–From the Huffington Post: Rep. Gary Ackerman (D-N.Y.) plans next week to break out the six likely most popular elements of this year’s health care bill and dare Republicans to vote against them.
–From the Jerusalem Post, Alon Ben-Meir argues that Robert Wexler, currently of the Center for Middle East peace, formerly of Congress, has the straight talk and the imagination to become the Obama administration’s point man on peace talks. Wexler, of course, was once a "fire breathing liberal" who nearly duked it out with some Gulf parliamentarian. Haven’t heard much from him lately. Ben-Meir argues he would constitute a fresh-faced replacement for Dennis Ross and George Mitchell, whom he says have been "tainted" by the process’ failures so far.
–From the International Herald Tribune, the U.S. Institute of Peace’s Scott Lasensky, Georgetown University’s Chester Crocker, and ubiquity’s Sam Lewis argue that the Obama administration should simply declare what it expects a two state solution would look like, and take it from there.
–J Street argues same.
–The New Yorker, especially the front of its book, is usually the place to go for considered and wry assessments of the news of the day. What a surprise then to see Hendrik Hertzberg wield (and deftly) a rhetorical axe, swinging it toward Glenn Beck and Fox News Channel and their bid to use George Soros’ Holocaust childhood against him. Or maybe not so surprising — most of Beck’s broadsides stem from perverse misreadings of the magazine’s 1995 portrait of Soros:
Call us oversensitive, but when our efforts are shanghaied like a nineteenth-century sailor and forced to work as a deckhand aboard a ship of lies, we can’t help getting our hackles up. You don’t have to be a professional semiotician to see that the Glenn Beck promo is intended to leave the impression that George Soros, the hedge-fund investor and funder of anti-totalitarian and liberal causes, is an anti-Semite; that he was somehow complicit in the Holocaust; and that he is an enemy of Israel. These are lies—lies told by innuendo, but lies all the same. The promo’s shard of truth is that “The World According to Soros” was indeed published in The New Yorker. Its author was Connie Bruck. (“Bruc” is a Fox flub, not a Fox fib.) The quotes from it, though accurately transcribed, are made to function as lies by being placed in an utterly mendacious context. Bruck’s article is the “source” of these smears only in the sense that the brooks of the Catskills are the “source” of New York City’s sewage.
—Sam Stein at the Huffington Post catches Rep. Shelley Berkley (D-Nev.) telling political journalist Jon Ralston that she wonders whether Nancy Pelosi should have run for minority leader — but that she voted for her for Nevada-specific rasons (Pelosi backs gaming, opposes nuclear waste dumping at Yucca.)
Stein speculates (not without reason) that sniping at Pelosi in a relatively conservative state makes sense for someone contemplating a run against scandal-tainted incumbent Sen. John Ensign (R-Nev.) in 2012.
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