A review essay of A New Voice for Israel: Fighting for the Survival of the Jewish Nation by Jeremy Ben-Ami. (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011). ISBN-10: 0230112749. Price US$26.00, 256 pages.

Jeremy Ben-Ami is the founder and president of J Street, a new interest group for Israel which presents an alternative, more liberal voice to the American government and media. His well-established rivals are the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) and allied groups which are conservative, powerful, and associated with the right in Israel.

I've been wondering in recent days if the Obama White House are really throwing some journalists and their own people under the PR bus. It certainly looks like it. After David Sanger's report on the Stuxnet virus and the "Kill List" piece by Jo Becker and Scott Shane, everyone and their grumpy uncle assumed that Obama's White House had sanctioned anonymous leaking to bolster the president's reputation as a tough guy, and thus his election chances against a Republican Party that always tries to paint the Democratic Party guy as "weak on national security".

The NYT's reporters bolstered this view. The Kill List story cited "three dozen of [Obama's] current and former advisers" who gave interviews on the subject. Sanger in his cyberwar report wrote of "interviews over the past 18 months with current and former American, European and Israeli officials involved in the program, as well as a range of outside experts" (emphasis mine - SH). David Sanger has gone further and told CNN's "Reliable Sources "Did I talk to a lot of people in the administration? Of course." That so many at such a high level of clearance could have talked out of school without official approval seemed a greater stretch.

I am trying to figure out Iran’s strategy in the current round of negotiations. The P5+1 presented a proposal in Baghdad last month. Iran has not responded to that proposal, nor presented a proposal of its own, although a number of Iranian government officials have made a variety of statements, some of them contradicting each other.

The preferred end states for Iran and the P5+1 emphasize different aspects of what might be a settlement. Neither side has made its preferred end state explicit, which is fair enough in negotiations. A public statement makes it harder to compromise. However, it is possible to infer something about the end states from the two sides' public statements and actions.

Germany's defense minister, telling it straight:

In an interview published in the Monday edition of the daily newspaper Tageszeitung, Thomas de Maiziere lamented that “the continued waffling by people who bear none of the responsibility creates expectations in regions like Syria, thereby causing terrible disappointment.”

De Maiziere added that he found it "hardly bearable that some coffee house intellectuals call for the deployment of soldiers in the world without being accountable for it."

Word.

Christine Legarde, head of the IMF, tells CNN’s Christiane Amanpour there's less than 3 months in which to save the Euro.

She also admits some movement on austerity policies: "You need to reduce the fiscal deficit gradually, steadily," Lagarde said. "It doesn't have to be this belt-tightening that everybody is talking about, but it has to be solid."

Finally, Euro financial bosses are starting to make sense - but only after the people kicked up their heels and threatened to burn the whole thing down if they kept up their draconian robbery of the populave to pay the debts of the elite. Still and all, letting the Euro fail probably has as much going for it as an idea as another major land war in Asia does.

Julian Borger at The Guardian notes desperation behind the scenes heading into the Moscow summit between the P5+1 and Iran.

The foreign ministry political directors from the six-nation group (US, UK, France, Germany, China and Russia) are meeting in Strasbourg today and tomorrow to try to figure out how to keep the talks on track. The EU foreign policy chief, Catherine Ashton is due to talk to Jalili by phone tonight, and the Russian foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, is to fly to Tehran on Wednesday to try to ensure that the Moscow round is not remembered as the dead-end of nuclear diplomacy.

From Washington, Laura Rozen, who follows the talks for Al Monitor, reported last week that the Obama administration was weighing up a possible change of tack, pushing for a comprehensive deal rather the piecemeal, confidence-building proposal put on the table in Baghdad.

European diplomats said they had heard mixed signals from the policy debate in Washington and would wait to see what the American chief negotiator, Wendy Sherman, brought to the table in Strasbourg. Their bottom line: this will ultimately be a deal between the US and Iran and we will back anything that has a chance of breaking the impasse.

That the Europeans are essentially bystanders shouldn't surprise anyone. These talks have always been about the U.S. and Iran, with the rest there as interested parties to be sure but mainly to give a sheen of international consensus to whatever the two protagonists may hash out.

Quoth The Walrus re: what the US should do about the crisis in Damascus:

First and foremost, we should cut Syria off from its major supporters. The television images from Syria will not change permanently until the underlying strategic terrain changes permanently. Russia should be told in no uncertain terms that it can forget about sustained good relations with the United States as long as it continues to back Assad. We should resume full-scale, indeed accelerated, efforts to construct the limited missile-defense system designed by George W. Bush to protect American territory not against Russia but against rogue states such as Iran and North Korea. But we should immediately make it clear to Moscow that we will begin to consider broadening our missile-defense program to deal with Russian and Chinese ballistic-missile capabilities. We should also announce our withdrawal from the New START arms-control treaty, and our utter disinterest in negotiations to prevent an “arms race” in space. Let Moscow and Beijing think about all that for a while.

The magnitude of such a shift as a response to the conflict in Syria may seem startling, but each of these proposals is meritorious on its own terms. Wrapping several major policy redirections around the Syria problem thus advances multiple objectives simultaneously. Both Russia and China think Obama is weak, that America is declining, and that they can ignore our views on Syria and many other issues with complete impunity. It is time for a wake-up call to the Kremlin and Zhongnanhai.

Next, we should tell Iran that our patience with their decade-long ploy of using diplomacy to gain time to advance their nuclear-weapons program has ended. Tehran should face a stark choice, and we can leave to their imagination what will happen if they fail immediately to dismantle all aspects of their existing nuclear effort. We should also reverse the fantasy still trumpeted by Obama that, despite its repeated violations of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty over 20 years, Iran is somehow entitled to a “peaceful” nuclear program. Until there is a new, trustworthy regime in Tehran, there can be no claim to benefits or “rights” under a treaty Iran has grossly abused. We should introduce this new reality to our European friends as well, perhaps by simply being unambiguous with them.

Finally, in Syria itself, we should do now what we could have begun to do ten years ago (and what the Obama White House at least says it is doing now): find Syrian rebel leaders who are truly secular and who oppose radical Islam; who will disavow al-Qaeda, Hezbollah, and other terrorist groups; and who will reject Russian and Iranian hegemony over their country. We will need some reason to believe that this opposition can prevail against not only the Assad regime but also the terrorists and fanatics who also oppose Assad. This must be not a faith-based judgment but a clear-eyed assessment of reality. Such is the kind of opposition that, assuming it exists, we should support, aiming for regime change in Damascus when — and only when — it becomes feasible on our terms. On this matter, too, we should tell our European allies that we want their support for something other than semiotic diplomacy.

Gosh. I can't wait till Bolton receives his future cabinet appointment from President Romney.

Can you?

h/t RCW

It appears as if habeas corpus, our most sacrosanct right, has been eviscerated by the court. So, tell me, will this court protect a woman's right to choose now? I don't think so. I mean, if they won't protect a right that has been fundamental to Anglo-Saxon jurisprudence since, oh, the Magna Carta, why would a woman's right matter much?

And so, that being the last reason to vote for Obama--you know, that he'll appoint liberals to the court--explain to me how he is any different than Romney?

It's easy to look around and see reasons for discouragement: Teabaggers are louder and more obnoxious than ever, the conservative right seems determined to lurch the country forward into the 19th Century, and even Europe is contemplating dismantling, albeit slowly, it's pro-citizen models of government.

Ignore them. Ignore them, ignore them, ignore them. In the background are signs that real progress on real progressive issues is taking place, and slowly, which means they'll be harder to stop or reverse.

Gay equality is one area where progress has been painfully slow, but being made nonetheless. Women's issues have been bubbling up, and the exposure of such shameful statistics as the ratio of salaries (77 cents for a woman to a $1 a man earns) and healthcare premiums has shown that issue will not go away quietly.

Attaboy, Spencer.

Who among us hasn't nipped down to pub for a pint or six and left his eight-year old daughter behind, sobbing hysterically?

And been a Conservative British Prime Minister?

In the world of language, prescriptivists are the advocates of established authority; descriptivists believe that language is created by people not grammar books. The battle between prescriptivists and descriptivists never ends; it just gets old.

Steven Pinker has a smart and lucid article about all these phony language controversies, prompted by a spate of them in The New Yorker. Here are the opening paragraphs:

Nature or nurture. Love it or leave it. If it doesn’t fit, you must acquit.

Government is the Entertainment Division of the military-industrial complex.
-- attributed to Frank Zappa

The ugly realities of modern electoral politics in America hit home this week with two body blows to self-styled anti-authoritarian political networks: The Ron Paul movement finally hit the brick wall as Rand Paul (R-KY Coal Mines) endorsed Mitt Romney (R-Rich Mormon Mafia) -- utterly shocking & depressing tons of semi-libertarian Republicans along with the entire conservative side of the "Truther" and/or "Liberty" movements.

Days earlier, the Wisconsin recall election against Gov. Scott Walker (R-Petulance) turned in uglier-than-expected numbers as likely thousands of Wisconsinites were stripped of their Constitutional right to vote through ridiculous new regulations -- and of course a bunch of shady electronic voting machines run from a company in a suburban St. Cloud strip mall. Fox News flacks and nasty Gloria Borger/Sarah Palin types cackled that the unruly, rebellious hordes had been licked for good. Now, the Paulistas and the rebellious Cheesehead hordes must ask: what's next?!

Perhaps these movements never had too much in common, though you could find some overlapping supporters. Probably the biggest difference is the Liberty types are pretty darn hostile to mainstream unions while the #OccupyCapitol (which the Dems transmuted into #WIrecall) clearly ended up with unions as its main hub. But they shared a hostility to the party hierarchies, business as usual, and to some extent the elite financial/War Machine domestic & international complexes, which has triggered the financial/austerity crisis by sucking out trillions of dollars.

The anarchist strain in Wisconsin, buttressed mainly by the IWW, complemented the non-interventionist libertarian one that's been rolling since about 2007 -- it showed that the new politics that people are actively hunting for is certainly not statist or socialist in the traditional sense.

Eric Fehrnstrom -- senior adviser to the Mitt Romney campaign and the guy who dreamed up Romney's "Etch-a-Sketch" campaign strategy -- is at it giving American women the straight dope on what women's health issues are to his candidate: "shiny objects" -- distractions from more important concerns, in other words:

Appearing on This Week With George Stephanopolus, Fehrnstrom said, “Mitt Romney is pro-life. He’ll govern as a pro-life president, but you’re going to see the Democrats use all sorts of shiny objects to distract people’s attention from the Obama performance on the economy.

Raw Story - House Homeland Security Chairman Peter King (R-NY) on Sunday refused to confirm the existence of U.S. drone strikes in other countries, but later insisted that the unmanned flying machines were being used to “carry out the policies of righteousness and goodness.”

During an interview on CNN, host Candy noted that an analysis by the New America Foundation estimated that drone strikes have had an 17 percent civilian casualty rate since 2004.

“Because I’m on the Intelligence Committee, I can’t officially acknowledge that we have a drone program,” King told Crowley. “I’m not concerned [with the casualty rate]. My belief is that when you’re in war — and we are in war — the idea is to kill as many of the enemy as you can with minimal risk of life to your own people. As far as the civilian casualties, every one of those is tragic. But the fact is in every war, there’s a large amount of collateral damage, of civilian casualties — whether it’s World War II, whether it’s the Korean War — and if we were using ordinary explosives, we would also have those type of civilian deaths.”
...
“There’s evil people in the world. Drones aren’t evil, people are evil. We are a force of good and we are using those drones to carry out the policy of righteousness and goodness.”

If you have an hour and a half to spare, this BBC documentary is well worth a watch.

The PR blurb says:

Beneath the America we think we know lies a nation hidden from view - a nomadic nation, living on the roads, the rails and in the wild open spaces. In its deserts, forests, mountain ranges and on the plains, a huge population of modern nomads pursues its version of the American dream - to live free from the world of careers, mortgages and the white picket fence.

Joseph Bamat | Jun 11

France 24 - Left-wing parties inched toward a parliamentary majority on Sunday, after exit polls placed the Socialist Party and its allies ahead of the conservative UMP party in the first round of Sunday's elections.

The UMP garnered an estimated 35.4 percent of the vote compared to the Socialist Party's 34.9 percent, in a ballot marked by low voter turnout. However, the Socialists' numbers combined with other left-wing parties secured the left an overall 47.1 percent of votes, according to estimates by the polling firm Ipsos.

The second round of the election, to be held on June 17, is expected to confirm the leftward trend in France, which saw François Hollande win the country’s presidential elections on May 6.

By Michael Collins
Somebody released information concerning one of President Barack Obama's methods for fighting terrorism. (Image)

"Mr. Obama has placed himself at the helm of a top secret nominations process to designate terrorists for kill or capture. Secret ‘Kill List’ Proves a Test of Obama’s Principles and Will, New York Times, May 29

Republicans are furious. Sen. John McCain says the White House intentionally leaked the story to make Obama look good.

"Regardless of how politically useful these leaks have been to the administration, they have to stop." John McCain, CBS News, June 6

This is the new looking good. You sit around, eyeball photographs of people you don't know, about whom there is little information. You pick a few to be killed, and then it's lunch time in the West Wing.

There is a bipartisan consensus among political leaders and unquestioning media - it looks good to bump people off. The financial, political, and media elite are in a free fall decline that does not reflect the people and a decline that is and will be very difficult to stop.

If this is what counts as principles, what is the definition of unprincipled action?

Nouriel Roubini passes along this Reuters report with the ominous tweet "Global slowdown accelerating!".

Second-quarter revenue growth for companies in the Standard & Poor's 500 index is expected to be just 2.2 percent compared with an average 7.3 percent quarterly increase since the fourth quarter of 1998, according to Thomson Reuters data based on Wall Street analysts' forecasts. Take out the supercharged sales of Apple Inc (AAPL.O) and the picture is even weaker - with growth of only 1.9 percent for the current period.

The lowered expectations are a result of the euro zone crisis hurting demand from Europe, the impact of a slowdown in major developing economies such as China, Brazil and India, and recent signs of weakness in the United States.

Just last year, S&P 500 revenue growth was in double-digit territory, at 11.1 percent in the third quarter following an even bigger 13.6 percent in the second quarter. Revenue growth in the first quarter of this year came in at 5 percent.

Interesting times. Maybe its a double-dip recession showing its teeth. Maybe it's the end of the capitalist system as we know it, as some Cassandras say. Either way, and to get all petty for a second, it surely increases the chances of a Republican administration in the U.S. after November.

Tireless Gitmo campaigner Andy Worthington has a good post examining what David Sanger's recent NYT report on Obama's "Kill List" also told us about how the Obama administration set about preserving the extra-territorial prison and the infrastructure around it. Read the whole thing. He's not at all happy with the "pragmatic" framing or revealed administration joy at having put one over on the electorate, as you might expect.

As the Times article put it, “Without showing his hand, Mr. Obama had preserved three major policies — rendition, military commissions and indefinite detention — that have been targets of human rights groups since the 2001 terrorist attacks.”

This phrasing was insulting to those “human rights groups” and other concerned parties who have been campaigning against indefinite detention, “extraordinary rendition,” and military commissions not for soft reasons, but because domestic and international laws and treaties — including the Great Writ of habeas corpus, the Geneva Conventions, and the UN Convention Against Torture — are not options to be cast aside, but rules and laws designed to prevent barbarism and tyranny, whether presided over by George W. Bush or Barack Obama.

That really is the bottom line: that the law should be universal, not open to privileged side-stepping. Alas, we do not live in that world and even the nations which give most face time to the notion that they support universal credos do little to further that notion in practise. The only way to push their "realism" into understanding the pragmatic long-term benefits of the moral high ground, if there is any way at all, is to make a stink about it.

Timely pre-convention dialogue, courtesy NPR's On The Media:

When protesters try to make themselves heard at this summer’s presidential conventions they’ll likely be penned by police some distance from the candidates. Law professor Ronald Krotoszynski argues in a new book that that’s a violation of the 1st Amendment, specifically the right to petition the government for a redress of grievances. He explains to Bob why protest is a form of protected speech and why proximity to the government officials you’re protesting is paramount.

LISTEN:

Related: DNC host Charlotte, NC prepares to put civil liberties on limited hiatus in September (the lottery-driven online application process one has to go through to be granted -- or, more precisely, win -- the privilege to protest seems especially Orwellian).

This isn't new but it's certainly clear and devastating in its implications. From Paul Craig Roberts last week:

"US banks' derivative bets of $230 trillion, concentrated in five banks, are 15.3 times larger than the US GDP. A failed political system that allows unregulated banks to place uncovered bets 15 times larger than the US economy is a system that is headed for catastrophic failure. As the word spreads of the fantastic lack of judgment in the American political and financial systems, the catastrophe in waiting will become a reality." Paul Craig Roberts, Collapse at Hand, June 5

Numerian had a solution for this in 2008:

There needs to be an accounting and a correction - and not by the usual suspects. Here's one way to start with derivatives crisis in major institutions:

"If all the top 25 financial institutions were put into receivership, and (big if) if they all could be liquidated under an agreed legal framework, many of these risky contracts could be allowed to offset each other, and much of the risk eliminated." Private correspondence, Numerian, The Agonist, Sept. 21, 2008 From Michael Collins, Meltdown Perpetrators, Sep. 2008

So, how long are we going to be held hostage by the big banks and the uber-wealthy?

Roberts' solution is clear and in line with Numerians:

Today's must-read is by Glenn Greenwald, writing for the Guardian on the Obama administration's ruthless use of access journalism by providing anonymous leaks to reporters who will tell the story to their liking and subpoenas for those who don't. "In sum, these anonymous leaks are classic political propaganda: devoted to glorifying the leader and his policies for political gain."

Somedays you wake up and you just need to hear something bright, happy and bouncy (but why's Matt Damon in there?).

Go on, what's your happy wake-up music?

Sabbath morn, June 9, 2012

By my watch it’s 4:30 AM Central Standard Time. I can’t sleep. Course I could console myself with the fact the rest of those in my region think it’s 5:30, a more respectable time to be up.

Teah, a Guernsey/Jersey cross milk cow has been sick and I am worried for her. The heat has been oppressive of late and I think she may have had a cow’s version of heat stroke. While high temperatures have not been near as bad as last year’s, humidity adds to the heat index and our low temperatures aren’t low at all. I am told we’ve experienced the hottest spring recorded.