Lots in the news today about the growing regional conflict in the Middle East.  Michael Young, writing in the Times, suggests: ISRAEL’S incursion into Lebanon after the kidnapping on Wednesday of two Israeli soldiers by the militant group Hezbollah is far more than another flare-up on a tense border. It must also be seen as a spinoff of a general counterattack against American and Israeli power in the region by Iran and Syria, operating through sub-state actors like Hezbollah and the Palestinian organization Hamas."

The Washington Post's editorial page writes: "WHEN ISRAEL withdrew its troops from southern Lebanon in 2000 after more than two decades of occupation, it also issued a warning: Any cross-border provocations by Hezbollah, the militant Shiite group, would elicit a severe military response. So there can be no surprise at the violent reaction to Hezbollah's ambush of an Israeli patrol Wednesday, in which three soldiers were killed and two others taken captive by the guerrillas. And there can be no doubt that Iran and Syria, Hezbollah's chief sponsors, bear responsibility for what has instantly become the most far-reaching, lethal and dangerous eruption of cross-border fighting in the Middle East in recent years."

And EJ Dionne correctly points out that the whole Bush strategy in the Middle East, here described as the Big Bang theory, has failed: "But when the Big Bang (invasion of Iraq)happened, the wreckage left behind took the form of reduced American influence, American armed forces stretched to their limit and a Middle East more dangerously unstable than it was at the beginning of 2003. Whether one ascribes these troubles to the flawed implementation of the Big Bang Theory or to the theory itself, what matters now is how to limit and, if possible, undo some of the damage."

As I wrote a few days ago, the Bush era foreign policy has failed.  The escalation in the Middle East, shines a light on what has been perhaps our greatest failure, our strategy to bring democracy and stability to the Middle East.   

But this is a familiar theme these days.  Katrina showed our Homeland Security strategy has failed; declining wages, rising health care cost, energy, college tuition and interest costs, coupled with the largest deficits in history has shown that our economic strategy has failed; a core piece of our strategy on how to fight the war on terror has been repudiated by the Supreme Court, and now in degrees by the Administration. 

In talking to many friends over the past two days, it is clear that people are worried by what is happening in the Middle East, but more worried that there is so little we as American can do about it.  Our extraordinary failure in Iraq has shaken our faith, and I would add the faith of the world, in America's ability to tackle difficult international challenges.  It feels very much like we need a new leadership team, a new strategy and a new direction at what is a very critical time for the nation.  But how is that to happen?

Want to learn how people involved in politics can better allocate their media dollar? Use blogs? Optimize search? Connect with young people? Make a mobile phone a tool for your message? Understand the exurbs? Reach Hispanics? Use influentials to spread the word about your work?

Then you will want to check out www.newpolitics.net, the website of the New Politics Institute, a think tank helping progressives master today’s transformation of politics due to the rapid changes in technology, media and the demographic makeup of America.

Over the last year, NPI’s network of top professionals in these fields have developed a compelling body of practical, useful reports that will help you get your message out more effectively today. We’ve also put on a series of events in Washington DC, many of which can be watched on digital video that is archived on the website. Taken together, they form a very 21st century toolbox for progressives.

The next event on “The Powerful New Political Tools of 2006” will be Thursday, July 20th, at the Phoenix Park Hotel. The two-hour lunch program will feature short presentations about best practices from top innovators and experts in half a dozen critical areas:

Paid Search Advertising: With Jim Lecinski, Midwest Regional Director for Google, who will explain why Google sold $6 billion in paid search ads last year and how political actors can start to use this outlet too.

Viral Video on the Internet: With Julie Bergman Sender, a longtime motion picture executive and producer who produced the well-known viral video in the 2004 cycle starring Will Ferrell playing George W. Bush with horses on a ranch.

Blogs and Next Wave Internet Innovations: With Jerome Armstrong, coauthor of Crashing the Gate: Netroots, Grassroots, and the Rise of People-Powered Politics, and the internet strategist for Governor Mark Warner.

Mobile Phone Media: With Tim Chambers, who recently served as Sony Corp of America’s Senior Vice President of Advanced Media Platforms and just started his own company, Media 50 Group.

Getting More from TV Ads: With Theo Yedinsky, NPI’s Senior Advisor, who will speak about shifting more ad spend from broadcast television to targeted cable buys.

Speaking in Spanish: With Simon Rosenberg, President of NDN who has been leading a national Spanish language media campaign using soccer and the World Cup.

Feel free to spread the word of this free lunch event to colleagues in the DC area. And if you won't be in DC next week, look for a video of the event off our website a few days later. In any event, you can always check out the tools in our tool box on our website.

There are a wide array of new tools and new media being used by early adopters in the public and private sectors that are totally ready for prime time in politics not someday, not next year, but right now. The more progressives who understand how to use them, the better. Please spread the word.

Short one today, am traveling.  

- The move by the Democrats to make raising the minimum wage a major issue in the campaign is a good one.   As we've discussed in our globalization initiative, the average family is making $1,400 less today than five years ago.  Costs like health care, college tuition, energy and interest payments have risen.  It is has become much harder to make it in today economy.  Faced with this, what is the governing party looking to do? Eliminate the estate tax for the very wealthiest Americans, and give themselves a pay increase. 

This let them eat cake strategy of the governing party is unacceptable, and has left a vast opening for the Democrats.  We clearly need to do more than raise the minimum wage, but this is a very good and important start.  It says to those Americans struggling to get by that we know of your struggles and are working to make it better.  

- The Times has an important piece showing how much Iran is behing the recent military actions against Israel.   The Post previews the G-8, and the troubles following Bush there.  Most papers today have stories about the Russians waning committment to democracy at home. 

- USA Today has a front page piece on the efforts to mobilize Hispanics in response to the current immigration debate.  It features El Cucuy, a powerful California based DJ at the very center of the education and mobilization effort.  In our spring immigration radio campaign, NDN advertized extensively on Cucuy, and another vital DJ, El Piolin.  In a related story, the Post had a must read piece about the rise of Spanish-language radio, now the 3rd most listened to radio format in America.    

Last week, my space officially became the most popular website in America.

"MySpace commands 4.46 percent of all visits, according to new research by Hitwise. That's a greater market share than Yahoo's email service (4.42 percent), Yahoo's home page (4.25 percent), and Google (3.89 percent)."

"Within the social networking sphere, MySpace's dominance is uncontested with fully 79.9 percent of the total number of visits. The next biggest network is Facebook (7.5 percent share), followed by Xanga (3.8 percent)."

You can read the full story here - free subscription.

Would love to hear thoughts about the new online social networking tools and the presidential campaign in 08?

The President seems to be wanting to talk about the conservative economic record at the moment. So this might be a fun time to remember what yesterday told us about two recurring, contradictory and economically rather silly tax nostrums trotted out by Republicans. These are the laffer curve and the starve-the-beast hypothesis, supported by Art Laffer and Milton Friedman respectively. The first turns up from time-to-time in the President's speeches as a justification for tax cuts. It argues that, up to a certain point, tax cuts cause higher tax takes because of changed incentives. The second, confusingly, means almost completely the opposite. It argues that tax cuts lower government revenue (and hence spending), starving the beast in question.) Which is right? Turns out - drumroll - it's neither.

A splendid post at the scarcely Keynsian Wall St Journal picks up new figures put out yesterday by the Administration explaining why the tax cuts don't pay for themselves:

"The congressional Joint Committee on Taxation, using conventional analyses, says making the president’s tax cuts permanent would reduce federal revenues in 2016 by $314 billion. That is more than 10 times what the Treasury analysis suggests tax cuts would generate."

(There is more on this at Brad De Long's ever excellent blog too, where he also agrees with Rob's post below on previously high deficit estimates.) And what of the beast? Yesterday's events shed less light on that, beyond the President's admission that little had been done on his watch to curb entitlement spending. Its common knowledge that spending has increased mightily under what the Economist calls his "Big Government Conservatism." But beasts aside, sensible economic theory isn't much surprised by this. Americans are at present getting roughly the same ammount of Government for less money. It makes perfect sense for them to then want more of it, because they don't have to pay as much for it in taxes. The rub, of course, is that future generations do, through the now 4th largest ever deficit. I'm afraid I can't find a WSJ article to back me up on this, so the CATO Institute will have to do instead. So there you have it. Taxes go down, so do revenues. Taxes go down, government spending does not fall, but deficits get bigger. Come in Mr Laffer, and Mr Friedman. Your time is up.

Once again, administration officials are corrupting a branch of economic science, and the American economy will pay a much bigger price than they realize. This week, the Treasury announced that based on spending and revenue data through May, the 2006 budget deficit will be some $100 billion less than the Treasury estimated just last February. The White House used the new estimate to trumpet the success of its tax cuts – which makes no economic sense, because Congress hasn’t passed tax cuts since February that could affect current economic activity in any way.

That leaves two possibilities. Either the revenue estimators at Treasury and spending estimators at OMB are wildly incompetent, and only recently became so – which frankly is not very likely. Or, the Treasury and White House manipulated the February estimate upward -- for example, using the most pessimistic economic assumptions available and massaging pay-out formulas for entitlements – so they could claim progress for their controversial policies in July. For an administration that has pursued political gain at almost any price, time and again, that seems entirely likely.

When the senior economic agencies and officials of the United States Government produce deficit estimates which wouldn’t pass muster in economic forecasting 101, they mislead the capital markets. Tens of billions of dollars in investments are made assuming that these estimates are as accurate as humanly possible – and no private forecaster can do an equally authoritative independent estimate, because nobody outside government has the Treasury’s revenue datasets and OMB’s spending datasets.

When these estimates are manipulated for cheap political purposes, it corrupts vital information flowing into U.S. capital markets, impairing their basic efficiency and distorting the distribution and cost of investment capital. And if it becomes a pattern – and when has this administration given up any of its bad habits? – the markets could simply stop trusting government data, and then the American economy could really suffer.

The headlines from today’s paper are not reassuring: terror in Mumbai, Baghdad boils, the Israeli incursion into Gaza continues, and spreads into Lebanon, Russian secret police publically arrest dissenters during an international conference about democracy, election troubles continue in Ukraine and Mexico.

Add to all this the troubling developments of the last few months – the Supreme Court’s challenge to much of the legal theory behind Bush’s war on terror, the growing belligerence of Iran and North Korea, the election success of Hamas, rising anti-Americanism in Latin America, the collapse of the Doha round of trade talks – and it is clear that American foreign policy – whatever today’s rationale is for it - is not achieving what we need it to. 

Josh Marshall at Talkingpointsmemo has had a series of thoughtful posts this week about the utter failures of Bush.  As he wrote last night: “Put simply, do we not detect a pattern in which the foreign policy neoconservatives strike out boldly on some foreign policy adventure, flop right down on their faces and then present the cause of their undoing as a novel insight wrestled from the maw of history when in fact, to everyone else except for them, this 'insight' was completely obvious and predictable from the start?"

Yesterday EJ Dionne had what I believe was a polite column, suggesting that the debate over the Bush era will be a challenging and difficult one for the 2008 Republican Presidential candidates.  He’s right.  The failure of the modern conservatives to do the basics – keeping the world safe and secure, fostering broad-based prosperity, paying our bills, resisting corruption – has been astonishing.  At a very simple level they’ve just blown it, big time, and a lot of what we have to do now in America is set a new course while cleaning up the mess they’ve left.   Bush’s recent admission that bringing the troops home from Iraq would be something left to his successor was in its own way an admission of failure, a throwing up of his hands, a nod to that they given it their best shot and had failed.

Our view here is that the monumental failure of conservative government is the most important political and intellectual story of our time, one with profound consequences for America and our future, and is something we as progressives must put front and center in the fall elections and beyond.   I reprint a portion of an essay we released hours before the State of the Union earlier this year (this essay and other ones on the topic of the conservative movement can be found at our Meeting the Conservative Challenge page):

“Tonight the President reports to the nation on the State of the Union. We will hear soaring rhetoric, powerful words, a President resolute and determined. We will hear of victories, progress, and pride. He will tell a compelling story – and very little of it will be true.  The truly compelling story of this decade is one that Bush doesn’t want told – the rapid and dramatic failure of conservative government.

Finally in a position of virtually unchecked power after decades in the political wilderness, modern conservatives have failed quickly and utterly at the most basic responsibilities of governing, leaving our nation weaker and our people less prosperous, less safe and less free.  Seduced by the temptations of power, these movement ideologues also quickly came to believe that the rules of our democracy did not apply to them. The result is one of the farthest-reaching episodes of corruption and criminal investigations into a governing party in our history.

To fully appreciate the State of the Union, we need a deep understanding of the conservative movement and its rise to power. Jumpstarted a little more than fifty years ago by William F. Buckley’s National Review, the conservatives began their long march to power by investing billions of dollars in a modern infrastructure to combat the entrenched position of progressives in government. They used this infrastructure – think tanks, for-profit media, superior and innovative forms of electioneering – to defeat an aging progressive movement, and now have more power than at any time since the 1920s.

In recent years America has learned what life is like under a true conservative government. With near absolute power, conservatives have pursued their agenda with little compromise or input from progressives. The latest chapter of the great conservative story – the Bush years – may have been one of political victories, but it has also been one of disastrous governance. The broad and deep failures of the Bush government should cause all Americans to reappraise the virtue of this grand conservative experiment, recognizing that even after 50 years and untold billions of dollars, they have yet to come up with a true alternative to 20th century progressive government -- which did so much good, for so long.”

I hope the NDN can make getting this conversation into the public debate one of our highest priorities for the remainder of the year. 

I guess this entry could also have been in the Hispanic / Latino category as well... In prepping for the upcoming NPI event I found this news story from the Gannet News Service... Here are excerpts:

Group to register young Latinos to vote through text messages

WASHINGTON - Text messaging worked so well in rallying young Hispanics
to immigration protests this spring that political activists want to
apply the technology elsewhere: registering those young people to
vote.

The message is a simple one, said Maria Teresa Petersen, executive
director of Voto Latino, which plans to register at least 35,000 young
Hispanics nationwide through the text message initiative.

"You've marched," she said. "Now you've got to register and now you've
got to vote."

Voto Latino, founded by actress Rosario Dawson, is among a number of
political organizations targeting young Hispanics for voter outreach
efforts. The group plans to launch their initiative early next month...

"It's not just a question of who you can register now, it's who are
you influencing for the 2008 elections as well," said Antonio
Tijerino, president of the Hispanic Heritage Foundation...

Through text messaging, musicians at a concert, for example, can ask
their fans to text Voto Latino to register to vote. Those fans would
receive an immediate response from Voto Latino with instructions on
how to get a voter registration form.

They also could forward that message to their friends.

The use of the technology is even more prevalent among youth and
Hispanic cell phone users. About 65 percent of Americans between the
ages of 18-29 use text messaging; 54 percent of Hispanics use the
technology. By comparison, only about 35 percent of the general
population does, according to a recent study by the Pew Internet &
American Life project.

But despite the popularity of text messaging, political campaigns and
voter outreach groups have yet to tap the potential of the technology,
said Julie Germany of the Institute for Politics, Democracy and the
Internet at George Washington University...

There is a story in Ad Age this morning - free subscription - about how the TV Networks will be altering the data used to determine cost for upfront ad buys for next season to account for DVR's and commercial skipping....interesting development.

Lots of intriguing economic issues bubbling around the press today, much of it summed up rather nicely in the leading Times editorial this morning, Another Mission Accomplished. Following his trip to Chicago, Bush will today wax euphoric over a slightly lower than expected budget deficit of$300bn. If you see some lipstick in the President's pocket, it might well be the beginning of a concerted campaign to pretty up his pig of an economic record.

Yesterday, the President spun the line a little further in remarks at the swearing in of Treasury Secretary Paulson. He put the best possible gloss on the latest job creation and unemployment figures, before concluding that all of this was "leading to higher wages and a higher standard of living for our people."

Luckily for us, the lie of this pig-polishing exercise on these three claims - the economy is doing well, $300bn isn't actually a bad federal deficit, and living standards are rising for "our people" - was nicely disproved before the lipstick was dry, in three excellent papers by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.

First, they point out that the current recovery is much weaker than the average for comparable recoveries since the Second World War, with the noteable exception of strong growth in the corporate sector. Second, they point out that any reduction in the federal deficit is a combination of expectations management (previous estimates were on the high side) and a strong tax take from (guess who?) the very richest Americans. Even given that - the administrations claim that the current is low by historical standards only works if you count times of war and reagan's fiscal recklessness. Without those, its a whopper. And, finally, they profile new data on income distribution for the last year in which figures are available. It is here that the President's phrase "higher standard of living for our people" comes into sharpest relief. It notes

"an exceptional jump in income concentration in 2004. The share of the pre-tax income in the nation that goes to the top one percent of households increased from 17.5 percent in 2003 to 19.5 percent in 2004. Only five times since 1913 (the first year that this data set covers), and only twice since World War II has the top one percent’s share risen by as much in a single year (in percentage point terms)."

So, there you have it. In as much as the economy is doing well it is doing well for our [wealthiest] people. Despite this a new campaign is clearly underway to gloss up the President's economic record, going into November. No ammount of lipstick should hide the fact that - for the quiet majority of Americans - this is an oinking economic recovery complete with little trotters and a pink twirl-around tail.