Who Expects ANYTHING Good To Ever Comes Out Of The Accursed Trump Regime-- Let Alone An Israel-Palestine Accord?

Did anyone ever think when Trump put his wormy and corrupt son-in-law, Jared Kushner, in charge the Middle East that peace between the Palestinians and Israelis would be nigh? It isn't. His peace plan is a p.r. stunt and con job that has already been rejected by the Palestinians. The sickening, ass-kissing video above-- much of it based on lies the way everything that comes out of the Trumpist regime is-- is Jared being interviewed by Christiane Amanpour on CNN, completely out of his depth and seeming to claim Trump has brought Israel together-- the hell with the Palestinians, who he berated as losers for passing on past proposals. Kushner, who rarely speaks in public, is much, much dumber than even I thought-- and I know his high school tutor who told me he's a moron long ago.

The Palestinians already passed on the Trump p.r. stunt while protesters burned tires and pictures of Trump (impeached) and Netanyahu (indicted). In the words of the NY Times, "The peace plan would create a small, disjointed Palestinian state in the West Bank and allow Israel to annex nearly all the Jewish settlements in the territory. Abbas rejected the deal before it was announced saying the U.S. was hopelessly biased toward Israel. Jordan meanwhile warned against any Israeli 'annexation of Palestinian lands' and reaffirmed its commitment to the creation of a Palestinian state along the 1967 lines, which would include all the West Bank and Israeli-annexed east Jerusalem. Foreign Minister Ayman Safadi warned of 'the dangerous consequences of unilateral Israeli measures, such as annexation of Palestinian lands.'" Netanyahu intends to annex 30% of the West Bank, with Trump's approval, in the next few days. There is nothing about the proposal that is a serious peace plan.

Zack Beauchamp at Vox was the first to hit toenail right on the head: "The proposal is missing a signature feature of every prior peace plan: a path to a viable Palestinian state. It divides up the Palestinian territories and surrounds them by Israel, and gives Israel total control over Palestinian security-- allowing a future Palestinian government to exercise full control over its own land only when Israel deems it acceptable. It’s a kind of state-minus: a Palestine without much of its land and subservient to Israel for basic functions."

“Trump can try to make this a Palestinian state by calling it a state. But it ain’t ever gonna whistle,” writes Tamara Cofman Wittes, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution’s Center for Middle East Policy.

Needless to say, the Palestinians cannot and will not agree to such humiliation, and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas has already ruled it out.

“No, no, and no,” he has said. “Jerusalem is not for sale. All of our rights are not for sale or bartering.”

In fact, the Trump administration didn’t even have a role in writing the plan: It was put together primarily by Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, in consultation with the Israeli government. The notion that this is a good-faith effort to make peace is laughable.

So if the “peace plan” isn’t a peace plan, then what is it?

First, it’s an effort to help Netanyahu, a staunch Trump ally, in advance of tightly contested March elections in Israel. The release of a plan so tilted to Israeli priorities helps the right-wing prime minister sell himself as the man best positioned to handle the vital US-Israel relationship. And it doesn’t seem like an accident that the plan was released on the same day that Israel’s attorney general formally indicted Netanyahu on bribery and corruption charges.

Second, and more insidiously, it is a plan to legitimize Israel’s ongoing effort to seize additional Palestinian land.

The United States, as Israel’s most important ally and the historic mediator in the Israeli-Palestinian peace process, helps define the parameters of what counts as an acceptable outcome.

As soon as the Palestinians have rejected the plan-- and it took only minutes for them to do so-- the Israelis can say, “Well, we tried, but they wouldn’t deal.” And they can proceed with settlement expansion and land grabs, moving Israel toward “not peace, but apartheid,” as B’Tselem, a leading Israeli human rights group, put it in a press release on the proposal.

The Trump vision is, in short, a truly Orwellian creation: a “peace plan” that actually is a plan to destroy the prospects for peace.

Trump's peace plan is a nonstarter

Prior to the Trump plan, the basic framework for Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiations had been relatively fixed. There would be two states, with the Palestinians taking control of the overwhelming bulk of the Palestinian-populated West Bank and Gaza Strip, and with Israel largely retreating to its current internationally recognized borders.

The two sides would come to agreement on thorny issues like which Israeli settlements in the West Bank could become part of Israel, and how exactly to share Jerusalem (a holy city for Judaism and Islam that both sides claim as their capital).

The Trump plan pretty much throws out this framework entirely.

Instead of allowing the two sides to negotiate solutions to these core disagreements, the plan lays out a detailed vision for final terms before negotiations have even begun.

On each of the four main issues-- West Bank borders/settlements, Jerusalem, justice for Palestinian refugees displaced in the 1948 war, and balancing Israel’s security needs with Palestinian sovereignty-- the plan is heavily tilted in Israel’s direction.

“Palestinians are being offered no state at all, just the box a state came in,” writes Hussein Ibish, the senior resident scholar at the Arab Gulf States Institute. “Israel will be left in complete control of the entire area from the river to the sea. Pure apartheid.”

Perhaps the easiest way to see why is to look at the plan’s map for what final borders would look like. The proposed Palestinian state is in green; the little dots in the middle of the West Bank are Israeli “enclaves” that will remain part of Israel:

What you see is a Palestinian “state” that covers Gaza and a fraction of the West Bank, is surrounded by Israel, and is cut up even further by Israeli land. The plan seems to permit Israel beginning the process of annexing part of this land, starting with the Jordan Valley in the eastern part of the West Bank, an area that would cut off Palestinians from neighboring Jordan.

And the drawing actually understates how bad things will be, because it’s simply too zoomed out to illustrate how many different Israeli settlements there are and how much they’d screw up Palestinian development. This map alone would render the entire plan unacceptable to Palestinians.

“For the first time, the United States has unveiled a map with precise borders, and an Israeli leader has endorsed it. That map is a maximal vision of Israeli territorial control in the West Bank and Jerusalem,” Michael Koplow, the policy director of the Israel Policy Forum, writes in The Forward.

But it’s also terrible for Palestinians on the other three main contentious issues.

The plan states that “Jerusalem will remain the sovereign capital of the State of Israel, and it should remain an undivided city.” The Palestinians will be granted only a tiny fraction of the heavily Palestinian-populated part of the city known as East Jerusalem that excludes the religious holy sites; “all of Jerusalem’s holy sites should be subject to the same governance regimes that exist today,” as the plan euphemistically puts it.

On refugees, the Palestinians literally get nothing-- just a vague promise that some money might come up.

“Proposals that demand that the State of Israel agree to take in Palestinian refugees, or that promise tens of billions of dollars in compensation for the refugees, have never been realistic and a credible funding source has never been identified,” the plan explains. “Nevertheless, we will endeavor to raise a fund to provide some compensation to Palestinian refugees.”

Yet it is the security section that is perhaps most revealing. Not only would the future state of Palestine not be permitted to develop its own “military or paramilitary” forces-- ever-- but Israel would also maintain full security control over Palestinian territory until it decides not to. And if at any time Israel changes its mind, it is within its rights under the deal to retake military control.

“Once the State of Israel determines that the State of Palestine has demonstrated both a clear intention and a sustained capacity to fight terrorism, a pilot program will be initiated in an area of the West Bank portion of the State of Palestine, designated by the State of Israel, to determine if the State of Palestine is able to meet the Security Criteria,” the plan explains. “Should the State of Palestine fail to meet all or any of the Security Criteria at any time, the State of Israel will have the right to reverse the process outlined above.”

A peace plan is supposed to end Israel’s military occupation of the West Bank. By giving Israel full control, the Trump plan makes such a withdrawal nearly impossible to envision.

“If you put it in Israel’s hands it will never happen,” writes Ilan Goldenberg, the Middle East security director at the Center for a New American Security. “It’s a recipe for permanent occupation.”

The real purpose of the plan

Given these harsh terms and the total lack of Palestinian buy-in, there is no plausible reason to believe this plan could ever serve as the basis of an actual peace agreement for the two sides.

So what’s the purpose of releasing it with all this fanfare?

Part of the explanation is purely political: Trump wants to help his friend Netanyahu seem strong before Israel’s elections. The timing of the plan’s release makes this relatively transparent.

But the Trump administration wouldn’t go through all the trouble of drafting a plan just to interfere in a foreign election. There’s a deeper, even likelier explanation: that the right-wingers who make up Trump’s Israel-Palestine team have worked with the Israeli right to figure out a way to undo the peace process itself.

Israeli politics has tilted heavily against peace negotiations in the past two decades, largely as a result of the collapse of the 1990s-era peace process into the violence of the second intifada.

The March elections are primarily a contest between Netanyahu and the center-right Blue and White party, which itself has endorsed the idea of annexing part of the West Bank-- and celebrated the release of Trump’s plan as providing “a strong, viable basis for advancing a peace accord with the Palestinian.”

Consider the likely effect of this plan’s release on Israeli politics in this context. The Israel Policy Forum’s Koplow does a good job outlining it:

Israeli expectations have been permanently reset, and the trajectory of the Israeli position moving closer to the Palestinian one with each successive round of talks is over. Trump has destroyed any remaining hope that Israel will settle for the deal that peace processers have envisioned for a quarter century. In fact, Trump’s vision is weighted so far in one direction that it makes any deal at all hard to envision, particularly if Israel actually goes through with the annexation scenario that Trump has now greenlit.

Not only will Israeli leaders be hard-pressed to accept less than what Trump offered, the inevitable Palestinian rejection of Trump’s plan will give them the opportunity to start taking land on their own. The Israeli argument since Oslo has always been: “We tried to negotiate, but the Palestinians wouldn’t listen.” They’ll be able to say that this time around too, even though the negotiations were never offered in good faith.

What’s more, they can use the plan’s huge territorial concession-- that Israel will get to keep its West Bank settlements permanently-- as a justification for annexing at least part of it unilaterally. Netanyahu had vowed to annex the Jordan Valley prior to the plan’s release; Israel’s cabinet appears set to start the annexation effort as early as Sunday.

Such a land grab would force Israel down one of two dangerous one-state paths.

Option one would be to give the vote to Palestinians and make them full citizens of Israel, leading to an Arab demographic majority and thus ending Israel’s status as a Jewish state. This is not only a recipe for violence between Muslims and Jews but also unacceptable to Israel’s current leadership, who care much more about the state’s Jewish character than its democratic one.

The other option is indefinite Israeli rule over Palestinians without granting them citizenship. There’s a word for keeping an ethnically defined part of your population in permanent second-class citizenship: apartheid.

And that is the most fundamental effect of the Trump plan: to grant legitimacy to the move toward apartheid, to give America’s imprimatur to something its government once saw as impermissible.

They are destroying any prospect for a just peace plan in the name of saving it.

Hunstman wants Willard's $10,000

ABC excluded Jon Huntsman from last night's Iowa debate because he isn't polling 5% in the state or nationally. Instead, he was in New Hampshire-- throwing stones:

"They're engaging in another evening of theatrics and game show-like discussions. We're here on the ground in New Hampshire talking real issues with real voters. I feel we are exactly where we ought to be, this is what needs to be done. We're doing the New Hampshire primary... I am in this race because I fundamentally feel the American people are getting screwed."

He even said he might not watch the debate on TV-- if Curb Your Enthusiasm was running a good episode.

Tomorrow Huntsman takes on Gingrich for a one-on-one Lincoln-Douglas style forum at Saint Anselm College in New Hampshire. He'd like to get a shot at Romney in a similar format but knows there isn't much chance the over-careful, poll-driven, focus group-driven Romney campaign will do anything out of the ordinary... except to start babbling nonsense about lunar colonies ("Places where we disagree? Let's see, we can start with his idea to have a lunar colony that would mine minerals from the moon") and to make a sponaneous $10,000 bet in front of a national auddience. The funny thing is, it's a bet Perry should have called him on and walked away with the ten grand. As you can see in the video above, that's what Huntsman would have done. Perry just used it as a class war weapon with which to pound poor Willard with this morning.

Rick Perry said Sunday he's still not a betting man, but the Texas governor is counting on Mitt Romney losing support among Iowans for offering to wager $10,000 in a dispute over his health care record.

"I was taken a little bit a back," Perry told Fox News Sunday. "Driving out to the station this morning, I'm pretty sure I didn't drive by a house that anyone in Iowa would even think about that a $10,000 bet possible, so a little out of touch of the normal Iowa citizen... The issue of individual mandates is still at the center here, and Mitt can deny this as many times as he wants, but in his first book, hard cover, of No Apologies, he clearly stated that individual mandate should be the model for this country. And then he took that out of the book, in the paperback, and that's the fact, and even a $10,000 bet is not gonna cover that."

..."I want to know if he has $10,000 in his pocket," the spokesman for new Republican front-runner Newt Gingrich, R.C. Hammond, said after the debate.

In a statement, the Democratic National Committee said $10,000 is almost three times more than what an average family spends on groceries in a year and more than a year's worth of mortgage payments for the typical American home purchased today.

..."I didn't grow up poor. And if somebody is looking for someone who's grown up with that background, I'm not the person," Romney said during the debate, noting that his father was poor at one point in his life. He added that his parents "made sure we had jobs when we were growing up. They made sure we didn't spend money foolishly."

As you can see, the front page headline in Iowa's biggest newspaper, the Des Moines Register wasn't favorable for Romney. And inside the paper, it only got worse.

Perry really made his mark when he successfully goaded Mitt Romney into one of the worst moments he’s had in a debate so far. Perry challenged Romney on a passage in his first book, claiming an early edition said the Massachusetts health-care program should be a model for the national plan.

Romney disputed the claim and when Perry persisted, he jokingly offered a $10,000 bet. Perry didn’t take the bet, but he won the point. Romney was casually offering the equivalent of about one-fifth of the average median income for an Iowa family. Romney’s privileged background was driven home later when the candidates were asked whether they’d ever had to cut costs in their own family budget.

“I didn’t grow up poor,” Romney said, and noted that if voters are looking for someone who did, they’ll have to vote for somebody else.

Huntsman Strikes Back

This morning he was on with Christiane Amanpour, whose bookers don't care if he has 5% or even 1%-- just as long as he's part of the one percent. And, of course, born into a family of multimillionaires, he certainly is. Here's some of their banter:

HUNTSMAN: [O]n the debate stage last night, I believe that the most important issue of all confronting the American people wasn't even touched upon, and that is the deficit of trust that we have in the United States. In fact, it may have-- it played right into the trust deficit. That is, nobody trusts Congress anymore. We need term limits in Congress. We need to close the revolving door that allows members of Congress to move right on into the lobbying profession. No one has trust anymore toward the executive branch. No one trusts Wall Street, with banks that are too big to fail. So the-- I would argue that the issues that are most salient in our political dialogue today weren't even touched upon last night.

AMANPOUR: So then how do you explain the phenomenal rise of Newt Gingrich? You say people don't have trust, and yet he does seem to be speaking, at least to Republican voters, in a way that you aren't, for instance.

HUNTSMAN: Well, listen, there have been so many ups and downs in this race, I'm getting whiplashed, quite frankly. We've had six front-runners in the span of about six months. And all I can tell you, having spent a whole lot of time here in New Hampshire-- we have had 116 public events in this state-- is that the voters will begin to coalesce around a candidate about a week to 10 days out. The marketplace is still open. People are shopping. They are listening very, very carefully. And all I can say, Christiane, is the two messages that we're delivering to the people here on the ground, the economic deficit which is the cancer metastasizing in this country and one that is a national security problem, I would say, and the trust deficit are the two biggest issues we face today. And we're getting people showing up to our town hall meetings in numbers I never would have imagined. They're signing up afterwards, they're taking lawn signs home.

I feel very good about their trajectory here in this great state. And this is always the state that upends conventional wisdom. So let's not fall back onto conventional wisdom. That never holds true in the end.

...AMANPOUR: [L]et me ask you about where this campaign is going. I read to you a few comments from people before, including one who called you the sanest one still running. But it appears that you're reversing some of your own eminently sensible positions, for instance on climate change. You in August tweeted that "to be clear, I believe in evolution, and I trust scientists on global warming. Call me crazy." You have been tweeting about this sort of rightward swing, you've been jabbing at the base. And yet last week, you sort of rolled that bit back on climate change. You sort of said there isn't enough science. I mean, what are you doing?

HUNTSMAN: Well, Christiane, I'm not changing at all. I have said all along that I put my faith and trust in science. When you have 99 out 100 climate scientists, you have members of the National Academy of Sciences who have weighed in on a body of research on the subject matter, I say that's where I put my trust.

Yes, there might be one percent of scientists who still are questioning some of those assumptions, and that debate and discussion will continue. But as for me, let me make it crystal clear. I'm on the side of science in this debate. I don't know a whole lot of people on Capitol Hill who are physicists or climate scientists. I think this is a discussion that needs to be taken out of the political lane and kept in the science lane.

AMANPOUR: One more question, you have said that you will endorse and support whoever's the nominee. If it is Newt Gingrich, will he get your endorsement?

HUNTSMAN: Well, listen, I don't have to worry about that, because we're moving up in this great state of New Hampshire. We're going to be the nominee, and I don't have to worry about anything beyond that.

Yep, when push comes to shove, he's still a lying sack of shit politician... and, if that's not bad enough, a Republican. But, lunar colonies aside, does anyone who didn't inherit millions of dollars want this out-of-touch freak as president?

How About This Compromise? The 1% Start Paying Their Fair Share But Don't Go To Prison

Today Christine Amanpour had Colin Powell on her ABC-TV show, This Week. He sure used the phrase "the 99%" a lot but wasn't really using it the way that's been current of late. In his Times column on Thursday, We Are the 99.9%, Paul Krugman was, as usual, more in the center of the zeitgeist.

“We are the 99 percent” is a great slogan. It correctly defines the issue as being the middle class versus the elite (as opposed to the middle class versus the poor). And it also gets past the common but wrong establishment notion that rising inequality is mainly about the well educated doing better than the less educated; the big winners in this new Gilded Age have been a handful of very wealthy people, not college graduates in general.

Powell was talking about something else, but not something unrelated: national service-- and not necessarily military service. Powell's ideas are the antithesis of the adolescent Ayn Rand "Selfishness and Greed Are Good" philosophy that has been expropriated by the Republican Party which, ironically, once begged him to run for president on their ticket.

Personally, I always felt that the antiwar protesters of the 60's-- myself included-- were doing another kind of service for the country than the kids who went over to fight for the corporate agenda in Vietnam (like Powell). I would have loved Amanpour to ask him today about the service that the OccupyWallStreet folks are doing for the country. Her mind isn't that nimble.

POWELL: We are able to recruit as many soldiers as we need into the military. So even though it's 1 percent of the population, that satisfies a need for troops in the armed forces and, in fact, we're looking to reduce the size of our armed forces in the months ahead. But the issue here is not the 1 percent that are in the military. It's the 99 percent who are not, and how do we make sure that they find it to be a call to serve.
 
AMANPOUR: So how does one, then?
 
POWELL: Well, there are many things going on in this country. And, you know, it isn't as if the 99 percent are not doing anything. There is a huge, huge commitment to service on the part of the American people. And what we want to do is leverage it, get even more, and then make sure it is directed in ways that, you know, the service is providing a useful outcome for the American nation.

... Amanpour: General Stanley McChrystal, the former commander of U.S. Forces in Afghanistan, wrote quite a provocative essay recently. I want to read a little bit from it.
 
POWELL: Yes.
 
AMANPOUR: Saying that, quote, "We have let the concept of service become dangerously narrow, often associated only with the military. And this allows most Americans to avoid the sense of responsibility essential for us to care about our nation and for each other. We expect and demand less of ourselves than we should."
 
What do you make of that? There does seem to be a sort of “we can hide in the corners.”
 
POWELL: I'm sorry. Just I don't fully-- I know the point he's trying to make, but I don't fully agree with him, because in the work I do with the America's Promise Alliance, that I founded at the request of all our presidents, some 14 years ago, we are able to get lots of people involved in service. 
 
We see a lot of ways in which people are stepping forward, to mentor kids in school, to read to kids in school, to give more of their resources to people in need
 
And one of the things we've been doing with the America's Promise Alliance is we made one of the key features of our program service to others among young people. So early as possible in the life of a youngster, you start putting in place that virtue and value are service to country, service to community, service to others. And it'll make a difference as these kids grow up.
 
AMANPOUR: What about this tone in the country right now? It's still very divisive. It's still very sort of brash, some say poisonous. I mean, you can barely get anything done on Capitol Hill, just behind me there. What needs to be done, to actually improve the tone and the ability of people to work together?
 
POWELL: The tone is not-- is not good right now, and our political system here in Washington, particularly up on The Hill-- Congress has become very, very tense in that two sides, Republicans and Democrats, are focusing more and more on their extreme left and extreme right. And we have to come back toward the center in order to compromise.
 
A story I like to tell is our Founding Fathers were able to sit in Philadelphia and make some of the greatest compromises known to man-- tough, tough issues. But they did it. Why? Because they were there to create a country, where we have a Congress now that can't even pass an appropriation bill, and we're running this country on a continuing resolution which is what else are they here for but to pass appropriations bills? 
 
And so we have got to find a way to start coming back together. And let me say this directly. The media has to help us. The media loves this game, where everybody is on the extreme. It makes for great television. It makes for great chatter. It makes for great talk shows all day long with commentators commenting on commentators about the latest little mini-flap up on Capitol Hill. 
 
So what we have to do is sort of take some of the heat out of our political life in terms of the coverage of it, so these folks can get to work quietly.
 
AMANPOUR: I get your point about heat and light, but what about the fact that, in fact, it is one of the political parties, although-- or rather the big political influence, which is the Tea Party, which quotes left and right the Founding Fathers? They say compromise is a dirty word, and they try to point to the Founding Fathers and the Constitution.
 
POWELL: They compromised-- the Founding Fathers compromised on slavery. They had to in order to create a country. They compromised on the composition of the Senate, of the House, of the Supreme Court, of a president-- what are the president's powers? Can you imagine more difficult compromises today? 
 
Compromise is how this country was founded, and unless two people in disagreement with each other don't find a way to reach out to one another and make compromises, you don't get a consensus that allows you to move forward. 
 
But the Tea Party point of view of no compromise whatsoever is not a point of view that will eventually produce a presidential candidate who will win.

Whether it's the corporate media or useful idiots, the problem with the kinds of "compromise" on the table in Washington is that the middle has moved so far to the right, that it's worthless for ordinary working families. That didn't happen by chance. Millions and millions of dollars have been invested in moving the center to the right. Look no further than the conflicted corporate shills that were put on the SuperCommittee. Whose side were they on anyway? Norman Solomon, one of the best of the candidates running for Congress this year (and endorsed by Blue America), has a different kind of compromise he's offering. It would save the souls-- and maybe the lives-- of the Ayn Randians. He sounds a lot like David Korten in offering his Economic Agenda For Main Street.

Create New Green Jobs

• Jobs and sustainability must go hand in hand. As co-chair of the Commission on a Green New Deal for the North Bay, I organized public hearings and heard testimony that repeatedly debunked the false choice between jobs and the environment. By bringing together labor, entrepreneurs and environmental leaders, I saw the potential of good green jobs to provide high-quality employment while safeguarding the environment.

• I support major federal investment to create jobs that expand green technologies such as rooftop solar, well-sited wind and tidal energy production.

• By expanding conservation efforts, we can create jobs programs that directly fund retrofitting and weatherization for homes, schools and other buildings.

• We need large-scale government investment in public transportation-– to create vast numbers of new jobs, reduce greenhouse gases and ease traffic gridlock.

Invest in Our Workers and Communities

• We must reinvest in America’s workers and families, to rebuild our economy and our social fabric. I support robust public investment in economic programs that create living-wage jobs. The government should invest directly in the nation’s infrastructure, and in social services that help stabilize our communities.

• I support policies that strengthen small businesses and protect them from the predatory practices of big box stores and other corporate chains which stifle competition and erode the local tax base. Small businesses are key engines for job creation and a core part of local economies.

• I will defend federal housing programs that help cities and counties invest in new affordable housing, create opportunities for first-time homebuyers, and reduce homelessness at the local level.

• I strongly support H.R. 870-– the Humphrey-Hawkins 21st Century Full Employment and Training Act-– introduced by Congressman John Conyers, which provides for a federal policy of full employment. With a one-quarter of 1 percent transaction tax on Wall Street, the bill would generate roughly $150 billion per year in revenues, creating millions of new jobs.

Stand Up for Workers-- Not Wall Street

• I will never hesitate to stand up to corporate lobbyists and Wall Street in defense of working Americans, the unemployed and under-employed.

• In the early 1990s, I publicly opposed NAFTA before it was enacted. Widespread evidence shows that NAFTA and other international "free trade" deals have hurt American workers, undermining job security and wages, and should be renegotiated to protect the U.S. economy and the environment.

• I publicly opposed the Wall Street banks bailout before it was enacted in October 2008. Rather than subsidizing big investors and rewarding corporate executives for destroying jobs, the federal government should be creating jobs and protecting homeowners from predatory foreclosures.

• I support passage of the Employee Free Choice Act. This measure is vital to restoring workers’ fundamental rights, and will help improve wages and healthcare for all American workers. I support a national living wage and a worker’s right to collective bargaining. All workers should be treated with dignity and respect.

Protect Social Security and Medicare

• I will fight to protect-- and strengthen-– Social Security for current and future beneficiaries. I support Sen. Bernie Sanders' bill to protect Social Security from the budget ax in the so-called congressional Super Committee.

• We must defend Social Security’s cost-of-living allowance.

• Contrary to myth, Social Security is solvent-– and we must stand firm against cuts and privatization schemes that would “fix” what isn’t broken.

• I will unequivocally oppose all efforts to raise the eligibility age for Medicare.

• I will push for reform of Medicare Part D to reduce the costs of drugs while reining in runaway profits of huge pharmaceutical companies.

Quality Health Care for All

• I support single payer health care, also known as enhanced Medicare for all.

• The fact that the U.S. spends more on health care than most industrialized nations is a reflection of the unhealthy power of the insurance, hospital and pharmaceutical industries. Our current system does not serve Americans equitably; it must be reformed and improved.

• I will fight to protect and bolster Medicare and Medicaid, known as Medi-Cal in California.

• I support expanded federal funding for Federally Qualified Health Centers.

• I will fight to ensure that every community has access to quality health care services.

This is what a Blue America candidate for Congress sounds like. There is no reason to hold your nose and vote for the lesser of two evils. These are the standards to which we should hold our candidates. It's why Blue America never endorsed Barack Obama-- and never will-- and it's why we picked these candidates for the House and the Senate.

If Rick Perry Is Forced To Balance The Ticket With The Hermanator, Does He Get Invited To Weekends At Niggerhead?

Don't ask me why Christiane Amanpour decided to waste so much of ABC's valuable time yacking with Herman Cain yesterday. (Maybe she was taking her cues from Sarah Palin in the video above.) He has as much chance of becoming president as that LaRouche guy who grabbed the mic at #OccupyL.A. yesterday and started raving about a resource based economy. Come to think of it, the LaRouche guy made more sense than the Hermanator usually does. But everyone's supposed to make believe, for some reason, the Hermanator is a serious candidate for the Republican presidential nomination. Amanpour would have served ABC's audience better had she spent her time talking about the OccupyWallStreet movement. (I know, I know... silly me.) Or she could have spent the time talking about Niggerhead, a hunting retreat by someone who could-- possibly, though less likely by the day-- be the GOP nominee. Some say Rove leaked the Niggerhead story to the Post. Other says Perry's camp got it out to curry favor with the racists who can be the deciding factor in a GOP primary battle, after he was seen as not racist enough towards Mexicans.

But Christiane, an actual recipient of multiple Peabody awards, and famous for timely interviews with Tony Blair, Yasser Arafat, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Jacques Chirac, Pervez Musharraf, and Muammar Qaddafi (and his sons), did a pointless Q&A with The Hermanator yesterday on This Week. She did manage to ask him-- without uttering the N-word, of course-- about Niggerhead, as well as what Cain refers to as African-American "brainwashing."

AMANPOUR: On the front page of the Washington Post today, there's a story about Rick Perry...

CAIN: Yes.

AMANPOUR: ... and a hunting lodge that belonged to his family, bought in the 1980s. And on a rock apparently near the entrance there, there is a word that is a very ugly racial word, a slur.

CAIN: Yes.

AMANPOUR: And it's been-- it's been painted over. But the report raises questions about whether this rock, this stone, with that word on it, was still on display even quite recently in the last several years. What is your reaction to that?

CAIN: My reaction is that is very insensitive. There are some words that do not basically inspire the kind of negativity like that particular word. And I know that you're refraining from saying that word, so I'm going to say what the word was on the rock. The name of the place was called "Niggerhead." That is very insensitive. And since Governor Perry has been going there for years to hunt, I think that it shows a lack of sensitivity for a long time of not taking that word off of that rock and renaming the place. It's just basically a case of insensitivity.

AMANPOUR: It was painted over.

CAIN: Yes. It was painted over. But how long ago was it painted over? So I'm still saying that it is a sign of insensitivity.

AMANPOUR: Let me move on to some things that you've said. Right after the debate in Florida, you told Wolf Blitzer of CNN that, basically, African-Americans, blacks in this country had been brainwashed over the years into supporting Democrats.

CAIN: Yes.

AMANPOUR: I mean, isn't that really an inflammatory thing to say? I mean, do you really believe that African-Americans, blacks, are so easily manipulated?

CAIN: I also said in that same interview...

AMANPOUR: No, but let me you ask about that. That word is very inflammatory.

CAIN: It is. I'm going to answer your question. I also said the good news is a large percentage of black people are thinking for themselves. Now, I think that-- if the word is inflammatory, that's too bad. It is true. And here's why: because some black people won't even listen to someone who appears to be a conservative or a Republican. I call that brainwashing.

AMANPOUR: Some would say that-- some would say that actually it's because those policies and what you're proposing, for instance, don't meet their demands or what they're looking for.

CAIN: And I say that the reason they don't see them as meeting their demands of what they're looking for is because they have not looked at them. My economic growth and jobs plan, as an example, is not partisan. It is a solution that benefits everybody, especially the African-American community.

The right-wing blogosphere's biggest Romney proponent, David Frum, says he considers The Hermanator a serious candidate. He must be high. But he did mention one thing worth repeating: "His business career is also the most admirable of any recent candidate for President. In the current GOP field only Mitt Romney can claim similar personal private sector success and, unlike Cain (the son of a chauffeur and a cleaning woman) Romney was born with immense wealth, privilege and political connections. He also possesses the type of campaign trail discipline that Michelle Bachman and Rick Perry seem to lack."