Democrats admit paying for pro-Daggett call (Matt Friedman, 11/02/09, PolitickerNJ.com)
The Democratic State Committee now admits paying for a robocall to Somerset County voters that slams Republican Chris Christie and promotes independent gubernatorial candidate Christopher Daggett.
When Pro-Israel Is Not Very Pro-Israel: Meet the J Street gang. (Michael Goldfarb, 11/09/2009, Weekly Standard)
What would you call a group that opposes sanctions on Iran, questions Israel's right to defend itself from terrorist groups firing rockets from Gaza, seeks to pressure Israel into making major concessions without regard to the views of the elected government in Jerusalem, and supports a U.N.-commissioned report accusing Israel of committing war crimes in the course of self-defense? That group is J Street, the new advocacy organization that calls itself "pro-Israel, pro-peace." [...]Meanwhile J Street organizers were becoming uncomfortable with some of their own invited guests after a video turned up of Josh Healey, one of the speakers, reading a poem called "Queer Intifada." He compared Guantánamo to Auschwitz and Anne Frank to Matthew Shepard. In another poem, he asked if "we're the ones writing numbers on the wrists of babies born in the ghetto called Gaza?" Other -videos were soon discovered, including one that showed another panelist calling Israel a "whore" in a reading at a Chicago establishment called "Café Intifada."
Obama's proclamations proclaim November a real proclamations month already (Andrew Malcolm, November 2, 2009, LA Times)
No one in recent years can top the Obama administration for conscientious issuing of ceremonial proclamations. No wonder healthcare reform and the Afghan strategy deliberations are taking so long.These proclamations are dropping like Bidenisms all the time. Last month, whether you knew it or not, we had Leif Ericson Day (Oct. 7), National School Lunch Week (Oct. 9) and White Cane Safety Day (Oct. 15), among numerous others of historical significance. Not to mention his proclaiming a national emergency over H1N1 swine flu.
This month of November is a doozy of a busy awareness month already, in case you weren't aware of that.
a TurkeyTo start the month with appropriate officiousness, the president has signed and the White House has already issued seven presidential proclamations. And we are -- what? -- not yet 30 hours into it.
Iran opposition to apologise to US for embassy siege: Leaders of Iran's opposition movement are to make an unprecedented apology to the US on the 30th anniversary of the storming of the American embassy in Tehran. (Damien McElroy and Ahmad Vahdat, 02 Nov 2009, Daily Telegraph)
Mohsen Makhmalbaf, an exiled film-maker who spearheads the opposition campaign overseas, said Iranians should repudiate the events of 1979, when a group of pro-regime agitators took over the US embassy and held diplomats and other occupants."Thirty years ago in the turmoil of the revolutionary zeal an indefensible act of hostage taking was committed that the new generation of Iran are not proud of at all," he said. "We know very well how that deplorable action hurt the noble American people and how it led to three decades of unnecessary and painful bad relations between our two nations.
"Only a small and repressive minority who rule Iran today still insist on keeping Iran on a confrontation course with the US, Britain and the West and indeed they have now taken the Iranian people as hostage to their destructive policies."
Cameron has only himself to blame for this mess on Europe: A shabby deal with the Sun and internal wrangling over the Lisbon treaty mean that the Tories still have one big Euro-headache (Peter Oborne, 11/01/09, The Observer)
For many, perhaps most, Conservative activists, the Lisbon treaty poses an existential threat to the British state: we cease to be subjects of the Queen and start to become citizens of Europe. Something ancient and of inordinate value will pass away.This insight – by no means without truth and merit – poses a grave problem for David Cameron. His supporters will hardly be content for him simply to shrug his shoulders at this disaster. They will want him to take up the banner of freedom and national independence when Klaus lays it down. So David Cameron's response when the Lisbon treaty is passed will pose a classic test of his leadership skills.
USS New York, built with steel from Twin Towers, sets sail on maiden voyage (James Bone, 11/02/09, Times of London)
The USS New York, a new battleship built with steel from the World Trade Center, sailed into New York harbour today on its maiden voyage and delivered a 21-gun salute near Ground Zero.
The $1 billion US Navy assault vessel, whose bow includes 7.5 tonnes of steel recycled from the 2001 terror attack, will be officially commissioned in its namesake city on Saturday.
Andras S wrote:
The Americans certainly know, how to abuse anything for patriotic pride. They could just as well use that steel to create wire-cutters to free illegally held prisoners at Guantanamo Bay. That would have been a decent gesture. Following the hysteria of 9/11, justice and freedom suffered greatly and no warship will be able to find Osama Bin Laden or to restore the USA's international prestige.
Hoffman Has Big Lead Over Owens in New York House Race (Bruce Drake, 11/02/09, Politics Daily)
Conservative Party candidate Doug Hoffman, who was embraced by the Republican Party after state Assemblywoman Dede Scozzafava dropped out, leads Democrat Bill Owens in a two-way match-up 54 percent to 38 percent with 8 percent undecided, according to a Public Policy Polling survey conducted Oct. 31-Nov. 1.PPP predicts Hoffman will win a "resounding victory."
One year on, Obamamania gives way to luke warm support (AFP, 11/02/09)
A quick look around downtown Washington confirms that the Obama trinkets are still for sale, but more than one strategically placed street hawker have found little point in displaying the T-shirts, posters, and "Yes We Can" buttons bearing the new president's image."They stay in the truck," grumbled a vendor who identified himself as "Dick," as he pointed to a rusty vehicle behind him. "They don't sell anymore."
Indeed, Obama's honeymoon with the American people lasted less than six months.
Michael Caine switches allegiance to Conservatives (Nick Collins, 01 Nov 2009, Daily Telegraph)
The actor, 76, a former Labour supporter, condemned the “terrible state” that has been allowed to develop in Britain and said he planned to change his allegiance at the next election.For his latest film, Harry Brown, about violence on Britain’s streets, Sir Michael spent time with a gang from a tough inner London estate, who were hired as extras. [...]
Earlier this year, he bitterly criticised the government’s decision to raise the upper tax rate to 50p, saying he would leave the country if it went any higher.
He said in April: “I will not pay the government more than I get. No way, ever.
“We’ve got three-and-a-half million layabouts laying about on benefits and I’m 76, getting up at 6am to go to work to keep them.
“Let’s get everybody back to work so we can save a couple of billion and cut tax, not keep sticking it on.”
If Fox Is Partisan, It Is Not Alone (JOHN HARWOOD, 11/02/09, NY Times)
Fox News has attracted the most attention because of its “fair and balanced” challenge to its competitors and its success. But the audiences of its competitors have tilted sharply in the other direction. (This reporter is chief Washington correspondent for CNBC and hosts “The New York Times Special Edition,” a program on MSNBC.)Press critics worry that the rise of media polarization threatens the foundation of credible, common information that American politics needs to thrive. Will Feltus, a Republican specialist in voter targeting, does not.
If it complicates the choices facing leaders in Washington, Mr. Feltus argues, it also decentralizes political communication in a way that is both inevitable and healthy in the information age. “I feel no hand-wringing about it,” Mr. Feltus said. “People are smart enough to understand what color filter is over the lens.”
What happened to Obamamania? (Michael Barone, 10/31/09, Washington Examiner)
Where have all those Obamenthusiasts who were so visible in 2008 been hiding this year? In this New Republic article Lydia DePillis seems to think that the problem is that Organizing For America has been run as a top-down organization, rather than as a bottom-up movement, giving the folks out there no sense of ownership. She asks, “Can a grassroots organization run in the top-down style of a political machine really accomplish much—let alone change the terms of debate on any given issue?”
I think there’s something more going on here. Many Obamenthusiasts were thrilled by the idea of putting Obama in and getting George W. Bush out. They achieved their goal a year ago. What more is left? Did these people really expend all this energy to reduce the percentage of people without health insurance? “We are the change we are seeking,” Obama said during the campaign. Well, the Obamenthusiasts got that change. Now they can go back to gardening or Sudoku.
U.S. looks past Karzai rival's decision to quit (Tom LoBianco, 11/02/09, Washington Times)
White House officials downplayed Afghan presidential challenger Abdullah Abdullah's decision to pull out of this week's scheduled runoff election and said they would work with President Hamid Karzai.
Captives: What really happened during the Israeli attacks? (Lawrence Wright, November 9, 2009, The New Yorker)
Gaza is a place that Israel wishes it could ignore: the territory has long had the highest concentration of poverty, extremism, and hopelessness in the region. Gaza makes a mess of the idealized two-state solution because it is separated from the West Bank, the much larger Palestinian territory, not just physically but also culturally and politically. In 2005, the RAND Corporation proposed integrating a future Palestinian state with a high-speed rail and highway system that would connect the West Bank and Gaza. Former President Jimmy Carter told me that, in 2005, he and Ariel Sharon had agreed to promote a land swap between the Israelis and the Palestinians that would provide a corridor between the two halves of Palestine.Such potential solutions have been poisoned by the frustration that both Israelis and West Bankers feel toward Gaza. The political distance between the two Palestinian entities has caused many Israelis to start talking of a three-state solution, rather than two. “Hamas in Gaza is a fact of life until further notice,” Yossi Alpher, a political consultant and a former Mossad officer, observed. “All our ideas about dealing with them have failed.” Shavit and other Israeli intellectuals have proposed that the Egyptians deed a portion of the Sinai to Gaza, to make the Strip more viable—“a semi-Dubai,” as Shavit terms it. The Egyptians have expressed no interest. “Egypt’s strategy for Gaza is to make sure it’s Israel’s problem,” Alpher said.
Hamas, which was founded in Gaza during the intifada of 1987, has come to embody the fears that many Israelis hold about the Palestinians. Its charter declares, “There is no solution to the Palestinian problem except by jihad.” The document, which is in many respects absurd and reflects the intellectual isolation and conspiracy-fed atmosphere in Gaza at the time, cites the “Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” the anti-Semitic forgery, and links Zionism to the Freemasons, the Lions Club, and “other spying groups” that aim “to violate consciences, to defeat virtues, and to annihilate Islam.” Part of the paradox of this conflict is that many Palestinians who firmly embrace the two-state solution have voted for Hamas.
In Restobar, Shavit pointed to a spot a few feet away. “In March, 2002, there was a beautiful twenty-five-year-old girl dead on the floor, right there,” he said. A suicide bomber had targeted the café, which was then called Moment. That month, eighty-three Israeli civilians were killed by Palestinians. Jerusalem was in a panic. Shavit was living nearby at the time, and on the night of March 9th he heard the bomb explode.
Running to the café, he saw mutilated bodies scattered on the sidewalk. People had been blown across the street. The dead girl was lying near the doorway. Inside, at the bar, three young men were sitting upright on the stools, but they were all dead. “It was as if they were still drinking their beers,” Shavit recalled. Eleven Israelis died, and more than fifty were injured. Hamas proclaimed it a “brave attack” intended to “avenge the Israeli massacres against our people.”
The Hamas attacks derailed the peace process initiated by the Oslo accords and hardened many Israelis against the Palestinian cause. Photographs of Gazans celebrating the Moment bombing confirmed the dehumanized state of affairs. Gaza became “Hamastan” in the Israeli newspapers. In 2007, after Hamas solidified its control of Gaza, the Israeli government declared Gaza a “hostile entity,” and began enforcing a blockade on a population that was already impoverished, isolated, and traumatized by years of occupation.
Hamas was not weakened by the blockade. Instead, the collective punishment strengthened its argument that Israel wanted to eliminate the Palestinians. The only thing that Gaza has that Israel wants is Gilad Shalit, but Hamas says that it will not free him until Israel releases fourteen hundred individuals, four hundred and fifty of whom have been convicted of terrorist killings, including the men who planned the Moment bombing. [...]
Gaza is a sea of children. The average woman there has 5.1 children, one of the highest birth rates in the world. More than half the population is eighteen or younger. “We love to reproduce,” Khalil al-Hayya, a senior Hamas official, told me on a searingly hot July day, as hundreds of young boys in green caps shouted slogans at a Hamas summer camp. Hayya, a former professor of Islamic law, has six children; a seventh was killed by an Israeli bomb.
There is very little for children to do in Gaza. The Israeli blockade includes a ban on toys, so the only playthings available have been smuggled, at a premium, through tunnels from Egypt. Islamists have shut down all the movie theatres. Music is rare, except at weddings. Many of Gaza’s sports facilities have been destroyed by Israeli bombings, including the headquarters for the Palestinian Olympic team. Only one television station broadcasts from Gaza, Al Aqsa—a Hamas-backed channel that gained notice last year for a children’s show featuring a Mickey Mouse-like figure who was stabbed to death by an Israeli interrogator. The mouse was replaced by a talking bee, who died after being unable to cross into Egypt for medical treatment. The rabbit who followed the bee passed away in January, after being struck by shrapnel from an Israeli attack.
The main diversion for children is the beach, and on Fridays, after noon prayers, the shore is massed with families. Unlike the topaz waters off Tel Aviv, here the sea is murky, a consequence of twenty million gallons of raw and partially treated sewage that is dumped offshore every day. The main water-treatment plant is broken, and because of the blockade the spare parts that would fix it are unavailable. Fishermen with nets wade into the surf as kids romp in the stinking waves.
Israeli authorities maintain a list of about three dozen items that they permit into Gaza, but the list is closely kept and subject to change. Almost no construction materials—such as cement, glass, steel, or plastic pipe—have been allowed in, on the ground that such items could be used for building rockets or bunkers. While Hamas rocket builders and bomb-makers can smuggle everything they need through the secret tunnels, international aid organizations have to account for every brick or sack of flour. Operation Cast Lead—a three-week-long Israeli attack on Gaza, which began in December, 2008—has left Gaza in ruins. “Half a year after the conflict, we don’t have a single bag of cement and not a pane of glass,” John Ging, the director of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian refugees, told me in July. (Later that month, Israeli authorities announced that they would allow the U.N.R.W.A. a limited amount of steel and cement. Ging says that that has yet to happen.) Humanitarian supplies that suddenly have been struck from Israel’s list of approved items pile up in large storage warehouses outside the Kerem Shalom crossing, and international aid worth billions of dollars awaits delivery. “For the last two school years, Israeli officials have withheld paper for textbooks because, hypothetically, the paper might be hijacked by Hamas to print seditious materials,” Ging complained. (Paper was finally delivered this fall.) When John Kerry, the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, visited Gaza in February of this year, he asked why pasta wasn’t allowed in. Soon, macaroni was passing through the checkpoints, but jam was taken off the list. According to Haaretz, the I.D.F. has calculated that a hundred and six truckloads of humanitarian relief are needed every day to sustain life for a million and a half people. But the number of trucks coming into Gaza has fallen as low as thirty-seven. Israeli government officials have told international aid officials that the aim is “no prosperity, no development, no humanitarian crisis.”
Murderous idealism (Paul Hollander, November 2, 2009, Washington Post)
The different moral responses to Nazism and communism in the West can be interpreted as a result of the perception of communist atrocities as byproducts of noble intentions that were hard to realize without resorting to harsh measures. The Nazi outrages, by contrast, are perceived as unmitigated evil lacking in any lofty justification and unsupported by an attractive ideology. There is far more physical evidence and information about the Nazi mass murders, and Nazi methods of extermination were highly premeditated and repugnant, whereas many victims of communist systems died because of lethal living conditions in their places of detention. Most of the victims of communism were not killed by advanced industrial techniques.Communist systems ranged from tiny Albania to gigantic China; from highly industrialized Eastern European countries to underdeveloped African ones. While divergent in many respects, they had in common a reliance on Marxism-Leninism as their source of legitimacy, the one-party system, control over the economy and media, and the presence of a huge political police force. They also shared an ostensible commitment to creating a morally superior human being -- the socialist or communist man.
Political violence under communism had an idealistic origin and a cleansing, purifying objective. Those persecuted and killed were defined as politically and morally corrupt and a danger to a superior social system. The Marxist doctrine of class struggle provided ideological support for mass murder. People were persecuted not for what they did but for belonging to social categories that made them suspect.
In the aftermath of the fall of Soviet communism, many Western intellectuals remain convinced that capitalism is the root of all evil. There has been a long tradition of such animosity among Western intellectuals who gave the benefit of doubt or outright sympathy to political systems that denounced the profit motive and proclaimed their commitment to create a more humane and egalitarian society, and unselfish human beings. The failure of communist systems to improve human nature doesn't mean that all such attempts are doomed, but improvements will be modest and are unlikely to be attained by coercion.
White House visit list includes Ayers, Wright, Moore; Names don't match controversial figures (Kenneth R. Bazinet and Richard Sisk, 10/31/09, NY Daily News)
For one brief, shining moment, it looked like conspiracy theorists had found the mother lode on Friday as the White House released visitor logs with such names as William Ayers, Jeremiah Wright and Michael Moore.But alas, they weren't that Ayers, Wright or Moore.
Ford has suffered less than rivals (DEE-ANN DURBIN, 11/01/09, AP)
Ford Motor Co. has been riding a wave of positive public sentiment since it steered clear of bankruptcy protection and avoided taking federal bailout money - unlike its crosstown rivals, General Motors Co. and Chrysler LLC.
Worldwide market share is up. And at least two analysts are predicting a quarterly profit for the automaker, which is releasing its third-quarter earnings Monday.
Is there anything Obama hasn't blamed Bush for? (CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER, 11/01/09, Jerusalem Post)
It's as if Obama's presidency hasn't really started. He's still taking inventory of the Bush years. Just this Monday, he referred to "long years of drift" in Afghanistan in order to, I suppose, explain away his own, well, yearlong drift on Afghanistan.This compulsion to attack his predecessor is as stale as it is unseemly. Obama was elected a year ago. He became commander-in-chief two months later. He then solemnly announced his own "comprehensive new strategy" for Afghanistan seven months ago. And it was not an off-the-cuff decision. "My administration has heard from our military commanders, as well as our diplomats," the president assured us. "We've consulted with the Afghan and Pakistani governments, with our partners and our NATO allies, and with other donors and international organizations" and "with members of Congress."
Obama is obviously unhappy with the path he himself chose in March.
Fine. He has every right - indeed duty - to reconsider. But what Obama is reacting to is the failure of his own strategy.
It is Japan we should be worrying about, not America (Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, 01 Nov 2009, Daily Telegraph)
Simon Johnson, former chief economist of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), told the US Congress last week that the debt path was out of control and raised "a real risk that Japan could end up in a major default".The IMF expects Japan's gross public debt to reach 218pc of gross domestic product (GDP) this year, 227pc next year, and 246pc by 2014. This has been manageable so far only because Japanese savers have been willing – or coerced – into lending for almost nothing. The yield on 10-year government bonds has been around 1.30pc this year, though they jumped to 1.42pc last week.
"Can these benign conditions be expected to continue in the face of even-larger increases in public debt? Going forward, the markets capacity to absorb debt is likely to diminish as population ageing reduces saving," said the IMF.
The savings rate has crashed from 15pc in 1990 to near 2pc today, half America's rate.
Guantánamo suspects want to stay, say officials (Alex Spillius, 01 Nov 2009, Daily Telegraph)
As President Barack Obama's deadline to close Guantánamo looms, some occupants of the notorious detention centre would rather prolong their stay than be sent to maximum security prisons on the US mainland, according to camp officials.Despite its reputation, the regime at the Pentagon facility on Cuba's southern coast offers privileges that would not be enjoyed at the federal "supermax" prison at Florence, Colorado, the likely alternative for the most dangerous al-Qaeda suspects.
'Toy Jews' are the peaceniks of J Street: A new lobby group in Washington is taking money from Arabs and trying to turn US policy on Israel on its head (Chris McGreal, November 2, 2009, Sydney Morning Herald)
On the face of it, J Street stands for what the rest of the Israel lobby stands for: peace, a two-state solution and a secure Israel. The divide is in how to get there.At the heart of the battle is who speaks for America's Jews and what it means to be pro-Israel.
For decades, groups from the Zionist Organisation of America (ZOA) to the powerful American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) have claimed to be the voice of the largest Jewish community outside Israel, advocating unflinching support for the government in Jerusalem.
But in recent years AIPAC, the ZOA and other groups have drawn closer to the hard right in America, particularly the neocons and Christian evangelical organisations, as the conflict in Israel is framed largely in the context of terrorism while hardline governments pay little more than lip service to peace and a Palestinian state.
Levy says J Street was born out of a belief that many American Jews are now alienated from those who claim to speak in their name.
''A community that is very, very liberal, votes 78 per cent Obama, overall a community that prides itself in the role it played historically in the US in advancing civil rights, was suddenly being identified with the most illiberal, reactionary, regressive policies advocated by groups that claimed to be doing this in the name of American Jewry and the name of Israel, making alliances with these dreadful people on the far right of American politics,'' said Levy.
''What we had a hunch about, and was proven when J Street was launched, is that there is this very large constituency of Jewish Americans who do care about Israel and who are cool identifying themselves as pro-Israel. But their pro-Israelness is about the need for Israel to be at peace with its neighbours, to gain security not by being an ongoing expansionist presence. In fact, that endangers Israel.''
