• How Wall Street Was Defeated on Capitol Hill--For Now, by Noam Scheiber
• Can Reform Actually Improve Medical Care? Not-So-Promising Signs From the Senate Bill. by Jonathan Cohn
• The Problem with Putting a Price Tag on Nature, by Bradford Plumer
• How Geithner Can Fix His Image Problem, by Noam Scheiber
• Peretz: The Accelerating Decline of Europe, by Marty Peretz
• Don’t Waste Any More Stimulus Money on Infrastructure, by Robert Puentes
• Watch Out, Obamacare Has Your Guns in its Sights! by Michelle Cottle
• Is It Too Late For the Fed to Help Ease Unemployment Rates? by Zubin Jelveh

As always, be sure to check out economic news on The Stash, environment and energy coverage on The Vine, the latest on health care at The Treatment, metro policy debate on The Avenue, and Marty Peretz's The Spine. Also be sure to take a look at TNR's new blogs by William Galston, Simon Johnson, Ed Kilgore, Damon Linker, and John McWhorter.

On the eve of the Obama administration's first State Dinner--a dinner in honor of Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh--The Indian Express has a major scoop. The 1992 destruction of the Babri mosque in Ayodyha led to the deaths of more than 1000 people, and arguably remains the most controversial event in recent Indian history. A retired supreme court justice, M.S. Liberhan, led a commission that investigated the massacre. The commission's report--almost two decades in the making--was submitted to the prime minister, but kept secret. Yesterday, it leaked.

Calling them “pseudo-moderates,” the Justice Manmohan Singh Liberhan Commission of Inquiry has indicted former Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee along with current Leader of Opposition in the Lok Sabha L K Advani and former BJP president Murli Manohar Joshi, among others, for the demolition of the Babri Masjid.

Citing the evidence it gathered, which includes witness statements and official records, one of the key conclusions of the Commission is said to be that the entire build-up to the demolition was meticulously planned. And there was nothing to show that these leaders were either unaware of what was going on or innocent of any wrongdoing.

What's more:

The report is learnt to have said that despite claims to the contrary, the Ayodhya campaign did not enjoy the willing and voluntary support of the common masses, particularly Hindus. In fact, Liberhan is learnt to have said that the demand for a temple never became a mass movement. The campaign only ended up silencing the voices of sanity and shaming them into joining the movement.

The "pseudo-moderate" comment is particularly noteworthy because the politicians listed above are indeed considered to be moderate members of the BJP, one of India's two largest political parties (Singh belongs to other major party, Congress). In other words, one of the most horrific acts of religious-inspired violence of the past quarter-century was orchestrated by the relatively sane wing of the country's second largest political party. This a rather humbling thought for the people who (rightly) want to celebrate the emergence of India as the world's other gigantic, multiethnic democracy.

The BBC has more.

As has been the case all year, progressives are giving mixed reviews to the latest legislative step health care reform legislation, the 60-40 Senate vote-to-proceed, which is basically a preliminary cloture vote. While everyone's happy that the vote wasn't lost, there's a fair amount of angst over the threats of some Democrats to vote against the final bill, or against cloture on the final bill, unless actions unacceptable to most progressives are taken to change the bill.

And again, as has been the case all year, nearly all the focus among progressive worriers is over the public option, which Senators Lieberman and Nelson seem to be ruling out categorically.

Let's look at these two issues separately.

If, indeed, wavering Democrats who voted for the motion to proceed nonetheless conclude that they have no obligation to vote for cloture on passage of the bill unless their substantive demands are met, then we might as well start rediscussing the reconciliation strategy, because there is no version of health reform, now or at any point in recent history, that could command 60 votes in the Senate. To get to 60 on cloture (even granting that a Republican or two might still be lured across the line), it will be necessary to convert those who basically said "I hate this bill but I don't want to prevent the debate" to a position of "I hate this bill but I don't want to prevent a vote." And that will require not just moral suasion but pressure and maybe serious threats of reprisals from the Senate leadership, supplemented by a robust public campaign over the next few weeks to demonize the de facto 60-vote requirement, which much of the public knows nothing about. Keep in mind that health reform isn't the only progressive initiative that's doomed if it takes 60 Senate votes to enact anything serious on any subject, and also keep in mind that an increase in Democratic votes in the Senate in the immediate future is exceptionally unlikely.

On the second issue, the public option focus, it's as good a time as any for progressives to finally begin looking at this legislation as a whole, and as compared to what will happen if no legislation is enacted before the 2010 elections. It is entirely possible (particularly if you are a single-payer advocate) to conclude that a reasonably strong public option is more important than covering most of the uninsured, more important than the level of subsidies to make coverage practically affordable, more important than regulation to end highly discriminatory insurance practices, and more important than how and when health reform is phased in, just to mention four competing priorities. But it's equally possible--and more to the point, legitimately progressive--to consider one or more of these factors to be as important as a conventionally constructed public option--again, if you major concern is the practical effects of reform rather than setting the stage for a future single payer system. In any event, an intra-progressive debate on priorities that goes beyond the public option issue needs to happen right away.

Ed Kilgore is Managing Editor of The Democratic Strategist and a senior fellow at the Progressive Policy Institute.

It's often said that you can't hope to apply Iraq strategy to Afghanistan because the two countries/conflicts are so different. But Stanley McChrystal seems not to agree:

In Iraq, the U.S.-funded Sons of Iraq program got as many as 100,000 Sunni insurgents to stop fighting the U.S., or even take up arms against the group Al Qaeda in Iraq, by forming paramilitary groups. Efforts are underway to move them into state security forces or provide other jobs. U.S. military officers deployed in Afghanistan's south, the Taliban heartland, say they are being encouraged to test similar ideas in the field.

Army Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, head of U.S. and Western forces in Afghanistan, personally wooed a key architect of the Iraq program out of planned retirement to help craft the drive, which is to be aimed initially at low-level Taliban fighters.

British Lt. Gen. Graeme Lamb, who arrived in Afghanistan at the end of August to help develop the plan, said a crucial element would be acknowledging that many insurgents believe that the West plans an open-ended occupation of Afghanistan.

Other fighters, he said, are acting on personal grievances related to powerful clan and tribal loyalties, such as a home destroyed or a relative killed, rather than subscribing to the overarching ideological agenda of Taliban leaders.

"We have an opportunity to reset the conditions," Lamb, former deputy commander of the Multi-National Force in Iraq, said in an interview at the North Atlantic Treaty Organization force headquarters. The vast majority of Taliban foot soldiers, he said, are "misguided -- they have fought well for a bad cause."

(Emphasis mine.) Of course a plan like this--turning the locals against the insurgents--doesn't work if people think you will fight with limited force and will be leaving soon.

CFR has an illuminating interview with Carnegie's George Perkovich:

[W]hat happened is that Jalili returned from Vienna to a place where the leadership had systematically made enemies of many in the Iranian establishment, including the speaker of the Parliament, Ali Larijani, who was the former chief nuclear negotiator and who himself has been regarded as a pretty hard-line guy. Ahmadinejad in the past had belittled him and said that he was weak, and so now was time for payback. Everybody who had been angered or frustrated or brow-beaten by Ahmadinejad turned around and dumped on him. So Mir-Hossein Mousavi, the leader of the opposition, and Mehdi Karroubi, the other leader of the opposition, as well as Larijani, all denounced the Vienna accord as a weak-kneed accommodation to the West, that it was giving away "our great patrimony." The deal actually is very good for Iran, and so the explanation for the turnaround is Iranian politics.

Perkovich basically sees no hope for productive negotiations with Iran, and advises the Obama administration to "draw the line and enforce that Iran doesn't go from the capability to making nuclear weapons." But of course the US has been drawing lines for years, to no effect.

(For more good expert opinion on Iran, check out this lucid presentation by nukes expert Matt Bunn of Harvard, who warns against the false hope that we can halt nuclear enrichment in Iran.)

Nate Silver makes the sharp observation that all the public hand-wringing by red state Democrats about how they won't vote for the health care reform bill in its current form may not do them much good with their voters:

Take a look, for instance, at some evidence from Montana, where we have a bit of a controlled experiment. In Montana, a purplish-red state, there are two Democratic senators -- Max Baucus and Jon Tester -- each of whom have ultimately decided to support the Democrats' health care reform plans. But whereas Tester has staked out his position very quietly, Baucus seemed to relish the attention he received as the head of the Senate Finance Committee, virtually taking it upon himself to strike a deal with the Senate's centrists, and frequently appearing in television and print media.

And what's happened? According to the Montana State University - Billings poll, Tester's approval ratings are virtually unchanged from two years earlier (although his disapproval rating has increased slightly). But Baucus has seen his fall precipitously, from 64 percent to 44 percent....

Baucus, indeed, is not alone in this department: virtually everyone who has tried to play a dealmaker role in health care has seen their approval ratings decline, from Chuck Grassley to Olympia Snowe to Harry Reid to President Obama....

I had two further thoughts, one of which cuts, at least potentially, against Silver's thesis, and one of which would tend to support it. While it's true that Tester's low profile on health reform has led to his catching far less flack back home than Baucus so far, it may not make such a big difference when he comes up for reelection in 2012 and has a Republican opponent eager to publicize his support for the measure. On the other hand, nobody enjoys the spectacle of legislative sausage-making--the deal-cutting and grandstanding and interminable debate--so it makes a certain degree of sense that a senator's loudly proclaiming himself one of the sausage-makers-in-chief would tend to make voters think less of him.

You can find more of Silver's thoughts, including his advice for Blanche Lincoln, here.

In news that is sure to warm the hearts of every American, the Charlotte Observer has a report today about Sarah Palin's meeting with Billy Graham and his son, Franklin.

"He's followed her career and likes her strong stand on faith," said son Franklin Graham, who was present for the 2 1/2-hour get-together. "Daddy feels God was using her to wake America up."

As if that were not dreary enough:

She quizzed him on the presidents he's known and wanted his take on what the Bible says about Israel, Iran and Iraq, Franklin Graham reported.

None of this is the least bit surprising, but it was depressing to read the following:

Graham's son also confirmed his father got a call Nov. 12 from President Obama, a Democrat, who was phoning from Air Force One as he jetted to Asia. "He said he wanted to come by and meet my father sometime," Franklin Graham said. Obama also wished the evangelist belated birthday wishes - he turned 91 on Nov. 7. Graham told the president he'd be happy to meet with him and then shared a verse from Proverbs, his son said.

In this charming spirit of bipartisanship, let us not forget another conversation Graham once had with an American president:

Nixon: No... Well, the thing that you've really got to emphasize to him though, Billy, is that this anti-Semitism is stronger than we think, you know - they just... it's unfortunate, but this has happened to the Jews, it happened in Spain, it's happened in Germany, it's happening... and now it's going to happen in America if these people don't start behaving.

Graham: Well, you know, I told you one time that the Bible talks about two kinds of Jews. One is called "the synagogue of Satan." They're the ones putting out the pornographic literature, they're the ones putting out these obscene films.

Congressional Quarterly's Shira Toeplitz has a good rundown on all the ways in which presumptive Pennsylvania GOP Senate nominee Pat Toomey has moved to the center ever since Arlen Specter bolted for the Democratic Party. Which makes me again wonder whether it was a mistake for Obama to encourage Specter's defection.**

If Obama hadn't welcomed Specter with open arms and Specter had been forced to stay in the GOP, he almost certainly would have lost the Republican primary to Toomey, who planned to run to Specter's right. Even though Toomey would have pivoted to the middle for the general election, the pivot wouldn't have worked terribly well, because he would have already spent months running as an archconservative and would be known to many Pennsylvania voters as such. In other words, the Democratic nominee would have been running against an out-of-the-mainstream-for-Pennsylvania Republican. But now that Toomey's been able to begin his move to the center early, he'll likely be viewed by many general election voters as a legitimate moderate.

Meanwhile, the Democratic primary is shaping up to be a bloody battle between Specter and Joe Sestak. And the idea that, as Politico reports, "Democrats are buoyed by polling that suggests either candidate would run competitively against presumptive Republican nominee Pat Toomey" isn't exactly comforting, when you consider that the only reason Toomey is a formidable candidate is because he didn't have to run as a right-winger in order to win his primary. It's enough to make you think that if Obama had simply taken a hands-off policy toward this race, Democrats would have had a better shot at picking up that Pennsylvania Senate seat in 2010.

**- Of course, Specter's defection has paid short-term benefits for Obama, especially on health care. So, if that was Obama's calculation in encouraging Specter's switch, it was a smart move.

Ross Douthat's column in today's New York Times makes the perfectly sensible point that Sarah Palin and Mike Huckabee have decided to use their fame to become bigger celebrities, rather than more policy-oriented, serious public figures. Huckabee hosts a (perversely enjoyable) television show on Fox News, and Palin has a new book out (or so I've heard). Douthat writes:

 For Palin, the serious path required at least serving out her term as governor before returning to the national stage. For Huckabee, it could have involved anything from starting a think tank to running for the Senate in 2010. For both, it would have meant wedding their political identity to ideas as well as attitudes.So far, they’ve chosen celebrity instead...

But they were the wrong moves if either wanted to become president someday. Huckabee’s gabfest is a weekly reaffirmation of the rap that he’s too lightweight for the Oval Office. Palin has sealed her identity as a culture-war lightning rod: she can inspire hysteria from liberals (ably catalogued in Matthew Continetti’s “Persecution of Sarah Palin”) and adulation from conservatives (visible at every stop along her book tour), but she’s unlikely to persuade anyone in the middle to trust her with the reins of government.

Douthat then contrasts them to Obama, who did not allow his celebrity status to get in the way of his wonkishness and seriousness.

The first problem with this argument is that, er, Palin is unlikely to become a policy wonk because she is not very smart. What's more, Douthat's argument is tautological. Sure, it would be nice for the GOP if Palin and Huckabee were interested in policy. But if they were interested in policy, then they would not be so appealing to the GOP base. In other words, the problem is that a large part of the right has no interest in a policy wonk, and sneers at intellectuals and elites and the types of people Douthat would like to see running the party. A candidate who was interested in learning the ins and outs of the welfare state and health care policy is unlikely to ever achieve Palin/Huckabee levels of popularity with the grassroots. 

One of the most fascinating aspects of the health-care reform debate are the creative, highly targeted arguments that outside groups are marshalling to try and kill it. My current favorite is from the Gun Owners of America. (If you think the NRA is a bunch of accommodationist wusses, this group's for you.) Saturday, the organization issued a warning to its members, featuring this motivational bit:

Of course, all this increased spending – and taxes – means that you will have less money to spend on pursuing your real passions:  like providing for your family and purchasing guns and ammunition!

The mandates in the legislation will most likely dump your gun-related health data into a government database that was created in section 13001 of the stimulus bill.  This includes any firearms-related information your doctor has gleaned... or any determination of PTSD, or something similar, that can preclude you from owning firearms.

And, the special "wellness and prevention" programs (inserted by Section 1001 of the bill as part of a new Section 2717 in the Public Health Services Act) would allow the government to offer lower premiums to employers who bribe their employees to live healthier lifestyles – and nothing within the bill would prohibit rabidly anti-gun HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius from decreeing that "no guns" is somehow healthier.

(Please note that the ellipses in the second paragraph are theirs, not mine. Far be it from me to leave out any of these rhetorical nuggets.)

Let's break this call to arms down into its two primary parts:

1. GOA pulls the common stunt of dragging an outlandish hypothetical straight from the fevered dreams of Ron Paul and spinning it as a perfectly reasonable, intended outcome of reform. Yes, there is (to my knowledge) nothing in this bill that specifically prohibits Sebelius from declaring non-gun-ownership to be an indicator of good health. There is also nothing in the bill that specifically prohibits her from donning a diamond tiara and declaring herself Queen of Festivus. Of the two, however, only the no-guns-equal-wellness maneuver would be tantamount to political suicide for Sebelius's entire party.

2. GOA is also apoplectic over the possibility that, post-reform, the government's health-care database will "most likely" make it easier to prevent people with grave psychological problems from owning firearms.

Let's set aside for a moment whether this kind of mass-scale coordination is remotely feasible, much less "likely," and just allow GOA's basic objection to sink in: As the group sees it, that whole seriously-mentally-ill-people-shouldn't-own-guns crap is precisely the sort of jack-booted thuggery that threatens the very fiber of this great nation. The only thing that makes such fascism currently palatable is that the existing system is so easy to game. (Let's hear it for the gun-show loophole, people!) But if Obamacare passes, look out.

Say what you will about the level of public discourse in this debate; it's providing an illuminating glimpse into the psyches of some of reform's more colorful opponents.

 Last week, the Republican Governors Association held a conference outside Austin where the group predicted that the ideas-oriented campaigns of Chris Christie and Bob McDonnell would serve as harbingers of the 37 gubernatorial races next year--an issue I touched upon in a piece a few weeks ago. While Mississippi governor Haley Barbour, the chairman of the committee, is coming out as the public face of the RGA, the real brains behind the group seems to be executive director Nick Ayers. Click here to read about how he is angling the RGA to lead the Republican comeback.

Les Gelb thinks Obama's trip to Asia was a flop, and that the time would have been better spent on a Hawaii vacation. He also wonders whether, after a couple of foreign trips with little to show for them, Obama's foreign policy team is serving him well:

First, the trip’s limited value per day of presidential effort suggests a disturbing amateurishness in managing America’s power. On top of the inexcusably clumsy review of Afghan policy and the fumbling of Mideast negotiations, the message for Mr. Obama should be clear: He should stare hard at the skills of his foreign-policy team and, more so, at his own dominant role in decision-making. Something is awry somewhere, and he’s got to fix it.

I don't agree that Obama should be castigated for the Asia trip's lack of "deliverables." I do think the Afghanistan policy review and Middle East diplomacy have left a lot to be desired. Just whose fault that is remains unclear. Different people have different theories and it's probably not fair to name names based on speculation. But to some degree, Obama inherited an incredibly lousy hand on foreign policy, and turning things around was never going to be simple and happy-making.

It's worth noting, finally, that we've already seen two minor shakeups. The veteran Middle East (and, more recently, Iran) guru Dennis Ross moved from the State Department to the national security council. And Obama's longtime foreign policy aide Mark Lippert recent departed the NSC, for reasons unclear, to return to the Navy.