This Saturday, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton will travel to Israel for her first official visit since Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government was sworn in. Her visit comes at a time when the Middle East peace dialogue appears to have stalled. Clinton “aims to push forward the discussions with Israel and the Palestinians about agreeing to a framework for negotiations.”

In an interview with ThinkProgress today, former British Prime Minister Tony Blair — who previously served as a Middle East envoy — said, “I just think the essential thing is to get the negotiations underway. You’ll never get the most optimal context. … It’ll never be perfect, so let’s get it going.” Blair also emphasized the need to show “real changes on the ground.”

Rather than embrace final-status negotiations for a two-state solution in the Middle East, Netanyahu has recently suggested the idea of forging an “economic peace” with Palestinians. Blair told us this idea isn’t practical because economic issues must be coupled with political progress:

You’ve got to have the political and the economic and the security. But however, having said that, the economics — provided it’s not separated out from the politics or the security — the economics can play a part. The West Bank economy at the moment is growing pretty strongly. … So it’s not all bad news, but you need the political context.

Watch it:

The Wonk Room’s Pat Garofalo asked Blair about the UK experience with community schools. Blair, who was at the Center for American Progress today to discuss how to improve student outcomes, emphasized that the longer hours and valuable services provided by community schools could mean they are “the wave of the future.”

Doug Hoffman, the Conservative Party candidate for New York’s traditionally Republican 23rd District, has just won the right-wing support of the Minuteman Political Action Committee — the political action arm of a “nativist extremist” armed vigilante group. The Minuteman PAC is currently running Independent Expenditure radio spots and predicts that Hoffman is “positioned to win a landslide victory” over Republican Party nominee Dede Scozzafava.

The Minuteman PAC’s Hoffman ad claims Scozzafava and Democratic candidate Bill Owens are tied directly to “the left-wing social agenda”:

You already know about ACORN — the corrupt organization scamming your tax dollars to promote a radical left agenda. And you’ve seen videos where Acorn officials offer to help a teenage prostitution ring involving illegal aliens. Now blogger Michele Malkin exposes yet another Acorn scandal: subsidized mortgages for illegal aliens. Acorn must be stopped, but how?

Two candidates for Congress, Dede Scozzafava and Bill Owens, are tied directly to Acorn and their far left-wing socialist agenda. That’s why voters all over Central New York and the North country are backing Doug Hoffman for Congress. Doug Hoffman is a CPA — a solid conservative and the only candidate for Congress opposed to amnesty and government handouts for illegal aliens. And only Hoffman will stand up to Acorn and the liberals. The choice is clear: Doug Hoffman for Congress — the wake-up call politicians in both parties need now.

Listen here:

The Minuteman PAC proclaims that it’s “THE ONE Political Action Committee that the open-borders, pro-amnesty lobby fears most,” but has been widely criticized for hoarding money and spending only a small fraction of its funds on political candidates.

However, Hoffman’s website indicates that he’s actually opposed to putting up a wall to “stop all immigration.” “The answer is to create an easier path for immigrants to enter the United States – and to work here,” says his immigration platform. Agriculture is one of central New York’s main industries and many farmers depend on migrant labor. The New York Farm Bureau has expressed “deep disappointment” in “the failure of Congress…to come up with an immigration reform measure that addresses the pressing labor needs of agriculture in New York and across the nation.”

Cross-posted at Think Progress.

Today the House Committee on Foreign Affairs is marking up H.R. 2194, the Iran Refined Petroleum Sanctions Act of 2009. Rep. Steny Hoyer has “committed to moving the bill quickly to a vote once it is passed out of the committee.”

The American Enterprise Institute’s Iran Tracker website looked at the potential impact of the gas sanctions, and concluded that “the imposition of sanctions might generate no significant change in Iranian policy in the short term.” It also notes that “the group that should be the target of strengthened sanctions, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), is least likely to be affected”:

Some analysts have argued that the IRGC actually benefits from a more economically isolated Iran because it no longer has to compete with foreign companies for government contracts. For example, one of the main engineering companies under IRGC control, Khatam al-Anbiya, has secured at least $7 billion in government oil, gas, and transportation contracts. Although IRGC companies do not always have the necessary technical expertise for some projects, they still generate revenue by acting as an intermediary between the government and international companies. IRGC members may continue to receive government contracts and subsidy money even if the government adjusted domestic economic policies.

So even the high church of U.S. aggression recognizes that not only would gas sanctions likely not have any effect on Iran’s nuclear policy, they could also end up empowering the very faction whose increased control over Iranian policy has resulted in Iran more aggressively pursuing its nuclear program. And that’s the upside. The downside is that the U.S. Congress moving forward with unilateral sanctions — with all the inevitable hawkish posturing that that entails — at an especially sensitive juncture in negotiations will provide opponents of a deal within the Iranian regime with precisely the demonstration of American bad faith — and thus a convenient excuse to walk away — that they’re looking for.