Last Call

Adam Serwer for the win.

But ultimately, voters don't really care that much about bipartisanship, they care about results. It's been clear to the voters since the beginning that the president has been trying to reach out to Republicans only to be rebuffed by the GOP's strategy of total obstruction. In fact, a Gallup poll way back in April of 2009 found that two thirds thought Obama was willing to work with Republicans, while only 38 percent thought Republicans were willing to work with him. Americans have been convinced of this all along -- but they voted Republicans into power anyway.

Whether the president gets reelected depends on whether the economy recovers and more Americans have jobs, not on the next Congress melting into a campfire chorus of Kumbaya. If unemployment is where it is now, voters will care about "Republican obstruction" about as much as they did in 2010.

All Republicans have to do to win the White House is make sure anything that might help lower the unemployment rate gets killed in the House.  They are counting on you going "I don't care what the Republicans did, Obama is supposed to be the adult, and if he can't get the job done, I'm staying home like I did in 2010 or hell I'm voting for the other guy."

They know the easiest way to win is to let the country fall apart. You will reward the Republicans with another chance.  They know this.

And fall apart we shall.

This Week's Busted Banks

Your Busted Bank Chart, via Barry Ritholtz.



How many banks will fold in 2011? No sign of the number slowing down. Could we break 200 next year? It's entirely possible as the pressure on the commercial real estate market will grow.

Southern Culture Warriors On The Skids

Matt Osborne explores the GOP "50-State Southern Strategy" as a source of short-term victory for the GOP and longer-term potential disaster for America.

There is no more Manichean human activity than war. There are only ever two sides, and the issue is total; so are suspicion and righteousness. Victories are counted in miles of territory or cities or body counts. In the most deceptive turn of all, winning battles can lead a society to think superior willpower or character or piety has been the difference when the reality is quite material. Thus the weight of Republican and right-wing rhetoric has become militant in part because it is such a natural fit for faith-based politics.

And in fact, one can easily argue the Republican Party behaves in a militant fashion. The tea party has succeeded in resurrecting the ardor of conservatives and bringing them en masse under the GOP banner; ‘conservative Democrats’ are a nearly-extinct species. Leadership squabbles among Republicans are short, and Republican legislators have developed lockstep habits in voting. Mitch McConnell runs his Senate minority with an iron hand. John Boehner has indicated he will use earmarks to bring Republicans under control. To be sure, Jim DeMint and Michele Bachmann aim to replace them or at least bring them further to the right (and use the language of war doing so); they want to lead the leaders, but in the end they will follow. Yes, the tea party doesn’t like earmarks — but they’ll be back next election, and behaving worse than ever. Head-stomping will seem quaint in 2012.

And what of the propaganda filling the airwaves and internet? What of Pamela Geller’s midsummer crusade against a mosque-that-wasn’t-a-mosque? What of two New Black Panthers blown up into a marauding army of Obama goons? What of spurious accusations of vote fraud? What of the smearing and defunding of ACORN? What of Darrell Issa’s promises to investigate the White House? They are part and parcel of the strategy of “no” and obstructed appointments: there will be no progress, there will be no advance. WE are the ones under attack.

Conservatives understand these things inherently. At the Huntsville appearance of the Tea Party Express bus tour in April of 2010, the attitude was exemplified by a sign that read: if we lose our FREEDOM here there is no place to escape. This is the last stand on Earth. Those are the stakes: total destruction or victory.

The famed Bushian binary worldview -- us or them, right or wrong, conservative or liberal, red or blue -- has itself become the means to an end.  It's a self-perpetuating super-cynical nightmare scenario, the famed "One Percent Solution" of Dick Cheney writ large.  If there's a chance that compromise with America's changing demographic means giving up power, then it cannot be allowed to happen.

Millions of Americans have become the enemy.  And the war itself is playing out on a daily basis.  Do read the article, Matt lays it out in stark and powerful detail, and the more people who read it, the more people will understand what's really going on out there.

The Certainty That It's Not Uncertainty

Kevin Drum sticks a much-needed fork in the "Obama and the Democrats created regulatory uncertainty and crippled the economy" myth.

Why does the economy continue to suck? The LA Times is hosting a symposium on the topic today, and USC business professor Ayse Imrohoroglu says the answer is uncertainty:

Businesses don't know what will happen to interest rates. They have trouble calculating what new workers will cost in light of potential new healthcare mandates and costs. They don't know what will happen to tax rates, which could rise dramatically. They are uncertain about increasing financial regulation and the possibility of a carbon tax. And as if that isn't enough, the soaring deficits and national debt raise very real questions about the federal government's long-term ability to meet its debt obligations.

That's the setup:  Now Drum's takedown:

• Interest rates will remain very low for a very long time. The Fed has made this as clear as any central bank possibly could.
• PPACA has no impact on small businesses and only a minuscule impact on large businesses. Medium-sized businesses face a modest penalty if their workers use federal subsidies to enroll in private insurance programs via the exchange. In other words, the overall financial impact on the business community is pretty small. What's more, there's really no uncertainty here. The broad impact of PPACA's rules is already clear and they don't take effect until 2014 anyway. This is not having an impact on business investment decisions in 2010.
• There's no excuse for Congress leaving tax policy up in the air for as long as it has. But even with that said, the Bush tax cuts affected personal tax rates, not business rates. And despite demagoguing to the contrary, even if the Bush tax cuts expire completely the effect on small businesses would be close to zero.
• Financial reform was a fairly modest affair, and in any case its effect is almost entirely restricted to the financial sector. Its effect on the rest of the business community is slight.
• There is no possibility in the near future of a carbon tax.
• There is no question about the federal government's long-term ability to meet its debt obligations, and even if there were this would have next to no effect on short-term investment decisions by American businesses.

And all six of those points are true.  The uncertainty meme, as Drum calls it, is complete and utter hogwash.  It always has been.  What the real problem is and has been for years now is demand.  Nobody wants to be the business to spend money to hire to create jobs to power consumption if there's no additional demand for the business's products, but if every business is holding back, the entire market suffers.

There's short-term risk to be the one business that hires.  Your competitors have lower costs.  That leaves the government as the buyer of last resort, but Republicans insist that this is a tax or regulatory problem.  The problem is with lost jobs and cut wages, people can't consume as many goods and services.

We have to spend money to jumpstart the economy.  If we do not, the economy stalls.  Period.  What we spent wasn't enough, and now the GOP is threatening to take all of it away.  This happened in 1937.  The result was the second half of the Great Depression.  Only massive forced government spending, in this case creating the materiel needed in WW II, resolved the problem.

We need an infrastructure project like that again.

The Conflictinator Explained

Here's the full Jon Stewart interview from Thursday on Rachel Maddow, it's better than any Sunday show stuff you'll waste time on today, and it's very, very interesting to see Stewart's take on the left in general.



At one point from about 12-20 minutes into this, Stewart basically asks "How does calling George W. Bush a war criminal, while technically correct, actually accomplish anything?" and goes on to say that Obama is doing much of the same stuff.  Rachel counters that this is a completely false conflation when the Tea Party is literally making things up about Obama, as opposed to the Left using facts.  Stewart then goes after Rachel on the Centrist Dalek "You and your network are ignoring the legitimate anger that created the Tea Party" argument.

Rachel, to her credit, does not dropkick Stewart's face in on this point.

It's a very eye-opening interview.

Top Of The Heap

Frank Rich's latest column is a reality check on GOP talking points for extending the Bush tax cuts for the top two percent.

The G.O.P.’s arguments for extending the Bush tax cuts to this crowd, usually wrapped in laughably hypocritical whining about “class warfare,” are easily batted down. The most constant refrain is that small-business owners who file in this bracket would be hit so hard they could no longer hire new employees. But the Tax Policy Center found in 2008, when checking out similar campaign claims by “Joe the Plumber,” that only 2 percent of all Americans reporting small-business income, regardless of tax bracket, would see tax increases if Obama fulfilled his pledge to let the Bush tax cuts lapse for the top earners. The economist Dean Baker calculated that the yearly tax increase at the lower end of that bracket, for those with earnings between $200,000 and $500,000, would amount to $700 — which “isn’t enough to hire anyone.”

Those in the higher reaches aren’t investing in creating new jobs even now, when the full Bush tax cuts remain in effect, so why would extending them change that equation? American companies seem intent on sitting on trillions in cash until the economy reboots. Meanwhile, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office ranks the extension of any Bush tax cuts, let alone those to the wealthiest Americans, as the least effective of 11 possible policy options for increasing employment.

Nor are the superrich helping to further the traditional American business culture that inspires and encourages those with big ideas and drive to believe they can climb to the top. Robert Frank, the writer who chronicled the superrich in the book “Richistan,” recently analyzed the new Forbes list of the 400 richest Americans for The Wall Street Journal and found a “hardening of the plutocracy” and scant mobility. Only 16 of the 400 were newcomers — as opposed to an average of 40 to 50 in recent years — and they tended to be in industries like coal, natural gas, chemicals and casinos rather than forward-looking businesses involving the Green Economy, tech or biotechnology. This is “not exactly the formula for America’s vaunted entrepreneurial wealth machine,” Frank wrote.

As “Winner-Take-All Politics” documents, America has been busy “building a bridge to the 19th century” — that is, to a new Gilded Age. To dislodge the country from this stagnant rut will require all kinds of effort from Americans in and out of politics. That includes some patriotic selflessness from those at the very top who still might emulate Warren Buffett and the few others in the Forbes 400 who dare say publicly that it’s not in America’s best interests to stack the tax and regulatory decks in their favor. 

But let's be honest here:  this is the group of Americans that are our New Brahmins.  They control the whole show.  You're mad if you think there was any way they will ever pay a dime more in taxes.  The Republicans and an increasing number of Democrats are sworn to defend them because they are the most important people in the country.

The rest of us, deadbeats all, are the ones who have to take our medicine and tighten our belts.  It's what serfs are expected to do, after all.

A Prize For Third

Nancy Pelosi solves her Jim Clyburn/Steny Hoyer whip problem like an actual adult:  she created a position in the Democratic caucus for Clyburn.

House Democrats will begin the next Congress with a leadership team that looks much like the one they have now if a deal struck between Nancy Pelosi and Jim Clyburn last night sticks. The essence of the plan: Pelosi will become Minority Leader, current Majority Leader Steny Hoyer will become Minority Whip and Clyburn -- the current Majority Whip -- will take a new number three job in the minority. Current Caucus Chair John Larson can remain in the Democrats' number four job in the new Congress.

Clyburn will take a newly created position called "Assistant Leader," according to a letter Pelosi sent to Democratic members today. As Roll Call reports, it's "unclear" what exactly the new position entails, or "whether the job is different from the Assistant to the Speaker position currently held by Rep. Chris Van Hollen."

The deal brings to an end a fight between Hoyer and Clyburn for the Whip job that threatened to mar Pelosi's expected transition into the House Democrats' top job when the Republicans take over in January. The final round of the Hoyer-Clyburn struggle came late last night when Pelosi threw her support behind Clyburn for the number three job. 

It seems to be that Pelosi here, demonstrating actual leadership by coming to a compromise position,  would have solved the party's intransigent issues and the Dems would be united and to move forward behind the new-found respect for Pelosi.  Alas, these are Democrats:  only happy when they are miserable.

Rep. Heath Shuler (D-NC) is setting the stage for an official challenge to Nancy Peolsi's bid to lead the Democratic minority in the next Congress. Shuler, a moderate from the North Carolina mountains, will make his intentions official on the national stage this weekend, The Hill reports.

Shuler pitched himself as a moderate alternative to Pelosi as leader of the House caucus before she officially announced her run for Minority Leader in the next Congress.

Now, with most observers thinking Pelosi has the position locked up, Shuler appears ready to make good on his promise to take her on.

He "is scheduled to address his leadership plans during appearances on CNN's 'State of the Union' Sunday and MSNBC's "Morning Joe" program on Monday," The Hill's Mike O'Brien reports.

Pelosi's smart enough to deal with Shuler and the younger Blue Dogs who apparently aren't quite savvy enough to see they're being egged on by conservative concern trolls on purpose.  Congressional egos are notoriously tetchy things, as such the Village will have no problem pushing Shuler to cause as much damage as possible because it gives them a story to run with and it gives him attention.  Shuler on the other hand is going to find out just who his friends really are, and I'm betting he doesn't have nearly as many as he thinks he does.

Still, Shuler's attack can cause damage, so Pelosi's going to have to deal with him quickly.  We've got bigger, slimier fish to fry.

Extra Moose-Tard And Hold The Catch-Up

BooMan wades through Sarah Palin's latest Armchair Presidenting By Facebook Post so you don't have to.

People have struggled to define what the Tea Party stands for, but Sarah Palin has provided a manifesto for the incoming freshmen. She starts with the conceit that the results of the midterm elections have put the government back on the side of the people. But she quickly disabuses us of that belief. I will list Palin's priorities for you, so you don't have to read her entire screed.

1. Defund ObamaCare.
2. Eliminate earmarks.
3. Make it procedurally easier to cut taxes than to raise them.
4. Enforce zero-based budgeting.
5. Cancel all unstarted stimulus programs.
6. Return all non-discretionary spending to 2008 levels (she may have meant discretionary spending).
7. Extend all of Bush's tax cuts indefinitely.
8. Control the growth of Entitlement spending.
9. Control the borders, but decouple it from immigration reform.
10. Continue our efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan.
11. Get tough with Iran.
12. Sign free-trade agreements with South Korea and Colombia.
13. Oppose ratification of the START treaty.
14. Side with Netanyahu's position that all of Jerusalem is part of Israel, and that no building in East Jerusalem can be considered settlement expansion.
15. Keep Guantanamo prison open and deny all prisoners there access to the courts.
16. Return to Bush's freedom agenda.
17. If anyone in the press praises your actions, do a reappraisal because you've probably gone off-track. 

Now.  Does any of this even remotely sound like "Compromise with President Obama to achieve bipartisan support to move America forward" to you?

There's a reason it doesn't.  Sarah here has declared herself the de facto queen of the party, and I'm just wondering how long it's going to take before the rest of the GOP finally moves to toss her grifter ass off the island.  At some point, somebody is just going to say "You know?  There's no way anyone can take this woman seriously on Presidential policy when she quit her last chief executive job to go on a book tour and to snipe from Facebook."

And the second that happens, the GOP is going to detonate.  I can't wait.  The rest of the Presidential contender field isn't just going to let Sarah win, folks.  It's going to be brutal.

The Dollar Gets Hog Thai-ed

Thailand's PM is calling on Asian countries to start using China's Yuan instead of the US dollar as a regional reserve currency.

Prime Minister Abhisit Vejjajiva, fearful of the effects of the soaring baht due to massive capital inflows, has proposed the use of the Chinese yuan as a major regional trading currency.

Asia-Pacific leaders will have to discuss measures to deal with the fund inflows after the Group of 20 major economies failed to reach any tangible decisions, Mr Abhisit said yesterday.

"The G20 did not make any progress on the matter and it is difficult to get the United States and China to express their clear stances on the issue. But what we can do is try to cooperate in the region and reduce the impact from currency volatility," Mr Abhisit said before leaving for the Asian Games in China and an Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (Apec) leaders' meeting in Yokohama, Japan, this weekend.

It may not look like much, but that's big, big news in the currency world.  As the dollar hovers near all time lows against Asian currencies like the Japanese Yen, it's clear Asia is taking the side of the Dragon in their own back yard -- China -- rather than the Eagle across the Pacific.

The prime minister expects the currency issue to be raised at the Apec meeting. "What Apec must push for are ways to promote regional cooperation so that the region can cushion the impacts of the fluctuations of currencies," Mr Abhisit said.

He added, however, that for the Chinese yuan to have a greater role in transactions in the region, China would have to relax its tight controls on the currency and its capital account.

At present, about 90% of trade in Asia is conducted in US dollars.

"I suggested that Asean could have an office dedicated to the handling of currency issues. It could join forces with the ADB in pushing the idea forward," Mr Abhisit said.

Experts expect currency issues to be highlighted at the Apec meeting.

The next level of the US-China currency war will involve which currency Asia wants to use regionally.  China relaxing controls to get a larger slice of the reserve currency clout that the US has seems like a really, really good deal for China, both short and long run.  And they know it.

On the other hand, the US is going to keep hurting from this.

Joe-Joe Left His Home In Mesa Arizona For Some Prison Yard Grass

Looks like everyone's favorite law and order Sheriff type has been possibly cooking the books.

To the tune of $80 million dollars.

A hidden computer database recently discovered in the course of a racial profiling investigation shows Arizona Sheriff Joe Arpaio misspent up to $80 million in funds intended for jail operations, according to Maricopa County supervisors and budget officials.

The hidden database contained payroll logs that detailed staff assignments and payments which were different than the staff assignments and payments reported in the official county-run database, they said.

"They've developed a system that basically tracks where they are working versus where they are being paid, and they did not update the official database, which led to the potential problems," Deputy County Manager Sandi Wilson told The Arizona Republic. "I think they deliberately hid this info from us."

A spokesman for the Sheriff's Office denied any intention of hiding information from the county and blamed the duplicate payrolls on a lack of compatible technology between the Sheriff's Office and county agencies. In September, Maricopa County officials reported that Arpaio's office misspent up to $80 million in funds over five years to pay his employees working in patrol, human-smuggling operations and investigative units. 

The voter-approved money was restricted by law to detention operations such as food, detention officers' salaries, and equipment.

"It appears that [the Maricopa County Sheriffs Office] violated the intent and explicit language of the voter approved jail tax when they used that money to fund activities not related to jail operations," a press release said. "Maricopa County will have to pay back the restricted funds to the detention fund. This is a misuse of public funds."

A good ol' boy County Sheriff for life who set himself up as king of Maricopa County, who made national news with his near military treatment of Latinos in Arizona, a man who treated criminals in his county as animals meant to be humiliated, and arguably one of the nastiest, bigoted, snake-mean people on Earth...and you're surprised he defrauded the taxpayers out of some 80 million dollars over the years to pay his anti-Latino goon squads, to hunt them down like vermin in order to "protect the people".

And now law-abiding Maricopa County taxpayers are on the hook for the money.  Twelve years worth of cooking the books.  Assholes like this are all the same.  They abuse their power whenever possible and take the money and run.  Con men to the last.

I hope this guy does a long stint in his own county jail.

With Maricopa County's new Latino Sheriff.

DADT Stupidity

CNN posted that Secretary of Defense Robert Gates has ordered an investigation into a leak to the Washington Post regarding DADT.

Because the leak is a concern, but they can't use those resources to confirm just how gays in the military pose a threat? This is small potatoes compared to Wikileaks, so why the urgency unless they never plan to repeal DADT and this is all a stage act meant to soothe the media? Surely they don't know something we don't, right?

This is a nugget of stupid so condensed it has collapsed in on itself, forming a black hole of stupidity from which no common sense can escape. Enough already.

He's So Good At His Job He Should Just Quit

This is the mind-boggling, bizarro world conclusion that Centrist Daleks Doug Schoen and Pat Caddell come up with: for Obama to be a great President, he must refuse to run in 2012.

No, really.   Behold their Centrist Dalek logic.

We do not come to this conclusion lightly. But it is clear, we believe, that the president has largely lost the consent of the governed. The midterm elections were effectively a referendum on the Obama presidency. And even if it was not an endorsement of a Republican vision for America, the drubbing the Democrats took was certainly a vote of no confidence in Obama and his party. The president has almost no credibility left with Republicans and little with independents.

The best way for him to address both our national challenges and the serious threats to his credibility and stature is to make clear that, for the next two years, he will focus exclusively on the problems we face as Americans, rather than the politics of the moment - or of the 2012 campaign.

Quite simply, given our political divisions and economic problems, governing and campaigning have become incompatible. Obama can and should dispense with the pollsters, the advisers, the consultants and the strategists who dissect all decisions and judgments in terms of their impact on the president's political prospects.

Obama himself once said to Diane Sawyer: "I'd rather be a really good one-term president than a mediocre two-term president." He now has the chance to deliver on that idea.

In the 2008 presidential campaign, Obama spoke repeatedly of his desire to end the red-state-blue-state divisions in America and to change the way Washington works. This was a central reason he was elected; such aspirations struck a deep chord with the polarized electorate.

Obama can restore the promise of the election by forging a government of national unity, welcoming business leaders, Republicans and independents into the fold. But if he is to bring Democrats and Republicans together, the president cannot be seen as an advocate of a particular party, but as somebody who stands above politics, seeking to forge consensus. And yes, the United States will need nothing short of consensus if we are to reduce the deficit and get spending under control, to name but one issue. 

I really wish Prop 19 had passed in California, because these two could have made an absolute fortune in cultivating and selling whatever primo weed these two clowns were smoking when they came up with the theory that Obama announcing he wouldn't run would magically make the Republicans compromise.  The visions of mythological beasts that accompanied this revelatory nonsense would give Hieronymous Bosch night terrors.

Let me explain to you what would happen if Obama said "I'm not running again in 2012."

It would be the same thing that would happen if Obama did run in 2012, which is that the Republicans will do everything they can to dismantle every law and executive order he passed, still insist he is a danger to the country, still insist that he gives them 100% of what they want right now and will attack him anyway.  There will be no grand magical compromise.  There will be no national unity.  The Republicans will get what they want, every single piece of legislation they introduce from January 2011 on, or they will attempt to destroy the country through petulant refusal to govern the country, and they will still blame Obama for it.

Of course the last paragraph there is the key to what these two knuckleheads really mean:

And yes, the United States will need nothing short of consensus if we are to reduce the deficit and get spending under control, to name but one issue. 

Because loosely translated from Centrist Dalek, it means "Obama needs to capitulate completely to the Tea Party-controlled Republicans and ignore his base, and dismantle the last 80 years of social programs so that we can finish the transfer of the remaining 18% of the country's wealth to the richest 20% of Americans because 82% is just unacceptable."

Triangulate nothing.  Only full and complete surrender as a stating point is acceptable to these two, and the completion of America as a banana republic in status as well as in name.

If Obama surrenders the country now, it will be much appreciated by our new lords.  Slimy little Vichy bastards, these two.  But this is of course serious thinking, followed by "Of course the Catfood Commission's recommendations are a good starting point towards a national unity government..."

These men are souless, even for Centrist Daleks.  Oh, and the Centrists called Reaganism dead after 1982 midterms too just like Clinton was "irrelevant" after 1994.  Villagers:  still clueless after all these years.

Hacking Sour Grapes Into Mooseberry Whine

The hacker who got into Sarah Palin's Yahoo email account will do a year and a day of time, but in a halfway house instead of prison. Lucky him. Most people who were following the case expected little to no jail time and a minimal fine. Guess we know what happens when you pick on the wrong person.

David Kernell guessed Palin's security question and answer and was able to change her Yahoo email password, leading to charges of obstructing justice, identity theft, unlawful access to a computer, and was acquitted of wire fraud. Kernell was 20 at the time of the crime. His defense that her emails would be public because of the duties as governor gave the courts pause, but in the end he lost. Whether it is because he dared repost material on a known hacker site or just picked a BullyMoose is a topic of hot debate in hacker chats and boards.

Palin's only statement thus far is that she is "thankful that the jury thoroughly and carefully weighed the evidence and issued a just verdict." Indeed. I hope she picks a better password, because she will now find herself on a mighty short list of targets. If she doesn't know what black hat is, she will soon enough.

And seriously, use at least a single freaking number in your "secret" answer, 'kay? This public message is brought to you by your favorite neighborhood geek. Let's put her in charge of national secrets, and see what happens!

StupidiNews, Weekend Edition!

• Myanmar's military rulers have released peace activist Aung San Suu Kyi from house arrest.
• The Supreme Court has refused to stop implementation of DADT while the measure faces appeal proceedings.
• Kansas becomes the latest state to take a close look at the controversial Four Loko alcoholic energy drink.
• European central bankers are pushing Ireland to seek a Greek-style bailout within days.
• Scientists theorize that keeping soldiers' brains busy after an injury can prevent PTSD, and the tool of choice may be Tetris.

Last Call

BooMan flags this gobsmacker of an article down on GOP Rep. Eric Cantor's meet with Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu.

What do you call it when the (soon-to-be) House Majority Leader sits down with a visiting head of state and assures him that he and his party can be counted on to side with his country against the president of the United States?

This isn't a hypothetical, by the way. It's not like I'm asking what would have happened if Joachim von Ribbentrop had sat down in Sam Rayburn's office in 1939 and received assurances that Rayburn and the Dems could be counted on to support Germany and block anything Roosevelt did to try to force concessions. Because, in a case like that (which did not happen) we know what we would call it. We know what Eric Cantor would call it.

But, there I go again, bringing up Nazis, which is in such bad taste in this case.

Last night, Netanyahu met in New York for over an hour with incoming House Majority Leader Rep. Eric Cantor (R-Va.), who is set to become the highest ranking Jewish member of Congress in history. The meeting took place at New York’s Regency Hotel, and included no other American lawmakers besides Cantor. Also attending on the Israeli side were Israeli Ambassador to the U.S. Michael Oren, and Netanyahu’s National Security Advisor Uzi Arad. Israeli sources characterized a one-on-one meeting between an Israeli prime minister and a lone American lawmaker as unusual, if not unheard of.

Cantor was understandably feeling delighted with his sense of self-importance and could not help but provide a readout of the meeting for the press. Part of that readout said:

"Eric stressed that the new Republican majority will serve as a check on the Administration and what has been, up until this point, one party rule in Washington," the readout continued. "He made clear that the Republican majority understands the special relationship between Israel and the United States, and that the security of each nation is reliant upon the other."

This isn't boilerplate. The president is trying to facilitate a peace agreement between two parties, only one of which is Israel. In that process, Israel must make concessions. Eric Cantor is promising to undermine that process. 

Two questions here for Cantor's defenders:

One, if this was Nancy Pelosi speaking directly to any foreign leader and specifically saying "We will act as a check on the Republican President of the United States in order to get the policies you want" would that be in any way acceptable? 

Two, if this was Eric Cantor making the same promise to "check the President's power" to Iranian President Ahmadinejad, Russia's Vladimir Putin, China's Wen Jiabao, or Cuba's Raul Castro, would that in any way be acceptable?

So I ask why is Cantor allowed to openly promise to the leader of a foreign country that he will undermine the foreign policy authority of the President?  How is that even remotely acceptable?

The answer is clearly that it's not.

Unless that foreign country is Israel.  Let's recall how Republicans have responded to that first theoretical question I posed as the excellent Amanda Terkel explains:

In the past, Republicans have been sharply critical of Democratic trips abroad that could be seen as undermining the official foreign policies of the U.S. president. For example, in 2007, both the Bush White House and its Republican supporters lashed out at House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Cali.) for visiting Syria, saying that she was trying to circumvent President Bush (never mind that Republican lawmakers were also in Syria and Pelosi didn't criticize the Bush administration).

"It has long been the established principle of this country that the president of the United States leads our foreign policy," said former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney. "And if you don't like the president, then you change him. But you don't have the two parties each conducting foreign policy in the way they think it ought to be conducted."

John Bolton, the former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, added, "I would simply hope that people would understand that, under the Constitution, the president conducts foreign policy, not the speaker of the House."

In 2006, conservatives went after former vice president Al Gore for criticizing "abuses" committed by the U.S. government against Arabs post-9/11 in a speech in Saudi Arabia, with the editorial page of Investor's Business Daily saying he demonstrated "supreme disloyalty to his country."

But in fact, in 1996, Rep. Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.) also tried to signal to a foreign country that it might have better luck working with Congress instead of the president, traveling to Colombia and telling military officials there to "bypass the U.S. executive branch and communicate directly with Congress."

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So does that mean Dennis Hastert and Eric Cantor are "supremely disloyal" too?