Reuters is reporting that diplomatic sources in Vienna indicate Iran is in the process of installing newer and more advanced models of centrifuges to refine  uranium that may be used to create nuclear weapons. These machines replace the older, more accident-prone centrifuges whose mishaps have slowed the development of the Iranian program. The new centrifuges have the potential to drastically shorten the time frame for Tehran’s gaining nuclear capability.

There are some doubts about the Iranians’ ability to use the more advanced models. However, the idea their technical backwardness is a permanent bar to a nuclear weapon seems more a function of a Western desire to avoid dealing with the threat than with hard intelligence. The centrifuges are reportedly being installed inside a mountain bunker, and they are further proof that an Iranian bomb is not the distant threat that optimists would have us believe.

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Apparently, Department of Justice officials think the allegations against NewsCorp are light on facts, but have decided to open a file on them anyway because of pressure from lawmakers–pressure which apparently didn’t convince the DOJ to investigate the ACORN scandal, 2008 voter intimidation claims, and other incidents that might have been damaging to the Obama administration.

Time Magazine’s Massimo Calabresi spoke with FBI officials, who seemed to concede allegations that News of the World reporters hacked into the phones of 9/11 victims are tissue-thin. The 9/11 claims were first published by the Mirror, a British tabloid, and they’re based on the second-hand account of an anonymous source, who supposedly got the information from an unknown private investigator from New York.

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Does it feel like the country is falling apart now? Thirty-two years ago today, it seemed a lot worse when President Jimmy Carter delivered his famous “malaise” speech in which he seemed to blame the country’s problems on the people rather than their leaders. While Carter didn’t actually use the word “malaise” in the speech, his deep pessimism about America and its place in the world was an apt symbol of his failed presidency, especially in light of the resurgent optimism that characterized the national spirit in the years his successor Ronald Reagan sat in the White House.

The main point of his speech was the energy crisis of 1979 and his championing of measures such as import quotas and possible gas rationing. These ideas turned off more Americans than his attempt to rally them to embrace shared sacrifice. Carter’s talk about a “crisis of confidence” spoke louder about his own beliefs than that of the country. But reading the speech again today, what also strikes me is how similar Carter’s rhetoric sounds to some statements President Obama has made recently.

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Supporters of Mitt Romney and Michele Bachmann–the two GOP frontrunners–tout their experiences as Republican leaders in blue states as evidence they can be strong general election candidates. But their home states (especially the media) haven’t been playing along. Just how much would their inability to win their home states matter in 2012?

While a hostile press is no guarantee they couldn’t win the state, I doubt anyone would put money on Romney winning Massachusetts. For her part, Bachmann’s outspokenness as a religious, socially conservative woman has earned her the scorn of liberals in Minnesota (and elsewhere). Both states are among the bluest in the nation.

The Boston Herald leads today with the cover headline: “Get a Clue, Mitt!” (The headline accompanying the online story is “Mitt Romney’s red-faced run.”) The story is unflattering, but pales in comparison with some of the hits he’s taken from other local press.

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Better late than never, the Obama administration has finally recognized the National Transitional Council as the rightful government of Libya. Note that since March 17, the U.S.and our allies have employed military force against the government of Muammar Qaddafi, which means de facto, we were intervening on the side of the rebels. Yet it has taken the U.S. this long–nearly four months–to do something roughly two dozen nations had already done: namely to extend diplomatic recognition to the rebels.

It would be fascinating to hear from the administration why it decided to wait so long and why it finally decided to take this step now which could and should have been taken months ago. From the outside, it appears to be of a piece with the bungling and mismanagement which has characterized this war effort. As a result, Qaddafi is still hanging onto power, and our NATO allies are running short of munitions.

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The much awaited figures for Michele Bachmann’s fundraising in the second quarter of the fiscal year reported today did nothing to burnish her image as the up and coming Republican. Her total of $2 million raised in the last three months plus two million more shifted from her congressional campaign account illustrated that for all of the progress her candidacy has made in the last several weeks, she seems to lack the infrastructure and staff work that more established hopefuls have already put into place. The high expectations her poll figures have produced means pulling in only $2 million has to be considered something of a disappointment.

Bachmann’s excuses for this showing will center on the fact that at the start of the quarter she barely had a campaign, let alone the sort of organization that would allow her to rake in the big bucks. Her Internet fundraising operation, key to a grass roots populist candidacy such as hers, so far lacks the sophistication and promotional efforts needed for her to harness the energy of enthusiastic Tea Party and conservative Christian backers.

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Today’s news conference provided further evidence that President Obama is determined to push the debt ceiling crisis to the brink. In his statement, the president said nothing new, repeating his demagogic attacks on Republicans and claiming their stand against raising taxes is ideological while deeming his own equally ideological stand on the same subject is moderate and above the fray.

Obama’s position is consistent if unbending. He says the people are with him and the only thing Republicans can do is to accept his “balanced approach” and give in on taxes in order to avoid being blamed for the debacle of a default or government shutdown. The president didn’t budge an inch today as he patronized his opponents and asserted they were listening to no one but “lobbyists and special interests.”  With rhetoric like that, how can we avoid the conclusion the president thinks it is in his political interest to bring on the very fiasco that he claims to be working to avoid?

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There has been one question surrounding Mitch McConnell’s proposed “Plan B” for raising the debt ceiling—giving President Obama the ability to raise the limit on his own, temporarily, so the Republicans would not be held accountable for either a default or the lack of spending cuts in the event a “grand bargain” could not be reached: Could the plan pass the House?

Most of the attention has been focused on what Eric Cantor, who has become the voice of the more conservative House members, will accept. It has been assumed the key to passing McConnell’s plan in the Senate (and perhaps ultimately in the House as well) would be the Democrats’ approval.

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11:36 We’re talking too much about debts and deficits which means we can’t talk about spending money on community colleges. Community colleges????

11:34 It comes down, says Obama, to “who’s trying to get things done.” That is an odd formulation; what voters want is for politicians to do things the voters think are good ideas and block things that are bad ideas.

11:31 As usual, the longer Obama goes, the more he begins to lose his cool. He attacks Republicans on trade deals, on failing to support his infrastructure bill…

11:25 “If the American people looked at this, they might say, ‘Boy, some of these choices are tough. But they don’t require us to” do anything about Social Security or Medicare, lower federal aid for college, deal with veterans benefits….So where are the tough choices again?

11:22 “We don’t need a constitutional amendment to do our jobs,” Obama says about the balanced-budget amendment. “We need to make tough choices.” Like, you know, spending $700 billion on TARP and bailing out the auto companies and a stimulus of $863 billion and passing health care. Lots of tough choices there.

11:19 Obama fears morphing into Carter, so he’s trying desperately to morph into Clinton, including the triangulating.

11:17 The only specific cut of any sort Obama mentions by name is ethanol subsidies. The only one.

11:15 Obama’s demeanor has changed entirely from the press conference earlier in the week. He’ s feeling far more confident that he has the wind at his back.

11:13 So basically Obama that it’s not serious to cut the federal budget by $2.4 trillion but that only modest changes to Medicare and Social Security can result in trillions of dollars in savings.

11:12 Obama is saying they’ve identified cuts of over a trillion dollars in defense and discretionary spending. 11:10 “I’m not going to get into specifics,” Obama says about the cuts he’s willing to accept, and there is the nub. If he isn’t willing to get into specifics, how on earth can a “big deal” be made?

11:09 “Modest changes” in Medicare and Social Security can save trillions of dollars, Obama says. It’s all so simple!

11:04 Jake Tapper asks about what exactly Obama is willing to do when it comes to entitlement spending, what specific piece of entitlement spending is on the table. This is a question the ABC correspondent has been pressing on White House press secretary for days without result. Obama answers by saying he’s willing to look at all kinds of approached and mentions only specific programs he won’t cut. Then he says he supports some form of means-testing for people of his age. Which, given the fact that he won’t be collecting on Medicare for 15 years, won’t really help.

11:03 For the first time in a long time when it comes to political gamesmanship, Obama is showing some real canniness here. If he keeps talking and talking and talking about how he wants a huge amount of deficit reduction, over time he may succeed in connecting his name to the idea even if the administration is actually unserious about it.

11:02 Obama is very confident that he has the winning argument here, and he’s using polling data suggesting Republicans believe in “revenues”—i.e., tax increases—just as he does.

11:00 Obama reiterates that all Congressional leaders want the debt ceiling raised. But again, Obama says “we have a chance to do something big…to stabilize America’s economy for the next ten years.”

Earlier, I cited a new poll showing two-thirds of Palestinians reject any two-state solution that entails recognizing Israel as the Jewish homeland, while the same majority sees a two-state solution as a mere stepping-stone toward Israel’s eradication. It also showed 72 percent deny Jewish history in Jerusalem, 53 percent support educating schoolchildren to hate Jews, and 73 percent support the Hamas charter’s call for killing Jews behind every “rock and tree.”

But perhaps even scarier than the poll itself was the delusional response of Israeli leaders when briefed on it by pollster Stanley Greenberg and Jennifer Laszlo Mizrahi of The Israel Project, which commissioned it. According to the Jerusalem Post, Israeli leaders said “they were encouraged by Palestinian support for talks.” Indeed, 65 percent of respondents preferred talks to violence as a tactic for achieving their goals. But what good is that if there’s nothing to talk about – which there isn’t as long as Palestinians deny the Jewish state’s right to exist?

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu sounded much more sensible in an interview with author Etgar Keret last month: He said forthrightly the conflict is “not about territory,” but about the Jewish state’s right to exist, and will therefore remain unsolvable until Palestinians recognize “Israel as a Jewish state.” Keret then asked what, if so, could be done to further peace: Read More

Alana’s right to question the decision of the Democratic Senate Campaign Committee (DSCC) to join the mob piling on embattled media mogul Rupert Murdoch. But, as Ben Smith points out at Politico, their decision to join the chorus of bashers is even more hypocritical than you may have thought. During the 2010 election cycle, News Corp. donated $124,550 to Senate Democrats while giving only $27,700 to Republicans.

If the DSCC thinks Murdoch is so bad, will they be giving all that money back anytime soon? Don’t hold your breath.

It’s one thing for members of Congress to call for investigations of Rupert Murdoch, but there’s something disquieting about the fundraising arm of a political party targeting a media organization because they don’t like what it publishes. Will any journalists or free press organizations speak up in defense of News Corp. on this? Doubtful:

The DSCC has launched a petition to “Stand With Democrats & Demand that Murdoch Come Clean on Spying,” as they put it in the ad that is the first thing anyone Googling ”Rupert Murdoch” will see today. …

“Murdoch’s empire often unfairly targets Democrats and progressives, but this recent scandal goes so much further and is only growing by the day,” says the petition. “Senators Robert Menendez, Jay Rockefeller, Frank Lautenberg, and other Democrats are pushing for investigations. They need your support. It’s time for Rupert Murdoch to come clean and immediately tell the American people whether his company targeted any Americans here at home. Sign our petition to demand the truth.”

Don’t get me wrong, there’s no problem with Murdoch being investigated if there are credible allegations of wrongdoing against him (as opposed to a politically-motivated fishing expedition), and the FBI is already on the case. I just think if the DSCC was running political ads targeting the owners of CNN or the Washington Post Co. instead of News Corp., other members of the fourth estate would be rightly outraged.

Here’s a poll you will not see covered in your daily paper, because it throws the real cause of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict into uncomfortably stark relief: Asked whether they agreed with President Barack Obama’s statement that “there should be two states: Palestine as the homeland for the Palestinian people and Israel as the homeland for the Jewish people,” only 34  percent said yes; 61 percent disagreed. Moreover, a whopping 66 percent said the Palestinians’ goal should not be a permanent two-state solution, but a two-state solution as an interim stage en route to the ultimate goal of a single Palestinian state in all the territory between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea – a goal that amply explains their opposition to recognizing Israel as the Jewish homeland.

This was a serious poll, conducted by American pollster Stanley Greenberg and the Beit Sahour-based Palestinian Center for Public Opinion by means of face-to-face interviews in Arabic with 1,010 adults in the West Bank and Gaza. And the findings only get worse. As the Jerusalem Post reported:

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Many pundits on both the left and the right are convinced Michele Bachmann’s boomlet is bound to collapse sooner or later. They believe she is too extreme to be taken seriously by the American people once they learn more about her. They also think her gaffes and scrutiny of her family will undo her. But instead of losing steam, the Tea Party heroine keeps gaining ground in polls. Part of the answer to this puzzle is to be found in Politico’s story about the way the Minnesota representative has, almost by accident, become the sole winner of a debt ceiling crisis that is threatening to sink both President Obama and the GOP congressional leadership.

The irony is being a backbench member of the House of Representatives was always thought too obscure a post to generate enough attention for a serious presidential candidate. But it is that status which is helping Bachmann stay in the news. Bachmann is an outsider in the House with no leadership responsibilities and no ties to either John Boehner or Eric Cantor that would motivate her to support any compromise on the issues of debt and taxes. The crisis has ramped up coverage of issues on which she is vocal while leaving her free to opine on television and on the stump and damn any thought of a short or long-term solution that doesn’t strictly conform to her own vision. While other Republicans are either bargaining with the White House or trying to sound like sober deal makers, Bachmann can wave the bloody shirt of debt and taxes all she wants to the applause of the GOP grass roots.

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After weeks of fruitless negotiations, the debt-ceiling showdown is coming down to a pair of unanswered questions. Is President Obama really prepared to risk the debacle that a failure to raise the debt ceiling might cause for the economy? And are the Republicans prepared for the deluge of abuse the president and his cheering section in the mainstream media are about to rain down on their heads if they stand their ground and refuse to go along with the tax increases that Obama demands as part of the price for an agreement?

The answer to the first question is yes. Everything the president has said and done in recent days shows he is not merely prepared to face the negative consequences for the economy that a blowup on the debt would incur; he is inviting them. Obama’s goal is to avoid making the tough choices he’s always prattling about prior to the 2012 election. Since he believes the polls that tell him his demagogic attacks on the Republicans about taxing the rich will absolve the Democrats of blame for the crisis, he appears to be seeking the fiasco that he claims to be working to avoid. Obama thinks he is in a no-lose position. Either the GOP will fold and agree to tax increases or he will saddle them with all of the responsibility for the impact of the debt crisis.

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