What if Congress rejects the Iran deal? Ex-Mossad chief Halevy fills in the blanks

There's one incontrovertible point in the argument against the Congress rejecting and invalidating the nuclear agreement with Iran. Even if you think the deal was poorly negotiated, if the U.S. walks away the sanctions regime will immediately fall apart and Iran will gain everything it could ever gain either by cheating on the deal or stepping up its enrichment and weapons program when various constraints expire. 

Obama has made this point repeatedly, minus the "even if you think..." part. The shorthand is "what is your alternative?" -- and there is none. Implicitly recognizing this, Chuck Schumer, in the most self-negating policy statement I've ever read, could barely bring himself to sketch in (in the statement's last breath) an alleged alternative path:

Fiscal cliff notes: speak however, but wield that stick

Re the fiscal cliff: Obama has promised repeatedly, from the December 2010 press conference in which he announced his Bush-tax-cut-extension-for-payroll-tax-cut-and-unemployment-benefit-extension deal, to the present, that he would not agree to another extension of the Bush marginal rate cuts for the wealthiest 2% this time around.

He gained further leverage when the "sequestered" budget cuts triggered by the failure of the budget supercommittee last November became law -- and Republicans began screaming about the mandated defense cuts far louder than Democrats have protested the domestic cuts.  Once Obama refused to lift a finger to stop the sequester, I began to wonder whether the Budget Control Act of August 2011 wasn't a 60-yard punt.  If so, he is now taking possession.

After coming close to ratifying a truly crappy grand bargain with Boehner in July 2011, has Obama learned to use the leverage he's gathered?  Signs are that he may have. Here's what he told the Des Moines Register a couple of weeks ago:

Whither Obama on taxes?

David Weigel notes that he tax stance that served Obama well in his town hall debate with McCain in 2008 will not serve four years later:

Obama had miraculous success in 2008 by promising to raise taxes on the wealthy as a way to be fair and close the deficit. It simply isn't working as well in 2012, when Obama owns four $1 trillion deficits. He can correct plenty of his staging problems in a town hall, compared to a back-and-forth podium debate. But he needs a bigger argument on taxes.

I'm not exactly sure why we should credit this, since Obama has not yet been able to put over his proposed restoration of Clinton era income tax rates on the top 2% and other modest tax increases for the wealthy, and the broad principle of "asking the wealthy to pay a little more" has broad popular support. But allowing that the tax proposals in Obama's proposed ten year deficit reduction plan are a bit lightweight, a few thoughts below about where we are and where we need to head:

Why the president's grand bargain offer is so conservative

Ever since Obama made it clear that he was engaging with Republicans to strike a multitrillion deficit reduction deal, Democrats have lamented how far the goalposts have been moved to the right.  Why were Democrats not insisting on, say, a 50/50 split between spending cuts and tax hikes? Why was the floated half-loaf deal weighted an apparently 83/17 in favor of cuts, and the more recently proffered grand bargain something like 3-to-1? (Though I wonder whether, as in the president's initial proposal, that is not in fact 2-to-1, with another trillion in savings credited to reduced interest paid on the debt.)

I believe that Chuck Schumer's statement yesterday in response to Boehner's rejection of the grand bargain may contain an explanation that's been hiding in plain sight, per the passage I've bolded below:

As Democrats tank, Is Stephen J. Rose rebounding? Will Obama?

As the Democrats stare at disaster, is Stephen J. Rose finally getting some traction?

An economist former Clinton Administration official, Rose has been crying in the wilderness that Democrats overestimate middle class distress and pitch their programs and rhetoric too much at the disadvantaged, ignoring the broad, relatively prosperous middle of American society. Democrats do not cotton to his rebuttals to assertions that the middle class is  "disappearing" or"drowning in debt" or his critiques of work by Elizabeth Warren and Jacob Hacker propounding those ideas.

Rose's book Rebound: Why America Will Emerge Stronger from the Financial Crisis got a plug from David Brooks just prior to publication this past April, but my impression is that it's been largely ignored otherwise. My customer review on Amazon, posted on May 10 (here on xpostfactoid), remains the only one, and the book's Amazon sales rank is 305,456.  By contrast, Richard Florida's the The Great Reset: How New Ways of Living and Working Drive Post-Crash Prosperity, published two weeks after Rebound and listed by Amazon as a Rebound comparable, has 15 customer reviews and a sales rank of 10,950.

Perhaps it's coincidence, but Rose's theses popped up on my screen twice yesterday. The first is a shadow appearance. Joshua Green gave a platform to Chuck Schumer, who here expounds pure Rose: