January 06, 2009
Panetta, Papa Bush and JFK
I'm intrigued by Obama's pick of Leon Panetta to head the CIA. I've kind of vacillated in my opinion of it as I've read the comments on Carla's post at Blue Oregon. But my initial reaction was to echo the concern expressed by such diverse individuals as Senator Diane Feinstein and Pat Buchanan - what qualifies Panetta for such a job?
But then I read a comment citing a TPM post which quotes an email from a long-time veteran of the CIA expressing approval of the Panetta pick. Which got me to thinking that Papa Bush (aka George H. W. Bush, Bush 41, etc.) was appointed by President Ford to head the CIA without any obvious intel experience and he seemed to do an at least adequate job of it. So that sent me to Google because I couldn't remember exactly when he'd been appointed - whether it was Nixon or Ford who appointed him. And since I was considering writing a post about it I wanted to do some fact checking first.
Surprise, surprise, surprise! I found something that I was wholly unprepared for.
Continue reading "Panetta, Papa Bush and JFK"
Posted by Kevin at 04:02 PM | Permalink |
The Early Days of a Better Nation
First off: hello there! I'm Ben, and I'm the newest contributor here at Preemptive Karma.
When Kevin asked me to join this blog, I was flattered. I've always considered the writers and discussions here some of the most robust and exciting in the Oregon blogosphere.
You can read my bio to get a sense of who I am, but I'll sum it up briefly: I'm a young gun Democratic political operative, former blogger at the now-defunct Witigonen.com, and came to Portland because of the lush green spaces and sustainability (and for the progressive politics).
I'll get this all started, though, by giving you a few thoughts about new Portland Mayor Sam Adams, who was sworn in yesterday and delivered a speech which gives us a lot to chew over.
Continue reading "The Early Days of a Better Nation"
Posted by Ben at 12:20 PM | Permalink |
The Israeli Propaganda War
Today's news that a second UN school in Gaza has been bombed by Israel (30-40 dead, 50-60 wounded) underscores the fig-leaf Israel has offered.
Israel has help up it's phone calls to individual Palestinians warning of an impending nearby bombing as evidence that they, unlike Hamas, are being careful to avoid harming civilian non-combatants.
But where are those Palestinians supposed to flee to?
There have been numerous reports of Palestinians so warned who fled, only to have to flee again and again because wherever they fled to was no safer.
Israel could allow them to flee into Israel, but hasn't and most assuredly won't. Instead, Palestinians are forced to flee from place to place like caged rats. Egypt has similarly declined to allow Palestinians to flee into Egypt. But while that failure has been held up by Israel's apologists as evidence that Arabs truly don't care about the plight of the Palestinians, not a word has been said about Israel's virtually identical refusal. And there is a crucial legal difference between the two. As the occupying power the onus is on Israel, not Egypt, to safeguard civilian non-combatants.
And let's be honest here. Even Israel estimates that Hamas forces only total about 20,000. There are 1.5 MILLION Gazans caged like rats.
Continue reading "The Israeli Propaganda War"
Posted by Kevin at 11:26 AM | Permalink |
January 05, 2009
Ballot Title Shopping
The Oregonian yesterday ran an opinion piece by Rick Attig regarding the ending of the practice of ballot title shopping. This is a topic I've addressed before, more than once (in fact, I've written about it more than twice!). So I was very gratified to read Bill Campbell's comments on the causes of ballot title shopping, posted in response to Attig's editorial.
Continue reading "Ballot Title Shopping"
Posted by Becky at 04:26 PM | Permalink |
Breasts: Baby Bottles or Boobies?
Kevin has brought to my attention a fascinating debate that is raging right now over Facebook’s decision to remove photographs of mothers breast feeding their children if any portion of the nipple or areola is showing. As one can easily imagine, breast-feeding mothers and advocates are outraged and are engaging in a variety of protest activities. Time has a piece on the debate that highlights the absurdities involved in society’s view of breasts, and particularly of nipples, and the appropriateness of their public exposure. I find the whole controversy both humorous and revealing (no pun intended).
Continue reading "Breasts: Baby Bottles or Boobies?"
Posted by Becky at 01:14 PM | Permalink |
Israel using human shields?
Apparently Israel Defense Forces have decided to adopt Hamas' alleged tactics and are effectively using Palestinian hostages as a human shield from which to fire on Hamas agents and whomever else they decide to fire on.
Israeli troops seized three six-story buildings on the outskirts of Gaza City, taking up rooftop positions after locking residents in rooms and taking away their cell phones, a neighbor said, quoting a relative in one of the buildings who called before his phone was taken away."The army is there, firing in all directions," said Mohammed Salmai, a 29-year-old truck driver. "All we can do is take clothes to each other to keep ourselves warm and pray to God that if we die, someone will find our bodies under the rubble." - AP
Obviously, if Hamas were to adopt IDF tactics and just bomb the buildings into piles of rubble - something they appear capable of - then any civilians locked in rooms inside would very likely die too - effectively making them human shields.
In the glibest of irony,
Maj. Avital Leibovich, an Israeli military spokeswoman, said Hamas was to blame for civilian casualties because it operates in densely populated areas."If Hamas chose cynically to use those civilians as human shields, then Hamas should be accountable," she said. "Civilians will probably continue to get killed, unfortunately, because Hamas put them in the first lines of fire."
Sickening...
Posted by Kevin at 11:44 AM | Permalink |
January 04, 2009
The acid-test for the idealistic liberal
A guy who won a $10.5 million lottery in Belgium is giving up to half of it to the poor. He hasn't given it all just yet. But he has already given enough to purchase 264 gallons of fuel to 100 poor families. I'd guess the price of gasoline to be approximately $5 per gallon. So that's about $130k that he's given away so far.
Would you do the same if you won? Are you sure?
Here in Oregon we remember the much ballyhooed state tax kicker checks which so many didn't get. I was one of those who didn't get a kicker check because I'd marked the box on my tax forms stating that any kicker could be given to the schools.
That was an easy enough choice to make a year ago when nobody had received a kicker check for a number of years... it was all an abstract exercise. I honestly didn't expect there to be a kicker check and so it was pretty easy to give away money that I didn't expect to materialize. But I gotta tell you that I was less... um... enthusiastic when I received notification that the roughly $650 worth of kicker that I would otherwise have been entitled to had been donated to schools... per my choice.
Now, I'd like to think that I'd be a lot more willing to part with cash in hand if it were only a portion of such an enormous amount and I'd be guaranteed to be fabulously wealthy even with the generosity. But after the kicker experience I'm less sure. I like to think of myself as a very giving kind of guy. But I'm pretty sure that I could spend $10.5 million all on my own.
Posted by Kevin at 06:02 PM | Permalink |
A transcendental irony
Irony of ironies: Israel's first aknowledged military death in the invasion of Gaza was a resident of the Giv'at Ze'ev settlement in the Occupied West Bank, and which is one of the land grab areas Israel hopes to exclude from any negotiations via The Apartheid Wall (more at Firedoglake).
Deepening the irony is the fact that on March 9, 2008, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert approved the construction of 750 new homes in Giv'at Ze'ev under the Agan Ha'ayalot project, a direct violation of the "road map" peace plan Israel agreed to. However, President Bush reportedly gave secret permission to then-PM Ariel Sharon to expand West Bank settlements. Thus, Olmert maintains that the expansion of Giv'at Ze'ev does not contravene his "road map" obligations because they are allowed via a pre-existing agreement.
Meanwhile, there are reasons to question the much-vaunted Israeli attempts to avoid civilian casualties in Gaza. Via WaPo:
Near sundown, Israel dropped leaflets on northern Gaza warning residents to evacuate their homes, as witnesses reported heavy movement of troops and tanks massed on the border. The leaflets read: "Area resident, as a result of the acts undertaken by terror activists in your area against Israel, the IDF is forced to respond immediately and operate in this area. For your own safety, you are asked to leave the area immediately."It was unclear where the residents were supposed to go; Gaza is tiny, and no part of the strip, home to 1.5 million people, has been spared from attack. Border crossings have been sealed for everyone except 220 foreigners and a small number of Palestinians in need of immediate medical help. (emphasis supplied)
Israel claims that there is no humanitarian crisis in Gaza and offers as proof the fact that they are allowing supplies into the territory. But allowing supplies through a border checkpoint does not automatically mean that those supplies can be distributed during an ongoing military campaign in one of the most heavily populated areas on the planet. Those supplies do no good to civilians who can't reach them.
That said, I wholeheartedly agree with French President Nicolas Sarkozy that Hamas "bears a heavy responsibility in the suffering of the Palestinian people in Gaza". They clearly do... as does Israel.
Demonstrating the supreme folly of Olmert, Hamas is busily eliminating Fatah members even as they continue to take on Israel. The sigificance of which is quite simply the profoundly ironic repetition of history - Israel militarily takes on a Palestinian entity which then comes out of the conflict stronger than they were before.
If Israel truly wanted to weaken Hamas then they would befriend them. Just look at how Fatah has been weakened as Israel treated them as legitimate representatives of the Palestinian people!
Posted by Kevin at 12:48 PM | Permalink |
January 03, 2009
Must-read article of the year
Avrum Burg is the scion of one of Israel's founding families — his father was the deputy speaker of the first Knesset, and Burg himself later became speaker of the legislature, and a member of Israel's cabinet. His position at the heart of the Israeli establishment makes all the more remarkable his critique of the Jewish State, which he claims has lost its sense of moral purpose. In his new book The Holocaust Is Over: We Must Rise from Its Ashes (Palgrave/MacMillan), he argues that an obsession with an exaggerated sense of threats to Jewish survival cultivated by Israel and its most fervent backers actually impedes the realization of Judaism's higher goals. He discussed his ideas with TIME.com's Tony Karon. - Can the Jewish People Survive Without an Enemy?Interesting, no? That's just the preface. Go read the interview.
Posted by Kevin at 11:06 PM | Permalink |
What is Israel's real objective?
The New York Times asks the question: Is the Real Target Hamas Rule?. It's a good question.
...while it may sound decisive to speak of taking Hamas out of power, almost no one familiar with Gaza and Palestinian politics considers it realistic. Hamas legislators won a democratic majority in elections four years ago, and the group has 15,000 to 20,000 men under arms...And while there are plenty of Gazans who would prefer Fatah, they seem hardly organized or strong enough to become the new rulers, even with the help of former colleagues in exile in Ramallah who say, anyway, that they would never be willing to ride into Gaza on the back of an Israeli tank. In fact, the longer Israel pounds Gaza, the weaker Fatah is likely to become because it will be seen as collaborating.
Indeed, Fatah leader and Palestinian President Abbas, who has NOT been lobbing missles and mortars into Israel, is condemning this invasion of Gaza.
Not only are there practical reasons why the rhetoric coming out of Israel right now makes little sense... politically, it makes little sense historically either.
Military crackdowns on the Palestinians hasn't ever accomplished the proffered goals. Not once. Ever. Each and every time whatever Palestinian entity was in Israel's crosshairs has come out of it stronger than before. The Pakistan Observer takes a crack at explaining why while tying what's going on in Gaza with the slow-motion failure of our military adventure in Afghanistan.
Both America and Israel will have to learn the hard way that this is wrong because in both cases we are facing not just a fight with some terrorists as many would like us to believe, but what is going on is a full-fledged popular uprising of people who fight for their soil, their survival and their future. And because of that they will not give in. The story of Gaza is the same as that of Algeria fighting the French colonist some years ago: you can’t have it both ways. If you want democracy and swear on elections you have to be ready to accept the outcome whatever it may be. The US who thinks that this is true only for some and not for others and they should be the ones to decide for how to oust the democratically elected Islamist government of Algeria with the result of many years of brutal civil war.
Now, I'd be the first to agree that whomever wrote this piece is putting a bit of spin on it which reflects that person's perspective. But the germ of truth is in there too. Not the least of which is the fact that Hamas was democratically elected, whether Israel likes that fact or not.
Think about this for a minute. Israel indeed has very successfully used her military to accomplish somewhat similar objectives... but ONLY with respect to her Arab neighbors who were not fighting for their own land, homes and futures.
Huge numbers of Palestinian noncombatants fled the fighting or were evicted during Israel's war of independence and their homes and lands were either seized or allowed to be seized by the nascent Israeli government. Few of those civilians have ever been allowed back into Israel. And the same dynamic took place during later wars - Palestinian noncombatants fled the fighting, their homes and lands were seized and the owners were barred from coming back.
Consider this: Hamas didn't exist back then, although plenty of outright terrorism was practiced by Jews and Arabs alike. Hamas was formed in the refugee camps populated by Palestinians who were being denied the right to return to their own homes and lands. Thus, the attempts to parse what's going on right now as a simple matter of firing missles into Israel for no other reason than to kill Jews is intellectually bankrupt and morally repugnant.
Back to the NYT piece.
The likelier result of a destruction of the Hamas infrastructure, then, would be chaos, anathema not only to the people of Gaza but also to those hoping for peace in southern Israel.Yet in its campaign so far, which has killed scores of children and other bystanders, Israel has not spared the trappings of Hamas sovereignty or limited itself to military targets. It says that the mosques it has destroyed were weapons storehouses and that the Islamic University, which it has hit repeatedly, housed explosives factories. But it has also reduced many government buildings to rubble without any claim that they were military in nature. (emphasis is mine)
Hamas and Israel are led by the insane. Not only the moral and ethical problems inherent in their approach (and eye for an eye leaves everyone blind...), but it's simply not practical either. By far the most successful resistance campaigns by indigenous people in history have been the product of PEACEFUL resistance, not ARMED resistance.
But too few care... about any of this. They're sitting in the comfort of their own homes, utterly detached from the suffering on both sides, rooting on one side or the other as if this were nothing more substantial than a game between sports teams.
The blood continues to flow.
The seeds of future fighting are being sown as I type this post.
The insane are in control.
Posted by Kevin at 01:45 PM | Permalink |
Off the beaten path - USC needs more than Obama's help
The Trojans may have exposed the weakness of the Big Ten by whipping Penn State in the Rose Bowl. But they'd need more than Obama's known advocacy of a college football play-off system and trash-talking Florida and Oklahoma - BCS's flawed "title game" combatants - to get the respect they clearly feel entitled to. They'd have to beat the only unbeaten major college football team this year: the Utah Utes who annihilated Alabama yesterday in the Sugar Bowl.
Say what you want about Alabama having come into the game on a two-game losing streak. The fact of the matter is that Oregon State proved that USC could be beaten. Nobody has come close to proving that about the Utes.
If anyone has a legit claim to be national champs regardless of who wins "BCS Championship" it's the Utes who have taken on all comers and won.
Posted by Kevin at 08:37 AM | Permalink |
January 02, 2009
Jamaican editorial gets the Israeli/Gazan conflict just right
We unequivocally reject Hamas' philosophy that Israel is an illegitimate entity that ought not to exist. We also repudiate its tactics of firing home-made missiles into Israel - such as resumed last month - in pursuance of its grievances against the Jewish state.Indeed, Israel has the right to exist and to defend itself within secure borders. But those borders must be in accordance with UN Security Council resolution 242 of November 1967 calling for a return to boundaries before the six-day war. The Palestinian people, too, are entitled to a genuinely sovereign and viable state, with contiguous boundaries rather than "Bantustans".
What are "Bantustans"? I'm glad you asked. Here are a couple of pop-up maps which illustrate exactly what the editorial meant. Just click on each to bring up the full map in a separate window.
Meanwhile, Egyptian President Mubarak is reportedly attempting to broker a new truce. But he finds himself in a conundrum.
Posted by Kevin at 09:51 PM | Permalink |
They Should Have Been Allowed to Fly
A little over two years ago now, we had quite the extended discussion over whether or not an airline was justified in barring several Muslim clerics from flying. Based on the police and witness reports, I felt the airline made the right call, but many here disagreed with me and saw it as pure racism. Today's news about a Muslim family being barred from flying by AirTran is an entirely different matter, and is clearly an incident of racial profiling.
Continue reading "They Should Have Been Allowed to Fly"
Posted by Becky at 08:43 AM | Permalink |
January 01, 2009
Glib Jewish racism
While perusing a blog post at the Israeli Jewish blog Shiloh Musings claiming that NYT photographs of suffering Palestinians, such as this one showing a father grieving next to the corpses of three very young Palestinian boys, are "posed or artificial," I found this banner statement near the top of the blog:
Quote from Israeli UN Ambassador, Yehuda Z. Blum, June 11, 1979
"Anyone who asserts that it is illegal for a Jew to live in Judea and Samaria JUST BECAUSE HE IS A JEW, is in fact advocating a concept that is disturbingly reminiscent of the 'JUDENREIN' POLICIES of Nazi Germany banning Jews from certain spheres of life for no other reason than that they were Jews. The Jewish villages in Judea, Samaria and the Gaza district are there as of right and are there to stay."
As you can see via the link above, this quote is accompanied by an unflattering picture of Israeli PM Ehud Olmert with the text "TOPPLE OLMERT" across the top of his pic - a clear reference to Olmert's policy of "unilateral disengagement" which forcibly removed Jewish settlers from the land they'd stolen and occupied in Gaza when the Israeli's withdrew from Gaza and a mere four out of the hundreds of similar settlements in the West Bank in 2005
What does Israel's official and historical opposition to the Palestinian right of return boil down to if not the assertion that it's illegal for a Palestinian Arab to live in his/her own home in "Judea" and "Samaria" just because he/she is an Arab?
As a person of Jewish heritage I am very proud to be able to point out that not all Israeli Jews are blind to Jewish racism. Indeed, some are working very hard to EDUCATE Jews and Palestinian Arabs alike about their common history and the imperative need for them to face it together.
After the jump is a very long (1.45 hours) video of Eitan Bronstein of the Jewish Israeli group, Zochrot, and Muhammad Jaradat of the Badil Resource Center for Palestinian Residency and Refugees' Rights, presenting "Acknowledging the Past; Imagining the Future: Israelis and Palestinians on 1948 and the Right of Return" right here in Portland this past April, courtesy of PDXjustice.org.
Continue reading "Glib Jewish racism"
Posted by Kevin at 12:53 PM | Permalink |
December 31, 2008
Ted Piccolo Back Under Sizemore's Spell
This little entry by Ted Piccolo at Northwest Republican this morning left me laughing out loud:
Remember a few weeks ago when the left got all twitterpated that Bill Sizemore was over-paid for a website design?
Yes, that's right. Ted Piccolo is referring to Sizemore's tangled web of lies, his repeated "deceit" under oath, and his nearly a million dollars of ill-gotten gains as nothing more than being "over-paid for a website design." I see Bill has spent a bit of time whispering sweet nothings into Ted's ear, just as I predicted when Bill was released from jail claiming to be a "political prisoner":
Continue reading "Ted Piccolo Back Under Sizemore's Spell"
Posted by Becky at 03:37 PM | Permalink |
James Dobson's gay-hating chickens come home to roost
Dobson's Focus on the Family organization continues to reel from the consequences of the deals they made compromising core beliefs in exchange for political help on Prop 8. In other words, just another "the ends justify the means" karmic reward being granted far sooner than I'm sure Dobson expected.
In this case it's actually quite interesting because the political ramifications are not entirely inconsequential.
See, Dobson et al have long categorized Mormons as members of an emphatically non-Christian cult. Then along comes the opportunity in California to further one of Dobson's other evangelical near and dear articles of faith - denying marriage to gays via California's Prop 8 ballot measure.
Continue reading "James Dobson's gay-hating chickens come home to roost"
Posted by Kevin at 08:25 AM | Permalink |
Kroger and Brown Will Have to Do More than Talk
Yesterday's Oregonian contained an article that seemed to imply that incoming Secretary of State Kate Brown and incoming Attorney General John Kroger are going to crack down on the likes of Bill Sizemore. I have my doubts they will actually do it, but they certainly have been handed a golden opportunity to put some action behind their words.
Continue reading "Kroger and Brown Will Have to Do More than Talk"
Posted by Becky at 08:06 AM | Permalink |
December 30, 2008
Israelis, Gazans, and the American political elite
Glen Greewald points to a poll taken a few months ago showing that 71% of Americans don't believe that our government should take sides between the Israelis and the Palestinians. Which puts us the the overwhelming international majority. 18 different countries were polled and 14 of them showed a majority not wanting their government to take sides.
Polls taken during Israel's disasterous invasion of Lebanon in 2006 showed the same thing - a majority of Americans opposed taking sides in the conflict. Instead, what Americans want is for our government to A.) remain neutral and B.) be even-handed in our treatment of the warring sides.
Yet our political leaders are virtually uniform in stating unqualified (or very nearly so) support for what Israel is doing and what Israel has done. Ditto for the 2006 war in Lebanon.
Greenwald notes the complexity of the situation in Gaza and the resulting variety of positions deemed "reasonable" by Americans voicing opinions on the conflict. He notes that even some who generally side with Israel are nevertheless opposed to this bombing of Gaza for strictly pragmatic reasons - it not only won't help but will make things worse - "that it won't achieve anything positive, that it will exacerbate the problem, that it makes less likely a diplomatic resolution, that there is no military solution to the rocket attacks".
But among our political elite there is lockstep rhetorical agreement in support for Israel. To the point that, as Greenwald notes, if a selection of quotes were lined up and the source names removed... it would be impossible to decipher which came from NeoCon warmongers and which came from Congressional Democrats.
Greenwald is incredulous:
In a democracy, one could expect that politicians would be afraid to express a view that 70% of the citizens oppose. Yet here we have the exact opposite situation: no mainstream politician would dare express the view that 70% of Americans support; instead, the universal piety is the one that only a small minority accept. Isn't that fairly compelling evidence of the complete disconnect between our political elites and the people they purportedly represent? (his emphasis, not mine)
Meanwhile, for those who claim that it is only Muslims and Arabs voicing support for genocide, I stumbled across an AP piece quoting an Israeli, "We should keep pounding them until they beg for mercy," he said. "As far as I'm concerned, all of Gaza can be erased." This man has lived under onerous conditions - frequent Hamas missiles raining down on his community. His being upset with Hamas is entirely understandable! But would erasing 1.6 million Gazans fix anything? Heck, that's not "an eye for an eye". It's "your life, the lives of your family and of your neighbors... for an eye". Which is what far too many (one is far too many) Palestinians have said regarding wiping out Israel.
Back to Greenwald, he cites a 2006 poll which showed that a strong plurality (46%) of Americans blamed both sides while Bush rushed bombs to Israel so that they could be dropped on villages and Lebanese government military bases (which hadn't lifted a finger to attack Israel or Israelis) in Lebanon.
Turns out Americans have a much stronger sense of fairness than our political leaders. Actually, I doubt that all of those political leaders truly hold such uncritical views of what Israel is doing and has done. It's just that it's political suicide for them to speak honestly about it... because that's how powerful the Jewish lobby is here in the "land of the free and home of the brave (sic)." Which, for those inclined to keep score on these sorts of things, should NOT be construed as letting our political elites off the hook for their own statements and positions. Real politick excuses nothing. It simply gives context.
Posted by Kevin at 07:15 PM | Permalink |
December 29, 2008
A picture is worth a thousand words
Posted by Kevin at 02:20 PM | Permalink |
