Month: June 2010

Peter Beinart makes the hairs on the back of my neck stand up:

The Netanyahu government is filled with Americans. The prime minister himself attended high school in the Philadelphia suburbs. Ron Dermer, one of his closest advisors, was born in Miami Beach. His ambassador to the United States, Michael Oren, hails from New Jersey. In addition, prominent Americans like Abrams regularly appear in the U.S. media to echo the Netanyahu line. But paradoxically, this familiarity breeds overconfidence and ignorance. When Netanyahu travels to Washington, he speaks before Jewish audiences that mostly dislike Barack Obama’s Israel policy, even though according to a recent American Jewish Committee survey, American Jews overall support it by a margin of close to two to one. When he’s not speaking to right-wing Jews, he’s speaking to right-wing Christians. And when he’s not speaking to right-wing Christians, he’s speaking to former Bush administration officials who expect to soon be back in their old jobs.

As an Obama official once told me about the Netanyahu team, with amazement, “these guys are actually waiting for President Palin.”

Of course they are. Then they get their war on against Iran and permanently occupy the West Bank. Remember Palin had one flag in her office beside the US one: Israel's. Remember also her position on the West Bank:

PALIN: I believe that the Jewish settlements should be allowed to be expanded upon, because that population of Israel is, is going to grow. More and more Jewish people will be flocking to Israel in the days and weeks and months ahead. And I don’t think that the Obama administration has any right to tell Israel that the Jewish settlements cannot expand.

WALTERS: Even if it’s [in] Palestinian areas?

PALIN: I believe that the Jewish settlements should be allowed to be expand.

Cheney, Palin and Netanyahu want their war back – with torture, pre-emptive attacks and every terrorist attack used to justify more aggression. And if you put the Christianist right back in the White House, this time purged even of the tincture of responsibility Bush inherited from his family, we have a world war on our hands.

Washington's alleged press corps have a beach party with the vice-president. Ambers attended:

Note, too, that shortly after I shot this video, Emanuel sprayed me in the shirt with his Super Soaker. I have a picture of that, too.

Bethel, Alaska, 8.41 am

A reader writes:

I want to take exception with you on equating Palin's politics as Christian at all. She might use Christian language but I think she engages in apostasy which is what most of the Christian right has done for the past 100 years. I consider what Palin does is to take the Lord's name in vain with her pandering and her rhetoric . She equates her positions with the cause of Christ. Mark's gospel refers to the sin against the Holy Spirit. I believe the sin against the Holy Spirit is to give God credit for that which God has not done and to invoke God's name in order to gain power. I think this describes Palin and those like her.

Me too. To co-opt the Gospels for a philosophy of environmental rape, untrammeled pursuit of wealth and fame, the cynical use of children for political purposes, cruelty toward animals, ignorant contempt for other cultures and peoples, and constant self-serving lies is actually an attack on the Gospels, not an expression of them.

The Israeli government helped distribute this neocon Youtube, mocking the Mavi Marmara killings, and now apologizes for it. Except they don't:

Press office director Danny Seaman said the video did not reflect official state opinion, but in his personal capacity he thought it was "fantastic".

Elle revisits an age-old debate by highlighting a complicated case. A couple agreed to terminate should they become pregnant, but the girlfriend changed her mind when the moment came. She's asking for child support:

While neither [Greg Bruell] nor [Mel Feit] believes a man should be able to compel a woman to abort or keep a pregnancy, they don’t want the state to make men pay for children they’ve made explicit they don’t want. Not all of their comrades in the father’s rights movement have been so moderate.

Brendan Nyhan gets butterflies. Douthat looks at the upside:

If Meacham had wanted to play to what seems like Newsweek’s business strength — its large audience outside the Acela corridor — he would have tried to tilt the magazine toward the center-right rather than the center-left, in the hopes of becoming the go-to outlet for the millions of Americans who think that the elite media is too liberal but find Rush Limbaugh too conservative. He would have staffed up with right-leaning columnists, reporters and cultural critics whose work could translate to a broad, not-that-ideological audience. (I’m thinking of writers like Jonathan Rauches and Matt Labashes, among many others.) And he would have embraced Newsweek’s brand advantage in the heartland, and tried to turn that to his magazine’s advantage, instead of convincing himself that he could compete with The New Yorker for the eyeballs and dollars of the liberal intelligentsia.

Newsmax is simply deranged. I read it for some kind of insight into the fever swamps of the Christianist right. It sure wouldn't publish Rauch or Labash. It publishes Beck and Coulter.

Israel has yet to release the full video they have of the attack on the Mavi Marmara. Until they do that, they do not appear interested in showing all the facts and therefore should not be allowed to conduct their own inquiry into the murder of nine unarmed civilians. Meanwhile, we have more testimony that I cannot confirm but that should certainly be reviewed by an international inquiry. It's from a "peace activist", former US Marine, Gulf War vet, and now Irish and Palestinian citizen, Ken O'Keefe. Again, I do not know whether these are untruths, whether the bloody scars on his face were self-inflicted, but I'd like to know the full story. I do not believe for one minute that the Netanyahu government or the IDF will provide it. Money quote:

While in Israeli custody I, along with everyone else was subjected to endless abuse and flagrant acts of disrespect.  Women and elderly were physically and mentally assaulted.  Access to food and water and toilets was denied.  Dogs were used against us, we ourselves were treated like dogs.  We were exposed to direct sun in stress positions while hand cuffed to the point of losing circulation of blood in our hands.  We were lied to incessantly, in fact I am awed at the routineness and comfort in their ability to lie, it is remarkable really.  We were abused in just about every way imaginable and I myself was beaten and choked to the point of blacking out… and I was beaten again while in my cell.

In all this what I saw more than anything else were cowards… and yet I also see my brothers.  Because no matter how vile and wrong the Israeli agents and government are, they are still my brothers and sisters and for now I only have pity for them.  Because they are relinquishing the most precious thing a human being has, their humanity.

From ads to a more innovative tactic:

[BP] has purchased several phrases on search engines such as Google and Yahoo so that the first result that shows up directs information seekers to the company's official website. A simple Google search of "oil spill" turns up several thousand news results, but the first link, highlighted at the very top of the page, is from BP. "Learn more about how BP is helping," the link's tagline reads.

I let rip in the Sunday Times yesterday:

Oil companies failed to report fully what they were planning, and permits were approved with almost absurd speed. In the Deepwater Horizon case, a permit was approved a mere 10 minutes after it was submitted. Obama did nothing to stop this syndrome when he came in, and his interior secretary, Ken Salazar, is well known for his cosiness with big oil. That will change now.

Alas, what won’t change is the oil addiction that has forced the US to drill deeper and deeper in more and more treacherous waters, where techniques carry more risks precisely because the terrain is brand new. If you want to assign real, structural blame, it belongs in the end to the American people, who simply refuse to wean themselves off carbon and want to continue having the cheapest petrol in the West.

This habit bolsters America’s enemies, empowers oil-rich Islamic states and is slowly cooking the planet. Meanwhile, the climate change bill passed in the House of Representatives remains stalled in the Senate. Because deep-sea oil exploration was a key way to get some Republicans on board for the package, the bill that might in the long run have prevented the same thing happening again has been killed by the BP gusher and a suspension of deep-sea drilling.

The obvious solution — some kind of carbon tax — remains anathema. Remember that America is a country whose de facto leader of the opposition, Sarah Palin, ran on a slogan of “Drill, baby, drill!”

Which means that it’s not just a question of when this ghastly gusher is stopped; it’s a question of when exactly this will happen again. And there will be another company to blame then, like a crooked drug dealer whose addicted customer is getting sicker and sicker and more and more determined to get his fix. Maybe it will take an even greater disaster to force Americans to realise that they have finally hit bottom in their addiction. But I wouldn’t count on it, even then.

(Photo: Shawn Luzmoor wears a gas mask and holds a sign reading, 'Drill, Baby, Drill !' as he tries to get people to react to the oil spill that is now washing up in the form of small oil globs on Pensacola Beach from the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico on June 5, 2010 in Pensacola, Florida. By Joe Raedle/Getty Images.)