When it comes to health care, Republicans should be careful what they wish for.

Their upcoming vote to repeal the health-care law will be largely symbolic -- they don't have the votes to override President Obama's certain veto. The real thing happens later, when they try to strip the Department of Health and Human Services of money needed to implement the law's requirement that all Americans buy health insurance. This could easily precipitate a showdown with the White House--and a government shutdown later this year.

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It's quite fitting that yesterday two top Republican Congressmen thought it more important to be at a fundraiser than at their Swearing In Ceremony. It looks like we have arrived back at the K-Street Plutocracy that got Tom Delay busted just three short years ago. What was Darrel Issa's first communication just before assuming the Chairmanship of the House Oversight and Government Affairs Committee? A letter to America's top corporate officers asking them which regulations he should try to eliminate.

In dissenting last term from the Citizen's United Supreme Court decision which finally unleashed the full money power of corporate America on our political system, Justice Stevens wrote the following.

At bottom, the Court's opinion is thus a rejection of the common sense of the American people, who have recognized a need to prevent corporations from undermining self government since the founding, and who have fought against the distinctive corrupting potential of corporate electioneering since the days of Theodore Roosevelt. It is a strange time to repudiate that common sense. While American democracy is imperfect, few outside the majority of this Court would have thought its flaws included a dearth of corporate money in politics.

Here's the weird paradox. Lots of the richest men in America realize that the rise of inequality is dangerous for the long term health of our democracy. Warren Buffet and Bill Gates both suggest a larger estate tax for instance. They also know that it is the concentration of wealth that ultimately makes it possible for the business elite to buy the favors of the congress.

This is why anyone who believes we need a democracy and not a plutocracy should support the Fair Elections Now Act. It is probably the most important piece of reform legislation in our time.

I found myself strangely moved by the way John Boehner assumed the Speakership yesterday and I think any objective observer would have to agree that his humility was touching. Including the tears. (I loved the way Speaker Pelosi seemed moved by how moved Boehner was. Of course, I love everything about Pelosi).

Of course, I am no objective observer. I am a heart-on-my-sleeve progressive who wants Obama to be re-elected and to move 60 degrees leftward. So I am not the kind of person who had a built-in bias favoring a new GOP Speaker.

But I think he will connect with Americans because, with all his contradictions, he really seems like one of us, by which I mean a human.

The tears are real. Why wouldn't they be? Essentially a poor nobody from Ohio, who pushed a broom to pay for college, he is in awe of where he is today.

What a difference from the majority of both parties who exude entitlement? (Just look at the way these people treat the salaried people who work for them.. Unless you enjoy being screamed at and ridiculed, you would definitely rather work for Boehner than Anthony Weiner).

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Very few reporters discussed the stock bubble before it collapsed in the years 2000-2002. It was the same way with the housing bubble. The most frequently cited source on the housing market in the Washington Post in the bubble years was David Lereah, the chief economist of the National Association of Realtors and the author of the classic book, Why the Real Estate Boom Will Not Bust and How You Can Profit from It. Those who tried to warn of impending disaster were virtually invisible in the Post and elsewhere.

The media badly failed in its job by not reporting about these bubbles before they grew to sizes where their collapse would inevitably cause serious harm to the economy. Remarkably, rather than learning from their mistakes they seem determined to repeat them. How else can one explain the coverage given to Gene Sperling, President Obama's likely pick as his head of the National Economic Council.

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When I was a kid, there was this song by Dion, "Abraham, Martin, and John" -- an elegy to Abe Lincoln, MLK, and JFK, leaders assassinated before their work was done, obviously. Readers of a certain age are sure to remember it: "Has anybody here, seen my old friend Martin..." It wasn't that great of a song, but it was evocative for the mood of that moment. It was released in late-1968, months after the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy.

I've been thinking of the song since the murder of Punjab Governor Salman Taseer on Tuesday. It's been a while since America has endured the national trauma of a political assassination, but our own times have been notably brutal to figures around the world who represent reform and progress. The champions of tolerance, it seems, can't be tolerated.

I'd probably date the start of this current "round" of tragedies to the 1995 slaying of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin by a right-wing Israeli extremist. (For then-President Bill Clinton, it hit very hard as the loss of a friend.) Also squarely in this pattern was the 2005 murder of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri. And then, also in Pakistan, Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto was assassinated three years ago. Perhaps Ahmed Shah Massoud -- the so-called "Lion of Panjshir" attacked in Afghanistan two days before the 9/11 attacks, dying six days later -- belongs in the updated elegy. The work continues.

New York City's former mayor, Ed Koch, has taken time off from his new career as a film critic to offer a valentine to Rep. Peter King (R-NY), the new chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, for scheduling hearings on the dangers posed by Muslim Americans.

Koch's support for King is not surprising. Koch has always been open about his contempt for Arabs and Muslims and his belief that a war of civilizations is now in progress between Muslims and everyone else. He recently wrote:

For me, the question is this: will the secular Western civilization shared by America and Europe, which allows us to enjoy life and its creature comforts, still be standing at the end of that war? Or will radical Islam, with an aggressive culture that treasures martyrdom and death over life, prevail.... [italics mine]

For years, Koch, King and others who share their anti-Muslim views hid behind that word: "radical." They said that they have no problem with Muslims as people or Islam as a religion. It is only "radical Islam" or "Islamists" that they can't abide.

Lately that caveat has been thrown to the winds. It is now clear that for Islamophobes (actually Islamohaters), "radical" Islam is just Islam. And "radical" Muslims are just Muslims.

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Jonathan Pollard was paid for his espionage by a foreign government. Whether that government was the Soviet Union, China, Great Britain, or as it turned out -- Israel -- Pollard was a compensated enemy of the US national interest and convicted.

Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has just signed on to a letter addressed to President Obama appealing for Pollard's release.

As one former Reagan administration official stated, Pollard ferreted away and transferred to Israel, which allegedly passed along the information to the Soviet Union, the "crown jewels" of America's national security strategy. In virtually any other country outside the United States and Europe, Pollard would have been executed for his deeds.

Some want him released -- but I don't support this -- unless the price is very high.

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Thanks to a New York Times op-ed today by Georgetown law professor David Cole, debate has been renewed over last summer's SCOTUS decision in Holder v. Humanitarian Law Project and the question of what constitutes "support" for terrorists and can be prohibited. Can you, for instance, outlaw efforts aimed at steering terrorist groups toward seeking redress via peaceful means?

The news hook is the recent backing from prominent Republicans for an opposition group of Iranian exiles designated by the United States as a terrorist organization. TPM's own Rachel Slajda wrote about a trip to Paris last month by Rudy Giuliani, Michael Mukasey, Tom Ridge, and Frances Townsend to express their support for the Iranian group.

The case -- and Cole's op-ed -- raise important issues of free speech. What interests me, though, is the decision's gross misunderstanding of how political legitimacy works. Here's Cole explaining the way the Court equated outreach to terror groups undertaken with the best intentions as tantamount to material support:

Chief Justice John Roberts reasoned that a terrorist group might use human rights advocacy training to file harassing claims, that it might use peacemaking assistance as a cover while re-arming itself, and that such speech could contribute to the group's "legitimacy," and thus increase its ability to obtain support elsewhere that could be turned to terrorist ends.

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Howard Sachar is the historian the rest of us of who write about Israel are cautious about referring to in our work, for fear of giving away just how much of his research and analysis we borrowed. His A History of Israel: From the Rise of Zionism to Our Time, published in 1976, is a magisterial book: a sweeping narrative line; a sequencing of facts and data representing years of careful digging into memoirs and economic archives; a humane drama that makes you feel the state's founding as a world-historical event without a trace of parochial special pleading. His work on modern Jewish life in the West is equally compelling. The son of Brandeis University founding president Abram Sachar, he is in many ways the embodiment of its haskalah.

Which is why Sachar's newly published article in Foreign Affairs should not be skipped (spring for the $.99 and buy the pdf.). Without the usual equivocations, he is calling on President Obama to propose a peace plan and rally the Quartet to impose it:

But with so-called proximity talks and even face-to-face discussions endlessly collapsing in a lethal series of cross-border Arab rocket attacks and Israeli military retaliation, the great powers themselves at long last are faced with the challenge of borrowing from historical precedent and operating not as mediators but as principals.

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During the 2008 presidential election, Hillary Clinton took a very tough line on China -- arguing then that President George W. Bush should boycott the Beijing Olympics opening ceremonies because of China's policies on Tibet and Darfur. My response to then presidential candidate Clinton was that that kind of posture was not presidential -- as she would simply raise the price for cooperation from China on everything international, environmental, and economic the US was trying to achieve while at the same time doing nothing to actually solve the problems in Tibet and Darfur.

Fortunately, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton gave her China position a major makeover, and she moved to a much more realistic and productive position.

But US-China relations -- no matter the posture that Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton or Bob Gates would prefer -- remain complicated and fragile.

On January 19th, President Obama will host China's President Hu Jintao for a State Dinner at the White House. Zbigniew Brzezinski suggests in this morning's New York Times that the visit is "the most important top-level United States-Chinese encounter since Deng Xiaoping's historic trip more than 30 years ago."

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Maybe the only thing I've been obsessed with longer than foreign policy is The Clash. Recently someone shared a brilliant YouTube misheard lyrics video of 'Complete Control,' and I knew I had to make one of my own. So, meaning no disrespect to the high-quality discourse we at TPM conduct on matters of consequence for the country and the world, and begging your indulgence, I give you these words for 2011: "WED VIGGO!"

A little over three weeks ago (around the time this blogger went quiet, in this season of reflection), Sidra and I took a little road trip to the Israeli Arab town of Nazareth, where we spent the weekend in a funky little inn, the Fauzi Azar. I haven't stopped thinking about it since. When you get away from the headlines that force your attention to the foreground--e.g., the Clinton speech, the rabbis' letter, unprecedented European calls for sanctions against settlements--the more ultimate truths of the background come into relief. The case of Nazareth is both fascinating and disturbing.

The city, it is true, didn't change my mind about things I and others have written about in the past. But it did make those things so vivid that I haven't been able to see the most familiar parts of Israel in the same way. The question, you see, is really not whether Israel can remain democratic; really, what's new about that worry except for the fact that it is finally dawning on people who call you anti-Zionist for saying it before it finally dawned on them?

No, the real question is whether any democracy can implement the kind of visionary federal arrangements Israel will need--not only with a Palestinian state, but with its own Arab minority--to survive as a vital, global and Hebrew democracy. The answer is yes, at least in principle. When you think about it, Europe's biggest national Jewish movement of the interwar period might serve as inspiration, if not as a model. But is there the time, let alone the will, to try in today's Israel, with its growing, orthodox right? Can Israelis be expected to muddle through by themselves?

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In the age of 24-hour news cycles and content-free shouting heads, there will be a tendency to forget last week's historic vote to ratify the New START nuclear arms reduction agreement and move on to other subjects. We should resist that tendency.

New START will make us all safer by reducing U.S. and Russian arsenals by one-third; sending a signal to other nations that the two countries with the world's largest nuclear arsenals are serious about reducing them, as they are obligated to do under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty; establishing a rigorous monitoring regime that can be used to verify compliance not only with New START but with future agreements involving further reductions in nuclear stockpiles; and fostering additional cooperation with Russia on issues like protecting loose nukes and bomb-making materials from terrorists and working to curb Iran and North Korea's nuclear programs.

But don't expect ardent anti-START ideologues like Baker Spring and his colleagues at the Heritage Foundation to admit that the treaty has any positive aspects.

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Ever since last November's election I've been trying to understand the role of right wing populism in our democracy. This is a movement that arguably began with George Wallace's 1968 and 1972 Presidential campaigns, began to flourish when Rush Limbaugh took to the airwaves in 1984 and perhaps reached its zenith with the rise of the Tea Party in 2010.

My question is this. Is this a real political movement or is it the most successful disinformation campaign (financed by America's financial elites) in the history of modern politics? I'm guessing the latter because if it was a true political movement the lives of its working class partisans would have improved in the last 40 years. Instead, the bottom 95% of wage earners have marched in place, while the financial elites have flourished. Look at these two charts.

The first chart shows that ever since the Right Wing Populist movement got started, the wages of the top 5% have soared while the wages of the average Rush Limbaugh listener have stayed flat. The second chart shows that while in the 1960's and 1970's real hourly wages and median household income tended to rise with productivity, by 1980 most of the gains in productivity were flowing not to workers but to the financial elites.

So what is the role of the Right Wing Populist like Rush Limbaugh or Glenn Beck if it is not to improve the relative economic situation of their listeners? The philosopher Walter Benjamin, trying to explain the appeal of fascism to the German and Italian masses in the 1930's had an idea: "Fascism sees its salvation in giving these masses not their right, but instead a chance to express themselves." This, in essence, is the role of talk radio and Fox News. Limbaugh, Beck and Murdoch have no interest in changing the financial status quo that had reigned since the rise of Reagan. But they are aware of the potentially volatile mixture of working class resentment and rising unemployment and so they give the masses "a chance to express themselves." How perfect to blame your current economic torpor on external forces: illegal immigrants or a President with a "Kenyan, anti-colonial" worldview.

So it's no wonder that the Koch Brothers, through their front groups like Dick Armey's Freedom Works, are anxious to finance the Tea Party movement. Because they know its just a Kabuki play. Working class anger will get vented, but the unstoppable ascent of the financial elites will continue. Calling in to Rush Limbaugh and bitching about Obama may make the worker with falling wages feel better, but it will never change her economic circumstances.