This is some exchange of letters.

The whole thing started when Joe Klein blasted the neocons for instigating the Iraq war. It started here, I think, with Joe Klein simply letting the neocons have it. His language was intemperate and the neocons at Commentary and National Review went ballistic, calling out Klein for being anti-semitic. Then the ADL's chairman, Abe Foxman, wrote a strong letter telling Klein he was out of line.

Normally, at this point, Klein would have apologized. But Klein is a Jew -- and an unapologetic one -- and he won't. (Also, he think he's right).

He is sticking to his guns. Read this fascinating exchange. First Foxman.

Then Klein.

Fascinating. And important.

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My how times have changed. In the early 90's the Russians were begging for American financial aid and investment. Yesterday, Russian President Medvedev talked about the recent visit of Treasury Secretary Paulson to Moscow, in search of Russian investment in a faltering U.S. economy.

Mr. Medvedev made his comments on Tuesday in a meeting with a small group of foreign journalists a day after the American treasury secretary, Henry M. Paulson Jr., appealed in Moscow for Russian investment in the United States. The symbolism of the visit resonated here, in that only a decade had passed since the Russian economy was in shambles and the country was desperate for Western aid.

Whether Paulson can convince the Russians to invest some of their new Sovereign Wealth fund in our failing banking system will be a true test of his negotiating skills. The sight of him sucking up to Putin and Medvedev is a true snapshot of a changed world order. As I pointed out last week, the Russians and the Chinese are already the largest holders of our Treasury Bills. I'm not sure even Karl Marx would have understood the irony that the countries that rose to power in the 20th Century under Communism, would end up bailing out the world's largest Capitalist power.

My summer reading pick is Rockin' Steady: A Guide to Basketball and Cool by Walt Frazier and Ira Berkow, published in 1974. Many of you may know Walt "Clyde" Frazier as one of the greatest basketball players of all time, the backcourt leader of the two-time NBA Champion New York Knicks of the early 1970s. Some may also be familiar with Clyde's razzle-dazzle wordsmithery as a color commentator for Knicks games on the MSG Network (and previously WFAN radio). And still others are no doubt aware of his work alongside Keith Hernandez in the Just For Men hair product commercial campaign (the Frazier-Hernandez pairing serving, according to Wikipedia, as the inspiration for the name of Denzel Washington's character in the movie Inside Man, which is... odd).

I submit that if you have any knowledge of Clyde Frazier whatsoever then you have at some point asked yourself the question, "How can I be as cool as Clyde Frazier?" The book Rockin' Steady provides the answers.

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The Bush administration no longer makes any pretense of opposing an Israeli attack on Iran. Yesterday Martha Raddatz of ABC asked President Bush if he would "strongly discourage" Israel from attacking. Bush wouldn't. He responded that he has repeatedly stated that he favors diplomacy "first."

This is a whole new role for the United States. We no longer even bother to tell our allies not to start wars. We simply smile.

In yesterday's Christian Science Monitor, former Israeli Foreign Minister Shlomo Ben Ami and the Iranian-American scholar Trita Parsi join in rebutting the ridiculous notion that there is no alternative to war,

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Okay, as I always say, it is not entirely President Bush's fault, but he is sitting there, and that is how the game is played (remember Jimmy Carter). Anyhow, here is my take on the June data.

The employment to population ratio (EPOP) ratio fell to 62.4 percent in June, its lowest level in more than three years, as the economy lost another 62,000 jobs in June. This was the sixth consecutive month in which the economy lost jobs. The private sector lost 91,000 jobs in June. With the April and May numbers revised down by 76,000, the job loss in the private sector over the last three months has been 273,000, an average of 91,000 a month. The private sector has now shed 578,000 jobs since employment peaked in November.

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During the 2000 campaign, George W. Bush and many conservative commentators attacked Al Gore for engaging in "class warfare" after Gore promised to help the little guy and criticized Bush for favoring the rich. Four years later, the Republicans, using a page from the same playbook, attacked John Kerry and John Edwards for being populist class warriors because of their talk of Two Americas.

In this year's campaign, there's a big difference, at least so far. John Edwards, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama have all used robustly populist language about the problems facing America's have-nots, but this year the attacks for engaging in class warfare have largely disappeared.

The reason for this may well be that the news media, political commentators and even many Republicans have come to recognize that income inequality has grown far worse and that many Americans are angry about the widening gap between those at the top and everyone else.

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Kidding! We kid the Obama people! We kid because we love! Ha-ha. We wouldn't vote for Nader if he peed a Starbucks double shot espresso roast with syrup and ice. As for Gabby Hayes, don't even ask.

But we are concerned. You could call us the campaign concern troll. Maybe we should start our own Obama Facebook group. Some sh*t really needs to be trolled, so a trolling we will go. Merrily we troll along. The object of our disaffection tonight is one Anthony Lake, who tries to make clear that the Obama Administration will be ready to go to war with Iran, if need be. Those last three words can bring us to a world of hurt.

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I've got a pile of books I'm hoping to get through this summer. I recently picked up a copy of Pennsylvania Avenue -- Profiles of Backroom Power, by John Harwood and Gerald Seib. As a reporter for TPMmuckraker, I figured maybe I'll stumble across some of those great nuggets of background knowledge that help show how things really work here in Washington. And I also bought a copy of George Soros's new book, The New Paradigm For Financial Markets: The Credit Crisis of 2008 and What It Means. I love these sorts of big-picture business books. And Soros seems like a pretty smart guy. (Remember when he made a billion dollars with that bet against the British Pound?)

But the book I pulled off the shelf a few weeks ago was The Oyster Wars of the Chesapeake Bay, by John Wennersten. I found it at a used bookstore last year in my hometown of Salisbury, Maryland. This is not, and never has been, a best seller. But I have a soft spot for the history of Maryland's Eastern Shore, the Chesapeake Bay and the Delmarva Peninsula.

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As a young African American woman and the first lawyer in my family, I find Justice Thurgood Marshall's life both professionally and personally inspiring. But today, which would have been Marshall's 100th birthday, is not just personally significant. It is a day where everyone who is passionate about fairness and equality should pause and reflect on what we must learn from his legacy.

Thurgood Marshall, the first African American U.S. Supreme Court Justice, was a pioneer for legal equality who used the civil court system as a tool for change. Born in 1908 in the segregated South, Marshall experienced all the obstacles and indignities that young people today only see in documentaries and textbooks. But by the time he died in 1993, he had not only witnessed the dismantling of formal legal racism, he had actually played an integral role in achieving it.

As a young lawyer he worked to chip away at Jim Crow, combining sophisticated litigation strategies that earned him respect among colleagues, with a unique wit and humor that warmed even those most staunchly hostile to his anti-racist agenda. At the end of his tenure as a civil rights trial lawyer he had won 29 of his 32 Supreme Court cases. But speaking at his alma mater, Howard Law School, in 1978, he warned graduates against believing that the struggle for social justice would end with a few, or even many, courtroom victories:

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There's a delicious piece in today's New York Post describing parents of graduates from some elite New York City private schools rending their garments over the inability of their children to get into Ivy League colleges this year. But what's really important about the story comes past all the sorrow and fury, when the article suggests that an important factor might be the new admissions policies that Harvard (and to a lesser extent other Ivies) implemented to enable more students from middle- and lower-income families to attend. Their generous subsidies have encouraged a broader range of students across the income spectrum to compete for slots, with some lower-income public school applicants beating out the prep school grads.

At Harvard, under its new policies, tuitions are waived entirely for families earning $60,000 a year or less. Families earning between $60,000 and $120,000 pay a reduced rate on a sliding scale that rises to a maximum of 10 percent of their income. The Post quotes Harvard director of undergraduate admissions Marlyn McGrath as saying, "Our low-income initiative has repositioned us. A lot of people are starting to think about Harvard when otherwise their state university might have been on top of their list." One example is public school student Lukasz Zbylut, who just graduated from Brooklyn's New Utrecht High School and will attend Harvard in the fall. Lukasz's parents are Polish immigrants, and his father works in construction in Brooklyn to support his wife and three children.

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In the mid fifties, the U.S. military got worried because American soldiers, captured by the Chinese in the Korean conflict had "confessed" publicly that the Americans were using germ warfare. We knew the confessions were false and so we began studying how the Chinese got these men to tell lies. As usual, the Army commissioned an academic study.

The 1957 article was entitled "Communist Attempts to Elicit False Confessions From Air Force Prisoners of War" and written by Alfred D. Biderman, a sociologist then working for the Air Force, who died in 2003. Mr. Biderman had interviewed American prisoners returning from North Korea, some of whom had been filmed by their Chinese interrogators confessing to germ warfare and other atrocities.

Those orchestrated confessions led to allegations that the American prisoners had been "brainwashed," and provoked the military to revamp its training to give some military personnel a taste of the enemies' harsh methods to inoculate them against quick capitulation if captured.

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Obama's proposed Council for Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships, faith-based initiatives to funnel social welfare money through religiously-run institutions, is not a move to the right as some bloggers argue; in fact, it's a brilliant plot to seize political territory and marginalize the religious right.

The key sentences from the proposal are these:

"Obama does not support requiring religious tests for recipients of aid nor using federal money to proselytize, according to a campaign fact sheet. He also only supports letting religious institutions hire and fire based on faith in the non-taxpayer funded portions of their activities, said a senior adviser to the campaign, who spoke on condition of anonymity to more freely describe the new policy."

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My 22-year-old daughter graduated from college in May, and I'm worried about her as she enters the workforce--actually I'm worried about her whole generation as it enters the workforce. Many young people don't realize that they face a far less friendly workplace than when my generation entered the workforce in the 1970s.

To tell the truth, when I began researching my book, The Big Squeeze, Tough Times for the American Worker, I wasn't planning a separate chapter on the nation's young workers--by that I mean, workers under age 35, and especially young Americans who have recently entered the workforce. But as I proceeded with my research, I was surprised and chagrined to learn how tough things have grown for young workers--and that was before the current economic downturn. As a result, I added a chapter, "Starting Out Means a Steeper Climb."

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Anybody interested in helping people across the world better their lives should read Bad Days in Basra (I.B. Tauris & Co, 2008). It matters little if you seek to help establish basic security, shore up the economy, curb corruption or reform schools--it is all in there. We learn that countries like Iraq, depleted by Saddam and by the sanctions imposed by the West, and countries that are in the very early stages of economic and political development, like Afghanistan, cannot be "reconstructed" quickly, especially not by foreign powers. There is no reason to expect that the developments that took the US and the UK several generations can be achieved on the run, in war-torn zones, and among people who have priorities other than material affluence.

Bad Days in Basra is written by a person with a unique qualification to address the topic: Hilary Synnott was a British diplomat when he was appointed the man in charge of Basra (the city and the province), after the British liberated it in 2003. On first read, one may see the book as a long list of all the things one must be prepared to do when seeking to jump a country from its present dilapidated condition to that of a prosperous, democratic nation. One may think that one can take the list of all the things that went awry in Iraq, or were mismanaged, or were missing, and fix them or provide for them.

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David Brooks made an important mistake in his Tuesday column about Barack Obama's fund raising. He writes: "If Obama's tax plans go through, those affluent donors could wind up giving over 50 percent of their income to the federal government."

According to the non-partisan Tax Policy Center's analysis of Obama's tax plan, the correct share for the richest 1 percent of households--those with income above $600,000--is 36 percent; for the for the richest 0.1 percent, above $2.9 million, the rate would be 39 percent. Note also that since these estimates include taxes remitted by corporations, the actual tax returns that these households fill out would find them paying less than 30 percent of their income in taxes. Even with Senator Obama's proposal to raise Social Security taxes on those with earnings above $250,000, a proposal for which he has yet to specify a rate, tax liabilities of the affluent would still be far below 50 percent of their income.

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Our new Coffee House editor Lila Shapiro has asked the TPM staff to share our summer reading lists here at TPMCafe's Coffee House blog. And I must confess that while I frequently fantasize that I'm going to read more Nabokov or any other sort of highbrow literature, I almost always end up spending whatever free time I have reading history. And that usually spending some span of months digging into one era before getting my fill of it and moving on to another.

At the moment I'm reading a series of books on World War I and World War II, mainly the first -- not so much the wars proper, but the periods leading up to them and what factors pushed the countries to war.

Most of my interest is just characterological. I've been on history kicks like this for my whole adult life. And at this point I just figure it's a permanent condition. But reading these books -- or in several cases rereading them -- has helped me work through, though not in any particularly linear or direct way, my thoughts about the Bush years and the last two decades, going back to the end of the Cold War.

Normally, anything so recent as the 20th century doesn't quite do it for me in the history department. But this is an exception.

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