A leftover from before the trip

I can almost see the tear in his eye, the quiver in his voice as he cries out in his emotional pain "The child- I mean, the banks! Think of the banks!"

A top White House adviser questioned the need [last] Sunday for a blanket national stoppage of all home foreclosures, even as pressure grows on the Obama administration to do something about mounting evidence that banks have used inaccurate documents to evict homeowners.

"It is a serious problem," said David Axelrod, who contended that the flawed paperwork is hurting the U.S. housing market as well as lending institutions. But he added, "I'm not sure about a national moratorium because there are in fact valid foreclosures that probably should go forward" because their documents are accurate.

Leave aside for the moment the fact that Axelrod expressed concern about the housing market and the banks - but not the homeowners being wrongfully evicted. Rather, consider that the specific purpose of the sort of moratorium being proposed is to stop things long enough to separate out the "valid" foreclosures from those based on incompetence or outright fraud. What that means is that what Axelrod is actually suggesting is that we knowingly allow the bogus foreclosures to continue until some unknown future time when the "flawed paperwork" is straightened out, although lacking a moratorium, it's hard to see what the incentive is for the banks and their partners in crime - excuuuuse me, "flawed paperwork" - to act with any alacrity.

Ultimately, though, isn't Axelrod's argument rather like saying we shouldn't have laws against, say, passing bad checks because, after all, some checks are legitimate?

Footnote: One little bit of good news on this front is that a week ago Obama vetoed a bill that would have

require[d] courts to accept as valid document notarizations made out of state, making it harder to challenge the authenticity of foreclosure and other legal documents. ...

The legislation could protect bank and mortgage processors from liability for false or improperly prepared documents.

The bill had been passed twice by the House only to die in the Senate Judiciary Committee. It appeared to be headed for the same fate this time. However,

[a]fter languishing for months in the Senate Judiciary Committee, the bill passed the Senate with lightning speed and with hardly any public awareness of the bill's existence on Sept. 27, the day before the Senate recessed for midterm election campaign. ...

Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy pressed to have the bill rushed through the special procedure [by which the bill is discharged from the Judiciary Committe and passed by unanimous consent], after Leahy "constituents" called him and pressed for passage.

[Senate] staffers [familiar with the actions] said they didn't know who these constituents were....

Any guesses?

Going away for a few days

Don't expect new posts before Friday.

See you then with a backlog.

Another '60s flashback

This is an update to this post about police raids last month on antiwar activists' homes in Minneapolis and Chicago along with demands that a number of them appear before grand juries supposedly investigating vaguely-defined "connections" with "terrorist groups in Colombia and the Middle East," according to the original article.

I sarcastically remarked at the time about having a "'60s flashback" but now there's another one from the other side of the coin:

14 of the antiwar activists who were subpoenaed to testify before a grand jury will refuse to appear, according to their attorneys. The group includes a number of the antiwar activists whose homes were raided on September 24.

Good on them! As I noted earlier, the best weapon in cases like this is continued defiance, a refusal to be intimidated, just keep on doing what you were doing.

At least four of the antiwar activists had been ordered to appear before the grand jury in Chicago today, while others had been called for later dates. The activists could be held in jail for the duration of the grand jury’s procedings for refusing to appear.

Another point here and again related to the experience of the '60s is that if you do go before a grand jury you have no effective ability to refuse to testify even on Fifth Amendment grounds. If you do invoke your rights, the prosecution - with compliant judges on speed dial - will get an order granting you either "use immunity" (where nothing you say can be used against you) or "transactional immunity" (where you can't be prosecuted for anything you talk about - that is, not just your words but the entire subject). After that, refuse to answer and bam! it's contempt of court.

In that case, unless you at some point submit and testify, you can be jailed for the length of the grand jury, which could be as long as 18 months. And even after that, there's nothing to prevent the prosecution from convening a new grand jury and calling you again.

Still, as the article points out,

the open-ended detention of the activists could further fuel opposition to the entire proceding, and strengthen the belief that the operation is designed primarily to intimidate the likely organizers of antiwar protests against President Obama at the 2012 DNC.

Whether or not it is specifically aimed at covering for Obama, since all this apparently grew out of the attempts to repress demonstrations at the Minneapolis GOPper convention in 2008, that this is an attempt to intimidate and suppress dissent seems unquestionable.

They're everywhere!

They're in Afghanistan! No, wait, they're in Iraq! No, wait, they're in Afghanistan again! No, wait, they're in Yemen! No, wait, they're in Pakistan!

No, wait, they're in northern Africa!

While Europe's latest terror threat stems from militants in Pakistan, a potentially greater menace lies just across the Mediterranean: Well-organized and financed Islamic terrorists from al-Qaida's North African offshoot. ...

Al-Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb effectively rules a wide, lawless swath of the Sahara and is trying to overthrow Algeria's government. It's active online and media-savvy, and has the globally recognized al-Qaida brand name.

It's really gotten tiresome. Every group of thugs and criminals - the article links the group to a string of kidnappings for ransom and drug traffickers and credits one leader with "building a bridge with the criminal underworld" - so yeah every group of thugs and criminals which wants to seem more powerful and is possessed with the brains to include some radical Islamic messages in their recruiting pitch and the "media savvy" to invoke the name "al-Qaeda" becomes in official proclamations part of some organized worldwide network of which we must be obsessively frightened. ("International Communist conspiracy," anyone?)

The ability to promote that fear in that way may be fading - note the article refers to the "al-Qaida brand name" - but that won't stop them from trying.

Footnote: The link at ABC News has no date, but the cruise missile attack on Yemen to which it refers took place on December 16, 2009. It and an associated air strike by the Yemeni military (which may have been carried out with the assistance of the USAF) reportedly killed 120 people and wounded 44 more.

One last note on this for now

Haaretz reports that

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu offered Monday to halt settlement construction if the Palestinians were to recognize Israel as a Jewish state, but the Palestinian leadership was prompt to reject the proposal.

"If the Palestinian leadership will say unequivocally to its people that it recognizes Israel as the homeland of the Jewish people, I will be ready to convene my government and request a further suspension," Netanyahu said while speaking at the opening of the third session of the 18th Knesset.

Bizarrely, Netanyahu called this "not a condition but a trust-building step." That is, not even something that would get a practical response but something just to make the Israelis a little more comfortable about dealing with the Palestinians. Put another way, it's "'unequivocally' recognize us as a Jewish state even before negotiations on the 'core questions' begin and we'll think about temporarily halting the expropriation of your lands." Yeah, I could see that sort of deal could make Israel more comfortable.

But again, as has happened before, this was a dishonest offer, a "deal" the Israelis had to know in advance the Palestinians would not accept. While Haaretz doesn't mention the reason, AFP does:

The Palestinians have agreed to recognise Israel as part of a final peace deal but refuse to recognise it as a "Jewish state" for fear that doing so would prejudge the thorny issue of Palestinian refugees from the 1948 war.

The issue of "the right of return" is one of deep importance to Palestinians as a group, every bit as much as the notion of returning to their homeland ("Next year in Jerusalam!") was to the Jews across the many years of the diaspora. It's one of the reasons that in an earlier post I mentioned "the at least symbolic acceptance by Israel of a 'right of return'" as one of the goals the Palestinians feel necessary for a final peace deal. (And, contrary to Israeli PR, that acceptance could be symbolic and its implementation "limited" - and Israel has known that for 10 years.) Openly accepting Israel as a "Jewish state" prior to an agreement about those refugees could be and by some surely would be read as relinquishing that goal, something no Palestinian leader would or could do.

There simply is no way the Israeli government does not know that. Netanyahu's "offer" was made for the purpose of seeing it rejected. The intent was not to make a deal, the intent was to find a way to blame the Palestinians for his own refusal to extend the construction moratorium.

Meanwhile,

[t]he Knesset's Ministerial Committee on Legislation ruled on Monday that the cabinet would support a bill outlining the referendum that would be held prior to any territorial concessions.

The bill sets our the procedures for carrying out such a referendum related to withdrawals in the Golan Heights and East Jerusalem, a referendum already required by earlier legislation.

The referendum law is seen as a measure aimed at hindering territorial withdrawals, making it more difficult for the government to give up land under future agreements.

I repeat: Israel. Does. Not. Want. Peace.

Sixth and last of some assorted footnotes to the preceding

Just a few folks in which some of you might be interested.

Jewish Voice for Peace says it "provides a voice for Jews and allies who believe that peace in the Middle East will be achieved through justice and full equality for both Palestinians and Israelis."

The Jewish Peace Fellowship, established in 1941, is "a nondenominational Jewish organization committed to active nonviolence as a means of resolving conflict, drawing on Jewish traditional sources within the Torah, the Talmud and contemporary peacemaking sages like Martin Buber, Judah Magnes and Abraham Joshua Heschel."

J Street says it is "the political home for pro-Israel, pro-peace Americans." It is a centrist group but serves as a counterweight to AIPAC in the halls and alleys of DC.

Fifth of some assorted footnotes to the preceding

A number of reports have referred to the US as offering "incentives" to the two sides to keep talking. The reported incentives do tend to point up the different treatment given the parties: The Israelis were offered diplomatic, military, and security guarantees in exchange merely for a 60-day extension of the leaky construction moratorium. The Palestinians were offered a statement supporting the pre-1967 boundaries as the starting point for determining final borders - a point on which everyone, even the Israelis, had long since explicitly or tacitly agreed.

But there was another point of those incentives that caught my eye. On Thursday, Israel and the US agreed on a deal for the US to sell 20 F-35 stealth fighter jets to Israel. The F-35 is or rather will be the most advanced fighter jet in the world - in fact, it is so new that it is still under development and the delivery won't be until 2015. Put that another way, we have agreed to sell Israel weapons technology so new even our own armed forces don't have it yet.

The thing is, some reports said that this deal was part of the "incentives" offered to Israel. Those reports are wrong. The Israeli government approved the decision to buy the jets back in mid-September. This had nothing to do with "incentives" to stay in talks; it would be better described as co-dependent enabling of abusive behavior, even if that behavior is, as it was in the IDF attack on the Gaza aid flotilla in May,

unlawful ... unnecessary, disproportionate, excessive and inappropriate and resulted in the wholly avoidable killing and maiming of a large number of civilian passengers....

That was according to a investigation ordered by the UN's Human Right Council. It also said that forensic evidence says that at least six of those killed, including US citizen Furkhan Doğan, were “extra-legal, arbitrary and summary executions.”

Admittedly, the Human Rights Council has a somewhat spotted reputation and in some cases, especially as it relates to its member states, a rather tenuous relationship with hard truth. As Hugh Pope of the International Crisis Group, writing in Haaretz on Friday, said,

[e]ven the council's chosen rapporteurs on the flotilla rejected their original mandate because of "justified criticism" of its "bias."

But he immediately goes on to say that

the 56-page document deserves careful study. Even the United States, explaining its lone vote against the council's report, did not criticize its contents.

Based on interviews with 112 passengers from 20 countries, the account is thorough, measured and consistent with publicly known facts. ...

The report concludes that "the conduct of the Israeli military ... demonstrated levels of totally unnecessary and incredible violence." It finds "clear evidence to support prosecutions" in eight areas of international law ranging from murder to restricting freedom of expression.

The rapporteurs thank Jordan and Turkey for their assistance. They note their "profound regret that, notwithstanding a most cordial meeting" with the Israeli ambassador to the UN, they were informed of an Israeli position of "non-recognition and non-cooperation."

Israel's non-cooperation extended beyond this investigation. In August, it agreed to cooperate with Secretary General Ban Ki-moon's more limited panel of inquiry, only to threaten a week later to withdraw if the panel tried to interview any IDF soldiers instead of just receiving the results of the inquiry by the Israeli military - that is, to put that another way, if the panel of inquiry actually tried to inquire instead of simply accepting the statement of the defense.

So here's the question I can't get away from: If even the "summary execution" of one of our own citizens is not enough, at what point do we say "enough is enough?" At what point do we way "Okay, you have gone too far?" At what point will some president, some Congress, stand up and say "That's it - no more jets for you, no more aid for you, no more vetoes for you, no more covering your ass politically, until you rejoin the community of nations?"

Have you read or seen Waiting for Godot?

Fourth of some assorted footnotes to the preceding

The tendency of too many in the US media to adopt an "assumption of correctness" toward Israel - that is, assuming Israel is in the right and the Palestinians are in the wrong in any conflict unless it can be definitively and irrefutably proved otherwise - continues unabated. One recent example came from columnist Jason Diehl in the Washington Post, who on Thursday idiotically asserted that the settlements are irrelevant not only to the continuation of Israeli-Palestinian talks but to their outcome as well and that the only reason they're a problem now is that "the Obama administration has once again chosen to ask Netanyahu for an unnecessary concession," one that could lead to a "crisis" in US-Israel relations. He then insists that

[a]nother U.S.-Israel crisis is probably what Abbas is hoping for - and why he has taken a hard-line position on the settlement issue. ...

All along, Abbas has shown scant interest in these peace talks - he made a point of saying he was dragged to the bargaining table. ... If he were genuinely interested in reaching a peace settlement with Israel, he could set aside the settlement issue without risking his own hold on power.

In other words, Abbas is trying to make the talks fail for the purpose of sparking Diehl's "crisis." Exactly what the gain for Abbas is in such an eventuality, one more likely to spur Israel to more intensive occupation and population of the West Bank, is not explained. I doubt you're surprised.

In fact, blaming Abbas is an argument that is so far out there that even columnist Herb Keinon of the right-wing Israeli daily The Jerusalem Post didn't make it; instead, he blames Obama for the hang-up over settlements because in May 2009, he called for a complete settlement construction halt - and

if Obama was calling for total settlement moratorium, then Abbas could certainly not do anything less.

Which, on second thought, is not the same argument as Diehl's but it is every bit as weird. They start from similar points, follow different paths, but wind up at the same end: Whatever happens, it cannot be Israel's fault.

Third of some assorted footnotes to the preceding

Ultimately, the new oath Netanyahu endorsed may have little practical impact: Jaffar Farah of Mossawa, an Israeli civil rights group working for equality for the Arab-Palestinian citizens of Israel, noted that family members of Israeli Arabs already have been barred from becoming naturalized citizens.

Second of some assorted footnotes to the preceding

That same reference to Biblical law and to "God says so" appears over and over again in official Israeli (and, more generally, Jewish) claims to sovereignty over the West Bank. As the end of this article from the Christian Science Monitor reminds us, the radical Jewish settlers' claims are explicitly based on such arguments, specifically that God "promised" all of Judea and Samaria - i.e., the West Bank - to the Hebrew people.

As the later-composed lyrics to the theme from "Exodus" have it, "This land is mine; God gave this land to me." For too many, that is not merely a song lyric, it's a statement of rock-bottom conviction.

Realize that in too many cases - not all but in too many - when we refer to "the settlers" we are referring to religious fanatics incapable of responding to rational argument.

First of some assorted footnotes to the preceding

In announcing his support for a new loyalty oath, one his cabinet is expected to endorse, Netanyahu said that there is

a very great struggle today to nullify and blur the character of Israel as the nation state of the Jewish people and to say that it doesn't belong to the Jewish people on a national basis.... I think that the struggle on this issue, both on an international and a domestic level, is a necessary struggle.

Concern was expressed about a supposed "campaign" to "delegitimize" Israel, all of which seems to me as translating to "criticism of Israel is antisemetic."

However, there is among some in Israel a feeling that there is an inherent tension, even a conflict, in being both a "Jewish" and a "democratic" state. That feeling exists not only among non-Jewish Israelis but is found even among the Jewish majority, some of who resent the disproportionate role the extreme right religious authorities play in public affairs.

As one example, last month it was declared that

Israeli government offices that provide a wide array of public services are pulling the plug on online payments on the Jewish Sabbath and holidays, creating a potential new source of friction between the religious and secular in the Jewish state.

Ultra-Orthodox Cabinet ministers are leading the charge to enforce the religious prohibition on spending money on Jewish holy days.

But for non-religious residents, tourists and foreign workers, the planned ban joins two leading ills of Israeli life — red tape and religious restrictions — in a marriage of inconvenience.

The ministries of interior, health, and religious affairs - all controlled by ultra-Orthodox parties - are the ones imposing the payment blackout. Meanwhile, Israel's social security agency has gone the opposite direction and has begun dealing with payments around the clock. Significantly, the agency is headed by a professional appointee, not a political one.

The inconvenience [of the new restrictions] is liable to fuel already considerable secular resentment of the ultra-Orthodox, who make up less than 10 percent of the population but wield disproportionate influence in Israel's parliamentary democracy.

Few ultra-Orthodox men serve in the military, which is largely compulsory for Jewish citizens. Many ultra-Orthodox families rely on state handouts because the men want to pursue religious studies rather than work.

The ultra-Orthodox also have a monopoly on civil matters like marriage and divorce, creating further tensions.

It's important to point out that the control of the ultra-Orthodox over those latter matters - marriage and divorce - is a matter of law, not a matter of what deals are struck by what ruling coalition in the Knesset. That control can lead to some very difficult circumstances for women seeking a divorce because the courts - acting on Biblical principles - favor the husband by their very nature. In fact, a woman cannot get a divorce unless her husband "willingly" gives her one.

So can your country be simultaneously Jewish, with some matters locked into Biblical law administered by right wing rabbis, and democratic, with the "rule of law" and "rule of the majority?" As soon as you say some laws are ordained by God and so leave no room for open democratic debate, it clearly becomes questionable.

Footnote to the Footnote: As a sidebar, Turkey struggles with the same issue from a different perspective, trying to be both Islamic and democratic. It experiences some of the same sorts of tensions and faces the same question of how religious law can ever be a part of democracy.

Ashes amid the hopes

Middle East peace talks are again - "still" is likely a more appropriate word - moribund, stalled now over the Israeli refusal to extend its moratorium on settlement construction in the West Bank. The Arab League described the talks as "negative" and "not bearing fruit."

Reuters quoted Arab League chief Amr Moussa as saying Arab leaders will begin drafting alternatives, which in the bizarro world of Middle East peace talks is seen as a hopeful development because it means Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas is likely to put off any final decision about quitting the talks, giving him and others a little time to try to prevent a complete breakdown. As the New York Times noted,

[n]either the Palestinian nor the Israeli leader seems willing to take significant political risks and immerse himself fully in the process, yet, pressed by an American administration that is so heavily invested in the process, neither wants to be seen as the one who walked away.

That concern with the US's position may mean even more than you think. Author and journalist Thanassis Cambanis, an instructor at Columbia University's School of International and Public Affairs, wrote this in The Daily Beast on Tuesday:

Not a single person I interviewed in the Middle East during the last two months expected anything to come of the current talks—certainly not anything good—although, for the record, no one predicted either that a failed peace process would unleash a new intifada or wholesale change in Israeli priorities.

Instead, the Arab diplomats, analysts, and activists who support Hamas and Hezbollah with whom I spoke seemed in accord that for the time being, neither the Israelis nor the Palestinians saw anything to gain from dialogue, except for earning chits with Washington.

The main benefit of a peace process, in this view, is that Washington wants one, and so long as it doesn't cost anything, Washington's allies in Ramallah and Jerusalem are happy to oblige.

In short, the word he's getting is that this is all a show: Neither side expects to gain anything but with an eye on the US, for PR reasons each wants the other to be the one to call it quits.

So okay, then, let's cut through the crap and the posturing and get to the meat of the immediate matter: the settlements. It is true that Netanyahu originally promised a one-time, not-to-be-repeated, 10-month, moratorium. It is also true, as any number of sources have pointed out, that he could face serious internal political difficulties if he supported an extension; it could lead to a major reshuffling or even potentially a fracturing of his ruling coalition.

However, it is also true that this "freeze" was much more a PR stunt than a freeze. As columnist Dror Etkes noted in the Israeli daily Haaretz, citing figures from the government's Central Bureau of Statistics,

[w]hat took place in the past few months is, in the best case scenario, not more than a negligible decrease in the number of housing units that were built in settlements. ...

[T]he truth is that the settlers know better than anyone else that not only did construction in settlements continue over the last 10 months, and vigorously, but also that a relatively large part of the houses were built on settlements that lie east of the separation fence....

And it is also true that the settlements are illegal under international law! Article 49 of the Fourth Geneva Convention makes it quite explicit:

The Occupying Power shall not deport or transfer parts of its own civilian population into the territory it occupies.

By pussy-footing around that simple fact and going on about a "moratorium" (which, let's not forget, means a pause, not an end, and which even if it became something permanent would leave the existing illegal settlements untouched) the White House and most of the US media are enabling defiance of international law and dodging an issue more central than is often realized.

That's because, and finally on this for the moment, it is also true the one of the avowed purposes of those settlements was to create "facts on the ground," to establish such a strong and widespread Israeli presence in the West Bank that dislodging it in order to create a Palestinian state would be impossible. (Note well that when Israel refers to "illegal" settlements, it means only those that have not gone through the process to receive official government approval.) The intent was and is to present Palestinians with a fait accompli, to say "This land is part of Israel. Get over it." And thus essentially to turn Palestinians into refugees or perhaps "merely" outsiders in their own homeland.

With over 300,000 Israelis already living in over 120 officially-approved settlements in the West Bank now - over 10% of the combined Jewish-Palestinian population and a figure which does not include another 190,000 in East Jerusalem - it's rather hard to imagine why the Palestinians would be willing to accept continued construction and a continued expansion of that number as talks go on. And on. And on.

(Parenthetically, the excuse some Israeli reactionaries have offered to counter that blatant illegality is that the West Bank is not "occupied," it is "disputed." Unfortunately for them, that doesn't help because that runs them up against UN Security Council Resolution 242, adopted in 1967 and agreed to by Israel in 1968, which opens by "Emphasizing the inadmissibility of the acquisition of territory by war" and shortly thereafter calls for the "Withdrawal of Israeli armed forces from territories occupied in the recent conflict," that is, the 1967 war, during which Israel seized the West Bank.)

Which bring up the big question, the one no one really wants to address: Do the sides actually want a peace agreement?

I'm convinced the Palestinians - in this case referring to the Palestinian Authority and President Abbas - do, provided certain goals are achieved. The biggest of those are borders that are something like the 1967 borders, the at least symbolic acceptance by Israel of a "right of return" of Palestinians driven from their homes in 1948, and resolving the status of East Jerusalem. That latter is the toughie as the Palestinians want it as their capital and the Jews (I use the term here as an alternative to Israelis because not all Israelis are Jewish) have deep emotional and for some religious connections to the idea of a united Jerusalem as the "eternal capital" of Israel.

But figure what a real settlement would mean to Abbas. For one thing, it would make him a huge hero and through that give him a major leg up in the ongoing long-distance political fight with Hamas. It would open up the possibilities of aid and investment to build the Palestinian economy. And it would expand his administration's authority. It's rarely realized just how geographically limited Palestinian "autonomy" really is, which is why I've included the map on the left. (I'm reminded of Yassir Arafat complaining about an earlier Israeli offer of "autonomy." He said "They offered me autonomy over garbage collection and little else.")

So Abbas has good reasons, more than adequate incentives, to agree to a settlement that meets those base requirements, the first two of which hardly seem outlandish or particularly difficult.

But Israel? Netanyahu? That is a different story.

The truth is, I don't believe Netanyahu is sincere. I don't believe his government is sincere. And I haven't believed for a while now that previous Israeli governments were sincere. In the present case, a report in the Israeli daily Haaretz says Netanyahu spent the second of his three meetings with Abbas arguing over what are the "core" issues - even though at least two previous Israeli governments had already reached agreements with the Palestinians on precisely that. And at the third meeting, he would not even talk about the details Abbas presented on his previous negotiations with former PM Ehud Olmert or the positions Abbas presented on issues such as borders, security, the refugees, Jerusalem, and the settlements. Instead, he simply repeated his position on security arrangements. What's more, according to what Abbas told diplomats after the meeting, Netanyahu wants to reach a framework agreement in a year - but implement it over 20 years. That's a lot of settlement construction.

Certainly, you would not expect all those issues to be resolved at a single meeting. But to go into such a meeting being unprepared if not outright unwilling to even talk about them? To not even be able (or again, willing) to present a position on them? This is not the mark of a serious negotiator.

Too many times there have been the dragged-out, go-nowhere negotiations, too many times there have been the bogus offers, too many times there have been the impossible demands ("a complete halt to all 'terrorism' no matter who did it before talks even begin"). And too many times the squandered - better yet, evaded - opportunities, too many times the provocative action just at the wrong time, just when it could provoke an angry reaction that would undermine the possibility of progress.

I've commented on that last point a few times before: In December 2003, when Israel launched a large-scale raid into Ramallah just two days before several Palestinian factions were to meet in Egypt to discuss halting attacks on Israel. A month later, when right after Syria offered to reopen talks, Israel announced plans for its biggest-ever settlement drive in the Golan Heights. And again in October 2007 when, just as Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice was starting a peace mission to the region, Israel declared Gaza a "hostile entity" in a move that provoked Palestinian anger and threatened to cripple preparations for a Mideast conference.

And now, just when it appears that these talks, as futile as they are, may not fall apart after all, particularly not in a way that Netanyahu could blame on Abbas, comes this:

Israel's cabinet next week will consider a bill that would require non-Jewish candidates for Israeli citizenship to pledge allegiance to the country as a Jewish state.

The bill, backed by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, calls for an amendment to Israel's citizenship law to include "a Jewish and democratic state" in a mandatory oath of loyalty.

In addition to kicking up accusations of discrimination against the country's Arab minority, observers suggested the proposal is timed to push Israel's diplomatic campaign to force the Palestinians to recognize Israel as a Jewish state as a condition for a peace accord. ...

The amendment was made public at a sensitive diplomatic juncture.

Well, surprise, surprise, surprise. The Israeli government making a provocative announcement at a "sensitive juncture." Will wonders never cease.

Not quite two years ago I wrote "An open letter to Israel" which began by saying

Israel, I write to you as someone who has never, not once, questioned your right to exist. Someone who for nearly 40 years now has advocated the "two-state" solution of mutual recognition between Israel and an independent Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza. Someone who, that is, would like to address you as a friend - but cannot. Cannot because you have made it impossible for me to be anything other than a dedicated foe of the course you have set, a course of war, of bigotry, of colonialism, of oppression. You have demonstrated for anyone with eyes to see and ears to hear that you do not want peace except the cold, deadly "peace" of domination and control.

The past two years have given me no reason to change that assessment. And more's the pity.

Hope amid the ashes

Some of the militant expansionist Israeli hardliners who are building and occupying illegal settlements in the West Bank in defiance not only of international law but even in the face of Israeli laws have adopted a new "policy" that should settle once and for all the question of are they "settlers" or are they bigoted fanatics.

It's called "the price tag." Any time the Israeli government acts to curtail their illegal activities or makes moves toward a peace settlement, they respond with violent attacks on Palestinians or Palestinian-owned property, thereby exacting a "price." If you can't understand why they would attack someone - Palestinians - in supposed retaliation for something someone else - the Israeli government - did, back up to the last two words of the previous paragraph.

One "price tag" incident occurred Monday, when settlers

launched an attack on a small Palestinian village, burning carpets and Qurans inside the village’s mosque before being expelled by the Israeli military.

The inside of the mosque had been doused with kerosene and slogans in Hebrew were written all over the mosque. ...

The timing of the attack again was clear, as Israel’s cabinet is in intense debate at the moment about extending the settlement construction freeze that expired last week. A number of settlers, as well as settler supporters in the cabinet, have expressed outrage at the idea of its extension.

But then again, things don't always work out the way the fanatics hope. The very next day, six settler rabbis

delivered a box of Korans to a West Bank mosque which had been torched by vandals, in an unusual peace gesture welcomed by Palestinians.

The delegation was led by Rabbi Menahem Froman, a founder of Eretz Shalom (Land of Peace), a small group of West Bank settlers who have reached out to Palestinians in the occupied West Bank to pursue peaceful coexistence.

They brought around a dozen copies of the Muslim holy book on a solidarity visit to the mosque in Beit Fajjar near Bethlehem the day after unidentified vandals spray-painted Hebrew insults on its walls and set it alight. ...

Several hundred Palestinians cheered as the rabbis arrived in two armoured Land Rovers accompanied by Israeli soldiers. ...

After talking with residents and examining the damage, Froman, who comes from the nearby Tekoa settlement, held hands with a Muslim cleric as they both raised copies of the Koran in the air.

"My belief is in peace and in God," the white-bearded rabbi told reporters.

"Those who act against peace act against God. God will defeat those who do things like this."

Palestinians at the event expressed a similar sentiment.

"We are all from the same family and we must live as good neighbours," said Abed Farajallah, a Palestinian from the southern West Bank town of Idhna.

But, as Jason Ditz wrote at AntiWar.com, when it comes to the West Bank, it don't come easy

and the plan for these settlers to join with Palestinians in a pro-peace demonstration were foiled by the Israeli military, which blocked them from attending and later clashed with them.

Meanwhile, more attacks seem to be in the offing, as a right wing settler group condemned the plans of the Israeli government to shutter an illegally built synagogue in a remote settlement and threatened to set Palestinian farmlands on fire and launch more “price tag” attacks if the Israeli government doesn’t back down.

The Israeli government joined the Palestinian Authority and the White House in condemning the attack; Netanyahu called it "terrorism." So now we will see just how serious the Israelis are about "fighting terrorism" when it can't be blamed on Hamas.

Oh, what a beautiful morning

Oh, what a beautiful day....

October 2. Gandhi's birthday. And the date of the One Nation Working Together rally in DC.

By almost all accounts it was an exciting and inspiring day - even if it was, as the satirical Charlie King song has it, "vaguely reminiscent of the '60s." I haven't written about it because I assume you know about it, plus that you were there and/or read accounts of it. Unhappily, I wasn't there - I wanted to go but for various reasons having to do with arrangements here it just couldn't be worked out.

So assuming as I do that you know about it and have seen at least a couple of the many pictures of that day that are out there, I'm going to add just a few observations of my own.

One is that I just knew that the numbers game was going to get played: Was this bigger or smaller than Glen "I am the Messiah" Beck's on August 28? Well, in fact it seemed to me, based on the pictures, that it was somewhat but not significantly smaller - but frankly I really don't care because I got tired of that game a long time ago. Back in the days when the DC police would give crowd estimates, I used to say you could get a fair guess as to the total by taking the average of the police estimate and the organizers' estimate and shading it a little toward the latter because the police tended to underestimate more than the organizers tended to overestimate.

On the other hand, the organizers' estimate here of an attendance of 175,000 was surely a lot closer to the mark than Beck's wildly inflated claim of 500,000-plus for his revival meeting - especially since according to an aerial survey of the crowd commissioned by CBS News, Beck's crowd actually numbered less than 90,000.

That in turn would make the total for October 2 "only" about 70,000 or so, but leave that aside because what I think is more important and can be safely said in any event is that the October 2 crowd was far more diverse both racially and ethnically than that Beck drew. If you wanted to judge on a "looks like America" scale, One Nation would drub Beck-o-Rama - that fact being one of the things that drives the fear in the Beckians: More and more, they do not "represent America."

At the same time, I knew I knew I knew as soon as I saw this photo from CNN, obviously taken before the rally started, that some rightwing nutzoid somewhere would take that or some similar shot and use it to claim that the rally was a fizzle. And indeed one, someone of who I had to this point been happily unaware, did just that, using a photo taken after the rally was over to claim that only "a few hundred losers" showed up - a claim so out of it that even his commenters could not swallow it whole.

Something else here is that whenever I attended these kinds of huge rallies, I never listened to the speakers. I usually spent the time roaming the edges of the crowd, reading signs and seeing what sorts of literature were being passed out. So had I been able to go to this one, perhaps I wouldn't have been as disappointed as I could have been - since I wouldn't have been aware of it as I could have been - by the fact that what came from the speakers' platform amounted to "elect Democrats." October 2 was promoted as a rally to demand jobs, justice, and educational opportunity, but what it came out as from the stage was a big Get Out The Vote For The Democrats event. That was not only a major disappointment, I say it was a serious failing.

Now, I am going to vote - other than a few strictly local elections, the only time in my adult life I haven't voted was once when I moved into an area too late to register - and while for Governor I'm voting Green, for Congress I will vote for the Democrat because he's reasonably good and there is no one better on the ballot. But if you try to tell me, especially at a "Jobs, Justice, and Education" protest, which should be about policy, not party, that the answer to our problems and pitfalls is keeping Congress in the hands of the Democrats who have been either (depending on your viewpoint and assuming there's a difference) corporate-toady fucking assholes or GOPper-accommodationist fucking assholes, well I'm going to tell you to go fuck off. Voting for a Democrat can be a tactic. It is not an answer.

Talking with Amy Goodman on Democracy Now! on October 4, journalist and filmmaker Danny Schechter expressed much the same idea in much politer terms. I did disagree with his first comment:

They were speaking not just to themselves, but to America. ... [T]hey missed an opportunity, I believe, to offer their analysis to the American people, who don’t get it in the media....

The idea of a rally is to rally. It is a time to rouse, to inspire, to demand, and to show there is support for those demands. It is a time to press your case to the powers-that-be and to show people who may be leaning in your direction that yes, they are not alone and others feel much the same way so come on in, the water's fine. It is not a time to "offer your analysis."

But what he said after that was, I think, spot on, especially as it relates not so much to the particular event itself but to the broader effort that should surround it:

[T]there was very little offered about what to do about all of this, except voting in November. And we all know that voting in November to return to Congress even people who are supposedly, you know, trying to do the right thing is very problematic, because we know that—how badly they’ve done. You know, even the Democrats are saying, you know, "Even if you don’t like us, vote for us, because we’re better than the other guys." That’s not much of an appeal.

So, where was the strategy? Where was the plan for the future? Where was the organizational vision for how to bring these people to stay together to work together to move for change? That was sort of missing, and I think it became, in a way, more of an event, more of a movie than a movement.

After Goodman mentioned that the people out on the grass "were more critical than the message from the stage," and "it was about how careful [the speakers] were not to criticize the administration," Schechter remarked on something I have said so damn many times (here, for example) it makes my teeth ache:

[I]f there’s pressure on the right and no pressure on the left, the left is not going to be taken seriously, as it has not been, because the administration feels they can take people like us, at large, for granted. ... But the people who want to see this administration really push forward a progressive agenda have to do more than just rally on the Mall. They have to organize. They have to try to build support for a program for change. And that, so far, has been missing.

And October 2 did very little to change that. And as long as the focus comes down to "vote for Democrats because OMIGOD! REPUBLICANS!" it's still not going to change.

Footnote: On another front, Jon Stewart's upcoming "Rally to Restore Sanity," with its "the left and right are both insane and wanting Bush administration officials prosecuted for their documented illegal wiretaps, illegal torture, and illegal wars is exactly the same as saying Barack Obama is a Kenyan Muslim" theme has obtained evidence of just how frivolous it is: Obama approves of it.

Obama said he was "amused" by Stewart's rally and that it's for people who expect some common sense and courtesy in their daily interactions.

The president said that having those voices lifted up is, as he put it, "really important."

And just how innocuous, how vacuous, how utterly unthreatening, how safe does an event have to be to get such an endorsement?

Everything you need to know

Okay, I've had everything you need to know in two sentences and everything you need to know in one sentence. Now comes a case of everything you need to know in just one phrase.

But getting there takes a bit of an introduction.

Some years ago, my wife and I seriously investigated the possibility of a version of living on the road: buying and living in an RV or what was then called a fifth-wheel for at least a few years if not longer. This was a time when my wife, an RN, could get work pretty much anywhere with the Traveling Nurse Corps and I could do odd jobs; plus there was a possibility I could do a newspaper column about politics and our travels.

Well, the column possibility fell through and we ultimately gave up the whole idea because try as I might, I couldn't make the finances work out in a way that would allow my wife to work any significantly lesser amount of time. So while the ideas of the travel and the seeing/living in different parts of the country were attractive, the bottom line was that we would be giving up a fair amount of security without the intended gain of more free time. It just didn't seem worth it. In the years since, the dream has not died, but the practicalities are even more against it.

There are people who pursue that dream, and more power to them. The point here, however, is that for other people, a good and increasing number of them in fact, making an RV your home is not a dream or a lifestyle, it's a necessity. From the NY Times:

Los Angeles - Every day, Diane Butler and her husband park their two hand-painted R.V.’s in a lot at the edge of Venice Beach here, alongside dozens of other rickety, rusted campers from the 1970s and ’80s. During the day, she sells her artwork on the boardwalk. When the parking lot closes at sunset, she and the other R.V.-dwellers drive a quarter-mile inland to find somewhere on the street to park for the night.

Their nomadic existence might be ending, though. The Venice section of Los Angeles has become the latest California community to enact strict new regulations limiting street parking and banning R.V.’s from beach lots — regulations that could soon force Ms. Butler, 58, to leave the community where she has lived for four decades. ...

Southern California, with its forgiving weather, has long been a popular destination for those living in vehicles and other homeless people. And for decades, people living in R.V.’s, vans and cars have settled in Venice, the beachfront Los Angeles community once known as the “Slum by the Sea” and famous for its offbeat, artistic culture.

Yet even as the economic downturn has forced more people out of their homes and into their cars, vehicle-dwellers are facing fewer options, with more communities trying to push them out.

What we're talking about here is people who are homeless - or, if you prefer, "semi-homeless," since they do have some sort of shelter - who are living in RVs because that's the best housing they can manage. As law professor and activist on homelessness issues Gary Blasi was quoted as saying,

most people choose to live in vehicles only when the alternative is sleeping in a shelter or on the street.

“The idea of carefree vagabonds is statistically false,” Professor Blasi said. “More often, these are people who lived in apartments in Venice before they lived in R.V.’s. The reason for losing housing is usually the loss of a job or some health care crisis.”

Neil Donovan of the National Coalition for the Homeless echoed that, saying that

vehicle-dwellers often end up on the street after their vehicles are towed or become inoperable. When his organization surveyed tent camps in California, they found that many residents had come from R.V.’s.

But why is this crackdown happening in Venice, "the 'Slum by the Sea' ... famous for its offbeat, artistic culture?" Why now, after "decades" of van-dwellers settling in Venice? Well, here comes that phrase, the one that explains it all in just three words, with the emphasis obviously added:

In the past, bohemian Venice was tolerant of vehicle-dwellers, but, increasingly, the proliferation of R.V.’s in this gentrifying neighborhood has prompted efforts to remove them.

And there you have it. The "better sorts" are moving in, in search of cheaper housing and good investments - and we all know how icky they find the sight of their inferiors.

Footnote to the preceding

On a somewhat brighter note, Senate progress on the misnamed Combating Online Infringements and Counterfeits Act (COICA) has been put off until after the election. While that doesn't mean the bill has been defeated, it does mean that the chances of doing so, at least for this Congress, have clearly improved.

The bill, introduced by Pat Leahy on September 20, was scheduled for a markup session just one week later. This rush to judgment was stalled when staffers realized the Senate would likely adjourn before that meeting could begin.

The reason this is good news is that the bill is, as EFF labels it, "an Internet censorship bill" that would empower the DOJ to hinder or even ban access to websites on lists it would compile. More specifically, EFF explains, it

would allow the Attorney General and the Department of Justice to break the Internet one domain at a time — by requiring domain registrars/registries, ISPs, DNS providers, and others to block Internet users from reaching certain websites. The bill would also create two Internet blacklists. The first is a list of all the websites hit with a censorship court order from the Attorney General. The second, more worrying, blacklist is a list of domain names that the Department of Justice determines — without judicial review — are "dedicated to infringing activities." The bill only requires blocking for domains in the first list, but strongly suggests that domains on the second list should be blocked as well by providing legal immunity for Internet intermediaries and DNS operators who decide to block domains on the second blacklist as well. (It's easy to predict that there will be tremendous pressure for Internet intermediaries of all stripes to block these "deemed infringing" sites on the second blacklist.) ...

[T]he DMCA [the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1996] already gives copyright owners legal tools to remove infringing material piece-by-piece, and to obtain injunctions requiring ISPs to block certain offshore infringing websites. The misuse of the existing DMCA provisions have had a tremendously damaging impact on fair use and free expression. By comparison, COICA streamlines and vastly expands this; it would allow the AG to shoot down a whole domain including all the blog posts, images, backups, and files underneath it. In other words, it's not just possible but probable that a great deal of legitimate, protected speech will be taken down in the name of copyright enforcement.

The way the bill would work is by interfering with the net's domain name system, or DNS. When you enter a web address in your browser, the DNS translates it into the form the system uses and tells your browser where that address can be found. Under the bill, the DNS in effect would have to tell your browser "ya can't get theah from heah."

Generally speaking[, EFF's legislative analysis says,] the bill forces all the Internet "middlemen" to act as if a part of the Internet doesn't exist, even though that page may otherwise be completely available and accessible.

As the group notes, if the bill passes the list of targets could conceivably include hosting websites (because in the absence of a takedown notice they don't police files, so the DOJ could decide there is "too much" piracy, making that "central" to their business), MP3 blogs and mashup sites (because the DOJ, under expected pressure from the RIAA, could declare such mashups are not "fair use"), and sites that advocate for p2p technology and/or piracy (because, while there is a great deal of Constitutionally-protected speech there, posts on the sites regularly link to tools and information potentially useful in piracy, and DOJ could decide that piracy is therefore "central" to the site's purpose).

Indeed[, EFF says,] had this bill been passed five or ten years ago, YouTube might not exist today. In other words, the collateral damage from this legislation would be enormous.

There are already laws and procedures in place for taking down sites that violate the law. This act would allow the Attorney General to censor sites even when no court has found they have infringed copyright or any other law.

And even where a site had violated the law, it would apply a bludgeon rather than a scalpel, smashing the legal along with the illegal. This bill is a really bad idea.

It's last week's news

Updated But still too important to let pass without comment.

Net neutrality, put simply, is the principle that providers can't discriminate among users in managing traffic flow. They can't, for example, give some corporate behemoth the digital equivalent of a superhighway with all green lights while relegating some crummy blog with 35 hits a day to a rutted side road with a stop sign at every intersection. Traffic is traffic and it all gets treated equally.

Net neutrality is one of the reasons the internet has thrived: It has been, at least technologically and theoretically, equally available to all rather than being dominated and ruled by a handful of media conglomerates, à la broadcast media. So of course corporations hate it and persistently have tried to undermine it.

One of the people who was supposedly a champion of net neutrality is Democratic Congressman Henry Waxman of California, who chairs the House's Energy and Commerce Committee. That accolade, apparently, is no longer deserved. Raw Story reported last week that Waxman has put forth a proposal that

under the banner of mandating network neutrality would instead prevent the government from requiring broadband providers to treat all Internet traffic equally.

Waxman, who has vowed that he would support the so-called 'Net Neutrality' policy proposals favored by most Democrats and progressives, has instead put forward an as-yet-unsettled legislative framework that explicitly prohibits the Federal Communications Commission from regulating broadband Internet under Title II of the Communications Act: a caveat key to implementation of what's been called the Internet's First Amendment.

Should the president sign a bill containing Waxman's language, it would effectively kill 'Net Neutrality' efforts and make key parts of a hotly contested proposal by Google and Verizon the law of the land.

Without plunging into the details of that proposal, I'll mention that the Electronic Frontier Foundation has an analysis of it, various points of which it rates "Good," "Interesting," "Troublesome," or "Fail." Even at that, I'm not sure I can agree with some parts they consider "good," such as "limit[ing] the FCC to case-by-case enforcement of consumer protection and nondiscrimination requirements and prohibit[ing] broad rulemaking." While I can share their concern about giving the FCC overly-broad authority, a "case-by-case" approach to the internet, with its tens of millions of content providers from major media outlets to individual blogs, would make any nondiscrimination requirements essentially unenforceable - a concern shared by others, even among some who see good parts to the corporate proposal. Indeed, as Raw Story points out,

[f]rom an Internet user's perspective, traffic shaping and discriminatory practices are impossible to prove without the service provider's own admission that it is occurring.

Despite that, Waxman's bill embraces case-by-case enforcement and states, Raw Story reports, that it gives the FCC no new authority to regulate providers unless the company actually elects to be regulated. What's more, violations of the rules would incur a maximum fine of $2 million, chump change to the majors, particularly in light of the profit potential of skirting those rules.

But even more importantly, the Google-Verizon vision would exempt wireless networks - almost universally agreed to be the future of internet access - from neutrality rules.

John Bergmayer, a staff attorney at Public Knowledge, has said that in doing so, the corporate plan

draws illogical distinctions both on the basis of what technology you use to access the Internet, and between “the public Internet” (Verizon’s mantra on the press call) and “additional online services.”

The Google/Verizon blog post misleadingly mentions “the FCC’s current wireline broadband openness principles.” But the FCC’s 2005 Internet Policy Statement refers to broadband, and does not carve out a distinction for wireless. The FCC was right to see that the Internet is the Internet—it makes no sense to apply different principles to different technologies.

That is, what Google and Verizon are trying to do is to create distinctions that did not exist previously in order to carve out a space where they can act to pursue their own corporate interests without oversight. And Henry Waxman is right there with them. While his bill

carries language that speaks of preventing ISPs from "unjustly or unreasonably" discriminating against "lawful traffic," the spirit of the rule is completely undermined by text that follows.

For today's fast-growing wireless networks ... it makes a provision allowing for "reasonable network management," but prohibits blocking "lawful Internet websites".

Which raises two enormous problems: One is, what defines "lawful?" Who gets to decide what is a "lawful" site? The primary issue here seems to be peer-to-peer sites, which the majors and their entertainment corporation partners hate with a passion. It's safe to say that at any given moment on any given p2p site there is a lot of copyrighted material being illegally distributed and a lot of other material, both copyrighted and non-copyrighted, being legally distributed. Is that site "legal" or not? Does it depend on how much of the traffic is being distributed contrary to copyright restrictions? Who decides how much is too much?

Here's another: Suppose the relevant honchos of some provider corporation dislike the War Resisters League because of its support for conscientious tax resistance and nonviolence civil disobedience. Can that provider block access to the WRL site on the grounds that its support for such law-breaking makes it an "unlawful" site? Who decides? And on what basis?

But Raw Story nabs the big one, the one that just slips by in a single phrase but makes all the difference:

That term, "reasonable network management," is defined as "a network management practice that is appropriate and tailored to achieving a legitimate network management function". Waxman's text goes on to explain that "appropriate and tailored practices to reduce or mitigate the effects of what it calls "traffic that is harmful to or unwanted by users" are permissible.

The catch: "Users" includes "premise operators, [...] the provider’s network, or the Internet".

Stated in plain language, under Waxman's proposal, traffic that is unwanted on a provider's network may still be subject to "management."

Stated in even plainer language, in Waxman's bill providers are "users" and in the case of wireless networks they are free "deprioritize" or even to block any content which they do not want. While the bill bans blocking "lawful applications that compete with the provider’s voice or video communications services," I'm really not worried about ads for T-Mobile not making it across Verizon's network; I sincerely doubt there will be a problem. I am, however, worried about sites like Verizon Sucks Ass and Google Sucks and other better- or lesser-known voices of whatever style or focus or seriousness that are for whatever reason unwelcome in the offices of C. S. Lewis's "quiet men with white collars and cut fingernails and smooth-shaven cheeks who do not need to raise their voice" being banished to some dark back alley of the internet.

Ultimately, as PC World columnist Ian Paul said back in August,

[t]he Google-Verizon proposal appears to make room for a two-tiered Internet: the public Internet we use today and a private one for premium services. That raises the question about what happens to the regular Internet in the long term? Would broadband providers be compelled to maintain and upgrade their regular Internet services? Could carriers cap regular Internet speeds at a certain level, and then force users over to the proposed private service if they wanted better broadband speeds? How does an open or so-called public Internet survive when corporations have financial incentives, such as private networks, to ignore it?

That is the future Henry Waxman has now endorsed, in fact for which he is pushing.

Did he ever did actually believe in net neutrality? I admit, I wonder, since a much better bill, the Internet Freedom and Preservation Act, has languished in the Energy and Commerce Committee - the committee Waxman chairs - for over year.

The fact remains, if he ever did believe in it either he doesn't now or he's been rooked by corporations that are prepared to pretty much accept the status quo that exists in the present for the sake of owning the future.

More and better Democrats, indeed.

Updated with a Footnote: I've learned since that when he presented his proposal, Waxman said that

if efforts to create bipartisan broadband legislation fail, the Federal Communications Commission should move broadband businesses under Title II of the Communications Act, a possibility phone and cable companies strongly oppose.

"If our efforts to find bipartisan consensus fail, the FCC should move forward under Title II. The bottom line is that we must protect the open Internet. If Congress can’t act, the FCC must," he said in a statement.

It appears, then, that Waxman is wielding the sword of pushing for regulation of broadband carriers as "common carriers" like telephone companies, and so subject to equal access rules, as a sort of weapon to pressure the corporations to get behind his bill. A "Hey, look, it could be worse" argument.

I'd like to be able to say that Waxman's repeated support for the principle of net neutrality mitigates some of the concern about his proposal, but it doesn't. The proposal still says what it says and either Waxman doesn't grasp the import of his own proposal or he has decided that it's sufficient to have a philosophical statement in favor of net neutrality even as actual control of the future of broadband is handed over to the corporate giants.

An Amusingly Revealing Footnote to the Footnote: It turns out that some GOPpers are feeling trapped between some of their big donors among the telcom industry (which likes some form of government regulation of the internet because it protects them against competitors while not damaging their positions) and their TP followers, who opposed to any sort of regulation whatsoever. Which means, true to their logic-less libertarian roots, the TPers think government is so eee-vuul that they actually want to have a handful of corporate behemoths dictating what can and can't be sent over the web, when, and how fast.

The Crawling Geek

Adding a bit to the overall mystery of Stonehenge comes the fact that in ancient times it may have been a tourist destination - at least it was a place people from quite some distance came to see.

Studies of the skeleton of an adolescent boy from some 3,500 years ago found near the site suggest that he traveled all the way from the Mediterranean - potentially Italy, Spain or southern France - to the southwest of England. ...

Another body found near the famous stone complex has been identified as coming from the German Alpine foothills some 800 years earlier.

So over 4,000 years ago, not only was Stonehenge being put to some actual use but knowedge of it was spread wide enough that people traveled halfway across Europe to be there.

Knowledge of the skeletons themselves was not new - the boy was found five years ago and the German before that - but determining where they came from, is.

Tooth enamel forms in a child's first few years, so it stores a chemical record of the environment in which the individual grew up. ...

Most oxygen in teeth and bone comes from drinking water - which is itself derived from rain or snow.

In warm climates, drinking water contains a higher ratio of heavy oxygen (O-18) to light oxygen (O-16) than in cold climates. So comparing the oxygen isotope ratio in teeth with that of drinking water from different regions can provide information about the climate in which a person was raised.

Most rocks carry a small amount of the element strontium (Sr), and the ratio of strontium 87 and strontium 86 isotopes varies according to local geology.

The isotope ratio of strontium in a person's teeth can provide information on the geological setting where that individual lived in childhood.

By combining the techniques, archaeologists can gather data pointing to regions where a person may have been raised.

One interesting thing is that both skeletons seem to indicate the presence of some sort of illness or injury. The boy died at 14 or 15 and since the article makes no mention of the skeleton bearing marks of violence, he apparently died young of some sickness.

The German seems to have suffered from a painful leg condition.

It may be that Stonehenge was a center of healing, drawing people from across Europe in search of cures....

Nobody is quite sure what the site was used for. It could have been a religious site built by sun worshipers, since the axis that runs through the center of the stone circle aligns with the midsummer sunrise.

Actually, it doesn't anymore due to Earth's precession of the equinoxes, but it did a few thousand years ago. Personally and in what is hardly an unshared opinion, I think part of the problem of "what was Stonehenge used for" is that is was used for different things by different people over the 1500 or so years in which the site was in use.

Whatever drew these ancient travelers to the location, they certainly weren't budget travelers. The boy was found with a 90-piece amber necklace, while the German had copper daggers and gold hair clasps.

"People who can get these rare and exotic materials are people of some importance," Andrew Fitzpatrick of Wessex Archeology told BBC News.

So were they seeking some sort of medical miracle? Was this a Bronze Age Lourdes? Or were they each on some (very) early version of The Grand Tour who just happened to die while they were there?

Questions are cool.

Footnote: Major props to the first one who can identify the source, the theme if you will, that provides the titles of a number of the science posts, marked by use of the word "geek" somewhere in the title.

A few random bits and pieces

Some things I noticed over the past week or so to which I wasn't going to devote a full post but still deserved to be mentioned, arranged chronologically.

- September 24: Citigroup, which received $45 billion in government bailout money and still holds such large amounts of bad loans and investments that it posted a loss in the third quarter, is giving millions of dollars in raises to top executives by paying them in stock to get around a cap on cash pay.

A couple of weeks ago I had a post called "Everything you need to know in two sentences." Consider this everything you need to know in one sentence.

- September 25: Fred Korematsu, a Japanese-American who refused to enter an internment camp in 1942 and was arrested for it, is to be honored by the state of California. A new law designates January 30 as Fred Korematsu Day of Civil Liberties and the Constitution.

It would have been nice if this had been done while Korematsu was still alive (he died five years ago), but ain't that always the way: The rebels get jailed while they are alive and honored when they are safely dead.

- September 27: Appalachia Rising staged a demonstration of about 2,000 Appalachians and supporters, who marched from the EPA to the White House, demanding an end to mountaintop-removal coal mining. At the White House, about 100 people were arrested in nonviolent civil disobedience, sitting down on the sidewalk and refusing to leave.

I have to say that video of the event, which included the crowd chanting "What do we want? Clean water! When do we want it? Now!" and a speaker crying out "Power to the people!" brought a smile to the face and some cheer (i.e., encouragement) to the heart of this worn-out DFH.

- September 29: A police officer from the town of Monck's Corner, South Carolina, has been fired for violating official policy. Y'see, police there are allowed to take their cruisers home and the unnamed officer thought he'd help out a charity fundraiser carwash for the Shriners Hospital in Georgia. So he had his own car washed there and then brought his cruiser.

But no good deed goes unpunished, so when his superiors heard that the car had been photographed being washed by women in bikinis, they fired him.

That is stupid enough, but when I think of all the cops who have walked after harassing people, beating people, tasering people (often repeatedly), shooting people, killing people, who walked because it was "reasonable" or "appropriate" or "in line with policy," it becomes thoroughly disgusting.

- September 29: A study claims that laws banning texting while driving have not reduced accidents.

This really was a lame study, as it examined accident rates in some states with anti-texting laws, comparing the rate just shortly before the law was passed to shortly after. However, it made no attempt to see if the rate of texting while driving had changed, nor did it consider any issues of how strictly the law was being enforced. What's more, it ignored the fact that behavior related to a change in a law generally does not happen immediately but develops over time. Just lame.

Finally, there is this:

- September 29: Canadian Minister of Justice Rob Nicholson announced that the government will appeal an Ontario court ruling that struck down key provisions of Canada's prostitution laws.

I really just included this because I was amused that my news aggregator filed it under "Business."

Maybe Alan Simpson is in for a bigger fight than he thought

CBS News reported yesterday that

[a] group of Democrats today pressed President Obama's bipartisan fiscal commission, which is will be putting fourth recommendations on December 1st to reduce the deficit, not to include any cuts to Social Security when they do.

The National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform "should keep their paws off" Social Security, Rep. John Conyers (D-Mich.) said on a phone call with reporters, calling for "no benefit cuts, no raising the retirement age, no privatization."

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) said explicitly that the purpose of the call was to warn the commission not to include recommendations to cut Social Security. "If you do we'll vote it down, and do everything we can to see it defeated," he said.

On another front, a letter circulated among members of the House by Rep. Raul Grijalva vowing to vote down the Commission's recommendations if they include any cuts in Social Security (including raising the retirement age) now has 102 signers - including five members of the Blue Dog coalition.

I can't help but wonder if this passion for keeping the system intact will melt away in the face of White House stubbornness and eagerness to placate conservatives, just as similar passion melted in the health care debate. Still, it's good to at least see some overt pushback on the moves to use Social Security as the sacrificial lamb on the altar of deficit reduction, to be presented as a burnt offering to the gods of the banks and investment houses and yes I know that was an incredibly strained bit of imagery. It's still good to see open resistance to cutting SS among members of Congress.

Yes, of course there's a Footnote: As another example of "know your sources," in its own short article on the Democrats' statement, The Hill referred to both "the nation's looming debt crisis" and "the looming fiscal crisis." But perhaps "looming," with all its overtones of imminent danger (How much more imminent can danger be than a "looming crisis?") was just the Word-of-the-Day at the place - especially since the same article also referred to the "looming elections."

More seriously, it described Sherrod Brown as having "argued that working class citizens couldn't reasonably survive an older retirement age," a statement that seems to make little sense and reads as thought The Hill wrote it with a smirk. What Brown really said was that

while raising the retirement age may not seem like a big deal to white collar workers, it would be devastating for people who work on their feet, such as a waitress or a carpenter.

Or a nurse. It's amazing to me how we already seem to have forgotten that not that long ago, 65 was the "normal" retirement age and that we have already repeatedly raised that age. Now, normal retirement age is 66 for those born between 1943 and 1954 and stretches out to 67 for those born in or after 1960. To further stretch that out to 70, as some GOPpers have proposed, would indeed be a cruel thing for people whose bodies can be so worn by the stresses of their work that they look forward to retiring at 62, despite the reduced benefits, just to be able to be away from it. But somehow I doubt that is something that Sir Boehner of Orange or Lord Alan - or Lord Erskine, for that matter - have ever considered.

It surely is something The Hill didn't.

A little T&A

Updated Yesterday, in a wonderful bit of political theater, Terry O'Neill, President of NOW, presented professional jackass Alan Simpson a bag of 1500 plastic baby bottle nipples in a campaign called "Tits for an Ass."

It was intended to dramatize their demand that Simpson have the "decency" to step down from Obama's Fiscal Commission in the wake of his calling Social Security "a milk cow with 310 million tits" and telling Ashley Carson of the Older Women's League to "get honest work!"

“The Fiscal Commission should be led by someone who will actually try to address the federal budget deficit, instead of using it as an excuse to undermine Social Security by cutting benefits or raising the retirement age,” O'Neill added. “Alan Simpson is not that person.”

Of course, the oh-so-serious pundits had to look for ways to dismiss it. The eternally-smirking Dana Milbank referred to it as "chest-bumping" between Simpson and NOW, focusing as always on the peripheral rather than the meat of the actual issue. Meanwhile, Tracy Clark-Flory, a staff writer at Salon who is so serious that she got the vapors just typing the phrase "Tits for an Ass" (no joke; she claimed doing so made her blush), called the action a "pathetic" "stunt" that only made NOW "look ridiculous." I can't understand how she could say that while also saying "I'm not sure" if the protest was "an effective way of communicating [the] point" that Simpson shouldn't be on the panel, but serious pundits don't have to be consistent.

She also appeared - it was hard to tell, but she appeared - to think the protest was over Simpson using the word "tits" in writing Carson. NOW's press release is focused entirely on Social Security and mentions the milk cow phrase only to call it an insult to "those who depend on Social Security." But of course, serious pundits are not required to have their facts straight, either.

Simpson didn't address NOW's criticism during the hearing, but co-chair Erskine Bowles, President Bill Clinton's chief of staff, defended Simpson's stance on Social Security.

"For those of you here today that want to save Social Security, I can assure you that the one thing Alan Simpson talks about is simply making Social Security solvent for 75 years," he said. "You don't have to worry about Alan Simpson."

Well, we could make Social Security solvent for far longer than 75 years, I expect, by raising the retirement age to 85 and cutting benefits in half. Problem solved. Oh, no one's proposing to do anything like that? (Aside from the privatizers, that is.) Well, you can't deny that it would make the system solvent for a very long time, yes? So the real issue is not making - actually keeping is the accurate word - the system solvent, it's how you do that.

Which means that, to use Simpson's words, "babbling into the ether" about "making Social Security solvent for 75 years" is utterly, completely, totally, vacuous. It means nothing, it tells you nothing.

But it sounds all good and reassuring, yes? So when Erskine Bowles says "You don't have to worry about Alan Simpson," by "you" he doesn't mean us. He means the people who put him where he is. As I said a bit back, Alan Simpson is not on the President’s Fiscal Commission despite his attitudes, he's there because of his attitudes. And don't you forget it.

Footnote the One: A month ago, Dean Baker of the Center for Economic and Policy Research offered a terrific "quick list of study questions on Social Security for Simpson." I won't try to summarize it here be I urge you to check it out, especially #1, as that relates to something I've said more than once, most recently just over a month ago: The business about the system being able to pay only 75% of scheduled benefits in 2037 is thoroughly, totally, bogus because it does not take into account the real (post-inflation) value of those benefits.

Footnote the Two: According to The Hill,

Standing on one side of the dais, O'Neill presented the bag of nipples to Simpson, who didn't take them, but just smiled and said, "You should send that to a children's hospital."

Close: They were trying to give them to someone acting like a child.

Updated with Footnote the Three: I see where Simpson dismissed O'Neill with "Merry Christmas." Now, how can we entrust planning for our nation's fiscal future to someone who doesn't even know what month it is? And if you think that reasoning is silly, consider his on the subject at hand. I think I come out looking rather good.

An I. F. Stone "shirttail"

Izzy Stone became well-known for paying attention to the "shirttail" of a news article. He explained the term in this 1988 interview:

You know what a "shirttail" is? When a paper picks up some information from the wires, related to a larger story, the desk editors will run it as little paragraphs following the paper’s own story. They hang down at the end like a shirttail.

He often found that the shirttail was more interesting or revealing than - and sometimes directly contradicted - the story's lead.

Well, on Tuesday, AP provided a damn fine example of that. Here's the lead:

Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales said Tuesday that whistle-blower website WikiLeaks' decision to publish entire contents of classified U.S. military documents was irresponsible and could put innocent lives at risk.

WikiLeaks drew worldwide publicity in late July when it posted a huge trove of secret U.S. military documents about the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. The U.S. Defense Department has warned it could have blood on its hands for publishing documents that name Afghan sources.

Besides calling WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange "irresponsible," Wales accused him of "dumping all kinds of crazy information online and get[ting] people killed." (And irrelevantly groused about WikiLeaks using the term "wiki.")

Now, I'm sure all the folks in the White House and the DOD are delighted that the media has swallowed their line and has made the leaking itself, rather than what the leak revealed, the story. But compare all that with this, the last line in the story, the shirttail:

The WikiLeaks leak is unrivaled in its scope, but so far there is no evidence that any Afghans named in the leaked documents as defectors or informants from the Taliban insurgency have been harmed in retaliation.

Which surely does re-raise the question of just who it is that is endangering the lives of civilians in Afghanistan and Pakistan and the media's almost-eager capitulation to the militarists' framing of the issue.