A California judge ruled Thursday that Don't Ask, Don’t Tell "infringes the fundamental rights of United States servicemembers." Photo: Soldiers Media Center, Flickr

The military’s Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell policy — which bars openly gay men and women from serving in the military — was ruled unconstitutional by a judge in Riverside, Calif., Thursday evening. The suit, brought by the Log Cabin Republicans, argued that the policy violated the First and Fifth Amendments to the U.S. Constitution, and the judge agreed, ordering a permanent injunction against the policy. The Department of Justice has seven days to appeal the ruling.

In a 28-page decision (pdf), U.S. District Court Judge Virginia A. Phillips wrote:

The Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell Act infringes the fundamental rights of United States servicemembers in many ways, some described above. The Act denies homosexuals serving in the Armed Forces the right to enjoy “intimate conduct” in their personal relationships. The Act denies them the right to speak about their loved ones while serving their country in uniform; it punishes them with discharge for writing a personal letter, in a foreign language, to a person of the same sex with whom they shared an intimate relationship before entering military service; it discharges them for including information in a personal communication from which an unauthorized reader might discern their homosexuality. In order to justify the encroachment on these rights, Defendants faced the burden at trial of showing the Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell Act was necessary to significantly further the Government’s important interests in military readiness and unit cohesion. Defendants failed to meet that burden. Thus, Plaintiff, on behalf of its members, is entitled to judgment in its favor on the first claim in its First Amended Complaint for violation of the substantive due process rights guaranteed under the Fifth Amendment.

A range of groups, including some that oppose same-sex marriage, hailed the decision.

“Today’s ruling is not just a victory for the LGBT community, but for our military, our security, and for U.S. taxpayers,” Courage Campaign founder Rick Jacobs said. “Asking soldiers to lie about who they are destroys the trust on which an effective fighting force is reliant, and discrimination of any kind undermines the values that generations of Americans–including LGBT Americans–have fought and died to defend. It is our hope that the Senate will act quickly to repeal this failed policy, so that we can avoid a lengthy and costly appeals process, and get on with the business of ensuring all patriotic Americans are able to serve our country with honor and dignity.”

The Log Cabin Republicans filed the lawsuit in Oct. 2004, and it went to trial in July 2010. Executive director R. Clarke Cooper praised the ruling.

“As an American, a veteran and an Army reserve officer, I am proud the court ruled that the arcane Don’t Ask Don’t Tell statute violates the Constitution,” he said. “Today, the ruling is not just a win for Log Cabin Republican servicemembers, but all American servicemembers.”

Chad Griffin of the American Foundation for Equal Rights said:

“Today’s court decision declaring Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell unconstitutional is yet another significant and long-overdue step toward full equality for all Americans. Along with the recent federal court decisions on DOMA and Proposition 8, it is clear that our nation is moving toward the day when every American will be treated equally under the law, as is required by our Constitution.”

Alexander Nicholson, executive director of Servicemembers United and a former U.S. Army interrogator, was the only plaintiff named in the case. He was discharged under Don’t Ask Don’t Tell.

“This is an historic moment and an historic ruling for the gay military community and for the readiness and integrity of our Armed Forces,” he said. “As the only named injured party in this case, I am exceedingly proud to have been able to represent all who have been impacted and had their lives ruined by this blatantly unconstitutional policy. We are finally on our way to vindication.”

Other groups also reacted to the decision. The Human Rights Campaign released this statement:

“Today a federal judge affirmed what the vast majority of the American people know to be true – that it’s time for the discriminatory ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’ law to be sent to the dustbin of history. With this legal victory in hand, Congress is right now in a perfect position to strengthen our national security by ending a law that has discharged thousands of capable service members. With House passage already secured, the Senate can and should vote in the next few weeks to repeal ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’ and allow every qualified man and woman the chance to serve with honor.”

And the Stonewall Democrats:

“Today’s Federal court decision calling the Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell policy unconstitutional on grounds that it violates gay military members’ rights to free speech, due process and open association is another nail in the coffin of the policy. We’re glad that the Federal court agrees with President Obama’s position: that Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell needs to come to an end. Our Senators need to hear from their constituents demanding repeal. We also call on Senate Republicans to rise above the obstructionism they’ve been playing at for months and let a vote happen on what the vast majority of Americans want: repeal of DADT.”

And perhaps surprisingly, the National Organization for Marriage, a group opposed to relationship rights for same-sex couples, released these tweets:

“#DADT has nothing to do with the tradition of marriage between a man and a woman and everything to do with citizens’ rights.”

And:

“There is no need to prohibit gays and lesbians from openly serving in the Armed Forces. They should have the opportunity to serve.”

According to Minnesota Public Radio, Pawlenty said, “You know, I think everybody has to make their own judgments. But in my view, I don’t think it’s a helpful or needed thing. It’s not something that’s a wise act on his part.”

Gen. David Petraeus’ has raised concerns in recent days that the Quran burning might jeopardize the safety of American troops.

“He is the expert on the situation in Afghanistan relative to American troops,” Pawlenty said. “I would certainly give anything he said great deference and respect.”

Bachmann told WCCO’s Esme Murphy, “I think it’s reprehensible and I don’t think he should do it particularly in light of the remarks by Gen. David Patraeus,” she said. “This could put our troops in harm’s way and I think it’s an absolutely terrible move and I would call on the pastor to please not to do anything like that that would put our troops in harms way.”

Meanwhile, on the national level, President Obama has spoken out about the event, too. This afternoon, he tweeted, “Burning a Quran is contrary to our values—this country was built on the notions of religious freedom and tolerance.”

Related: Ellison: Religious bigotry behind recent anti-Muslim fervor

Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and the House Democratic leadership. Photo: EPA/ZUMApress.com

The Treasury Department announced Tuesday that the country’s deficit had hit the $1 trillion mark just nine months into the fiscal year. Fear of the deficit had already led Congress to kill or delay an administration-backed jobs bill, a federal extension of unemployment benefits, a war funding bill and federal funding for Medicaid. Now, the 13-digit monster has claimed its latest victim: a full budget for the coming fiscal year.

Recognizing that Democrats would be reluctant to record “yes” votes for a budget that would augment the deficit, the House leadership opted to deem as passed a “budget enforcement resolution” instead, just before the July 4 recess. While the distinction between an enforcement resolution and a full budget is largely technical, there is one crucial difference: Under the enforcement resolution, Democrats can no longer use a parliamentary tactic known as budget reconciliation next year — a process Democrats had hoped might allow them to pass key pieces of legislation, such as a jobs bill, with 51 votes in the Senate, as opposed to the usual 60 needed to overcome a filibuster.

Under the arcane rules of the Senate, budget reconciliation can only be used if it was written into the budget rules passed the previous year. With no full budget, there can be no reconciliation. As a consequence, Democrats lose a valuable tool for passing budget-related items on a majority-rules vote. Stimulus and jobs measures, if they combined short-term spending with longer-term deficit reduction, would have qualified for reconciliation.

Some policy advisers and members of Congress pushing for a such a measure — and recognizing that it could not make it past a Republican filibuster — viewed reconciliation as a last hope. “What we want to do is end up with legislation that is going to create a substantial number of jobs,” Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) told reporters. “We don’t have 60 votes to do that. We could do that through majority rule, 51 votes.”

But a desire among Democrats to avoid voting on a deficit-increasing budget won out over the need to preserve reconciliation in creating the budget enforcement resolution. “Members looked at the budget and said, ‘We might need more deficit spending,’” said Jim Horney, the director of federal fiscal policy at the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities. “And anything you do to try to reduce those deficits would necessarily include policies that might not be popular — tax increases, cuts in major programs.” The House leadership judged the enforcement resolution as less of a political risk for moderate Democrats who will face difficult re-election campaigns in the fall.

It wasn’t either chamber’s first choice. Throughout the spring, both House and Senate leaders promised that a full budget was coming down the pipeline. “The plan is to work to bring a budget resolution to the floor,” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) told reporters in April. And Sen. Kent Conrad managed to pass a budget through the Senate Budget Committee, a major step in getting a budget to the floor.

But behind closed doors, the budget process caused considerable tensions — both between the House and Senate and between more and less liberal members of each chamber. In one of the few on-the-record comments made about the process, Rep. Earl Blumenauer (D-Ore.) told Fox News: “There is some real tension within our caucus. … But it is still an item of open discussion. … I, for one, feel better about putting [a budget] out for everybody to see — but that’s a little above my pay grade.”

Off the record, Senate and House staffers have pointed fingers at one another as to who is to blame for the lack of a full budget. The Senate is the chamber that cannot get enough votes to pass anything, House staffers say, and the House should not be required to do the Senate’s work. The House did not even put together an actual budget — unlike the Senate Budget Committee — Senate staffers retort. The House side proffers that it did not pass a budget because the Senate said it could not get 51 members to stand up and vote for a deficit-increasing measure.

Ultimately, reconciliation and the broader budget both died due to a lack of conviction on the part of Democrats about the need to spend more. Democrats knew in advance that they absolutely wanted the reconciliation option available for health care, and so they kept it on the table in last year’s budget. But they never committed to more stimulus, jobs funding or other types of bills for fiscal year 2011.

“Even if they had gotten a full budget, there was no agreement that they would want to have reconciliation instructions for any big, significant legislation,” Horney said, noting that Democrats had promised not to move cap-and-trade or a carbon tax via reconciliation. “There was just no consensus among Democrats about what to do here.”

The budget enforcement resolution passed the House quietly, attached to a war spending bill. Nevertheless, the maneuver ginned up considerable criticism. “There is not a big functional difference between [a budget and a budget enforcement resolution], but there is a big symbolic difference,” said Maya MacGuineas, the head of the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget. “Having Congress neglect to create a budget for political reasons is disturbing, to say the least, this year. In terms of the symbolism, for the credit markets, it is a strike against us, if Congress will not talk about where responsible cuts are going to come from. And in terms of partisan politics, it is fuel for the fire, too.”

And Republicans have been happy to fan the flames. “Facing a record deficit and a tidal wave of debt, House Democrats decided it was politically inconvenient to put forward a budget and account for their fiscal recklessness,” Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.), the ranking member of the House Budget Committee, said on the House floor. “With no priorities and no restraints, the spending, taxing and borrowing will continue unchecked for the coming fiscal year. The so-called ‘budget enforcement resolution’ enforces no budget, but instead provides a green light for the appropriators to continue spending, exacerbating our looming fiscal crisis.”

So despite their efforts to avoid deficit-related criticisms, Democrats are being hammered for deficits and for obfuscation. And in the process, they’ve made it almost impossible to imagine a meaningful jobs bill passing next year.

President Obama at the G-20 Summit in Toronto on June 27 (Xinhua/ZUMApress.com)

BERLIN — President Obama’s push for additional economic stimulus is not just hitting a wall in Congress. The president has also been rebuffed by the largest European countries — with potentially profound consequences for the U.S. economy and Obama’s national agenda.

In the run-up to the G-20 summit in late June, the Obama administration went on a PR offensive, urging other wealthy nations to keep pumping stimulus into their economies. But with the Greek budget crisis heightening anxieties over public debt, conservative governments in Berlin, Paris, London and Rome are all on an austerity track. Instead of a pledge to inject more capital into their economies, all Obama got at the Toronto conference was a communique that emphasizes savings over stimulus.

Some economists fret that Europe’s fiscal retreat threatens to tip the U.S. deeper into recession. Meanwhile, leading analysts in Germany, the continent’s largest economy, say the trans-Atlantic spending spat underscores Obama’s limited maneuvering room in his effort to steer the fragile recovery back home.

“America is having enormous difficulties,” said economist Gustav Horn of the Macroeconomic Policy Institute, part of a labor-affiliated foundation in Düsseldorf, Germany. “At the moment, [the U.S.] is dependent on the rest of the world offering it a friendly economic environment.”

For Obama, the environment is less friendly than he would like. In an open letter to other G-20 heads of state before the summit, the president wrote that leaders should “learn from the consequential mistakes of the past when stimulus was too quickly withdrawn.” Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner, meanwhile, told the BBC, “Growth in the future around the world can’t depend on the United States as much as it did in the past.”

Some economists warn that austerity in the largest European economies, combined with severe budget cuts in countries such as Greece and Spain, could push the continent into a double-dip recession. If so, the consequences for the U.S. could be severe. A European downturn, Horn said, would hurt American exports, both by lowering demand and by strengthening the dollar. Perhaps more importantly, he added, a stumbling Europe could weaken crucial U.S. trading partners in Asia. Likewise, Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman recently warned that the resistance to more stimulus in Europe and the U.S. raises the specter of a depression.

But the dominant view in Germany is that such fears are misguided. Supporters of budget consolidation note the country is on an upswing, with GDP growth expected to reach as high as 2 percent this year as exports accelerate. Moreover, they argue that fiscal retrenchment will spur private-sector spending. A recent report by the Ifo Institute for Economic Research, a Munich-based think tank with government funding, says cuts would lead to an “expansive confidence effect on German consumers and investors.”

The fear that a European slowdown could hurt American trade underscores a more fundamental challenge that German economists say the U.S. must tackle: expanding exports as a source of economic growth.

“Before the crisis, we had a consumption boom in the U.S. that was not sustainable,” said Ifo economist Klaus Abberger. “And so we think there is a need for some redirection.”

That redirection, economists say, will be outward.

“The growth driver you’ve got left is ultimately net exports,” said economist Christian Dreger of the Berlin-based German Institute for Economic Research, another government-funded think tank.

The Obama administration has come to a similar conclusion. In his State of the Union speech in January, the president announced a new initiative to double American exports within five years, though many analysts called the goal unrealistic.

“For too long, America served as the consumer engine for the entire world,” the president said in follow-up remarks in March. “But we’re rebalancing. … Countries with external deficits need to save and export more.”

But the future of U.S. exports is not entirely under American control. The country can only reduce its trade deficit if the rest of the world has sufficient buying power, Horn said. The G-20 has been touting a new initiative to ease trade imbalances, which would require net exporters like Germany to buy more from net importers like the U.S. But it remains to be seen whether there will be any action to follow the talk.

Obama’s inability to induce Europe to boost its stimulus spending is rendered even more discouraging by the limited traction his spending proposals are getting in Congress. And it does not help that Obama is looking increasingly isolated among world leaders in pushing a more expansive fiscal policy.

“You don’t win something in Congress by saying, oh, Europe’s doing this,” said economist Dean Baker, co-director of the left-leaning Center for Economic and Policy Research in Washington. “[But] you don’t want the U.S. to look like an outlier.”

The president should not get his hopes up for a hand from Berlin, though. As the Berliner Zeitung newspaper declared of Germany’s chancellor in a recent headline: “Merkel won’t listen to Obama.” The country has a culture of thriftiness to rival even the fiscal-conservative wing of the Republican Party. The traumatic hyperinflation that racked the Weimar Republic during the 1920s has made Germany hyper-sensitive to price stability. The country last year amended its constitution to include limits on government debt. Deep concern that the aging of the population will soon make Germany’s welfare state unaffordable have made people here anxious to get back to budget cutting. Meanwhile, unemployment is lower than in the U.S., so the economic pain is less acute.

Deficit hawks here also argue the turmoil in Greece is a warning to profligate governments across the continent.

“We saw with the Greek crisis how vulnerable highly indebted countries are to [speculative] attack,” said Norbert Barthle, a member of the German parliament from the ruling center-right Christian Democratic Union party (CDU) who specializes in budgeting.

The American economy has managed impressive growth so far this year, but it has largely been driven by the effects of government stimulus, Horn said. And the looming dry-up of stimulus funds around the world amounts to a serious problem for the American president.

“He has to do more if other countries do less,” Horn said. “And in that sense, his worries are absolutely understandable.”

David Dagan is a freelance journalist living in Berlin.

The delegation will “look into environmental remediation of dioxin and the joint funding of medical services for people with disabilities, and meet with Vietnamese government officials to discuss education initiatives, labor issues, and trade relations.”

Franken will also visit Laos, where he will likely be working on issues related to the forced repatriation of Hmong refugees. In early June, Franken hosted a community briefing with Ravic Huso, the U.S. Ambassador to Laos, and Minnesota’s Hmong leaders; he promised attendees he would be visiting Laos soon, according to Hmong Times.

Sens. Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.) and John Kerry (D-Mass.), the authors of a comprehensive climate bill, on Tuesday. Photoe: epa/ZUMApress.com

If President Obama hoped that his meeting with key senators on Tuesday would produce anything resembling a consensus on energy legislation, he came away disappointed. Democratic leaders emerged from the meeting expressing their grudging willingness to compromise further — provided some sort of emissions limits are put in place — while Republicans continued to hammer emissions controls as an “energy tax.”

But the events of the day may have brought some clarity to a point that has gradually emerged over the past two weeks: If the eventual energy bill is to include a price on carbon, it’s likely to affect the utilities sector only.

Sen. Olympia Snowe (R-Maine), a moderate Republican without whose support energy legislation stands virtually no chance of passing the Senate, issued a statement after the meeting expressing hesitation on an economy-wide carbon cap — a provision many scientists consider essential to efforts to fight global warming.

“On the complex and difficult question of curbing greenhouse gas emissions, there is no consensus at this time,” Snowe said. “From my perspective, I’ve long asserted that placing a price on carbon will send the appropriate signals to entrepreneurs that would unleash the innovation to position America as a global clean energy industry leader. However, today we are in different and perilous economic times. … We cannot afford economy-wide approaches to carbon reduction that could cost consumers another 18 cents per gallon of gasoline in this struggling economy or subject our manufacturing sector to unnecessary regulations when they’ve already reduced their emissions by five percent below 1990 levels.”

Her solution? “I believe that one possibility is to more narrowly target a carbon pricing program through a uniform nationwide system solely on the power sector which is the sector with the most to lose from the EPA regulations and it’s also the sector in which businesses actually make decisions today based on prices 20 to 30 years in the future.”

It’s hardly a new idea. Two weeks ago, White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel proposed a utilities-only cap as a possible compromise solution. And last week, Duke Energy CEO Jim Rogers, the most vocal advocate for climate legislation in the electricity industry, co-authored an op-ed in Politico in which he expressed openness to a carbon price for utilities alone — provided other sectors eventually follow.

“It’s time for all of us — politicians, business leaders and environmentalists — to put wishful thinking aside, establish realistic goals and develop a consensus for legislation that can be passed this year,” he wrote, along with Pew Center on Global Climate Change president Eileen Claussen. “If that means capping emissions from the utility sector first — so be it.”

But they added, “Electric utilities may be willing to go first. But they are not going to be willing to go alone.”

Exactly how other sectors would be added remains unclear.

“Some climate bills have featured a sort of Phase Two,” said Marchant Wentworth, deputy legislative director of the Union of Concerned Scientists, where other sectors are phased in “four, five, six years down the road.”

But Wentworth was skeptical that a utilities-only bill would be able to pass a Senate where Republican opposition to climate legislation has grown increasingly intense.

“Is there something unique about a utility-only bill that gets you more support in the Senate than a comprehensive bill?” he asked. “Can you get to 60 [votes] on utility-only? No.”

Still, for all the disappointment among environmentalists over the repeated compromises Democrats have made on climate legislation to win over moderates, some argue that a utilities-only cap would achieve most of the goals of an economy-wide carbon pricing scheme. The question now is whether Democratic leaders in the Senate can muster 60 votes for even a weakened bill to overcome a Republican filibuster.

The answer may be in the president’s hands — at least according to Senate Majority Harry Reid.

“I think it’s pretty clear we have to do something,” Reid said last week. “The question is, what do we do? Now, a lot of that depends on what the White House is going to do to help us get something done.”

Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.), a leading voice for strong climate action, thinks Obama took an important step in that direction in the meeting Tuesday.

“He didn’t lay out a recipe, but he made it clear that a price on carbon is a very powerful instrument,” Merkley told The Washington Post. “He said it’s a very important tool and one we should thoroughly explore. … He made a point of raising carbon pricing a number of times. I dont think he would have done so if that wasn’t very important to him.”

But the president himself equivocated on the need for a price on carbon following the meeting.

“The President told the Senators that he still believes the best way for us to transition to a clean energy economy is with a bill that makes clean energy the profitable kind of energy for America’s businesses by putting a price on pollution — because when companies pollute, they should be responsible for the costs to the environment and their contribution to climate change,” the White House said in a statement. “Not all of the Senators agreed with this approach, and the President welcomed other approaches and ideas that would take real steps to reduce our dependence on oil, create jobs, strengthen our national security and reduce the pollution in our atmosphere.”

The diversity of opinions on energy legislation notwithstanding, Obama remains optimistic about the prospects of a bill.

“The President is confident that we will be able to get something done this year,” the White House said.

Rep. Keith Ellison

Rep. Keith Ellison will be traveling to Africa in July with a delegation of five Democrats and three Republicans as part of the House Democracy Partnership. According to the Star Tribune, Ellison will visit Senegal, Liberia, Kenya and Tanzania through the program, which brings House members’ expertise in government to developing democracies around the world.

The House Democracy Partnership “works through peer-to-peer partnerships with emerging democratic legislatures to assist in the development of the fundamental building blocks of legislative government: oversight, transparency, accountability, effective legislation, and responsiveness to constituents.”

The House has partnered with legislatures in 15 countries including Afghanistan, Colombia, East Timor, Georgia, Haiti, Indonesia, Kosovo, Kenya, Lebanon, Liberia, Macedonia, Mongolia, Pakistan, Peru and Ukraine.

Barack Obama. Photo: WDCpix

A year after President Obama’s speech in Cairo vowing to reset relations with the Muslim world, Muslims worldwide are telling pollsters about their disillusionment with what they consider unfulfilled expectations.

According to the Pew Center’s new survey of global attitudes (PDF), released Thursday morning, citizens of Muslim nations report disproportionate antipathy to Obama’s foreign policy. With the exception of Indonesia, where Obama spent a portion of his childhood, Muslims are the exceptions to the Pew poll’s findings that eighteen months of the Obama administration have seen a surge of international support for the United States after the public-opinion troughs of the Bush administration.

“The Pew results reflect growing dissatisfaction with Obama’s policies, as many Arabs and Muslims are disappointed that Obama has not lived up to his promises, especially on the Arab-Israeli conflict,” said Marc Lynch, a George Washington University professor and the co-author of a recent Center for a New American Security report measuring Obama’s global engagement efforts. “They don’t see his actions matching his words, and until they do then it isn’t likely that there will be a sustained recovery in America’s image.”

In Jordan, the U.S. approval rating has fallen to 21 percent. It’s at 17 percent, the lowest of any countries Pew surveyed, in Turkey, Egypt and Pakistan. And this comes after the Obama administration has presided over the largest non-military aid package to Pakistan — the $7.5 billion, five-year Kerry-Lugar-Berman bill — in history.

“Opposition to key elements of U.S. foreign policy remains pervasive,” Pew analyzes, “and many continue to perceive the U.S. as a potential military threat to their countries.”

The news is not universally negative. Nigerian Muslims give Obama a 70 percent approval rating, up from 61 percent in 2009. But they’re the outliers. In Egypt and Lebanon, Obama’s ascendance — and the departure of George W. Bush — elevated Muslim attitudes toward the U.S. somewhat: 25 percent of Egyptians reported favorable opinions of the U.S. in 2009, up from 20 percent a year earlier; Lebanese Muslims in 2008 had given the U.S. a 34 percent favorability rating, which rose to 47 percent in 2008. Now Egyptian Muslims have reverted to their pre-Obama 20 percent favorability rating. Lebanese Muslims have settled into a 39 percent favorability rating.

More ominous from the perspective of Obama’s Cairo speech, Muslims express a sentiment directly opposite the speech’s offer of partnership: They fear that the U.S. will attack them. Majorities, and sometimes large ones, of respondents in Egypt (56 percent), Lebanon (56 percent), Indonesia (76 percent), Pakistan (65 percent), Jordan (52 percent) and Turkey (56 percent) believe the U.S. is a potential military threat. That shouldn’t be surprising: Pakistan, despite being a Major Non-NATO Ally of the U.S., is currently battered in its tribal areas by CIA drone strikes, a step the U.S. has taken in response to what it considers insufficient Pakistani military action against al-Qaeda-aligned extremist groups. In Cairo, Obama pledged that the U.S. “is not, and never will be, at war with Islam,” but many Muslims worldwide believe that the U.S. still has them in its crosshairs.

Support for the Afghanistan war and U.S. counterterrorism efforts in Muslim countries is also anemic. Lebanon is the only Muslim country surveyed by Pew where even 20 percent believe that the U.S. should keep fighting in Afghanistan. (Neighboring Pakistan? Seven percent.) While support for U.S. counterterrorism efforts have grown in non-Muslim countries since Obama took office, it’s at 18 percent in Egypt, 12 percent in Jordan, and 47 percent among Nigerian Muslims.

Several counterterrorism experts believe the U.S.’s counterterrorism efforts will ultimately be hobbled if they run into a headwind of Muslim antipathy. Malcolm Nance, a retired veteran military intelligence officer who served in Iraq, Afghanistan and throughout the Middle East, argues in a new book that rather than attempt to change Muslim attitudes, a more productive strategy would involve moving the conversation to al-Qaeda’s apostasy. Nance code-names this approach CIRCUIT BREAKER, and writes in “An End to Al-Qaeda” that subjecting al-Qaeda to a “deep analytical dissection of their religious motives” can provide a path to “a new era for reconciliation and cooperation with the Muslim street.” It would also provide a platform for popular acquiescence to military or intelligence action against al-Qaeda — or at least limit blowback from it.

The administration appears to be attentive to the challenges, even if it hasn’t figured out a programmatic way to overcome them. Last month, the Pentagon quietly established a new office to ensure that military efforts don’t inadvertently undermine the administration’s broader promotion of the rule of law around the world.

Lynch, who also recently evaluated Obama’s counterterrorism efforts for CNAS partially through the prism of Muslim acquiescence, disputed that the Pew numbers demonstrate that Obama’s outreach to the Muslim world was in vain. “It’s more that he said he would do things, but thus far hasn’t delivered,” Lynch said, “so the words lose their meaning. It’s a real problem for the broader counterterrorism strategy, since winning over mainstream support is absolutely key to the strategy.”

Image: Freedomworks

Since mid-May, a grinning Glenn Beck has popped up to greet visitors to the FreedomWorks website. Standing in front of his trademark chalkboard, the conservative host is the official face of FreedomWorks’ newest free offering: the “Take America Back! Action Kit.”

Together with a souvenir Gadsden Flag, the tea party starter-kit includes an informational DVD explaining the proper “pro-freedom” positions across the wide range of issues on which FreedomWorks is active. This menu of burning concerns, also found on freedomworks.org’s “Issues” page, includes primers on School Choice, Red Tape and Regulation, and even Asbestos Lawsuit Reform. While largely focused with domestic issues, the list also includes subjects of broader scope, such as International Trade and Global Warming.

There is, however, a striking omission in FreedomWorks’ otherwise expansive public agenda: It says nothing about national security or foreign policy. FreedomWorks, the organization most often credited with organizing the revival of an activist conservative grassroots, studiously avoids mention of the country’s two wars, its ballooning defense budget, arms control or the tangle of legal controversy that has outlived the previous administration’s “war on terror”—from Guantanamo to torture.

There is a simple explanation for why FreedomWorks fails to offer a bold new foreign policy agenda alongside its ambitious domestic one. The tea party movement for which it claims to speak, despite its sweeping rhetoric of renewal and reclamation, does not appear to have one. Where the tea party legions and its spokesmen raucously decry profligacy in domestic spending, they fall silent on the defense budget’s role in fueling deficits in recent years. While the highest-profile tea party-approved candidates and politicians agitate for radical redirection on social spending, taxes and the deficit, this boldness stops abruptly at water’s edge.

“My understanding from talking to tea party leaders who contact us regularly is that the overriding concerns at this time focus on spending, mounting debt and expanding role of government,” said Bridgett Wagner, Director of Coalition Relations at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank that advocates for a strong defense and an internationalist foreign policy. “The [tea party activists] are definitely patriotic and concerned about security and foreign policy issues, but these are not top-tier issues for them at this time.”

To the extent that the diffuse tea party movement has a foreign policy vision, there is little to distinguish it from the mainstream Republicanism of the last decade it claims so heartily to disdain.

The campaign platform of Pat Toomey, a Republican Senate candidate in Pennsylvania backed by local tea partiers, offers the homiletic belief that America “must have the strongest defensive capabilities in the world.” Without mentioning Iraq or Afghanistan, it goes on to state, “We should not hesitate to take action in defense of our freedom and our American way of life.”

That’s more than interested voters will find in the public platform of tea party darling and Florida Senate candidate Marco Rubio, which lacks even a perfunctory section on foreign policy or national security.

“There’s no question that the most pressing issues right now are domestic,” said Alex Burgos, a Rubio spokesman. “We’re talking to an electorate with a 12 percent unemployment rate, so the most dominant topics are going to be jobs, debt and the deficit.” Burgos noted that this does not mean that Rubio does not take foreign policy seriously. “Marco has spoken out on the issues,” added Burgos. “He supported the surge in Afghanistan, opposed canceling missile defense installations in Eastern Europe and supports Israel, as well as tough action against Iran.”

The foreign policy platform of Kentucky senatorial candidate Rand Paul likewise reflects the conventional wisdom of strong-defense conservatism, and fails to approach the radicalism of his domestic policy suggestions. In Arizona, tea party-supported Senate hopeful J.D. Hayworth offers a hawkish foreign policy line that could have been written by Dick Cheney. Sen. Jim DeMint (R-S.C.), Glenn Beck’s favorite senator, is yet another new-breed conservative who argues for breaking with the recent Republican past on domestic and economic issues, but on foreign policy sounds like any Bush-boosting Republican senator circa 2005.

When tea party heroes do wade into foreign policy issues, they do so at risk of exposing rifts within the ranks. After Sarah Palin began giving speeches under the tea party banner that smacked of Cheneyism, many of the tea party old guard felt betrayed. The tea party activist-theorist A.C. Kleinheider, who had joined the nascent movement as it first began coalescing in the Ron Paul campaign, was just one of those to resign from the movement in disgust.

“The tea party movement is dead, and Sarah Palin drove a stake right through its heart,” Kleinheider wrote following Palin’s keynote to the National Tea Party convention. “The tea party I’m familiar with was concerned more about the collusion of big business and big government than the War in Iraq. The tea party I’m familiar with was more concerned about rejecting the bailout of Wall Street while looking for ways reinvigorate the economy of Main Street than looking for Al-Qaeda. The tea party I’m familiar with seemed more concerned about restoring the Republic at home than Democracy abroad.”

No wonder, then, that groups like FreedomWorks prefer to avoid the subject altogether.

Oil containment boom in Pensacola, Fla. Photo: U.S. Coast Guard

Sam Stein at the Huffington Post reports that President Obama has come out in support of lifting the $75 million liability cap for oil spillers. Congress had hoped to raise the liability cap to $10 billion, but Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla.) blocked the measure single-handedly. Now, Stein reports, the White House has backed new legislation to make oil companies liable for unlimited amounts for the economic damage caused by oil spills.

“The President supports removing caps on liability for oil companies engaged in offshore drilling,” White House spokesman Ben LaBolt told Stein. “Oil companies should have every incentive to maximize safety and arbitrary caps on liability create a disincentive to achieve that goal.”