reformists -– and those in the West who wish to help them -– now must confront. The “global war on terror” will not fade so easily away.

One of the tragedies of the Bush administration was that, while it may have correctly identified some of the factors inhibiting reform in the Middle East — authoritarianism, corruption, religious and political extremism — many of the policies adopted and framed within the war on terror aggravated and even strengthened those factors.

It’s important to note that not all of these policies began with George W. Bush — and not all of them ended with him. I recently interviewed Issander El-Amrani, a Cairo-based writer and analyst, who spoke about some of the effects of U.S. policy on his own country of Morocco. Recognizing that the Obama Administration has ended the practice of extraordinary rendition, Amrani notes that “the practice of ordinary rendition, which dates from the Clinton Administration, continues”:

[I]t’s not only a question that torture is being practiced and the moral questions that raises about what America’s values are, it’s also a question of how it affects the development of the societies that are partners in this rendition program.

If you take the example of Morocco… a country with a pretty terrible human rights record under the previous king, under Hassan II…[S]ince 1999 when the new king, Mohammed VI, came in on the promise of carrying out political and human rights reform, there was a tremendous hope for progress on these issues. What we saw in the earlier part of the decade is the beginning of the Arab world’s first truth and reconciliation movement that looked into past abuses, that looked into allegations of torture, that allowed victims of torture and their family to testify — and this was televised. And this was really a watershed moment, I think, for the Middle East and it’s the first case of any such truth and reconciliation commission.

And because of the war on terror what we have seen since then, since this commission ended in 2003, is a regression. And you have to ask yourself: does Morocco’s prominent role in the rendition program, the fact that many people were sent to the Temara detention center just outside of Ranat, the capital, and detained there, interrogated — and we should have no illusions, its not a question of just the US sent them there and “oh no, the Moroccans used torture on them.” Americans, federal officials, were willing participants in some of these interrogation sessions — what impact does this have on Morocco’s own efforts to end the practice of torture, to have a reform of its security establishment when its main ally that at the same time is praising reform is also encouraging these practices?

Watch it:

Full transcript below. Read more

For the past few days, right-wing health care opponents and anti-immigrant wingnuts have been relentlessly spreading the myth that the proposed health care bill will offer undocumented immigrants “free and total access” to federal health care benefits. In a portion of an interview with Univision’s Maria Elena Salinas which aired this morning, Obama reiterated that undocumented immigrants will not be covered under his health care reform plan and stated that we need to pass comprehensive immigration reform that puts them on a path to legalization:

SALINAS: Mr. President, the National Council of La Raza says that we cannot have true health care reform unless it includes undocumented immigrants, legal residents, and immigrant children. These are the groups that are most likely to be uninsured. How do you address this?

OBAMA: As I said before, the best way to deal with undocumented immigrants is to make them documented.

SALINAS: But what happens to legal residents who have followed the rules?

OBAMA: As I just said, when it comes to legal residents we want to find ways that they can access preventative services, enrollment services, regular treatments. So, I think there’s a difference between legal immigrants who work here — they should have access to medical services. Undocumented workers who are here illegally — we want to create comprehensive immigration reform so they can get on a path to citizenship. Until they do, we can’t reward them with some of the benefits which quite frankly cost us a lot of money. There will be a lot of resistance when people who are citizens and legal residents aren’t getting these services and we’re giving them to undocumented workers.

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Sec. 242 and 246 of America’s Affordable Health Choices Act of 2009 explicitly state that only individuals who are lawfully present in US will receive any of the benefits provided in the bill.

It’s no secret that the Washington Post’s editorial page has become a kind of graveyard of neoconservatism, but even so this is a pretty profoundly misleading passage in today’s editorial lamenting the Obama administration’s firm stance against Israeli settlements:

Rather than pocketing Mr. Netanyahu’s initial concessions — he gave a speech on Palestinian statehood and suggested parameters for curtailing settlements accepted by previous U.S. administrations — Mr. Obama chose to insist on an absolutist demand for a settlement “freeze.” Palestinian and Arab leaders who had accepted previous compromises immediately hardened their positions; they also balked at delivering the “confidence-building” concessions to Israel that the administration seeks.

Netanyahu did not make a speech on “Palestinian statehood.” He made a speech laying out Israeli demands, in which he also briefly acknowledged a “Palestinian state” — and then placed such stringent conditions upon that state as to divest the term of any meaning.

In any case, previous Israeli governments had already committed to the creation of a Palestinian state. As the American Prospect’s Michelle Goldberg wrote in an analysis of the Bar-Ilan speech, “after taking office Netanyahu essentially revoked this commitment and now stands to reap rewards for re-offering it in diminished form.”

It’s also pretty interesting how, in the Post’s telling, the claim by some Israeli officials that they had arrived at secret, oral understandings on settlement growth with one U.S. administration — the Bush administration — has now magically morphed into “suggested parameters for curtailing settlements accepted by previous U.S. administrations”.

As to President Obama’s “absolutist demand for a settlement ‘freeze,’” President Bush’s 2003 road map is very clear on this point, stating that Israel “freezes all settlement activity, consistent with the Mitchell report.”

If Obama looks like he’s being unusually firm on settlements, it’s only because past U.S. administrations have unfortunately been all too willing to bend on the issue, recognizing the settlements as a serious problem, but never really moving seriously against them. Israeli governments, and settlement supporters in the U.S., have grown accustomed to the game in which the president says settlements must stop, and the Israeli prime minister agrees, and then the next day Israel announces 1400 new settlement homes. This has been disastrous not only for the Palestinians, whose daily lives are impacted in countless negative ways by the settlements and the military occupation that sustains them, but also for U.S. credibility and the credibility of Palestinian moderates who we’re ostensibly trying to strengthen.

It’s certainly fair to question whether Obama’s focus on settlements is correct, but it’s also fair to expect one of the leading papers in the country not to misrepresent the basic facts of the situation while doing it.

Last night, Lou Dobbs Show correspondent Lisa Sylvester reported that “people who break immigration laws” will be “rewarded” with free health care coverage due to “gaping loopholes” in the proposed health care bill. Sylvester interviewed right-wing immigration hardliners and health care opponents to make her case:

ROBERT RECTOR, HERITAGE FOUNDATION: What we’re doing is creating a new program for low-income people to give them free medical care and giving illegal immigrants free and total access to that system. It’s a huge transformation. It’s radically different than anything the country has done in the past.

SYLVESTER: An amendment was offered that would have enabled states to use the Welfare Eligibility data base to keep illegal immigrants from qualifying for health care benefits. But that amendment was defeated in committee on a party line vote. And there’s another provision in this bill that some Republicans take issue with. It says that if one member of a family is eligible to receive universal health coverage then the entire family is eligible. Representative Lamar Smith calls that another loophole that he says will permit illegal immigrants to receive taxpayer funded health coverage.

Watch it:

Far from “free and total access,” there is specific language in both the House and Senate bills that prohibits undocumented immigrants from obtaining any federal health care assistance. However, several conservatives are still whining about the failure of the Heller Amendment, which Sylvester also cites above. None of them have mentioned that the amendment would have given private insurance providers unprecedented access to the sensitive income and identity information of all those applying for health care assistance while curtailing the privacy and redress responsibilities that the Social Security Act requires of government agencies.

The second “loophole” that Smith falsely claims will allow undocumented immigrants to receive universal coverage through legal family members represents another distortion. The House bill clearly stipulates that only family members who are “affordable credit eligible individuals” will receive government assistance. “Affordable credit eligible individuals” are defined as someone who is lawfully present in the US.

Rather than requiring Americans to hand over sensitive information to private insurers, the eligibility provision is enforceable via less invasive documentation requirements. If Congress decides to take up comprehensive immigration reform, there’s also the likely possibility that illegal immigration will be addressed head-on by putting undocumented immigrants on a path to legalization which is when and how this whole topic should be addressed in the first place.

It seems that Michael Gerson is trying really hard to miss the larger picture when it comes to President Obama’s engagement strategy, which Gerson claims “is on its deathbed.” Pointing to Obama’s failure — a full six months after taking office — to cause North Korea and Iran to completely surrender their nuclear aspirations, throw open their facilities to international inspections, and apply for U.S. statehood, Gerson proceeds directly to autopsy, writing that “the problem is not engagement itself — which was, after all, attempted in various forms by the previous administration.”

The difficulty is that the Obama foreign policy team has often argued that the reason for tension and conflict with nations such as North Korea and Iran is a lack of adequate American engagement — which is absurd, and which has raised absurdly high expectations. [...]

Fists remain clenched. This is not because some magical diplomatic words remain unspoken. It is because of the nature of oppressive regimes themselves.

Such regimes are often internally preoccupied. Precisely because they lack genuine legitimacy, they spend large amounts of time and effort maintaining their fragile authority, consolidating power and managing undemocratic transitions. North Korea confronts a succession crisis. Iran deals with growing dissent and clerical division. Both tend to make calculations based on internal power struggles, not some rational calculation of their external image and interests. They are so inwardly focused that they do not have, as Clinton said, “any capacity” to respond to engagement. It is questionable in these cases whether we currently have any serious negotiating partners at all.

While it’s pretty funny to read Gerson blaming Obama for raising “absurdly high expectations” after he’s just failed him for not transforming the world in six months, there are actually some serious problems here.

The first is this idea, which is becoming more common on the right, that the Bush administration already tried engagement, and it didn’t work, so we shouldn’t expect it to work now. I responded to AEI’s Michael Rubin on this point in an exchange about Iran on the LA Times website, noting that, while the claim is “perhaps true if one simply tallies up the number of contacts and communications between the two governments, I think it does some injustice to the sort of good-faith attempt to change the U.S.-Iran relationship that many of us in the “pro-engagement crowd” would like to see undertaken. The nature of the engagement and the larger foreign policy context within which that engagement occurs are important.”

Engagement involves more than just an offer to talk — it requires a range of signals to indicate that one is serious about reaching an accord. Given Bush’s addiction to tough-guy posturing, it’s no mystery why the Iranians didn’t take his offers of engagement, such as they were, very seriously.

Another problem has to do with treating North Korea and Iran the same. While both are regimes that pose huge challenges to the United States, the similarity pretty much ends there. All oppressive regimes are not oppressive in the same way. While Iran is certainly oppressive, life in Iran is nothing like that in North Korea, for whom “Orwellian” would represent a kind of glasnost. As we’ve seen over the last month and a half, political speech exists and public opinion is registered in Iran in a way that is unimaginable in North Korea.

And that brings us to the most important point that Gerson misses in regard to the “growing dissent and clerical division” that he recognizes is occurring in Iran. While we shouldn’t pretend that the Iranian elections were a referendum on Obama, I do think it’s fair to see the elections as something a referendum on greater Iranian engagement with the United States and the world. In this respect, Obama’s clear message of reconciliation played a significant part in Iran’s internal politics, empowering reformers seeking an end to Iran’s international isolation and undercutting hardline propaganda about the Great Satan. This represented an enormous threat to Iran’s conservatives, who responded accordingly. Read more

Reviewing a new book about Donald Rumsfeld in Sunday’s Washington Post, CNAS honcho Nathaniel Fick gets at one of the often overlooked but mustn’t-be-forgotten aspects of why the Iraq war happened.

Fick writes that “the two biggest questions about his tenure at the Pentagon — why the United States invaded Iraq, and why it so bungled the aftermath of the Hussein regime’s fall — are often answered with only the simplest of explanations: ideology and hubris.”

In this meticulously researched and compelling book, veteran Washington Post reporter Bradley Graham acknowledges these contributors to the national-security travails of the Bush years, but he highlights another as well: the secretary of defense’s unwavering commitment to military transformation, his vision of a leaner, more lethal Department of Defense. The early phases of the war in Afghanistan apparently vindicated this concept, while the prospect of war in Iraq promised a wider proving ground for it — but the nasty counterinsurgency campaign that followed threatened to undermine it.

Among the various elements of “transformation,” Rumsfeld envisioned a lighter, faster, and more deadly combat force with high-tech support providing a comprehensive view of the battle space. And after 9/11, he really wanted an opportunity to reestablish U.S. credibility by unleashing such a force — he was after a “teaching moment” for anyone who doubted American power.

As Richard Clarke told CBS in 2004, invading Iraq was immediately discussed after 9/11:

As Clarke writes in his book, he expected the administration to focus its military response on Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda. He says he was surprised that the talk quickly turned to Iraq.

“Rumsfeld was saying that we needed to bomb Iraq,” Clarke said to Stahl. “And we all said … no, no. Al-Qaeda is in Afghanistan. We need to bomb Afghanistan. And Rumsfeld said there aren’t any good targets in Afghanistan. And there are lots of good targets in Iraq. I said, ‘Well, there are lots of good targets in lots of places, but Iraq had nothing to do with it.

“Initially, I thought when he said, ‘There aren’t enough targets in– in Afghanistan,’ I thought he was joking.

Rumsfeld’s belief in a technologically transformed military, and his desire for an appropriate stage upon which to demonstrate that military’s deadly effectiveness, dovetailed with the neoconservatives’ fantasy of quickly and simply knocking off Saddam Hussein’s regime and installing a friendly government in its place. And the result was that we’ve spent six years (and counting) and about a trillion dollars (and counting) demonstrating the limits of American military power.

Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN) wrote a blog post for Townhall.com today in which she falsely claimed that undocumented immigrants will be covered by the proposed health care bill:

“The relationship between illegal immigrants and our nation’s health care system is one that cannot be overlooked. In 2006, the Census Bureau reported that there were 46.6 million people without health insurance of which about 9.5 million were not United States citizens…It’s clear that a bill that is silent on eligibility means a bill that includes illegal immigrants.”

To begin with, both the House and Senate health care bills explicitly state that health care benefits will only apply to legal U.S. residents. President Obama himself has said that undocumented immigrants should not be covered under a new health care plan.

Bachmann also criticizes House Democrats for voting against what she calls “a commonsense amendment that would have ensured that illegal immigrants are not covered.” However, that same amendment would have also given private insurance providers unprecedented access to sensitive income and identity information while curtailing all of the privacy and redress responsibilities that the Social Security Act requires of government agencies.

Bachmann doesn’t point out that 9.5 million of uninsured noncitizens that she cites includes both legal and undocumented immigrants. In general, all immigrants incur less health care costs and less expensive care than native-born Americans. Health care costs for the average immigrant ($1,797 per capita) are 55% lower than health care costs for the average U.S.-born person ($3,702 per capita). Ultimately, U.S. citizens make up the majority of those who are uninsured and that’s where the debate should focus.

Bachmann has repeatedly invoked “fear-mongering right-wing rhetoric” to block health care reform.

As Pakistan’s anti-terrorism court begins the long process of trying five suspects in last November’s terrorist attacks in Mumbai, it’s worth revisiting the triangular relationship between the Pakistani public, the government and militant groups that will determine whether or not the militants can be defeated. For once, there’s some good news: the Pakistani public, while remaining overwhelmingly anti-American, has turned decisively against militants.

Eighty-one percent of Pakistanis now see “Islamist militants and Taliban in FATA and settled areas” as a “critical threat,” while 67 percent view the “activities of religious militants in Pakistan as a whole” as a similarly critical threat. There is little support for Taliban governance – the government leads the Taliban by forty points in providing “effective and timely justice,” “preventing corruption,” and “helping the poor.” Significantly, in each case double digits say that both or neither will do better job, and the government only scores above 50 points in the justice category. These results indicate that while there’s little appetite for Taliban rule and general confidence in the government, the latter is weak and has much room to grow.

Al Qaeda, as distinct from Pakistani militants, is also seen as a critical threat. Eighty-two percent of Pakistanis now view al Qaeda as such, double from 41 percent in September 2007. But while 88 percent think al Qaeda should not be allowed to operate training camps in Pakistan and 74 percent thinks the government should use military force to close the camps if necessary, only 12 percent actually think there are al Qaeda training camps in Pakistan. Moreover, while 62 percent of Pakistanis oppose al Qaeda’s attacks on the United States, 59 percent say they “share many of its attitudes toward the U.S.” What’s perhaps most disturbing is that a quarter of Pakistanis share both al Qaeda’s attitudes and approval of its methods – a significant reservoir of support in a critical country.

Part of these results can no doubt be explained by the Pakistani military’s long-standing cultivation of and support for militant groups like Lashkar-e-Taiba, the chief organizational suspect behind the Mumbai attacks. Pakistan’s notoriously unreliable and self-serving Inter-Services Intelligence agency leaked today that membership in LeT is about 150,000 people and that its members “were good people” who could be controlled. While there’s still uncertainty as to the actual relationship of LeT to the military, the fact that someone in ISI (described as a “midlevel officer”) still talks about controlling the group indicates that the culture of militant support within the Pakistani military may be far harder to uproot than the militants themselves.

After steamrolling through Swat with artillery and airstrikes (creating 2 million refugees in the process), the Pakistani military has put offensive operations in the tribal regions on hold. As one local politician with the largely secular Awami National Party put it, “It’s an insane dream to expect anything different from the Pakistani government… The Taliban are the brainchildren of the Pakistan army for the last 30 years. They are their own people.”

For years the Pakistani military has been playing a double game with the United States -– supporting its favorite militants, giving up those that posed too much of a problem, and taking money from the United States in the process. Now it’s embarking on a double game with its own population, a population that now supports overwhelmingly operations against militant groups that have begun targeting Pakistan itself.

Texas has the largest uninsured population and Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-TX) decided to pin the blame on undocumented immigrants at a Dallas press conference this past Friday. “We have the highest number of uninsured. Mostly because of the illegal immigrant population,” said Hutchison.

However, state hospital officials were quick to point out that Hutchison is wrong. Ann Ward, Vice President with the Texas Hospital Association, points out:

“People say illegal immigrants are a large part of the uninsured population but the studies I’ve seen by the Texas Department of Insurance, it’s less than 20 percent of uninsured are illegal immigrants. And one thing we know, many of the people who come to hospitals for care. They pay, they pay cash.”

Ward explains that Texas has the highest rate of uninsured because of the large number of low-wage workers who cannot afford private insurance and the small business which do not offer their employees health care benefits. Another national study shows that U.S. citizens make up the majority of the nonelderly uninsured (78%), while legal and undocumented immigrants account for only 22%.

Listen here:

An employee of the Department of Homeland Security, Jimmy Slaughter, is suing his own agency for accidentally raiding his home this past Spring in search of an undocumented immigrant who didn’t live there. Slaughter’s lawyer claims that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents entered his house without a search warrant or probable cause. ICE authorities were looking for an immigrant woman whose mail had been incorrectly sent to the Slaughters’ residence. In an affidavit attached to the lawsuit Slaughter said:

“Is this the agency which protects our country? . . . Now my neighbors are wondering or believe I am just another ‘DIRTY COP!’ I have served my country proudly for 23 years in the Marine Corps and six years as a Customs K-9 handler. I bleed Red, White and Blue.”

Slaughter’s case was one of the many highlighted in a recent report released by the Cardozo School of Law which claims that federal immigration agents have violated their own agency rules as well as the Constitution while conducting home immigration raids. The report accused ICE agents of approaching their work with a “cowboy mentality” which has lead to severe misconduct and disregard for the rule of law. In the report Slaughter explains what happened:

“I was at home with my wife when the door bell rang. I opened the door and noticed approximately 7 uniformed ICE agents with vests and guns standing at my door . . . I opened the door to look at the paperwork and five agents entered my house . . . . The agents then told my wife to stand in the center of ‘OUR’ living room. Not once did anyone say they had a warrant.”

Not only are ICE officials mistakenly raiding the homes of their colleagues, this weekend the San Francisco Chronicle also documented several recent instances in which US citizens have been accidentally detained and deported.

Last week, responding to international criticism of Israeli plans to build new Jewish homes in an Arab neighborhood of Israeli-occupied East Jerusalem, Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman “ordered embassies abroad to use a photo of Adolf Hitler meeting a top Palestinian cleric.”

The decision to circulate a 1941 photo featuring the Nazi dictator sitting with the then grand mufti of Jerusalem Amin al-Husseini is aimed at easing pressure on Israel over a construction project on land in annexed east Jerusalem once owned by the cleric, [an Israeli] official told AFP.

Appointed “grand mufti” in 1921 by the British mandate authorities as a means to dividing and controlling competing Palestinian factions (the title and position itself was a British creation), Husseini eventually fled Palestine and attempted to form an alliance with Nazi Germany. Husseini hoped that, by collaborating with the enemy of the British, who he believed were facilitating the takeover of Palestine by Zionist settlers, he might be able both to prevent the creation of a Jewish state and establish himself as a regional power.

There is little doubt that Husseini had extreme, racist views of Jews, and that he gave support to the Nazis in hopes of gaining advantage against the British and Zionist forces in Palestine. What this specifically has to do with Israeli settlement activity in East Jerusalem, however, is less clear.

Doing his part to push the Israeli line, yesterday Alan Dershowitz took it even further. In his Jerusalem Post column — which, in a bit of unintentional irony, is called “Double Standard Watch” — Dershowitz questioned whether the Palestinian people, collectively, bore any responsibility for the Holocaust. “The truth,” wrote Dershowitz, “is that the Palestinian leadership, supported by the Palestinian masses, played a significant role in Hitler’s Holocaust.”

This claim is preposterous. And, needless to say, Dershowitz utterly fails to prove it, managing only to establish the already known facts that a Palestinian leader, Husseini, had a relationship with the Nazis, and that many Palestinians still consider Husseini something of a nationalist hero. The idea that Husseini, let alone the Palestinians as a whole, played a “significant role in Hitler’s Holocaust” is laughable, as if the Nazis required one of the sub-human races to sign off on their plans for mass murder.

This is obviously not scholarship, but nor is it simply polemic. It is the attempted slander of the Palestinian people, in order to diminish their historical claim to a state with Jerusalem as its capital. In his Cairo speech, President Obama importantly recognized this claim as being co-equal with Israel’s, and admirably rejected the childishly one-sided narrative of the conflict that Dershowitz is peddling.

It’s important not to lose sight of what’s really at issue here. Lieberman’s order to push the Husseini photo and its attendant anti-Palestinian propaganda is aimed at deflecting attention away from Israel’s extremely provocative efforts to thicken the Jewish presence in occupied areas of Jerusalem. These efforts inflict an enormous cost on Jerusalem’s Arab inhabitants, who are prohibited from expanding their homes and neighborhoods, even as Jewish residents are encouraged to — and aided in it by the Israeli government and private American donors.

This is the real double standard, Mr. Dershowitz. Look into it.

In an interview with Jorge Ramos on Univision’s “Al Punto,” Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) blamed Spanish-language attack ads, which he claims portrayed him as anti-immigrant, anti-Hispanic, and anti-immigration reform, for costing him the Latino vote in last year’s elections:

RAMOS: Are Republicans concerned about upsetting their base if they vote to legalize undocumented immigrants?

MCCAIN: I don’t know…uh…I can’t speak for all Republicans…I know I was out there twice — on the floor of the Senate with Senator Kennedy — trying to pass comprehensive immigration with a path to legalization on it and I was attacked during the campaign for being anti-immigrant. Life isn’t fair.

RAMOS: Talking specifically about that — the last time we spoke was during the campaign. And you know and I know that you only got 31% of the Hispanic vote. Are you disappointed? What went wrong?

MCCAIN: Obviously I’m very disappointed. Millions of dollars of attack ads on your network and across the country in Spanish-language stations attacked me for being anti-immigrant, anti-Hispanic, and anti-immigration reform. They succeeded.

Watch it:

In 2006, McCain voted for Sen. James Inhofe’s (R-OK) amendment to “declare English as the national language.” It seems McCain has consistently failed to note that many Latinos have mastered both English and Spanish. The 69% of Latino voters who voted against McCain probably didn’t have to look much farther than his own conflicting statements on immigration policy. It’s true that McCain fought and lost the battle for comprehensive immigration reform in 2007. Yet, less than one year later he stated that he wouldn’t support his own bill during a Republican presidential primary debate. Later on, his party adopted an “uncompromising anti-immigrant agenda” as part of the GOP platform.

Meanwhile, McCain sang a much different tune in the ethnic media. He launched a Spanish-language ad campaign blaming Obama and Senate Democrats for intentionally killing immigration reform with what he called “poison pill amendments.” Maybe McCain forgot that the same day the bill died, he came out blaming opposition within his own party, saying “A lot of the Republican base was passionate about the issue, and they made their influence felt.” The Obama camp responded by airing its “dos caras” ad, which portrayed McCain as two-faced on immigration. In another campaign ad, McCain translated “pro-innovation immigration policies” in English to “immigration policy innovation” in Spanish captions, essentially conveying two different messages to anyone who understands both.

When Ramos asked McCain if he thinks immigration reform is possible this year, McCain responded that he “didn’t know,” but that he will not support any legislation that does not contain a legal guest worker program.

Via The Goldfarb’s maladroitly titled post, Bill Sweetman lists seven “memes that killed the F-22“, including:

Meme number 1: The F-22 hasn’t been used in Afghanistan or Iraq. In itself this is a statement of the obvious. What makes it a meme is the corollary that the F-22 is militarily irrelevant. However, there are many capabilities that haven’t been used in those theaters — submarines, for instance — but nobody seems to panic as we keep spending money on those.

Well, in the event that the Navy comes asking for a brand new set of fantastically expensive invisible submarines that to do nothing more than run up the U.S.’s already considerable military advantage while having no application to the actual wars we are currently fighting, we might consider panicking. Or at the very least releasing a report saying it’s a bad idea.

Sweetman concludes that “whether you think it was smart or not to kill the F-22, the public argument has been dominated by assumptions that are, at best, unproven.” That may be true, but I would suggest that many if not most of those assumptions were on the pro-F-22 side, and at the end of the day the program was killed because no one could come up with a good enough argument for why we needed it.

Read the list for yourself, but I think that the seven memes, when taken together as they should be, actually form, Voltron-like, an impressively solid argument for killing the fighter.

Michelle Malkin appeared on Fox and Friends this morning promoting the hysterical claim that millions of “illegal lawbreakers, border jumpers, visa overstayers, and deportation fugitives” will be receiving health care because House Democrats decided to vote down an amendment to the health care bill proposed by Rep. Dean Heller (R-NV) that would have used immigration to drive yet another wedge into the volatile health care debate:

MALKIN: The democrat leaders are vehemently denying that the Obamacare would cover illegal lawbreakers, border jumpers, visa overstayers, deportation fugitives, but I think their actions speak louder than words…Remember that Obama at the same time has parallel plans to grant amnesty. And what you’re really seeing is that universal health care is being used as a vehicle, as a means to achieve other ideological and partisan ends. And one of those ends is amnestizing the entire illegal alien population so they can be guaranteed democrat voters in the future.

Watch it:

While Malkin and others are paranoid that Democrats are working towards greater “ideological and partisan ends,” it’s members of the GOP who are using every trick in the book to derail the health care bill and smear immigration reform before it even hits the floor. The Heller Amendment would have required each and every individual to prove his or her public health insurance or credit eligibility using the Income and Eligibility Verification System (IEVS) and the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements (SAVE) programs. Dragging complex citizen verification systems from the immigration debate into health care reform and giving private insurance providers access to them would’ve forced Congress to address database errors, misuse, abuse and hammer out details on complaint and redress procedures, privacy protections, educational outreach, and increased funding.

Democrats are “vehemently denying” that America’s Affordable Health Choices Act of 2009 will cover undocumented immigrants because there’s specific language in the bill which excludes them. Secondly, though Malkin chooses to adamantly oppose comprehensive immigration reform and boil it down to “amnestizing,” the Obama administration and members of Congress have made clear that an electronic verification system and other enforcement measures must accompany any earned legalization program for undocumented immigrants.

Ultimately, the progressive’s “grand plan” involves an ambituous legislative agenda which seeks to remove barriers to quality health care and fix the broken immigration system through separate pieces of legislation because they are in fact two very different goals. The only thing that will actually “guarantee democrat voters” in the future is if the GOP continues to thwart progress on both issues in an effort to please its aging right-wing base.

Observing the tension between the U.S. and Israel over the issue of settlements over the last few months, and the debate here in the U.S. over the wisdom of Obama’s approach, a real point of division between the conservative pro-Israel community and the progressive pro-Israel community, in which I include myself, is that the former seem to believe that the U.S.-Israel special relationship, in addition to involving close economic, cultural and military ties, should also require the special privileging of Israeli national-historical claims over Palestinian claims.

The discord over Israeli settlements in East Jerusalem has revealed this divide pretty starkly. To state the obvious, Jerusalem is a hugely sensitive issue. Both Israelis and Palestinians have strong historical ties to the city, and both claim it as their capital. Many Israelis have memories of when Jews were denied access to their holy sites by the 1948-1967 Jordanian occupation, and understandably react strongly against any hint that the city might again be divided.

In this article in the Jewish Week describing how Netanyahu is appealing to the American Jewish community to oppose the U.S. pressure on Jerusalem settlements, the ADL’s Abe Foxman, while acknowledging that Obama’s approach is “not a departure, policy-wise,” said:

What troubles many in the Jewish community isn’t that the U.S. is raising the issue of settlements, but that it looks like Washington is negotiating with Israel on behalf of the Palestinians — and that part of that involves the central issue of Jerusalem. So in a way, it looks like the U.S. is basically predetermining final-status issues in those negotiations.

It’s pretty clear that Israel is actually the party who, by continuing to build up the Jewish presence in Jerusalem’s Arab neighborhoods while tightly constraining Arab growth, is trying to predetermine the final status of Jerusalem. The U.S. is simply asking Israel to stop this until Jerusalem’s status can be decided through negotiations — which has been U.S. policy since 1967, and is the reason why the U.S. Embassy remains in Tel Aviv. Foxman’s claim really doesn’t make much sense unless one is working from the assumption that treating Israeli and Palestinian claims equally is inherently unfair to Israel.

But, as President Obama made clear in his Cairo speech, he does treat Israeli and Palestinian claims equally. This was hugely significant, something that has been recognized in the Middle East far more than here in the U.S. By holding up Palestinian nationalism as co-equal with Israeli nationalism and treating Palestinians as deserving of statehood in their own right, not merely as some sort of consolation prize or as a secondary plot in a Jewish national redemption story, Obama became the first president to really explicitly recognize “two states for two peoples” as more than just a slogan.

As significant a shift as this was, though, it doesn’t necessarily means that the U.S.-Israel relationship must become weaker, or any less special, and I don’t think it should. If anything, that outcome would be a result of continuing Israeli intransigence on necessary steps toward two states, such as ceasing building on land it has previously committed to negotiating over. I do think, however, that President Obama could do a better job communicating this distinction to the American and Israeli people.

While it’s great that crazy man Ralph Peters is coming in for some public shaming over his atrocious suggestion that the Taliban could “save us a lot of legal hassles and legal bills” by simply executing their American captive, Pfc Bowe Berghdahl, it’s important to remember that Peters says ridiculous, offensive things like this all the time. It’s only getting attention now because he had the impressivley bad form to direct his fire at one of our troops.

During the the Maersk Alabama hostage crisis Peters advocated against “proportional” response, calling on the U.S. military to go after the extended families of those suspected of piracy:

Attack their harbors with land, sea and air power. Kill pirates, sink their vessels (including those dual-use fishing boats) and wreck their support infrastructure. The clans behind the pirates must feel sufficient pain to rein in their young thugs. The price for piracy should be stunning.

And we don’t need to stay to rebuild Somalia. End the fix-it fetish now. We need to leave while their boats are still burning down to the waterline.

During the Russia-Georgia conflict, Peters wrote:

The Russians, on whom I have wasted far too much of my life, are drink-sodden barbarians who occasionally puke up a genius.

During the 2007 Annapolis conference, Peters shared his view of the Palestinian people as vagrants:

In the end, the [Israeli-Palestinian] problem’s difficulty can be put in New York City terms: A shiftless, violent family that turned an apartment into a slum was evicted. The new tenants cleaned up the place and made the apartment a showcase. Now the former tenants hate them for it — and want the apartment back.

Frustrated by the Iraqi insurgency in 2006, Peters wrote “If we can’t leave a democracy behind we should at least leave the corpses of our enemies“:

The holier-than-thou response to this proposal is predictable: ‘We can’t kill our way out of this situation!’ Well, boo-hoo. Friendly persuasion and billions of dollars haven’t done the job. Give therapeutic violence a chance.

Aside from the standard conservative old man bigotry, when you read Peters’ past work it’s actually pretty amazing how many problems he believes can be solved simply through the use of collective punishment and indiscriminate killing.

Interestingly, on Tuesday Bill O’Reilly brought Peters on to his show to explain his comments, from which Peters refused to back down. You might remember that in 2002 O’Reilly picked a fight with rapper Ludacris, who O’Reilly accused of glamorizing a “life of guns, violence drugs and disrespect of women.” Peters, however, isn’t a rapper. He’s only a political columnist, TV commentator, and occasional presidential campaign adviser, so his celebration of mass violence isn’t as big a deal

Yesterday, three Republican congressmen continued spreading the poorly fabricated myth that “criminal illegal aliens” will be covered by America’s Affordable Health Choices Act of 2009, despite the fact that the bill excludes undocumented immigrants from receiving federal funds to buy health insurance from either a private or government plan.

Rep. Todd Akin (R-MO) and Rep. Paul Broun (R-GA) relied on fear and misinformation to garner opposition to both immigration and health care reform to essentially kill two birds with one stone:

AKIN: If before we had trouble with people coming here illegally, if we give them free health insurance and health coverage that’s going to make it more attractive for them to come. So if you don’t like illegal immigration, then you’re not going to like this bill either…

BROUN: We don’t know how many illegal aliens are here — they’re not immigrants — they’re aliens. They’ve committed crimes, so they’re criminals…they’re guilty of many law infractions. This health care plan, Obamacare, is going to give every single one of those illegal aliens health insurance at the cost of taxpayers.

Akin and Broun apparently overlooked the section of the House’s health care bill that reads:

“Nothing in this subtitle shall allow Federal payments for affordability credits on behalf of individuals who are not lawfully present in the United States.”

They also should’ve done some research before rattling on about immigration. The global economic recession has shown more than ever that the labor market, not health care, drives migration. Even if foreigners are under the false impression that undocumented immigrants in the US are receiving health care, in most cases it’s not going to be the reason they drop everything and leave.

Rep. John Fleming (R-LA) took a slightly less antagonistic approach:

AKIN: Is this bill going to give illegal immigrants health care?

FLEMING: About 10 million…that’s 10 million people who either should be here legally and then paying into the system and paying their way or they should go back home because they’re here illegally to begin with and that would not be a cost or a burden.

Though Fleming apparently didn’t coordinate with his colleague Rep. Steve King (R-IA) who put the number at 5.6 million yesterday, he provided a reasonable suggestion. That is, requiring all those in the country illegally to fix their status so that Republicans can stop using the immigration issue to drive a wedge through policy proposals they don’t like. Most undocumented immigrants actually do pay taxes, but maybe passing comprehensive immigration reform would force the “whacko wing” of the GOP to finally stop griping and grumbling about “illegal aliens” and start focusing on solving the issues at hand. Meanwhile, a policy designed to send 10 million undocumented immigrants “back home” would cost taxpayers at least $206 billion over five years, or $41.2 billion annually.

Watch it:

Secretary of State Clinton’s statement earlier today that the U.S. would consider extending a “defense umbrella” over the Middle East if Iran continues down the path toward developing a nuclear capability were met with unhappiness in Israel:

Dan Meridor, Israel’s minister for secret services, told Army Radio that the comments imply a willingness to reconcile with the eventuality of a nuclear-armed Iran.

“I heard, unenthusiastically, the Americans’ statement that they will defend their allies in the event that Iran arms itself with an atomic bomb, as if they have already reconciled with this possibility, and this is a mistake,” Meridor told Army Radio. “Now, we don’t need to deal with the assumption that Iran will attain nuclear weapons but to prevent this.”

Interesting that Meridor was upset by Clinton’s language, given that Israel’s entire Iran policy seems to be based around the idea of assuming, and preparing for, the worst. But there’s no reason to think that Clinton is changing policy here — she’s acknowledging the possibility of a bad outcome, and letting Iran, and U.S. allies, know that the U.S. prepared for that eventuality. Certainly, language and signaling matters in politics, especially in international politics, but it seems pretty silly to insist that U.S. government officials simply refrain from publicly addressing the possibility that Iran continues down it’s current uncooperative course.

The New York Times reports Clinton as saying “We want Iran to calculate what I think is a fair assessment that if the U.S. extends a defense umbrella over the region, if we do even more to support the military capacity of those in the Gulf, it’s unlikely that Iran will be any stronger or safer, because they won’t be able to intimidate and dominate, as they apparently believe they can, once they have a nuclear weapon.”

“[Iran] faces the prospect, if it pursues nuclear weapons, of sparking an arms race in the region,” Mrs. Clinton said. “That should affect the calculation of what Iran intends to do, and what it believes is in its national security interest.”

Clinton was making clear that, whatever benefits the Iranian regime hopes to realize from the development of a nuclear weapons capability, the United States is prepared to make sure the costs will be far higher.

Meanwhile, the offer of engagement remains on the table, and it can’t be stressed enough that President Obama’s outreach to the Middle East, and to Iran specifically, has been essential to making clear that it is not the U.S. that is the recalcitrant party, and making stark the choice that faces the Iranian government right now.

Rep. Steve King (R-IA) set off an alarm this morning, warning that the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimates indicate that 5,600,000 “illegal aliens” may be covered under “Obamacare.” King’s office didn’t do much number-crunching to come up with that big, scary figure. Instead, they relied on sheer inference to reach the nitwit conclusion that millions of undocumented immigrants will be covered by a health care bill that explicitly excludes them.

King’s primitive logic is as follows:

14.1 million “illegal aliens” will make up the 2019 non-Medicare population.

If America’s Affordable Health Choices Act is passed, 17 million U.S. residents will still be uninsured in 2019 — nearly half of whom would be undocumented immigrants.

That must mean that up to 8.5 million “illegal aliens” will not have health insurance by 2019.

14.1 million “illegal aliens” – 8.5 million uninsured “illegal aliens” = 5.6 million “illegal aliens” covered by America’s Affordable Health Choices Act of 2009

However, none of the figures that King cites — including the 5.6 million number that he uses to strike fear in xenophobic hearts — are included in the CBO’s infamous health care bill projections. The CBO’s analysis does not reference the undocumented population other than to point out that the percentage of the uninsured population increases if undocumented immigrants are included in its estimates. There is no reference as to how many undocumented immigrants would be covered by the proposed health care bill because the entire CBO analysis was essentially written under the assumption that undocumented immigrants will not be eligible.

In a press release distributed this morning, King warns:

“Taxpaying families, already weighed down by bailouts and massive spending bills, cannot afford to pay for health insurance for millions of illegal aliens. Hard and smart working Iowans should not be forced [typo included] pay for illegal aliens to obtain health benefits under any health care reform plan. It is wrong to reward law breakers. The American people are speaking loud and clear and saying, ‘No health care for illegal aliens.’”

Hard and smart working Iowans rest assured, there is explicit language in the bill exempting undocumented immigrants from its coverage. Sec. 242. of America’s Affordable Health Choices Act of 2009 explicitly states:

“For purposes of this division, the term ‘affordable credit eligible individual’ means, subject to subsection (b), an individual who is lawfully present in a State in the United States.”

And if there is still doubt in anyone’s mind, President Obama told Katie Couric last night that “Obamacare” should not include undocumented immigrants. Instead, Obama indicated that we need to pass comprehensive immigration reform so that the country doesn’t have an undocumented population to begin with. Watch it:

Around noon today, the Senate is expected to take up and vote on an amendment sponsored by Sen. John Thune (R-SD) to allow individuals “who have concealed carry permits from the State in which they reside to carry concealed firearms in another State that grants concealed carry permits.”

This amendment would, in effect, mean that states with the weakest laws will set the law for all other states. In so doing, it would strip each state’s power to enact its own public safety laws. For instance, 31 states currently prohibit “habitual drunkards” from carrying guns. The Thune amendment would render these provisions useless.

Thune has long claimed to be a supporter of “states’ rights”:

“Republican Rep. John Thune found himself in the minority last week when he voted against a five-year extension of a ban on Internet taxes. … ‘I think this is partly an attack on states’ rights.’” [AP, 5/13/00]

“Decisions about South Dakota values should be made by local and state officials – not federal bureaucrats,” Thune said. “My amendment will protect states’ rights and guarantee that Washington bureaucrats do not dictate our values.” [4/29/05]

But, as USA Today notes, Thune’s gun amendment — which is supported by the gun lobby — “shoots holes in state sovereignty.” When asked for comment by ThinkProgress, New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg provided us with this statement:

This legislation is impractical for communities and police departments across this country and tramples on states rights. Under current law in most states, if you have certain misdemeanor convictions, are an alcohol abuser, or haven’t completed a gun safety training program, you cannot carry a concealed weapon. This bill would effectively erase those rules. We can’t destroy the common sense safeguards states across the country have put in place. There has been no hearing on this Amendment, which has been tacked onto a defense appropriations bill. Laws should not be passed this way, and I am proud to stand with 450 mayors to try and put a stop to it.

50 mayors in Ohio are running an ad today urging Sen. George Voinovich (R-OH) to vote no. Eight North Carolina mayors are doing the same with Sen. Kay Hagan (D-NC). Cliff Schecter highlights some more Senators “whose minds need to be changed.”