Month: October 2011

As I drive around the Philly suburbs, I see a lot of people doing lawnwork. Most of the people doing the lawnwork are Latino. I don’t know how many of them are here in this country without documents, but I imagine that some of the lawn care companies don’t bother checking the status of their employees. Perhaps others are duped by fake documents. The main thing, though, is that I don’t think many homeowners care one way or the other. They want their lawns mowed, and they want a good price. That’s why there is nothing particularly alarming about the fact that Mitt Romney had undocumented workers taking care of his lawn. That’s hardly an unusual situation.

But that’s why the Republicans’ stance on immigration is so obnoxious. Remember the spectacle of Meg Whitman saying that the maid she employed for years should be deported? There is something really wrong with knowingly hiring undocumented servants and then turning on them and saying they should be thrown out of the country.

If you really care about undocumented workers, you certainly shouldn’t employ them. And then to go around the country saying that people who employ undocumented workers should be punished? That reminds me of all the politicians who support drug laws that would have landed them in jail when they were teenagers.

People are buzzing about Rick Perry’s decision to call Mitt Romney a hypocrite on immigration in last night’s debate. It’s a cynical attack from Perry, but it’s a valid criticism. You can be sure that the Obama campaign will mention Romney’s hypocrisy, so it’s an issue the Republican voters need to discuss. It’s a weakness in the record of their frontrunner.

The problem isn’t that Romney, like countless other Americans, had undocumented workers tending to his lawn. The problem is that he has no respect for the people who tended his lawn. The problem is that he wants to use them as a political punching bag.

I was interested to see that Ed Koch did a sudden about-face recently and endorsed President Obama’s reelection. It was a rather dramatic transformation, as Koch had just led the charge to beat the Democrat running to replace Rep. Anthony Weiner because he wanted to send a message to the president about his policies toward Israel. However, the president asked for a meeting with Koch, and Koch came away from the meeting feeling that he had misunderstood the president’s words and actions. Koch hasn’t been an elected official for a very long time, but he’s probably the best example of an American official who transparently puts the interests of Israel (as he sees them) above any domestic considerations. He’s fairly open about it, probably because he’s not actually an office-holder.

This is obviously one of the most sensitive subjects in American politics. There have been so many lies and libels against Jews, and with such tragic results, that one must tread lightly around subjects of dual-loyalty. Yet, that doesn’t mean that we can’t question to actions of Jewish politicians when their behavior seems to indicate that they’re putting the interests of Israel (as they see them) ahead of the interests of their own constituents and their own political ideology.

How do we explain the recent actions of Sen. Joe Lieberman of Connecticut? He’s not supporting the president on the jobs bill. He even opposes the bill coming up next week to hire back teachers, police officers, and firefighters. This is not consistent with Lieberman’s record over 22 years in the Senate. He’s always been a friend of public service workers, and even though he’s clashed with teachers over vouchers, he’s been supportive of teachers and education spending.

There are some senators who oppose the president’s plan because they’re up for reelection and they’re worried about more stimulus spending, even if it’s paid for. That’s certainly the case with Ben Nelson of Nebraska and Jon Tester of Montana. But Joe Lieberman isn’t running for reelection, so he’s liberated to vote his conscience. Does his conscience tell him that we need more unemployed teachers, police officers, and firefighters? Has he suddenly decided that the Republicans are right about how to stimulate the economy? I kind of doubt it.

Joe Lieberman endorsed John McCain in 2008, arguing that he was better prepared to take on Islamic extremism. If Lieberman was worried about Obama on that score, his fears should have been alleviated by Obama’s relentless pursuit of bin-Laden and his super-agressive drone campaign. It’s hard to see why Lieberman would still want the president to lose his reelection bid, but that is how he is behaving.

Remember that this man was the Democratic Party’s nominee for vice-president in 2000. He hasn’t changed that much. Certainly, he has a more hawkish attitude than he used to, which is somewhat understandable in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks. But he was a leader in repealing the Don’t Ask Don’t Tell policy, he’s tried to lead on climate change, he’s pro-choice, and he’s generally on the left’s side of most political disputes. If he’s trying to sabotage President Obama’s presidency, there must be some powerful motivating force. Is it spite? Or he suffering from the same malady that Ed Koch so recently recovered from?

It’s an uncomfortable question. But when a man inexplicably votes against his entire history, against the preferences of his own constituents, against his own caucus, and when he doesn’t have any good excuses for his actions, you have to wonder what’s going on. Why is Lieberman jettisoning everything he believes in to try to destroy Obama’s presidency? Is it because he cares first and foremost about Israel?

It’s not a subject matter that I raise lightly because I know the history and danger of such accusations. The one thing I know for sure is that Lieberman’s opposition to the president’s job proposals in inexplicable unless we realize that he wants Obama to fail.

Leftinesses Unite!!!

Someone’s talking some sense out there.

Gotta defend ourselves immediately!!!

The poster massappeal and I have been having a little colloquy on the thread Why Romney is Likely To Win Nomination regarding Ron Paul. Massappeal is a typical kneejerk leftiness clone in this regard, accusing Paul of being consciously allied with right-wing “racists,” “nativists” and the like.

With all due respect to you, and to the power of the Corporate PermaGov, and its paid media, how is Ron Paul, longtime cozy friend of racists and nativists, in any way someone for progressives to celebrate?

—snip—

Ron Paul and his followers sound familiar to these ears.  Not unlike the last time the US had this level of income inequality (1920s, and there was a vibrant neither-left-nor-right popular movement that united against (in their words) Koons, Kikes and Katholics.

And so on.

I answered massappeal at some length, but the blather just kept on spewing. So now I am going to try to make my point on a slightly larger stage.

Read on if you have even a shred of an open mind still available to you after consuming the various leftiness journals, blogs and media outlets that are the analog of Fox News for dedicated Dems and their like.

As Shakespeare wrote:

There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,
Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.

Bet on it.
Y’know what I hear here, massappeal?

I hear the pot calling the kettle black.

You are in a sense doing the same thing that you accuse Ron Paul of doing. You are using “code words” to paint him as a white supremacist just as you are accusing him of using the same code word method to identify himself to the haters as “one of them.”

You write:

I’ll just observe that the language the Pauls use in talking about the 1964 Civil Rights Act is strikingly similar to language used by many segregationists at the time, and since.

For me, that sets off a warning signal—not unlike the one that Ronald Reagan set off when he opened his general election campaign in Philadelphia, MS with a speech endorsing “states’ rights”.

—snip—

The fact that the political faction of which he’s a prominent leader has a long and ongoing history of being a haven for many followers with racial, ethnic and religious prejudices that have as their target me and many of those I know, like, and love—that matters to me.

Oh.

He believes that the federal government has gotten much too intrusive into the lives of its citizens. Not “just” the Civil Rights Act…in fact, his son states quite emphatically:

Let me be clear: I support the Civil Rights Act because I overwhelmingly agree with the intent of the legislation, which was to stop discrimination in the public sphere and halt the abhorrent practice of segregation and Jim Crow laws.

Ron Paul is saying that the solution to this problem of intrusive government is to take away a great deal of the federal government’s power and give it back to the states, the basic idea being that localized government is more easily controlled by its citizens. In a representative democracy those citizens are supposed to be the ones who ultimately decide what it can and cannot do.

You then say that many white supremacist types have also used the words “State’s Rights.” This is true. Then you say that because Ron Paul uses those words, you suspect that he is allied with those forces that “have as their target me and many of those I know, like, and love.”

Apples are round.

Oranges are round.

Therefore apples are oranges?

Please.

Your thinking is extremely cloudy here.

I believe that the federal government has accrued way too much power over the past 30 years or so. I further think that the rapidly burgeoning surveillance state in which we and much of the rest of the world now live is the greatest threat to the concept and effective practice of democracy to have appeared on the face of the earth since the European fascist movements of the ’30s. I really do. I also think that a possibly workable halfway measure to stop that surveillance state from becoming even more intrusive is to take power away from the federal government…especially from its intelligence services…and return it to more localized control.

I say “halfway measure” above because I really think that the entire United States of America should be broken up into its 5 or 6 component parts as sovereign states that govern themselves, but I cannot imagine that happening any time soon. The massive power of the USA has been a regressive force in the world, a vicious killing machine responsible for the death and/or ruined lives of literally millions of people for well over 60 years. Time to stop that shit, massappeal. Time to stop it. For our own sakes as well as that of our millions of victims. Why for our sake? Because it just isn’t working, that’s why.

It just is not working anymore. If it ever did.

In a recent post here I wrote about my upbringing in the Long island, NY area in the early ’50s through the early ’60s. Here is what I said:

I lived in Freeport (on Ray St. right next to the Baldwin border) from 1st grade through 3rd grade. Early ’50s. For me at that time it was a paradise of sorts. There were docks and boat basins at the western end of Ray St. and I went snapper fishing and/or crabbing there almost every summer day. Kids were everywhere and Casino Pool (a salt water swimming pool near the waterfront) was my other hang. Freeport was almost Tom Sawyeresque then. Little adventures that seemed so big. Lots of friends, a functioning extended family…my mother’s parents lived with us and my father’s parents were a 15 minute drive away. Bicycles, little girls to pursue (No one had actually been kind enough to explain sex to me, but it was everywhere.), Little League baseball, a really good library, what I remember as a very happy school experience…even the year that I had to deal with crabby old Mrs. Duntley.

And later on I wrote:

Merrick was…different. It was a couple of years later in my life…we had moved to Pittsburgh (a disastrous decision on so many levels) and Merrick (North Merrick, to be precise…not as affluent as the waterfront areas, to say the least.) seemed as if the same kinds of people who lived in Freeport were trying to be middle class and not quite making it because they had to try so hard. And it was violent, Supe. I do not remember a single violent incident amongst the kids when I was in Freeport…well, there was a fat bully who lived on our block but the older kids and the mothers pretty effectively nullified him right out of the box…but from 6th grade on out in North Merrick it was “Danger on the playground!!!” and “Danger walking home from school!!!” almost every day. Kids sharpened the buckles of their garrison belts and fought with them, carried razor blades in their pomaded pompadours…it was really funky. Look at Joey Buttafuoco’s face. Like dat. Italian, Irish and working class Protestant versions thereof.

Like dat.

—snip—

A strange little town.

Upwardly mobile and at the same time downwardly moral

This got me to thinking…maybe I lived through a sea change in the American psyche during that period and that was the real reason that Merrick…about a mile due east from Freeport…seemed to be so different. I wonder if any child in the US…constantly surrounded by the immense forced socialization machine that we laughingly call “the media” since then…has had an extended period of ease and innocence in which to safely grow.

i wonder. I really do.

Ron Paul apparently thinks the same thing, and he is trying to stop that  massive killing/socialization machine using electoral means to do so. He’s a moderate in this sense. Believe it. If he fails to do so…and I am beginning to think that his efforts are doomed, not by any fault of the ideas behind them but rather because of the absolutely effective mind-control power of the mass hypnomedia (another factor in the surveillance state’s successful rise)…if he fails in this attempt, it is going to take much more radical means to stop this federal/multinational creature from gobbling up the lives of every human being on the planet.

i do not want to see that radical means come to pass, but neither do I wish to live on a lockstep planet. Clomp clomp clomp clomp clomp clomp clomp, mentally goose-stepping off into that Brave New World that Aldous Huxley so presciently envisioned 80 years ago and Shakespeare saw through another age’s glass 320 years earlier.

MIRANDA: O, wonder!
    How many goodly creatures are there here!
    How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world,
    That has such people in’t!

PROSPERO: ‘Tis new to thee.

Prospero knew.

Clomp clomp clomp clomp clomp clomp clomp.

Not me, baby.

Not me.

Bet on it.

I’ll go down dancing first.

Bet on that as well.

Wake the fuck up.

You been had.

Later…

AG

Apparently the lunatics have assembled again.

i’m a little startled to realize that I agree with Pastor Jeffries’ editorial in the Washington Post. He’s right that the Constitution bans any religious test for people holding public office, but it does not prevent you or me from imposing our own religious test. What a candidate believes or professes to believe matters quite a lot. For me personally, I care much less whether a candidate is Protestant or Catholic or Jewish or Mormon or Muslim or Buddhist or agnostic or whatever, than I do about whether they accept the expertise of scientists and whether they support a woman’s right to choose. If your religious beliefs lead you to doubt the theory of evolution or the theory of plate tectonics, I’m not voting for you.

I think it’s bigotry to rule out voting for someone just because they profess some religious belief that I find strange or implausible. But the moment that belief translates to policy, I have every right to take notice of it, and reject it.

There are members of every major religious faith that I could vote for. I suppose there are some religions or cults that I’d reject out of hand, but only because they’ve taken the crazy to a level I just can’t trust (the Hale-Bopp comet people, for example).

To bring this down to the here and now, it would be unconstitutional to deny Mitt Romney a place on the ballot because he’s a Mormon, but you and I can decide whatever we want about his religious faith and vote accordingly.

Of course, this all came up because Pastor Jeffries said the following about Rick Perry at the Values Voter Summit:

“We understand Mormonism is not Christianity and thus the difference between somebody who’s moral and good like Mitt Romney and a true born-again follower of Christ,” Jeffress said after Perry’s speech, adding that Perry had welcomed his endorsement. “I really think the decision for conservative evangelical Christians right now is going to be, do we prefer somebody who is truly a believer in Jesus Christ, or somebody who is a good moral person but he’s a part of a cult.”

“It’s not politically correct to say, but it’s true. Mormonism is a cult. And for those reasons, besides Governor Romney’s lack of consistency on social issues, I think Rick Perry is the most electable choice among Christian conservatives,” he went on.

I don’t really have a strong opinion over whether Mormonism should be classified as a religion or a cult. Most people would say it is a religion. I also don’t have a strong opinion about whether it is a form of Christianity or not. Opinions will differ and I don’t really care. I find it to be an odd religion, but it’s not any more objectionable to me than the brand of Christianity practiced by Pastor Jeffries. In fact, I’d say it is less so.

I don’t like how Pastor Jeffries is using Romney’s religion as a political weapon. But he has the right to do so.

You probably know who Mark Penn is, but you may not know his business partner Doug Schoen. Together, they run a consulting firm called Penn Schoen Berland that specializes in helping corporations hone their communications strategies. In other words, Doug Schoen literally makes his living carrying water for corporations. But he also makes his living doing polling work for Democrats. And his polls invariably produce results that encourage Democrats to eschew populism and to adopt more corporate-friendly policies.

Schoen sent one of his employees to Zuccotti Park on October 11th and 12th to interview the people occupying Wall Street. In total, they polled less than 200 protesters, and they discovered that the people there are not thrilled with Wall Street, global capitalism, deregulation, and giving tax breaks to enormously wealthy people.

As a result, Schoen advises the Democrats to distance themselves from the movement.

Nothing could be less surprising.

Now, it’s true that the Occupy Wall Street movement could become unpopular at some point in the future. In fact, that’s probably a fair assumption. It happened to the Tea Party, and it’s likely that eventually people will tire of reading about people complaining about Wall Street. Schoen warns that 31% of the protesters would support the use of violence in the furtherance of their aims. Any violence perpetrated by the protesters would accelerate their decline in popularity.

But the reason these people are out in the street is that Congress cannot do anything to address unemployment, yet they had little difficulty saving Wall Street. That’s what makes this so unpersuasive:

Today, having abandoned any effort to work with the congressional super committee to craft a bipartisan agreement on deficit reduction, President Obama has thrown in with those who support his desire to tax oil companies and the rich, rather than appeal to independent and self-described moderate swing voters who want smaller government and lower taxes, not additional stimulus or interference in the private sector.

Rather than embracing huge new spending programs and tax increases, plus increasingly radical and potentially violent activists, the Democrats should instead build a bridge to the much more numerous independents and moderates in the center by opposing bailouts and broad-based tax increases.

Put simply, Democrats need to say they are with voters in the middle who want cooperation, conciliation and lower taxes. And they should work particularly hard to contrast their rhetoric with the extremes advocated by the Occupy Wall Street crowd.

I really have a lot of contempt for Schoen’s argument here. But rather than rebut him point by point, I just want to focus on two things. First, his argument doesn’t discuss the merits of different policies at all. He’s making a purely political argument that the Democrats will suffer if they continue on the path they’ve chosen. Second, the Democrats have tried postponing tax hikes. They’ve tried to work with the Republicans to craft legislation that might appeal to business-friendly moderates. They’ve made some progress on the margins using this approach. But they hit a stone wall during the debt limit debate, and the Republicans are now simply refusing to do anything about the high unemployment rate. Continuing to ask Republicans to work with them isn’t going to work, and it isn’t going to satisfy anyone regardless of their political orientation.

The problem is the GOP. And, to the degree that the Democrats share the blame, it’s because they have a tendency to take Doug Schoen’s advice.

Wall Street has been a curse on our country since the financial institutions there manipulated our political process and subverted both political parties to destroy the New Deal reforms that imposed sensible regulations and helped fuel the rise of our nation’s middle class and living standards after WWII. When the deregulation of the Banksters was accomplished, they immediately did what anyone with half a brain would expect: crashed our economy, exacerbated income inequality, and pocketed Trillions of dollars in free bailouts while pushing a political agenda to siphon off wealth from the “lower classes” (i.e., the eponymous 99%). They deserve all the opprobrium for their criminal misdeeds and mischief that the Occupy Movement has once again rightly highlighted.

However, another industry is also siphoning off money from the 99%, and weakening our economy through its efforts to eradicate investment in renewable energy. What’s even worse about this industry is that its actions will have long term consequences for the future of our planet and the future of our species. That industry is named in the title to this diary: Big Oil. Their products have altered our climate in ways that are killing people today, and will kill more people in the future, as well as lowering the health and living standards for all but the wealthiest among us. Here are just a few examples of the horrific consequences that are now and will in the future occur as a result of our continued dependence on their products, an addiction that they foster through their influence and control over our elected officials and the federal government:

Depletion of Natural Resources:

(cont.)

LONDON, Oct 17 (Reuters) – The Earth’s natural resources like food, water and forests are being depleted at an alarming speed, causing hunger, conflict, social unrest and species extinction, experts at a climate and health conference in London warned on Monday.

Increased hunger due to food yield changes will lead to malnutrition; water scarcity will deteriorate hygiene; pollution will weaken immune systems; and displacement and social disorder due to conflicts over water and land will increase the spread of infectious diseases, they said.

Indeed, the experts cited above conservatively predict 70 million people will die as a result of climate change — and that is only from one region: Sub-Saharan Africa — by 2050. Diseases such as malaria and schistosomiasis, diseases that will kill millions of people and create public health crisis for generations to come. In other words:

Climate Change will Damage Public Health

“Climate change will progressively weaken the Earth’s life support mechanism,” [Tony McMichael, professor of population health at the Australian National University.] said. “Health is not just collateral damage on the side, the risk is central and represents a denouement of all the other effects of climate change”. […]

“The biggest risk to human health is from the rise in fossil fuel use, causing cardiovascular disease, stroke and cancer,” [Ian Roberts, professor at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine] added.

Europe will also be at risk from heatwaves, floods and more infectious diseases as pests shift to northern latitudes, said Sari Kovats, lead author of the Europe chapter for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) fifth assessment report.

Clean, fresh drinking water is disappearing

(a) As a result of Climate Change:

Earlier this month, officials in the South Pacific island nation of Tuvalu had to confront a pretty dire problem: they were running out of water. Due to a severe and lasting drought, water reserves in this country of 11,000 people had dwindled to just a few days’ worth. […]

Other island nations like the Maldives and Kiribati will see their groundwater spoil as sea levels rise. Texas, along with much of the American Southwest, is in the grip of a truly record-breaking drought — even after days of storms in the past month, Houston’s total 2011 rainfall is still short of its yearly average by a whopping 2 ft., or 60 cm. Australia has experienced severely dry weather for so long, it’s not even clear whether the country is in a state of drought, or more worryingly, a new and permanent dry climate that could forever alter life Down Under. “Climate-change impacts on water resources continue to appear in the form of growing influence on the severity and intensity of extreme events,” says Peter Gleick, one of the foremost water experts in the U.S. and head of the Pacific Institute, an NGO based in Oakland, Calif., that focuses on global water issues. “Australia’s recent extraordinary extreme drought should be an eye-opener for the rest of us.”

Read more: http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,2097159,00.html#ixzz1b8tvTt30

[More on Tuvalu’s water crisis here and here.]

and

(b) As a result of oil and gas production practices that contaminate fresh water:

From Injection Wells

Injection wells, where pressurized liquid waste or other fluids are injected into aquifers, are a major method of disposal for industrial and hazardous waste. Injection wells are also used to help recover oil, gas and minerals. For example, injection wells are used to inject fresh water into an underground oil field for secondary recovery of oil. Uranium and sulfur are often mined by injecting hot water into formations to loosen up these materials. […]

Injection wells have been involved in a number of controversial lawsuits and permit battles, as well as high-profile groundwater contamination cases, usually resulting from improper handling of the waste at the surface prior to injection …

[Additional links regarding groundwater contamination as a result of oil and gas production can be found here.]

From Hydrofracking

There are few things a family needs to survive more than fresh drinking water. And Louis Meeks, a burly, jowled Vietnam War hero who had long ago planted his roots on these sparse eastern Wyoming grasslands, was drilling a new well in search of it. […]

Meeks used to have abundant water on his small alfalfa ranch, a 40-acre plot speckled with apple and plum trees northeast of the Wind River Mountains and about five miles outside the town of Pavillion. […]

But in the spring of 2005, Meeks’ water had turned fetid. His tap ran cloudy, and the water shimmered with rainbow swirls across a filmy top. The scent was sharp, like gasoline. And after 20 minutes — scarcely longer than you’d need to fill a bathtub — the pipes shuttered and popped and ran dry.

Meeks suspected that environmental factors were to blame. He focused on the fact that Pavillion, home of a single four-way stop sign and 174 people, lies smack in the middle of Wyoming’s gas patch. Since the mid 1990’s, more than 1,000 gas wells had been drilled in the region — some 200 of them right around Pavillion — thousands of feet through layers of drinking water and into rock that yields tiny rivulets of trapped gas. The drilling has left abandoned toxic waste pits scattered across the landscape. […]

Three months before his water went bad, EnCana had laid pipe down into a gas well about 500 feet from Meeks’ front door. The well, called Tribal Pavillion 24-2, had “circulation” problems during its construction — meaning that the cement may not have filled all the space between the well and the earth, and that its walls had to be strengthened. EnCana says the problems were minor and had nothing to do with the deterioration of Meeks’ water. “There is no evidence to suggest the well bore integrity was in any way or at any time compromised,” Hock said. But over time Meeks’ water had become undrinkable. His neighbors stopped filling up their bottles with it. Soon they were afraid to touch it. […]

As more wells were drilled, however, more reports began to emerge from people who had similar experiences to that of Louis Meeks.<p<

In Clark, a small northern Wyoming town, benzene was detected in an aquifer after a well blowout. In central Colorado, near the town of Silt, a water well exploded, sending its cap shooting off into the sky. A few miles away, methane gas was found bubbling up out of a placid eddy in a tributary to the Colorado River; then high levels of benzene were detected. It was difficult to say what led to each of these accidents — the latter two of which were also connected to EnCana wells — but drilling and the close proximity of hydraulic fracturing operations was a common thread. […]

Yet that’s what Meeks tried to do. In October 2007 he hired a private engineering firm to take samples of his water. The glass vials were shipped to a lab in Virginia … and analyzed for an array of pollutants. … In addition to abnormal levels of chloride, iron and total dissolved solids, the lab found glycols, a chemical often used to keep fluids flowing in cold conditions. “Glycols are commonly used in antifreeze,” testing hydrogeologist Bill Newcomb wrote in the lab report, “and with regard to natural gas production, in dehydration processes.”

[More about contamination of groundwater by hydrofrackng can be found here and here.]

Species Extinction

ondon (CNN) — Climate change is shrinking many plant and animal species and is likely to have a negative impact on human nutrition in the future, according to a new study.

Rising temperatures and growing variability in rainfall are affecting the size of all species in the ecosystem from microscopic sea organisms to land-based predators, say researchers. […]

But perhaps most worrying for marine life was the reduced growth rates of phytoplankton in response to acidification which “could negatively affect all ocean life because (it) forms the basis of the marine food web.”

Researchers also say plants, which were generally expected to get larger as CO2 levels rise, are not immune from reductions.

“Over the past century, various plant species have shown significant negative correlations between growth and temperature…resulting in smaller grasses, annual plants and trees in areas that are getting warmer and drier,” according to the study.

[More links on species extinction can be found here and here]

This is obviously not an exhaustive list of all of the many dangers, problems and likely negative outcomes posed by the fossil fuel industries and the continued use of their “products.” In particular large oil and gas mega-corporations, who continue to fund denial of climate change science while lobbying for increased drilling for oil and gas, and also for for reductions in government investment in renewable and sustainable sources of energy, are the single greatest threat to human civilization this century.

So, to everyone in the Occupy Movement, please consider widening your target to occupy cities where the corporate headquarters of companies associated with oil and gas production are located. For future millions if not billions of people, this issue is literally a matter of life or death.

When it comes to matters of intelligence, I do trust the Obama administration considerably more than I trusted the Bush administration, but that doesn’t mean I am going to believe any thing that they say. Their story about the Iranian plot to assassinate the Saudi Ambassador in a Georgetown restaurant is filled with holes you could drive a truck through, and their excuses for why they won’t release more compelling evidence do not inspire confidence. None of that concerns Richard Cohen, however, who swallows the whole tale without the slightest hint of skepticism and uses it to argue that Iran cannot be allowed to have a nuclear weapon.

If you believe in nuclear non-proliferation and you don’t want to see a nuclear arms race in the Middle East, then you don’t need any further rationale for trying to deny Iran a nuclear arsenal. This would be true even if the people of Iran overthrew their leadership and installed a benevolent Republic.

I know it’s not easy to adopt a position of default skepticism about the claims of our own intelligence agencies and government, but that’s Richard Cohen’s job. If the government tells him a story that doesn’t add up and then refuses to divulge any information that might explain the legitimacy of its claims, his job is to withhold his support and endorsement of the government’s claims.

But Richard Cohen doesn’t operate that way.

.

BREAKING NEWS IDF: Gilad Shalit back home in Israel

The Gilad Shalit prisoner swap as it happens

(Haaretz) – Minute-by- minute updates as the day, and the exchange, unfolds; Shalit family heads to to Tel Nof AFB as first stage of swap deal completed

Live blog @ Jerusalem Post

• Gilad Shalit in Egyptian hands, prisoner exchange officially under way

May this be part of further steps to a peace deal with the Palestinian nation …

Political battle between Hamas and Fatah an obstruction for a peace deal

(Daily Maverick) – Besides the greater conflict with Israel, Hamas is also fighting a political battle against Mahmoud Abbas’ Fatah movement. Fatah of course enjoys Western approbation, while Hamas has been blacklisted as a terrorist organisation; but it is Hamas that has held the sway over the Palestinan people in recent times. The Palestinian Authority’s bid to gain recognition of a Palestinian state at the United Nations has however warmed Abbas to many Palestinian people. Analysts point out that a surge in popularity for Abbas and Fatah may prove an insurmountable challenge to Hamas. Securing the release of one eighth of the Palestinian prison population in Israel is a statement of strength. With this deal, Hamas has cleverly displayed one-upmanship over Fatah and Abbas. Officially, however, Hamas has emphasised Palestinian unity, indicating that all factions of Palestinian society were reflected in the list of prisoners to be released.

The spectacular leaks from the Palestine Papers on Al-Jazeera last January proved that Abbas and Fatah had previously obstructed previous negotiations. In their own words it was revealed that Abbas and the PA preferred to keep Palestinians in Israeli prisons than to let Hamas have “victory”. It would appear that this deal has gone through a particular lack of interference from Abbas.

Officially, Fatah and Hamas are now meant to have patched up their differences towards the greater good. Earlier this year the rival Palestinian factions signed a reconciliation agreement that was hailed as an important step towards achieving peace for the Palestinian people. While many doubt the integrity of the reconciliation agreement, the prisoner-swap deal may prove to be a product of Palestinian unity.

"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."

I think Zaid Jilani is a little confused. While the details of the arrest and trial of Jesus are a matter of hot dispute, even within the differing accounts in the New Testament, it’s pretty clear that he wasn’t sentenced to die by any Roman court. He was arrested, most likely, on the orders of the High Priest of the Temple. His trial was in front of the Sanhedrin. which was basically occupied-Israel’s Supreme Court. And his fate was decided by the Roman prefect, Pontius Pilate, who had the ultimate jurisdiction over the case. Maybe none of that is correct, but that’s about as good as we can do with the available sources.

Now, as this pertains to Herman Cain’s argument that Jesus was “a perfect conservative” who was sentenced to die by a “liberal court,” it just proves that Herman Cain is a moron. Insofar as we can take the Gospels at face value, it’s clear that one of Jesus’s core messages was that the religious Establishment in his time was hypocritical and that they ignored the spirit of The Law in favor of the letter of The Law. In standing up to the existing authority, he questioned tradition. Mocking, berating, and humiliating existing religious authorities and questioning long-standing social mores is the opposite of conservatism. And the idea that the Sanhedrin had any liberal impulses just strikes me as ridiculous. They existed to uphold religious law.

Even if there had been a Roman trial for Jesus, that court could not be reasonably described as liberal, either. But, since Pontius Pilate is described as ambivalent about Jesus’s guilt and reluctant to execute him, I guess you could say that he was soft on crime.