Last night Anthony Weiner (D-NY) sponsored a "colloquy" on the House floor so Democrats could go on record to support Israel's handling of the Gaza flotilla.

The following House members -- many of whom were quite vocal in opposition to the Iraq war and in President Bush's conduct of it -- have nothing but praise for Israel's action:

Weiner (NY), Grayson (FL), Wasserman-Schultz (FL), Nadler (NY) Schwarz (PA), Himes (CT), Hoyer (MD), Maffei (NY), Engel (NY), Lowey (NY).

Here are their statements.

Members of Congress are, of course, entitled to think whatever they want. And they are also entitled to support the views of their constituents (as they understand those views).

But aren't any of these representatives embarrassed that they give Netanyahu (and his dumb policies) an enthusiastic blank check while they stridently (and rightly) opposed Bush's? I'd say "no." It's just politics.

At least conservatives are consistent. They supported Bush's war. They support Netanyahu's. Somehow that is infinitely less jarring.

The supposed free market fundamentalists are once again running to get a helping hand from Big Government. Apparently, the Republicans are outraged over the fact that many homeowners are now "strategically defaulting" on their mortgages. They have stopped paying a mortgage even though they can still afford the payment because they decided that they would be better off just giving the house back to the bank. There have been some press accounts talking about strategic defaulters who have used their savings to buy a new car or even take a trip to Europe.

This has outraged Republicans in Congress. They have now proposed a bill to have the government punish strategic defaulters by denying them the option to receive a loan insured by the Federal Housing Authority (FHA).

It is important to get some perspective on the issue here. Strategic defaulters are following the terms of their contracts to the letter.

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Today's most important economic news: U.S. household debt fell for the seventh straight quarter in the first three months of 2010 as Americans continued to respond to the recession's fallout.

But like all economic news, its significance depends on where you're standing -- whether you're a typical American or someone at the top.

The common wisdom is that excessive debt-financed spending was one of the causes of the recent recession, so the news that household debt is dropping is being celebrated by business cheerleaders as reason to believe we're on the mend.

Baloney. The reason so many Americans went into such deep debt was because their wages didn't keep up. The median wage (adjusted for inflation) dropped between 2001 and 2007, the last so-called economic expansion. So the only way typical Americans could keep spending at the rate necessary to keep themselves -- and the economy -- going was to borrow, especially against the value of their homes. But that borrowing ended when the housing bubble burst.

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This is worth a read.

The author -- an American and adviser to rightist pastor John Hagee-- writes that Americans are not allowed to criticize Israelis when they act like barbarians because Americans do the same (Fallujah, etc).

Stupid point. Most of us who criticize Israeli behavior oppose the Iraq war, fought to prevent it (to no effect), and decry the crimes perpetrated in Iraq by our government.

So there is no inconsistency here, quite the opposite.

And there is no inconsistency among Brog's neocons either. They supported the Iraq war (for Israel's sake) and care not whit about the crimes America commits there. In fact, when the "enemy" is Muslim, there is no war crime they won't defend, by America, Israel or anyone else.

Also, it should be noted, that Israeli rightists and American neocons have the exact same agenda: defending everything Israel does unless it tries to make peace (i.e., Yitzhak Rabin). Both have no use whatsoever for America except as Israel's supporter and arsenal.

Bottom line: so long as America is providing Israel with billions in aid (more, by far, than we provide any other country), people like Brog have no right to call us out for criticizing Israeli actions. The mortgagee should not call the bank names, until he can find another bank.

Media coverage of two events -- both related to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict -- demonstrated why Israel's image has suffered so grievously in recent years.

And there can be little doubt that it has. Not long ago, Israel had the support and sympathy of most of the world. Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin was viewed everywhere -- in Europe, Africa, and Asia as much as America -- as one of the world's great leaders. His funeral in 1995 -- only 15 years ago -- brought as many heads of state to Jerusalem as JFK's brought to Washington in 1963.

That was only 15 years ago. But what a long, dismal 15 years!

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I'm a writer who at times likes to think of himself as an intellectual, and certainly I'm someone who's interested in intellectual history and past highbrow political arguments. And my own book about American foreign policy deals a fair amount with that sort of material. But since the time of writing, I've come to think I paid too much attention to the history of ideas and debates and too little to basic structural issues. The Icarus Syndrome, it seems to me, tilts in the other direction -- presenting the history of smart people arguing about American foreign policy as if it was the key driver of actual policy.

That seems to me to be fairly wrongheaded. Take, for example, the Carter-Reagan contrast that Peter mentions in his introductory post. It seems to me that the further we get from this period historically the more it will look like a time in which the fate of the superpowers was rocked by oil price swings beyond their control. With the United States the heaviest oil consumer in the world and the USSR a major oil producer, a high-price era like Jimmy Carter's administration makes the U.S. look weak whereas a period of falling prices such as Reagan presided over restored our confidence while shaking the Soviet economy.

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In the good old days of Tamany Hall politics, an enterprising politician could buy a vote for a 50 cent beer. Meg Whitman's 1,101,528 votes in the California Republican Governor Primary came at the cost of $77 per vote, most of the money coming from her own fortune.

So what is she willing to spend in the general election? $150 per vote?

This is either an obscene indulgence of a bored woman's egomania or some kind of dystopian vision of the future of American politics in the post Citizen's United era, where money really does equal speech.

I have a modest proposal. As a part of their obligation under the Federal Communications Act and in return for their free use of the nation's airwaves, all broadcast stations should be obligated to give an equal number of free 1 minute advertising slots in the 30 days before a general election to the candidates of any party that garnered more than 10% of the vote in the previous election. This would apply to all statewide offices (Senator, Governor, etc).

Otherwise, any pretense that America is a democracy and not a plutocracy is a sham.

1 Why hasn't BP moved more of its rigs and tankers to the site? Because BP's first responsibility is to maximize shareholder value, and moving more rigs and tankers would be too expensive. Coast Guard Admiral Thad Allen, the government's man on the scene, said BP planned to move another rig to the spill site June 14, which would enable the company to boost its capacity to collect oil from the ruptured well to 28,000 barrels (1.18 million gallons/4.45 million liters) a day.

2. Why isn't BP leveling with the American people about how many barrels of oil is gushing into the Gulf? Because BP's first responsibility is to its shareholders, and a bigger leak means more liability. Government scientists estimate the leak spews 12,000-19,000 barrels a day, with one estimate as high as 25,000 barrels. BP says it's not nearly this much.

3 Why isn't BP acknowledging a huge plume of oil developing deep under water? Ditto. On Tuesday, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration researchers reported subsurface oil as far as 142 miles from the leaking Gulf well, the first clear confirmation of such a plume. On Wednesday, BP rejected the report, insisting that it has not found any significant concentration of crude under the surface. "We haven't found any large concentrations of oil under the sea. To my knowledge, no one has," BP Chief Operating Officer Doug Suttles said on NBC's TODAY show.

Say you're a high government official with some responsibility for advising the President on what he should be doing and saying about the economy. You know the economy is still in a deep hole, the deepest since the Great Depression. The jobs report for May was dismal -- a mere 41,000 new private sector jobs, when the economy needs at least 100,000 to keep up with population growth. The Fed projects gross domestic product, the broadest measure of economic activity, to rise about 3.5 percent this year -- a pace barely above that needed to keep pace with the growth in the labor force.

You also know that consumers don't have the buying power to get it out of the hole because they can no longer use their homes as collateral for loans, as they could before the crash of 2008, and they also have to get out from under huge debts. The housing market is still awful. You know businesses are reluctant to create new jobs if there are few customers for their goods or services. And you know export markets are drying up because of a high dollar that's made our exports more expensive, and Europe has embarked on austerity measures to shrink its deficits. You also know state revenues are way down because of the deep economic hole, and they're forced to raise taxes, cut services, and lay off large numbers of state workers, including teachers.

Oh, and one more thing: You know that all the boosters keeping the economy barely going now are coming to an end. The Fed can't keep interest rates near zero for long because it's starting to worry about inflation. It's already stopped buying Treasury securities and mortgage bonds, and its own deficit hawks are squawking. The federal stimulus is 75 percent spent, and the money will be gone in a few months. Census workers will also be gone by the end of the summer.

So what do you do?

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Am I the only one revolted by voter suppression in the Arkansas Democratic primary? Whose victorious winner is that supreme hack Blanche Lincoln? On top of which, the profane Rahmbo has presented a platter of raspberries to the Democratic Party's most loyal constituents in the labor movement? 14-year-old soccer leaguers show more class.

In my foolishness, I fantasized that the Obama campaign had built a new political movement, independent of the old-line, Clinton Democratic apparatus. What it has turned out to be is a marketing machine dedicated to the same old DP practices. It's not a movement; it's a one-way Internet money-vacuum cleaner, a new adjunct for a corporatist party.

One such practice, also embraced by the House and Senate DP leadership, is incumbent protection. The Lincoln scam is Exhibit A. The national party was fully complicit, as evidenced by ExPresident Poontang's vigorous, labor-baiting campaigning for Lincoln.

The Specter deal, by contrast, was defensible. If you are going to get Repubs to switch, you have to come through with support after the move. Nobody should fault the White House for that. Of course, there is no obligation on anybody else to support these cheeseballs. Some bring more virtues than others. Lincoln Chaffee and Jim Jeffords come to mind. Arlen Specter does not.

With the indulgence of voter suppression, the national Democrats forfeit any moral authority to criticize Republican practices leveled against them. Perhaps there is a good reason. In corporatist-dominated politics, popular sovereignty is not a high ideal. The people, after all, present the risk of escaping control. Better to confine competition to the craven machinations of moneyed interests.

The moral of the story is for honest citizens to channel political energies into independent formations and initiatives. Support for politicians should be conditional, in clear and simple terms that a child can understand. Criticism for the same reason should carry the rhetorical force of a two-by-four, in terms that a mule can understand.

In an interview published today, Israel's ambassador, Michael Oren, warns that Israel will not continue behaving with restraint if it keeps getting criticized.

"Our critics don't get it," Oren said. "In Jenin, we went house-to-house and sent 23 soldiers to their death. But if we're going to be called war criminals no matter what we do, then maybe that changes our thinking."

Uh, ok. Whole interview is here. Plenty of other telling nuggets too.

Also, see Spencer Ackerman here. It turns out that the Israel lobby, and Israel, has long supported the government of Turkey in its denial of the Armenian genocide. This was rather amazing considering that Hitler himself cited the Armenian genocide as a precedent for the Holocaust.

But Israel and its lobby supported Turkey because Turkey was pro-Israel. End of story. But now that the Israelis (and their lobby) hate the Turks, they are changing their position on the Armenian holocaust. It was a genocide after all.

Count on AIPAC to get the Armenian genocide bill to be adopted soon.

We just deployed some code that should fix the Dashboard issues you've been experiencing. If you're still seeing a blank Dashboard, please let me know.

Everybody hates public housing, except the low-income people who live there and the people on the long waiting lists to get in.

Now, after years of neglect, the Obama Administration wants to save public housing for future generations. It has a plan to inject billions of dollars into the developments to make long-deferred repairs.

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The Icarus Syndrome is an argument wrapped around three stories. The argument is that success breeds disaster. The process plays itself out this way: A group of foreign policy thinkers and actors hit upon a strategy for dealing with some immediate, finite problem. The strategy succeeds, at least in their eyes, so they grow more confident in it. Confronted by some new challenge, they reason by analogy: this strategy worked before, so it will work again. But although they think they're on a treadmill, they are actually on a ladder--broadening ideas beyond their original context, taking on more risk, becoming less sensitive to America's fallibility and their own.

The first story is about the war progressives--Woodrow Wilson, Walter Lippmann, John Dewey--who made their success in rationalizing American politics a template for rationalizing world politics. At home, they believed they were turning politics from a clash of selfish, arbitary power--industry versus labor, in particular--into a sphere of reason and law. Independent experts would investigate problems and promulgate answers that appealed to the broader, common interests that all Americans shared. Thus, reason would conquer force, and domestic conflict would give way to what Colonel House called "a scientific peace." That became their vision for the world America would help create after World War I, a world community operating by certain common, scientific rules rather than a jungle in which nations divided into rival alliances. That vision blinded Wilson to the reality that any postwar world order needed to rest on a balance of power in which the US, Britain and France joined together to restrain German power.

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This week at Cafe, Daily Beast and Time contributor Peter Beinart joins us for a discussion of his new book, The Icarus Syndrome: A History of American Hubris.

Please welcome Peter and his fellow participants -- Matt Yglesias, who once blogged at Cafe and is now at Think Progress; Jeremi Suri, E. Gordon Fox Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and author of Henry Kissinger and the American Century, among other books; and our very own Josh Marshall.

Enjoy the discussion!