I’m fond of telling friends who are more interested in foreign than domestic policy that they’re two sides of the same coin in terms of the power of a president whose policies you support or oppose. And it’s no less the case with Obama. As Akiva Eldar notes in Haaretz Prime Minister Netanyahu and his advisors have made little secret of their hope that President Obama would fail in his push for health care reform since it would damage him sufficiently that he’d be fatally weakened on the international stage, enough to prevent him from exerting any more pressure on Netanyahu’s government for at least the remainder of Obama’s first term. Read More

Civilian casualties in Afghanistan for the first 10 months of 2009 totaled 2,038, up from 1,838 in the same period during 2008, according to a new UN report. That and the day’s other political news in the TPMDC Morning Roundup.

Steve Clemons has some thoughts about just what we might be getting into in Yemen.

We’re getting a lot of good reports from readers about what wavering Dems are saying at home about the current version of the health care bill. Please keep those reports coming. David Kurtz has more.

A succinct explanation of Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, those who’ve preceded him and will no doubt follow. From Steve Coll …

As the analyst Marc Sageman once formulated it, the biography is one of dislocation and radicalization that often seems to involve a young man who is raised in country A, becomes radicalized in country B, and then decides to attack country C, with “C” often (but not always) being the United States. Here we also have the elements of economic privilege and globe-crossing travel familiar from the biographies of Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri, Al Qaeda’s two senior leaders, who by now have reached that state of advanced middle-age in which they can no longer be expected to remember their period of teenage radicalization and early violence very accurately.

I mentioned over the weekend that it’s always a bit surreal to hear that these suicide bombers, at once so alien to our world, are so enmeshed in our popular culture, globalization and the like. And a number of readers wrote in to say, quite rightly, that it’s hardly going to be Pashtun town dwellers or the poor and illiterate who end up getting placed on these missions. They have to work with people with some money, US Visas and the like. That’s of course right. But there’s more to it than that.

Majority Of Tea Party Group’s Spending Went To GOP Firm That Created It