The Dish

Ambinder explains some political maneuvering:

[A]s the Copenhagen climate talks begin, the Environmental Protection Agency plans to issue a formal "endangerment" finding for carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases.  In doing so, the agency is giving the administration what amounts to a cattle prod. Having "found" that CO2 is a "public danger," and having taken the requisite administrative steps, the executive branch now believes it has the power to unilaterally impose carbon and greenhouse gas emissions caps on industry in the United States.  This overhanging boot will threaten to drop until and unless Congress acts. It's a neat executive weapon to have — one that, incidentally, the Bush administration chose not to take out of the locker, and one that the Obama administration decided to unsheathe as the President prepares to travel to Copenhagen.

Bradford Plumer speculates:

As The Wall Street Journal reports, many large businesses, particularly power companies, hate the idea of the EPA issuing its own carbon rules. They'd rather have Congress set up a more flexible cap-and-trade system. (Electric utilities, in particular, were able to shape the House bill more to their liking, and they'd have less luck with EPA regs.) So will those companies start ratcheting up the pressure on lawmakers to pass a climate bill?

One of the more dramatic clips from today:

Another dramatic scene – protesters defiantly breaking down the gate at Ami Kabir University – after the jump:

Ezra Klein previews a possible non-public plan compromise (follow-up here):

These plans would be private, but the [Office of Personnel Management] would act as an aggressive purchaser, ensuring that they met high standards and conducted themselves properly. It's a private option with a public filter, essentially. But more importantly, it's a menu of national, nonprofit plans, which would be much more interesting from a competitive standpoint than state-based, public plans.

 
Nate Silver plucks out an interesting nugget from an Ipsos/McClatchy poll:

43 percent of people favor health care reform, whereas 38 percent oppose it (20 percent are undecided). But the actual plan under consideration gets numbers that are more or less the reverse of that — 34 percent in favor, 46 percent opposed — because a significant number of people think the plan doesn't go far enough.

Marc Lynch picks apart last week's Pew survey on foreign policy:

Only 16% of the public has a favorable view of Pakistan, our essential partner in the new AfPak strategy — barely more than have a favorable view of Iran (11%) — and unfavorable views of Pakistan have gone from 39% to 68% since last year.  Yikes.  And the partisan gap on Israel is interesting, if not new:  in the general public, 68% of Republicans and 43% of Democrats say that they sympathize with Israel more than with the Palestinians. Among [Council on Foreign Relations] experts, a solid 41% plurality say that they sympathize with both Israel and the Palestinians equally.

A reader writes:

Your reader is right:  Sometimes people-in-the-spotlight are able to bring attention to a misunderstood or relatively unknown issue, in a way that raises awareness and helps families who are struggling with such issue. Tipper Gore helped to diminish the stigma associated with mental illness by talking about the personal story of her mother, Michael J. Fox courageously shows the face of Parkinson's disease, as did Betty Ford with alcohol dependency, etc. So I'm sure that some people are helped by seeing Trig on stage "so openly, proudly and even normally apart of someone's life."

But outside of parading Trig around so "proudly," what has Palin done to advance the issue, or educate others on the issue, in the way Gore, Fox, Ford and others have done?

So far as I can tell, she's only given one speech on the issue, in October 2008, during the campaign. It was a pretty good speech. Palin advocated for extending the funding and scope of the federal program, IDEA (Individuals with Disabilities Education Act), and utilizing the NIH to get parents better information on how to care for a special needs child from birth onwards.

Unfortunately, she hasn't followed through on those campaign promises, not as Governor, not as a political or celebrity figure who wields enormous influence. If I were a mother of a special needs child, I might find this frustrating—I would want Palin to use her stage to do more than simply illuminate Trig. Just sayin.

Electronically:

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The Persian website Kalameh reports that Zahra Rahnavard, Mousavi's wife, was stalked by a group of Basiji women and sprayed with pepper spray. Persian2English translates:

According to an eye witness, when Zahra Rahnavard asked them why she was being followed, the women claimed they intended to protect her. Zahra Rahnavard then replied, “You have been following me all day anywhere I went including my office.” According to the eyewitness, Rahnavard said, “I’m telling you that I am Green from head to toe and you are only here to prevent my presence.”

This conversation ultimately lead to a verbal discussion and Rahnavard was insulted by the leader of the women Basij who questioned Rahnavard on what her ideas were before and after the revolution.  Rahnavard then replied, “Are you interrogators or body guards as you claim?” The lady replied, “You are scared of us.”

Continued here.

(Photo: ATTA KENARE/AFP/Getty Images, Hat tip: Enduring America)

Once again, the Israeli press is more candid and interesting than the neutered US MSM which fears being tarnished as anti-Semites if they dare question aspects of the current US-Israel relationship and how it impacts the US' broad global and regional interests. From Haaretz:

Every appointee to the American government must endure a thorough background check by the American Jewish community… The latest round of heated debate has been over the nomination of Hannah Rosenthal to head the Office to Monitor and Combat Anti-Semitism in the Obama administration. Rosenthal, who is the daughter of a Holocaust survivor, served as a Health Department regional director under the Clinton administration, and held positions in different left-leaning Jewish organizations.

Between 2000 and 2005, Rosenthal was the head of the Jewish Council for Public Affairs; she was also the executive director of the Chicago Foundation for Women. In recent years, she has served on the advisory board of the J Street lobby.

Many Jewish groups are fine with her, even the ADL. But she has actually criticized some neocons for erecting an absurdly Manichean, Seth Lipsky-style "pro-Israel" or "anti-Israel" dynamic. And so true hardliners are trying to derail her too:

Shortly after the announcement of Rosenthal's nomination, conservative Jewish web sites began to attack her, some of them declaring that Obama appointed an anti-Israeli to fight anti-Semitism.

Rumors brewed that she had accused Israel of systemically strengthening anti-Semitism. Bloggers argued that her appointment would cause Jews and Israelis to cast doubt on Obama and his relationship with Israel. In one of her articles, Rosenthal criticized conservative voices in the Jewish community who she accused of taking over the discourse regarding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

"It's a scary time, with people losing the ability to differentiate between a Jew, any Jew, and what's going on in Israel," Rosenthal said. 

What she means is that there is immense neoconservative resistance to the idea that the interests of Israel and the interest of the United States may not always be identical. And an immense conviction that anyone who even utters this truism is a closet anti-Semite.

Putting NSFW words in their mouths: