The Washington Post Company

According to a heavily embargoed press release from The Washington Post Company's reps, the company has acquired Foreign Policy, the magazine and Web site formerly owned by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

FP will become part of The Slate Group, which recently launched The Big Money, a business site.

Why this news is embargoed until approximately 3 P.M., we have no idea, but the release is after the jump.  read more »

Spinoffs are well known in television. Sometimes they work: The Jeffersons spun off from All in the Family and ran for 10 years. Sometimes they don't: Look at Joey. (You didn't while it was on.) Slate, the Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive's wonky, contrarian Web site of politics and pop culture, isn't a sitcom—if it were, Christopher Hitchens would surely be Archie Bunker—but it's launching a spinoff of its own today with The Big Money, a business site.

This is the first new site from The Slate Group, which was created in June and is overseen by Jacob Weisberg, the former editor of Slate. It encompasses the flagship site (which, amazingly, is on its second owner, third editor, and fourth presidential election since it was founded by Michael Kinsley for Microsoft in 1996), the video site  read more »

On Wednesday morning at 11 a.m., Arthur Sulzberger and Janet Robinson will be managing a conference call that, from the looks of it, won't be much fun.
 
They'll be reporting The New York Times Company's second-quarter earnings. Last time they did one of quarterly earnings calls, The Times reported big losses; there was a plan to cut 100 newsroom jobs, some through straight-up layoffs rather than superannuation and retirement deals.
 
And in the past few weeks, it's only gotten worse: the company's stock has fallen to a decade low, and tumbled more than 15 percent in just this month.  read more »

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This holiday weekend will be bittersweet for 100 Washington Post employees: They've each accepted buyouts in order to reduce the newsroom by 10 percent, according to Frank Ahrens of The Washington Post.

After the jump, a partial list of departing staffers, according to Aherns:  read more »

And here's that Susan Glasser update we promised. Adding to Michael Calderone's Politico report that The Washington Post's Assistant Managing Editor Susan Glasser had been let go, The New York Times' David Stout confirms that she was removed "because of poor morale among her subordinates." (In an update to his original item, Calderone wrote, "Glasser’s bedside manner was a problem" and that some Posties "appeared joyous at the news" of her departure.)

In a repeatedly updated post on Mediabistro's FishbowlDC, Patrick W. Gavin gives a timeline of Glasser's career at The Post, while in a blog post on his paper's site, City Paper's Eric Wemple has promised he will be "aggressively updating this story" as it continues.

Politico's Michael Calderone is reporting that Washington Post Assistant Managing Editor Susan Glasser is being replaced by Rajiv Chandrasekaran.

According to a 'Dept. of Media' column by Eric Wemple in The Washington City Paper from July 18, 2007, "Ever since [her hiring], Glasser’s boss can’t stop talking about her vision. 'Susan is one of our most talented and visionary journalists,' said Executive Editor Leonard Downie Jr. at the time. In a recent interview, he said, 'Susan has a strong vision and that is one of the reasons she got this job, and I’m pleased to see that she’s carrying it out.'"  read more »

A reader emails to say that the Daily Show is filming a segment right now with City Councilman Leroy Comrie about his resolution against the N-word.

The segment is expected to air tomorrow.

-- Azi Paybarah

Hillary Clinton said that under her presidency, redeployed troops remaining in Iraq would not stop sectarian violence even if it turned into ethnic cleansing.

Hillary is looking for more support among black women.

Andrew Kirtzman takes a long look at Rudy Giuliani in the Washington Post.

Giuliani defended his law firm's connection to the oil company controlled by Hugo Chavez.

Barack Obama's roots in Hawaii are explored.

Obama and Al Sharpton chatted by phone and buried whatever hatchet might have existed.

Eliot Spitzer's argument against the hospital lobby could be a road map for his fight against the teachers union.

Several upstate county governments, which receive state aide, have hired Sheldon Silver's law firm.

The state has been tampering with the natural spring water in Saratoga Springs.

Rival studies give top honors to New York and London for financial competitiveness.

The Bloomberg administration is adjusting its strategy on homelessness.

Some legislative staffers in Albany are making six-figure salaries and have access to state-owned cars.

Union leaders in New Jersey say their contract negotiations are being undermined because the governor had a personal relationship with influential labor leader Carla Katz.

And New York's fanciest postal code is getting smaller.

-- Azi Paybarah

Rudy Giuliani seeks friendly audiences and doesn't get tough questions on the campaign trail, according to the New York Times.

He's more aggressive on the fund-raising trail, aiming for $10 million in the next six weeks.

Bill Clinton made about $40 million for paid speeches in the last six years, according to the Washington Post.

Eliot Spitzer said that health care unions running ads against him are opposed to changing the state's expensive health care system.

City officials will back away from their plan to cut 17 bus routes as part of a major school transportation overhaul.

Aides to Councilman-elect Mathieu Eugene of Brooklyn said he has a signed lease for an apartment in the district, and that he has repaid himself $30,000 he lent the campaign.

County Executive Tom Suozzi is exempt from a new policy in Nassau that lets only law enforcement personnel use lights and sirens en route to emergencies.

Anthony Weiner filed paperwork for a possible mayoral run in 2009.

And New Paltz Mayor Jason West is running for re-election, but without the slate of candidates he ran with in 2003.

-- Azi Paybarah

If Eliot Spitzer's plan to flip control of the state Senate to the Democrats works, landlords should beware.

Mike Bloomberg was "curt, testy and defensive" when speaking with reporters yesterday about the snow, according to the Times.

The Daily News editorial board said the mayor can "redeem" himself by throwing out parking tickets.

Christine Quinn's call for education reform and a $300 rebate for renters in a speech yesterday sounded like "a blueprint for a potential mayoral campaign".

City Comptroller Bill Thompson switched his position on a plan for schools to use Randalls Island Park after making an agreement with Deputy Mayor Ed Skyler, reports Juan Gonzalez.

City cops can't videotape people at public gatherings anymore, says a federal judge.

Chuck Schumer wants to block the $1.3 billion sale of Starret City in Brooklyn.

Rudy Giuliani will speak at a school founded by the conservative Rev. Pat Roberts.

The Post editorial board said Hillary's hiring of a consulting firm associated with a politician who later endorsed her was "odiferous, but legal."

And in a Washington Post op-ed, writer Marjorie Valbrun asks, "If American blacks can view black South Africans thousands of miles away as brothers in need of their support, why are they having such a hard time seeing Obama as one of their own?"

-- Azi Paybarah

In her 1997 autobiography, the late Katharine Graham of the Washington Post described her father as an assimilating Jew who didn't talk about his Jewishness to his Episcopal-church-going children. He was "involved in Jewish charities, causes, and international issues.

"He was not a Zionist, however, believing strongly that he was an American citizen first and foremost."

That's odd. Her father, the financier Eugene I. Meyer Jr., who bought the Washington Post in the 1930s, is a figure in Zionist history. Behind the scenes, Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis turned to Meyer again and again for money to support the Jewish settlement in Palestine. Meyer met with Brandeis's Zionist klatches, personally lobbied his friend FDR on their account, and agreed to head the University Zionist society—an organization to build support among Jews on campus (per Brandeis's letters, edited by Melvin Urofsky and David W. Levy, and Peter Grose's Israel in the Mind of America).

So was Katharine Graham lying about her father?

Well, no. Despite Meyer's support, even Brandeis conceded late in life that "his heart was never in Zionism and he did this largely on my account." So Meyer was merely tithing—to something he didn't believe in. This speaks to an interesting feature of the Israel lobby: It has long counted on support from assimilationist Jews who were lukewarm on the idea but went along under pressure from their nationalist Jewish friends.

Consider Meyer's counterpart at the NYT: former publisher Arthur Hays Sulzberger. When Sulzberger died in 1968, the Times obit was emphatic about his views. "[Jewishness] was to him a religion, not a nationality. He did not believe Jews to be a race or a people, and, like Mr. Ochs [his father-in-law], was deeply opposed to the Zionism movement..."

Deeply opposed. Successful assimilating German Jews like Sulzberger and Meyer loved America. They were becoming big deals in the land of opportunity, they didn't quite see the point of Zionism—though they knew that Eastern European Jews who had fled pogroms were excited by it.

Sulzberger flirted with public declarations of his anti-Zionism. According to Thomas Kolsky's splendid history, Jews Against Zionism, in the 1940s, Sulzberger helped draft the mission statement of the anti-Zionist Jewish organization, the American Council for Judaism—which opposed "all philosophies that stress the racialism, the nationalism and the homelessness of the Jews, as injurious to their interests." Wow.

But in the end Sulzberger dithered and didn't sign on publicly. He wanted to, he told the Reform rabbis who headed the group. But till it got a big following, he just couldn't do so. It would hurt the integrity of the newspaper. Chicken.

Besides, the nascent Israel lobby was already on the Times' case, accusing it of being "a transmission belt for anti-Zionist propaganda." This ticked Sulzberger off. He said the viciousness of the Zionists' attacks were a big reason he had converted to anti-Zionism!

What is my point? Here are two powerful Jews, one a non-Zionist, the other anti-, controlling two of the most important newspapers, and both are afraid to express their views. Some may call that professionalism, I call it abdication: they were holding back on a central issue of the time. The publishers of the New Republic and the New York Sun and Commentary would never cheat their readers of their views of Israel, that's their raison d'etre.

Why didn't these men express their views? I think they were ashamed of their assimilation. And they were outplayed by the nationalists in their community. Kolsky says that the Zionists beat the anti-Zionists not on the issues, but by outsmarting them. They put them on the defensive by saying they were unrepresentative or "self-hating." They allowed them to piously play by the rules—no lobbying! the anti-Zionists declared— while the Zionists were working the White House. Give them credit. Today the Israel lobby works the cloakrooms and paints anyone who criticizes the intimacy of the U.S.-Israel relationship as an anti-Semite; and liberal Jews sigh and walk away.

Lately Richard Cohen of the Washington Post admitted regretfully that the creation of Israel was a "mistake." Sixty years ago a group of Reform anti-Zionist Jews were saying just that: that a Jewish state was an anachronism, it would result in endless violence in the Middle East, and would require support from Jews here, which would make those Jews confused about their allegiance. The two publishers evidently shared many of these views but couldn't take a stand.

So what was the position of liberal assimilating Jews in the Zionist movement? Just what Stokely Carmichael said the position of women was in the black power movement: prone.

As you may have heard, Joe Bruno held a press conference yesterday afternoon to announce he was under investigation by the F.B.I. Bruno said he made the disclosure after learning that reporters had discovered the existence of the probe.

The Post's Fred Dicker says he was digging around Bruno's consulting firm, Capital Business Consultants.

The Daily News says it's all about his relationship to businessman Jared Abbruzzese.

Flashback: The Times had an investigative piece on Bruno's relationship to Abbruzzese, who is bidding for a contract to operate the state's horse racing tracks, on Saturday.

The investigation "doesn't come as a shock," says the Post editorial page, more in sorrow than in anger.

Bruno's business dealings "demand a close look by Cuomo," says the News' editorial page, more in anger than in sorrow.

The old gang--Peter Powers, Randy Mastro, Howard Safir, Andrew Eristoff--all turned out for Rudy's $2,100-a-plate fundraiser at the Mariott Marquis in Times Square.

Not coincidentally, John McCain released a list of 57 important New York supporters.

Newsday says the turnout for Rudy's event "appeared to fall short" of what was neccessary to raise $1 million.

The Washington Post warns that conservatives and "activists in key primary states are skeptical" about a Rudy run.

Mayor Bloomberg is casting doubt on the city's ability to raise the funds neccessary to host the 2008 Democratic Convention.

Republican Virginia Gov. Jim Gilmore is considering a run for president.

Rahm Emmanuel's successor at the DCCC will be Maryland Rep. Chris Van Hollen.

The Albany DA confirms he is negotiating a plea deal with Alan Hevesi.

"He can either go to Florida or go to Attica," a "high-ranking Democrat" tells the News.

Sheldon Silver is poised to approve the Atlantic Yards project, the Post reports.

Eliot Spitzer isn't getting his first choice to be health commissioner.

Ellis Henican says it's time for Peter Kalikow and the MTA to take over the Long Island Railroad.

--Andrew Rice

Tom Ricks of the Washington Post is ticked that I said he is on "the left" (in my last item re Obama). He wrote me a note, here's the exchange:

TR: Describing Iraq as a Hobbesian state worse than a civil war makes one a leftist? That would be a surprise to the Army major in Baghdad who first used the term in a discussion with me. Under your definition, the Defense Intelligence Agency is a leftist organization. Cheers...

PW: Nice appearance. Yep, I made the assumption which I make of most mainstream reporters, esp ones that write about Fiascos in Iraq, that they're on the left. Certainly that was the function Meet the Press assigned to you: to represent the left. If I'm wrong, I'm happy to run your response... Also: can I score your book from someone?

TR: Here's my response: "It's a rookie mistake to assume things, especially when you can check them out. It must be a real luxury to be able to make things up. If you had read my book, you'd know it isn't a book of my opinion, but instead is based on hundreds of interviews and a review of 37,000 pages of documents." You can get the book at the bookstore.

The only thing I want to retract is describing my judgment of Ricks's politics as an "assumption" (putting it in the same category as his false assumption I'm a newby). It was a characterization, and I stand by it.

1, Meet the Press assembled a roundtable of four: two neocons, a centrist (CFR's Richard Haass), and a lib/left voice: Ricks. It's too bad that Anatol Lieven or Dan Swanson, someone truly on the left, isn't at the table, but that's just the way the American cookie crumbles now. The Washington Post is a liberal publication. 2, I mentioned Ricks last summer when he made the brave comment on Howard Kurtz's show that the Israeli generals were leaving some Hezbollah rockets intact so that the civilian-deaths wouldn't just pile up on one side, Lebanon. Brave, because Ricks, who as I recall based his statement on informed speculation at the Pentagon, was thereby defying an iron law of the conventional wisdom: Israel is fighting for its existence, not to maintain the perception that it's David to an Arab Goliath. The Israel lobby went crazy, and Ricks and the Post backed down, alas (with Ricks saying drily that he was going to go back to a noncontentious issue: Iraq). But let's be clear: Ricks's willingness to question Israeli motives places him firmly where Russert put him, on the left side of the discourse. 3, Ricks's claim that the Pentagon's DIA is neutral shows how little he understands of the ideological matrix in which we work. As I've said many times on this blog, with the elites signing off on the Iraq calamity, from the New Yorker magazine to Hillary Clinton, the military is our best hope as the braintrust of the antiwar movement. Cindy Sheehan isn't far removed from the colonels who are talking to Seymour Hersh, and probably to Ricks, too. Last spring, West Point hosted Noam Chomsky, the Naval War College hosted Walt and Mearsheimer (when these important intellectuals are in mainstream purdah). The guys in uniform who are being called upon to make the only real sacrifice here are also the ones looking for real ideas (like, Talking to Syria). Navy Secretary Winter is pushing for a "hearts and minds" battle with Islam, not a hot war.

I understand why Ricks is ticked. He's a soi-disant professional and doesn't want to be ideologically punched. It might damage his credibility. Not in my book. When Ricks said on Meet the Press that the Iraq war was "probably...the most profligate and worst decision in the history of American foreign policy," he was a brave speaker of truth, and also mirroring the military's best judgment, which is now on the left of the discourse. The good minds in the defense establishment occupy the same position as State Department Arabists do when the political parties and the executive sign off on illegal Israeli settlements. Tom Ricks can't cop to this. His problem, not mine.

The Iraq Study Group report has freed the left to describe Iraq in a new way, as worse than a civil war. On Meet the Press, Tom Ricks of the Washington Post said:

Right now it's...the pure Hobbesian state, the war of all against all at this point. It isn't a--it's worse than a civil war in many ways. It's in a state of meltdown. The country is falling apart.

Yesterday at CAIR, Imad Moustapha, the Syrian Ambassador to the U.S., said the situation in Iraq was moving from "disastrous to catastrophic" and appealed for Americans to work with Iraq's neighbors simply to end the suffering. His theme was similar to a forum on Monday at Congress, to air the Lancet study on 600,000 deaths in Iraq (led by presidential aspirant Dennis Kucinich.) Epidemiologist Les Roberts lost his composure as he described the degree of suffering in Iraq, the number of families affected. Then Roberts spoke in spiritual terms. What is needed before anything, he said, is a full accounting of the losses brought on by this visionary war, a public acknowledgement followed by acts of American "contrition."

Roberts is going to be waiting a long long time for that. It's not the American way to apologize. Ask the Tuskegee airmen. Ask Leo Frank.

The Obama boom is the American way of turning the corner. The hero-worship Barack Obama experienced in N.H. and the endless references to JFK are, as the senator said, not about him, they're about us. It's a spiritual reclamation.

Americans like to think of themselves as idealists, yet our country has been dragged in the moral mud for years by this filthy war. The neocons can talk forever about the necessity to knock off Middle East heads of state as a sniper takes out a hostage-taker (Perle & Frum); but Americans don't like to think of themselves as the authors of assassination, devastation, disease, emigration, etc. They want to think of the world in more hopeful ways. That's what Obama is all about, reimagining the U.S. as a country that embraces progress and idealism. More power to him.

Jimmy Carter's use of the word "apartheid" in the title of his new book has generated a lot of controversy—the Washington Post reporting that a Middle East scholar has angrily resigned his affiliation with the Carter Center over Carter's book. The Democratic Party has of course banished Carter over the word, and, inevitably, Dershowitz has castigated the gentlemanly old prez.

The word is obviously loaded, as it echoes the South African regime that oppressed blacks, denying them many rights. Apartheid literally means separateness; and it's worth pointing out that the Israelis themselves call their forbidding wall, which goes well east of the Green Line, sometimes encircling Palestinian villages, a "separation fence." More importantly, if you've visited the Occupied Territories, apartheid seems a fair description of the isolation and abuse the Palestinians experience, and the denial of so many rights, including the freedom to move about, the freedom to seek employment. In this interview on Youtube, you can watch Avichai Sharon of Breaking the Silence describe how as an IDF soldier he used to confiscate Palestinians' cars for minor infractions and seize their keys and never return them, simply forget about them. There was a box of keys at his headquarters; no one had bothered to give them back. Jimmy Carter and a South African church leaderI met in Hebron both say that the Israeli treatment of Palestinians is in some ways "worse" than apartheid.

Apartheid is now a general term (with of course a South African shadow). According to the U.N.'s description, it means denying a subject group of different ethnicity "basic human rights and freedoms, including the right to work, the right to form recognised trade unions, the right to education, the right to leave and to return to their country, the right to a nationality, the right to freedom of movement and residence, the right to freedom of opinion and expression, and the right to freedom of peaceful assembly and association."

The journalists who are now piping the Israel lobby's objections should visit the Occupied Territories and report for themselves on the real conditions of the Palestinians.

Eliot Spitzer has a house upstate.

The Assembly has a list of its pet projects.

The state nurses' union doesn't like the Berger Commission's recommendations.

Elizabeth Dole said the Senate Republican Campaign Committee is under "an avalanche of debt."

Rudy could benefit if California and Florida move up their GOP primaries to the first Tuesday in February, says the Giuliani Blog.

Greg Sargent wants to know whether Washington Post reporters and editors are officially allowed to call Iraq a civil war.

Adolfo Carrion is the city's only Rodel Fellow from the Aspen Institute.

Mike Bloomberg met quietly with the family of shooting victim Sean Bell.

And above is Adam Green.

-- Azi Paybarah

Allbritton Communications, which owns seven ABC affiliates, including WJLA-TV in Washington, D.C., n  read more »

Allbritton Communications, which owns seven ABC affiliates, including WJLA-TV in Washington, D.C., n  read more »

• EMI Music moving to Chelsea Market.
[NY Post]
• Old Mustard Company sells in Brooklyn.
[NY Post]
• City debuts Lower East Side, East Village height caps.
[NY Post]
• More bones found at Ground Zero.
[NY Post]
• Record Wall Street bonuses coming.
[NY Times]
• Number of unsold homes soaring in Phoenix.
[NY Times]
• WTC Memorial Museum opening delayed.
[Daily News]
• Waldorf-Astoria rash spurs evacuation.
[Daily News]
• Giving away City Island's lighthouse.
[Daily News]
• Four Seasons Hotels going private.
[NY Sun]
• 1540 Broadway signs first tenants.
[GlobeSt]
• CB Richard Ellis joins S&P 500 this week.
[CPN]
• Greenspan: Home sales, prices to keep sliding.
[Washington Post]

Did we miss any New York City real estate news this morning? Please send along tips and links.

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John Kerry's statement about education and military service may be a political liability to the power-lusting Dems, but journalists (most of whom vote Democratic) aren't politicians, they're the busy bees of the information age, and they should perform their jobs now: Is Kerry's statement true?

I bet it is. I am sure (without data; I see this feelingly) that the kids who are serving in Iraq are not nearly as well educated as, say, the kids who are getting internships at media companies that served the Koolaid on WMD, or serving as pages to closeted gay Republican congressmen.

It's an economic draft, stupid.

Bravo John Kerry, for exposing the terrible hypocrisy of the Iraq war: the journos and thinktankers and pols who banged the drum were never at risk, and neither are their kids. Because they didn't fall off the back of the meritocracy bus. Do I hear some resentment? Yes. Jim Fallows established his reputation with a famous piece called Where Were You In the Class War, Daddy? about the class divide between those who served in Vietnam and those who protested the war in the safe streets of America. The piece appeared in the Washington Monthly, published by Charlie Peters, the former Peace Corps exec who has long called for mandatory national service. The class divide is (I bet) even wider today; including in the officer corps, where Ivy grads are (another wild wager on my part) far less likely to be found on the Tigris than their predecessors were to be found on the banks of the Mekong. E.g., John Kerry and Donald E. Graham, publisher of the Washington Post, who for whatever stupid, noble, democratic, or ambitious reason, served in that disastrous war.

Maybe we can't have the conversation for another week, while John Kerry is held in a safe house inside the green zone in D.C., but let's have it out. What's Charlie Rangel saying? Help my man out!

Soldier, the new bio of Colin Powell by Karen DeYoung of the Washington Post, includes some incisive comments about the neoconservatives' concern for Israel's interests. Per the LA Times review:

According to the author, the then-secretary went out of his way to identify the pro-war neoconservatives as affiliates of the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs, a think-tank with decidedly hard-line views on Israel's security. "Powell referred to Rumsfeld's team as the 'JINSA crowd.' " Later in "Soldier," readers are told that the neoconservatives in the Defense Department -- nearly all of them Jews -- supported war against Iraq as the first step to replacing Arab despots with democratic governments that would sever their ties to the Palestinians, thereby enhancing Israel's security. In explaining why he did not resign over his profound differences with the White House, Powell cited the example of Gen. George C. Marshall, who refused to quit as secretary of State even though he opposed President Truman's recognition of Israel as a quest for "Jewish votes."

The LAT's reviewer, Tim Rutten, dismisses this thinking as a "blot," the old "dual-loyalty" charge. Yes, this is how we are chided again and again, that it's wrong and antisemitic to even raise the question. Yet the evidence won't go away: that the Iraq war plans were pushed by people who opposed the Oslo peace process and dismissed the Palestinians' grievances as baseless, who saw the way to peace in Jerusalem going through Baghdad. These delusions need to be exposed, and as Tony Judt has said, just because bigots and antisemites have made similar types of charges about neoconservative influence should not stop serious people from reckoning with facts.

Even as the Washington Post continues its effort to blackball Walt and Mearsheimer as antisemites, how interesting that their ideas gain wider and wider circulation. Later this month the giant issue they raised, the Israel lobby, will be the subject of a debate, sponsored by the London Review of Books, in the great hall at Cooper Union in New York on Sept. 28.

Something else about this debate is the roster. On one side are the inevitable Dennis Ross and Martin Indyk. Joined now by Shlomo Ben-Ami, former Israeli foreign minister, who in his fine new book on the Arab-Israeli "tragedy" acknowledges the Zionists' "expulsions and atrocities" that resulted in ethnic cleansing of 700,000 Palestinians in 1948.

On the other side John Mearsheimer is joined now by the eloquent Rashid Khalidi and the redoubtable Tony Judt, who in a brilliant piece in Haaretz last spring described Israel as an indulged adolescent that refuses to grow up. (Though, witness Haaretz, the discourse on these issues in Israel is at a much higher level than ours). Expect the Walt-Mearsheimer thesis to be textured and expanded by the addition of an Arab and a Jew. To gain the psychological and geographical dimension that the authors, realist political scientists, were not able to supply. Their achievement in breaking the seal last March will only be magnified in this way. An event not to be missed!

On the eve of the five year anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks, William Dobson of Foreign Policy magazine has a front-page article [subscription only], saying that, in some sense, we are back to Sept. 10, 2001.

"If you were in either of the two cities that were attacked on September 1, you might have picked up a copy of one of the daily newspaper. The headline of one story in the Washington Post read, "Israeli Tanks Encircle a City in West Bank." The front page of the New York Times led with a story headlined, "Scientists Urge Bigger Supply of Stem Cells." Inside the appear, readers might have also noticed a small item that read, "Iran: Denial on Nuclear Weapons." The headlines on that morning - before the world learned of the attacks - suggest that our pre-9/11 preoccupations are certainly not that different from those we carry today."

I'm guessing that Rudy Giuliani, at least, disagrees.

-- Azi Paybarah

I've heard from several journalist-friends who were appalled by Dana Milbank's smear of Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer in Tuesday's Washington Post, in which he likened the scholars to Nazis. So: the mud has splashed back on to Milbank. That said, two "points" Milbank made deserve further rebuttal.

1. Milbank says he overheard Walt saying after his talk at the Council on American-Islamic Relations that if you take a position against Israel, your business will suffer. Wrong. Walt is no businessman, he's a student of policy, and what he said is that if you talk about this stuff, your academic/professional career suffers. (It's the same point he made several weeks back on the Diane Rehm show and that I blogged about then.) Many colleagues have said to Walt, "You're never going to work in Washington." He adds, "I find it interesting that that is so frequently the reaction, that this has made us compete pariahs. Quite remarkable." Yes, and Milbank is now running around collecting wood to burn the heretics in Lafayette Park. 2. Milbank hinted that Walt and Mearsheimer are Nazis because their names sound German. I emailed Walt to ask him about two things I'd heard (and never thought worth writing about before) —he's of Danish ancestry, his wife is Jewish. Walt wrote back to amend those reports:

I am 1/4 Danish, insofar as my maternal grandfather was an immigrant from Denmark, who arrived here as a very small boy. His mother was a widow, and she died shortly after they emigrated here. He was subsequently adopted by an American family, although he still spoke a bit of Danish as an adult. The rest of my ethnic background--if it matters-- is some mix of English, German, French, and I think a bit of Swedish.

My wife's background is a bit more complicated. She comes from Russian and Rumanian Jews on her father's side, and Episcopalians and Catholics on her mother's side. (Interestingly, her maternal grandfather worked in the 1930s helping German Jews escape Nazi Germany.) She grew up in New York City, in what might be loosely termed a culturally Jewish extended family, and there's been lots of inter-marriage throughout. She was not raised in any particular faith.

As you might imagine, I find this whole type of discussion disheartening. Our country shouldn't be debating important issues by focusing on people's individual characteristics and backgrounds. That is what racists and anti-semites do: they look at someone's heritage and claim to know what they think, what they believe, and how they will act. Instead of focusing on our arguments and evidence, people want to look for some hidden motivation.

Walt's note is interesting on a couple of grounds. For one thing, it underscores the scholar's largeness of mind. Walt is no provincial. He is a sophisticated guy, his resume is Mandarin through and through: Stanford-Princeton-Harvard. He was a dean at Harvard; he is, or he was, going places. Yet he put everything on the line because of an idea. Impressive.

His note also echoes something he said at CAIR when discussing the dual-loyalty charge some lodge against Jewish neocons: "All of us have many affiliations and commitments—to religion, families, even employers. It is OK for those different commitments and attachments to manifest themselves in politics." Walt went on to say that when those attachments shape how people think about things, it's OK to bring them up in political debate. I liked the way he said this. It got us past the whole rancorous dual-loyalty issue.

My critics are going to say, Weiss, ala Milbank, opened the door on this stuff by discussing Jewish tribal affiliations so bluntly. It's true, I opened the door, and I'll open it again (hopefully with accuracy). The point is, these affiliations have real meaning in our lives—but important ideas transcend them.

Political Arithmetik looks at poll numbers since British officials foiled the airline terror plot and finds not much has changed.

"In polls taken since the British terror plot against airlines, five of the seven polls have shown a reduced Democratic advantage...Interestingly, the post-plot polling does not show any evidence for an upturn in overall presidential approval."

Although Democrats gained ground in a number of Senate races, Republicans are on pace to retain their majority, according to Zogby poll numbers on WSJ.

Greg Sargent catches a Washington Post reporter wondering how exactly to cover people who constantly lie to him.

The Ethics Commission reports that there is no problem with the state attorney general sitting on the board of his family's trust fund.

A professor at Fordham thinks blacks in Brooklyn's 11th have to learn to vote strategically.

The Integrity Party hands in their petitions to the Suffolk Board of Elections.  read more »

And, as you can see from the picture above, Fernando Ferrer is back, and endorsing Hiram Monserrate.

-- Azi Paybarah

As Connecticut Democrats went to their polling places to choose a Senate nominee, waves of rhetorica  read more »

The new web journal, The Democratic Strategist, has an interesting, data-generated take on Hillary Clinton's electibility, the subject of an editorial written this week in the Washington Post by her pollster, Mark Penn, and James Carville.

Their take is basically that her fate lies with the independents, and that she is electable, if not a clear cut favorite in a general election.

"what really matters for the electability question is how independents view her. According to a recent ABC/Washington Post poll, 48 percent of indies have a favorable opinion of her, while 46 percent view her unfavorably. (The rest are unsure.) This is remarkably close to John Kerry's 49-48 margin among independents in the 2004 election. So an initial conclusion is that with Clinton heading the Democratic ticket, we will be dealing with another nail-biter in 2008. (Of course, much depends on the Republican ticket.)

On the other hand, Clinton's favorability among Republicans - 26 percent - is significantly larger than Kerry's performance among Republicans (a whopping 6 percent). Presumably she would end up getting substantially less than a quarter of the Republican vote in 2008, but it may be that she can attract enough Republican women to improve on Kerry's performance."

- Jason Horowitz

Two weeks back, Paul Krugman got off a brilliant stroke in the Times, when he cited that "peculiar rule, which still prevails in Washington, that you have to have been wrong about Iraq to be considered credible on national security."

The examples of this are legion. The author Peter Beinart, for instance, putting himself forth as an advocate for the use of force overseas after admitting, I got it wrong on Iraq. Sort of like a kid asking for matches after he burned now the neighbor's house. Shouldn't these people have a little humility? Does the suffering unleashed in Iraq mean nothing to them? Or do they rationalize it, saying, Oh it was inevitable when Saddam fell. Do any of them have family members at risk in these adventures?

Yesterday the Washington Post gave a platform to Richard Perle, once again lecturing us about a third force in Iran, and the dangers of appeasement:

A few days ago, I spoke with Amir Abbas Fakhravar, an Iranian dissident student leader who escaped first from Tehran's notorious Evin prison, then, after months in hiding, from Iran. Fakhravar...wonders whether... the proponents of accommodation with Tehran will regard the struggle for freedom in Iran as an obstacle to their new diplomacy.

Wait a second, didn't he just do that with Chalabi?

Washington Post reported a U.S. Embassy cable

Newt Gingrich will wage a campaign for president in 2008 if there remains what he calls "a vacuum" of viable candidates on the Republican party into the fall of 2007, according to a story in today's Washington Post.

Apparently Gingrich belongs to the school that thinks Rudy Giuliani, who consistently beats him in temperature polls, is unelectable.

- Jason Horowitz

The Washington Post today follows up the Times frontpager on the Clinton marriage with a column by veteran political commentator David Broder, titled "The Shadow of a Marriage," in which Broder hints that Bill Clinton has a girlfriend. He does so in a passage that critiques the Times piece:

It touched only lightly on the former president's friendship with Canadian politician Belinda Stronach.

Then Broder says that the character of the Clinton marriage is the "elephant in the room" with Senator Clinton—and thus, fair game in the political process.

I genuinely wish the Clintons luck on this one. I'm never going to vote for Hillary (too much blood under the bridge). But aren't we sick of the prurience? And isn't there a freedom in their choices of which others are envious? Maybe we can all learn from their experience. Related posts: I Should Be Boiled in Oil; I Was Disingenuous; Hillary's Baggage: A Tale...; and Al Gore Is a Serious Person; Is Bill Clinton?

Two Presidents Do Not Make a Right   To the Editor:    read more »

The Democratic leadership has its talking points on gas prices; they are part of a pattern of Republican corruption. On Meet the Press yesterday, Nancy Pelosi said,

On the Republican side, you have what The Washington Post called a "criminal enterprise" operating out of the Republican leader's office. You have corruption, cronyism and incompetence which has cost--has a cost to the American people. Whether again, price at the pump, of, of price at the pharmacy, or of Katrina. This is--has an impact on the American people. It's a part of a system.

This is truly misguided. The high gas prices are simply the laws of supply and demand. We are gas-addicted, and gas is a declining resource. Now is the time to save us from

The New York State Democratic Party is taking John Sweeney, Tom Reynolds, Sue Kelly, Jim Walsh, and Randy Kuhl to task for voting for what they call a "weaker ethics bill," in the House yesterday.

The bill was passed 217-213, to the dismay of the Washington Post editorial board, who wrote this about it yesterday.

—Nicole Brydson

The same day that The Times reported on Mayor Bloomberg's stalwart defense of eminent domain, The Washington Post carried a tale of an architect who refused to sell a house he owned in the northwest quadrant of the nation's capital to office and condo developers. So what happened? Is the neighborhood still a "stretch of decrepit lots claimed by the homeless, vacant houses and prostitutes" like the Mayor believes that Times Square would be had the state not intervened?

No. In Washington (which, interestingly, set a Supreme Court precedent for eminent domain for private development ), the developers just developed around him.  read more »

What the owner, Austin Spriggs, may do with his property, though, may not be much different. He has applied for a Ledo Pizza franchise.

-Matthew Schuerman

The March fund-raising numbers are in for the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee and National Republican Congressional Committee, and the two committess are effectively neck-and-neck -- a first in recent history.

After trailing its Republican counterpart for a really ... long ... time, the DCCC, chaired by Illinois Congressman Rahm Emanuel, reports that it raised $9,160,832 and spent $2,447,259. It now has $23,018,449 in the bank -- just a million or so shy of NRCC's $24,488,775. The NRCC raked in $9,196,101 in March and shelled out $5,513,680.

But the situation isn't looking as rosy over at Howard Dean's Democratic National Committee, which reportedly has a humble $10 million in the party piggy bank compared to the Republican National Committee's $43 million. The Washington Post's Tom Edsall has the full rundown.

-- Lizzy Ratner

• In exchange for teaching math, science or special education in city schools, teachers will receive housing subsidies for up to $14,600. They can live anywhere they want, but have to commit three years. (The New York Times)
• The Garden State, also known as the Armpit of America, is rehabilitating Great Falls State Park, "a 7-acre, post-industrial eyesore that surrounds a natural wonder." (The Architect's Newspaper)
• New York State is losing more residents than any other state in the country, so why can't we find a seat on the subway? (The New York Sun)
• Karim Rashid's Design Your Self comes out next month with insightful design tips: "Sex is a completely different experience on a couch or on a rocking chair." (The Architect's Newspaper)
• The McMansion crackdown has begun. (MSN)
• And, fewer homes are being built, indicating a "cool down" (?) of the residential market. (Bloomberg)
• The city of Chicago seems to value freedom more than New York. They even built a museum for it. "Our intention is to avert apathy, and educate students and adults as they come through the museum, so that we can reverse what we see as an unfortunate trend." Meanwhile our own Freedom Museum languishes. (Lynn Becker)
• "Boring Al Gore" captivates by telling the world that "Earth is going to hell in a handbasket." Oh, and New York will drown. (The Washington Post)
• Another Coyote hits up the big city, but this time it's in the Bronx. (New York Post)
• A landlord-broker becomes an inmate, and the world sleeps at night. (Metro)
• A gallery exhibit that features photographs of constructions sites. Is the art the photo or the subject? (Candace Dwan Gallery)
• It comes down to this: the city is making money off Brooklyn's new residential popularity. How about some reliable subway service, eh? (New York Daily News)
• Fine, you messed up your taxes. Next year, don't forget to include these real estate tax breaks. (Forbes)

- Riva Froymovich

The intellectual challenge of the Walt-Mearsheimer paper on the power of the Israel lobby is whether Americans are capable of debating the ideas in it without freaking out. So far the answer is: No.

The paper was rejected by the Atlantic, as too hot for this country to hear. And while it has been favorably received in Israel and England, it continues to be smeared in this country in the Washington Post and the Boston Globe. The latest attack is from Eliot A. Cohen, a Hopkins professor, in the Post. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/04/04/AR2006040401282.html

Cohen says the professors are guilty of antisemitism, bigotry and of trading in ideas from the "sewer" in broaching their belief: that the Israel lobby is too powerful.

This is, once again, a fearful response from the rightwing Jewish community, fearful that if the issue is even discussed, Jews in this country will be persecuted. It reminds me of my own relative's comment after 9/11, They're going to blame the Jews. This anxiety has controlled the response to the powerful Harvard paper: If we even discuss it, Jews will be blamed. As for the ideas? Cohen's claim that the lobby is not powerful is based on such weak arguments as, the Cuba lobby is powerful, too, or, People who don't like Israel also supported th