Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack has backed up and apologized to the recently resigned/fired USDA Georgia Rural Development Director Shirley Sherrod.

And he's offered her a new job, in his words "a unique opportunity" -- the outlines of which have not yet been made public.

It would not be unreasonable to think that the job he has offered involves serving as a sort of USDA "Special Envoy" -- bridging misunderstandings, class differences, or race differences -- a sort of ombudsperson fixer -- among the USDA's constituents and within the Department.

If I was in the pickle that Vilsack was in, given that he probably still entertains visions of future political advancement, then I'd offer her some plum-sounding perch.

But note to Shirley Sherrod: KICK THE TIRES of the offer.

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The closer the new Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (New START) with Russia moves towards a ratification vote in the Senate, the wilder are the claims made by anti-arms control ideologues at the Heritage Foundation. New START is a modest but important step forward in reducing the world's stockpile of over 20,000 strategic nuclear weapons. It brings U.S. and Russian strategic warheads down by about one-third, to 1,550 each; it will re-establish a verification and monitoring system so each side can keep tabs on nuclear developments in the other nation; and it will make it easier to get other countries to reduce their own arsenals. It will make the world a safer place, as noted by Sen. Carl Levin (D-MI) in a recent piece in The Hill newspaper. But don't tell that to James Carafano of the Heritage Foundation, who argues that "the START treaty will only lead to a new arms race." Really? What basis does Carafano have for making this claim?

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A few weeks ago I wrote that the Atlantic's Jeff Goldberg was busy at work on a magnum opus for "The Atlantic" calling for a bombing attack by the United States on Iran.

The article will appear as a cover story in August.

The war party decided that Goldberg is to play the role on Iran that Ken Pollack played for Iraq. He will be the first out to define the terms of the debate and get the engines revved up for our 3rd simultaneous Middle East war.

Goldberg, of course, played a key role in spreading the lies that got us into Iraq. He is just the man to do it again.

Note: Goldberg, the former IDF soldier, is very very close to Netanyahu.

Why Jeff Goldberg matters.

Tomorrow morning, 8:00 am, Vice President Joe Biden will be meeting with his successor as Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, John Kerry.

Their meeting is closed to press - but I imagine that besides their low carb meals, they'll work through their angles on how to get the important START Treaty ratified and then may discuss America's slogs in Iraq and Afghanistan. If they get to Iran, which I hope they do, that will lead to the Israel-Palestine standoff and how weak America's hand there is right now.

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As Chris Matthews reports tonight, Andrew Breitbart totally manufactured, by horrendously deceptive editing the Shirley  Sherrod racism story. He is worse than Goebbels in creating The Big Lie. He owes this woman a huge apology and then he owes the country an apology.

He thinks he's a BSD, but he just a liar with a big megaphone.

As for Tom Vilsack, the Ag Secretary who threw this honest woman under the bus without asking her side of the story. Shame on you. Hire her back.

The Obama White House indulges the jobbing of Shirley Sherrod for the same reason the Clinton Administration threw Lani Guinier under the proverbial bus. When you base your campaign on an ersatz political philosophy that consists of bullsh*t clichés, you are susceptible to attacks based on bullsh*t. Obama stands no chance of being any more transformative than Clinton.

In the Guinier case, the president's intellectual sin was greater. Guinier happened to be in the intellectual forefront of scholarship on voting rights, racial discrimination, and democratic participation. Her nomination by Clinton to a position in the Justice Department was greeted by a racist campaign that simply categorized her as a 'quota queen' based on nothing more substantive than the fact of her race. The withdrawal of her nomination was justified by Clinton on the basis of the lies told about her. Since then we have heard nothing about innovation in the field of voting rights. Worse, we have witnessed the systematic sabotage of the democratic franchise, to the explicit disadvantage of the Democratic Party, in the presidential elections of 2000 and 2004. Worse still, the source of the new smear deployed similar tactics to destroy an important defender of electoral participation, namely ACORN.

Today the sin is not intellectual (really, for Clinton it was anti-intellectual) but a blatant indifference to the facts of the smear of Ms Sherrod. The similarity is that the White House and its minions at USDA betray exaggerated sensitivity to the bogus 'reverse racism' narrative favored by all energetic racists. As a friend of mine tweeted, in the hierarchy of the nation's tribulations, reverse racism ranks somewhere around flat Pepsi Zero and iPhone call drops.

This deal stinks to high heaven. The evasions coming out of the White House reflect a gross deficiency of character. It's one thing to pursue centrist politics out of some exaggerated sense of pragmatism. It is inconceivable that those in the White House are unaware of the facts of the situation. If there is anything they follow obsessively, it is this sort of thing. The firing could be reversed, but the curtain has already fallen before the mendacity of this Administration.

If anyone deserves firing, it is Rahm Emanuel, Tom Vilsack, and Cheryl Cook.

It is hard to believe that, given the history of this country, anyone takes seriously the right's concern about anti-white racism.

How can anyone buy into this?

Here's an analogy. A Jew says he is uncomfortable with Germans because of the Holocaust. Is that racism? Is it even anti-German? No, it's just a reflection of history. It's not nice, it's not right, but it is certainly understandable.

That is because of the context. And the context, when it comes to Jews and Germans, is the Holocaust. That is why Germany works so hard at ridding itself of anything that, in any way, smacks of anti-Semitism.

Similarly, any discussion of anti-white racism on the part of African-Americans has to be viewed against the context of hundreds of years of slavery, lynchings, segregation, mass murder, beatings, burnings, and the denial of basic rights until 1965.

That does not make "anti-white racism" right. All racial bigotry is ugly.

But the fact is that comparing "anti-white" racism to racism is like comparing Jewish discomfort with Germans of a certain age to Auschwitz.

The comparison is obscene, especially when -- unlike the Holocaust -- racism, real American racism, is not just part of history, it is thriving.

Doc Holliday said, "My hypocrisy knows no bounds" in the movie Tombstone. The same apparently is true for our current crop of Bankster Politicians, many of whom today voted against extending unemployment benefits even after they voted in 2008 for a bank bailout.

Yes, these Corporate Communists not only voted for billion dollar bailouts for companies that were about to fail due to their own terrible decisions, but then subsequently have done nothing to prevent the ongoing and future theft. By destroying this very tenet of capitalism - that the losers actually lose so that new ideas, people, companies can become winners - they have now crippled our economy and kept millions out of work.

Now when faced with giving a pittance of support to many of the same people tossed from employment by their cronyism, they have all of a sudden found ideology. Of course, considering that many of these Bankster Politicians are going to lose their jobs for this, they will try to make excuses like the following:

Unemployment needs to be paid for out of current spending!
And for some reason the bank bailouts did not? But even letting bygones be bygones, I have a suggestion - let's use clawbacks to pay for unemployment, considering this financial crisis (a) was caused by these people and (b) is why there are no jobs.

But unemployment pays people not to work!
Well, bailing out these banks is even worse - it's the government literally paying people ungodly sums to destroy our country. Like I've said before, there's a reason why banking is an unpaid job in Monopoly - it is basically a utility rendered unprofitable by modern technology. These bailed out banks are dangerous casinos gambling with the well being of America, and America is losing.

Mind you, I don't even agree with current Unemployment program in this country. I believe people should have to volunteer for a non-profit for 10-20 hours a week to qualify for unemployment. However, our vote-loving Politicians like to keep their jobs by giving future generation's money away for nothing in return.

TARP was to keep people working!
Really? Well then it's done a terrible job of keeping people working, because unemployment is actually getting worse. The only place it's actually saved "us" is in the imaginary crony-ist utopia of those who benefited. Their jobs plan is a lucky few of you cleaning the pools built with their $145 billion in 2010 bonuses.

TARP was just a loan and has been paid back, with interest!
I suggest you all familiarize yourselves with THE BIG TARP LIE...and make sure the Politicians and Media that continue to spout it become familiar as well.

But I was lied to about TARP!
Then do your job. Those people who lied to you were often under oath. They should be investigated and put in jail if found guilty.

So without further ado, I present to you the list of today's Banksters - those who voted "Yes" for Bankster billions and "No" for their Victims. Please check to see if your Senator is on the list:

BANKSTER PARTY

Lamar Alexander [B-TN]
Robert Bennett [B-UT]
Christopher Bond [B-MO]
Richard Burr [B-NC]
Saxby Chambliss [B-GA]
Thomas Coburn [B-OK]
Bob Corker [B-TN]
John Cornyn [B-TX]
John Ensign [B-NV]
Lindsey Graham [B-SC]
Charles Grassley [B-IA]
Judd Gregg [B-NH]
Orrin Hatch [B-UT]
Kay Hutchison [B-TX]
John Isakson [B-GA]
Jon Kyl [B-AZ]
Richard Lugar [B-IN]
John McCain [B-AZ]
Mitch McConnell [B-KY]
Lisa Murkowski [B-AK]
Ben Nelson [B-NE]
John Thune [B-SD]
George Voinovich [B-OH]

"If this bill passes, future historians will inevitably wonder why, at a critical moment in its history, Israel chose to tell 85 percent of the Jewish diaspora that their rabbis weren't rabbis and their religious practices were a sham, the conversions of their parents and spouses were invalid, their marriages weren't legal under Jewish law, and their progeny were a tribe of bastards unfit to marry other Jews."

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To deny that there are racist elements in the Tea Party seems to be a pretty fruitless Republican exercise. So on the Sunday talk shows all the Repubs were on the defensive. But Matt Bai has a much more interesting take. Racism is basically an old people's disease. It will eventually die off in America.

But the insidious presence of racism within some quarters of the movement -- or, maybe more accurately in some cases, an utter indifference toward racial sensitivities -- shouldn't really surprise anyone. That's not necessarily because a subset of these antigovernment ideologues are racist, per se, but in part because they are just plain old -- at least relatively speaking. According to a survey by the Pew Research Center in June, 34 percent of Americans between the ages of 50 and 64 -- and 29 percent of voters 65 and older -- say they agree with the movement's philosophy; among Americans 49 and younger, that percentage drops precipitously. A New York Times/CBS News poll in April found that fully three-quarters of self-identified Tea Party advocates were older than 45, and 29 percent were older than 64.

This does not mean that there aren't hateful 25-year-olds coming to Tea Party rallies and letting fly racial slurs. What it does mean is that a sizable percentage of the Tea Party types were born into a segregated America, many of them in the South or in the new working-class suburbs of the North, and lived through the marches and riots that punctuated the cultural and political upheaval of the 1960s. Their racial attitudes, like their philosophies of governance, reflect their complicated journeys. (This is true for a lot of older, urban Democrats, too, who consider themselves liberal but whose racial commentary causes their grandchildren to recoil.)

White Americans of that generation are not the only ones whose longstanding views on race seem increasingly dated. The N.A.A.C.P. has over the years lost its currency among younger, more educated African-Americans, whose sense of opportunity is such that they are less convinced of their need for a traditional civil rights organization (let alone one with the word "colored" in its title).

So far, any slice of China and the Chinese people one wants to cut out is full of economic, cultural and intellectual diversity -- so I fear that it is very easy for an observer to see what he or she wants to see in this country. That in itself, though, seems to be a huge change from what this place was like 30, or even 20 years ago.

One of the behavioral characteristics many before me have seen in China is the well developed sense of self interest in China. Japanese citizens in contrast seem to me to be much more focused on their group, and clubs, and other vastly sprawling social networks. The Chinese want to do business, do projects, engage in hobbies, be pragmatic and get ahead.

In my encounters here, I don't get a sense from many people of deep concern for the common good, for the broad public welfare. They expect the government to see to these needs and to make the choices that promote public happiness and well-being, and when the government doesn't -- as many feel in environmental issues -- the public gets frustrated. Otherwise, the average citizen doesn't really ponder these larger issues and has mentally delegated them to the political order.

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According to the Jerusalem Post, the endless flattery of Israel, a virtual full-court suck-up, has produced nothing. Israelis do not trust Obama, meaning they suspect that, in his heart, he may not adore everything about Binyamin Netanyahu and his policies. (One can only hope). Here is the latest poll.

But the White House keeps trying. On Friday, I received a White House e-mail with links to five "Israel can do no wrong" statements by the White House. They couldn't be more blatant. "Election Day Is Coming. And We LOVE Israel."

Cynical much? Here's what the White House sent for my weekend nausea fest. Too much.

· Remarks by Andrew J. Shapiro, Assistant Secretary for Political-Military Affairs, at the Brookings Saban Center for Middle East Policy - 'The Obama Administration's Approach to U.S.-Israel Security Cooperation: Preserving Israel's Qualitative Military Edge' (7/16/2010):

· Washington Post - 'Despite diplomatic tensions, U.S.-Israeli security ties strengthen' (7/16/2010):

· Remarks by UN Ambassador Susan E. Rice during a reception for Israeli Ambassadors Gabriela Shalev and Daniel Carmon (7/14/2010):

· Remarks by Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton at a Reception Hosted for the Jewish Community and Hannah Rosenthal, Special Envoy to Monitor and Combat Anti-Semitism (7/13/2010):

· The Interview of the President by Yonit Levi of Israeli Television Channel 2 from last week.

What a shocker! In 2001, Israel's slick prime minister told precisely how he intended to destroy any chances for a Palestinian state.

One thing you have to say for this guy. He's a man with a plan and he sticks to it. The only way to deal with the Palestinians is to "beat them up, not once but repeatedly, beat them up so it hurts so badly, until it's unbearable"

Plus, great commentary from Ha'aretz on this thoroughly dishonest operator.

"I know what America is," Netanyahu replied. "America is a thing you can move very easily, move it in the right direction. They won't get in their way." He then called former president Bill Clinton "radically pro-Palestinian," and went on to belittle the Oslo peace accords as vulnerable to manipulation. Since the accords state that Israel would be allowed to hang on to pre-defined military zones in the West Bank, Netanyahu told his hosts that he could torpedo the accords by defining vast swaths of land as just that.

"They asked me before the election if I'd honor [the Oslo accords]," Netanyahu said. "I said I would, but ... I'm going to interpret the accords in such a way that would allow me to put an end to this galloping forward to the '67 borders. How did we do it? Nobody said what defined military zones were. Defined military zones are security zones; as far as I'm concerned, the entire Jordan Valley is a defined military zone. Go argue."

BP may have lobbied for the release of a known terrorist to secure an oil contract with the Libyan government. They may finally plug the leak this week. And Tony Hayward may go on another sailing race. Top hats and booms. Clean up crews and lawsuits. Over the last few months of this disaster, we've heard talk about it all. But what you haven't heard about is the significant national security risk created by this catastrophe. And you probably also didn't hear that due to a bureaucratic loophole, many of the men and women in uniform responding to this mess in their own state are not receiving credit toward educational benefits they have earned.

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Thursday the President pronounced that "because of this [financial reform] bill the American people will never again be asked to foot the bill for Wall Street's mistakes."

As if to prove him wrong, Goldman Sachs simultaneously announced it had struck a deal with federal prosecutors to pay $550 million to settle federal claims it misled investor -- a sum representing a mere 15 days profit for the firm based on its 2009 earnings. Goldman's share price immediately jumped 4.3 percent, and the Street proclaimed its chair and CEO, Lloyd ("Goldman is doing God's work") Blankfein, a winner. Financial analysts rushed to affirm a glowing outlook for Goldman stock.

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