Why not? Everybody knows that there are no nuclear weapons in the Eastern Mediterranean. And everybody knows that there are no nuclear weapons in Iran.
The new and welcome Israeli realism towards Syria and Hamas does not merely presage such a realism towards Iran. It is such a realism towards Iran.
Americans and others who merely love an idea of Israel without regard to Israelis themselves, and who are in any case on the way out at least in the US, can like it, or lump it.
They can fantasise all they like about "rehearsals" for nuclear strikes against Iran or anywhere else. Those fantasies are not going to come true.
Saturday, 21 June 2008
Are The Irish Joey Barton,...
...that they deserve a four month sentence?
Perhaps they have fed a live cat to a mad dog?
But worry not. According to the dear old BBC, "all 27 leaders" have to approve any treaty change. So what is the fuss about? All 27 "leaders" already do so approve. Don't they?
Over to you, the "leading" Pole and the "leading" Czech...
Perhaps they have fed a live cat to a mad dog?
But worry not. According to the dear old BBC, "all 27 leaders" have to approve any treaty change. So what is the fuss about? All 27 "leaders" already do so approve. Don't they?
Over to you, the "leading" Pole and the "leading" Czech...
Andy Anonymous
This, by Marina Hyde, is mostly about the "strange" alliance between Labour and the DUP.
Well, no, there is nothing New Labour about the DUP. But they are economically working-class populists, they are moral and social conservatives, they are British and Commonwealth patriots (and therefore very anti-EU), they are strongly church-based, and they are staunch defenders of grammar schools as the ladders of advancement.
In other words, they are Very Old Labour, pre-Blairite because pre-Bennite, old-fashionedly in politics for what they can get out of it for their voters.
Or, at least, they were, until they signed up to 42-day detention.
But I simply cannot resist this:
"The individual has no right to anonymity," Andy Burnham once explained during a robotic defence of identity cards. "The state has a right to know who you are." Yet despite his concerted efforts to draw attention to himself with dazzling feats of brown-nosery, the cloak of anonymity has hung heavy on the current culture secretary, with very few citizens of this state having the first clue who he is. Indeed, for most of the final years of Tony Blair's premiership, he was presumed to be lodged in the prime ministerial colon, only emerging blinking into the daylight the minute Gordon took over, whereupon he announced to the press: "I was a Blairite, and now I am a Brownite."
Is he called Andy at home? I strongly suspect that he is called Andrew, just as Blair is called Anthony (which he is), recalling Harold Wilson's public pipe and private cigars.
Well, no, there is nothing New Labour about the DUP. But they are economically working-class populists, they are moral and social conservatives, they are British and Commonwealth patriots (and therefore very anti-EU), they are strongly church-based, and they are staunch defenders of grammar schools as the ladders of advancement.
In other words, they are Very Old Labour, pre-Blairite because pre-Bennite, old-fashionedly in politics for what they can get out of it for their voters.
Or, at least, they were, until they signed up to 42-day detention.
But I simply cannot resist this:
"The individual has no right to anonymity," Andy Burnham once explained during a robotic defence of identity cards. "The state has a right to know who you are." Yet despite his concerted efforts to draw attention to himself with dazzling feats of brown-nosery, the cloak of anonymity has hung heavy on the current culture secretary, with very few citizens of this state having the first clue who he is. Indeed, for most of the final years of Tony Blair's premiership, he was presumed to be lodged in the prime ministerial colon, only emerging blinking into the daylight the minute Gordon took over, whereupon he announced to the press: "I was a Blairite, and now I am a Brownite."
Is he called Andy at home? I strongly suspect that he is called Andrew, just as Blair is called Anthony (which he is), recalling Harold Wilson's public pipe and private cigars.
Grievous
The great white hope of Toryism, Dominic Grieve, was pleased to inform the Any Questions audience, both that he "strongly believes in" the EU, and that the Scottish Parliament was "the sovereign body" in relation to any referendum on Scottish independence.
Nobody batted an eyelid that a senior Tory frontbencher held these views.
Nor, alas, should they have done.
Nobody batted an eyelid that a senior Tory frontbencher held these views.
Nor, alas, should they have done.
Friday, 20 June 2008
Conservative American Republicans: Conserve The American Republic
Craig Roberts doesn't think too much of Obama, but still feels bound to conclude:
Where is the hope when Obama endorses a foreign policy that benefits only Israeli territorial expansion and an economic policy that benefits only multimillionaires and billionaires?
The answer is that Obama’s election would signify the electorate’s rejection of Bush and the Republicans. Considering the cowardice of the Democratic Congress and its reluctance to hold a criminal regime accountable, electoral defeat is the only accountability that the Bush Republicans are likely to experience.
It is not sufficient accountability, but at least it is some accountability.
If the Republicans win the election and escape accountability, the damage Republicans have done to the U.S. Constitution, civil liberty and a free society will be irreversible. The Bush regime and its totalitarians have openly violated U.S. law against spying on Americans without warrants and U.S. and international laws against torture. The regime and its totalitarians have violated the Constitution that they are sworn to uphold. Bush’s attorney general, Alberto Gonzales, even asserted to the Senate Judiciary Committee that the U.S. Constitution does not provide habeas corpus protection to American citizens.
When federal courts acted to stop the regime’s unconstitutional practices and abuse of prisoners, the Republicans passed legislation to overturn the court rulings. The Republican Party has shown beyond all doubt that it holds the U.S. Constitution in total contempt. Today, the Republican Party stands for unaccountable executive power.
To re-elect such a party is to murder liberty in America.
The June 12 Supreme Court decision pulled America back from the abyss of tyranny. For years, hundreds of innocent people have been held by the Bush regime without charges, a handful of which were set to be tried in a kangaroo military tribunal in which they could be convicted on the basis of secret evidence and confession extracted by torture.
The Court ruled 5 to 4 that detainees have the right to appeal to civilian courts for habeas corpus protection. The Bush Republicans, claiming “extraordinary times,” had created a Gestapo system in which the government could accuse, without presenting any evidence, a person of being a threat and on that basis alone imprison him indefinitely. Justice Anthony Kennedy reminded the Republican Brownshirts that “the laws and Constitution are designed to survive, and remain in force, in extraordinary times.”
Bush’s current attorney general, Michael Mukassey, said he would proceed with his kangaroo trials.
President Bush indicated that he was inclined to again seek to overturn the Court with a law.
Brownshirt Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham said he would draft a constitutional amendment to restore the executive branch’s tyrannical power.
Republican presidential nominee John McCain said that the Supreme Court decision protecting habeas corpus “is one of the worst decisions in the history of this country.”
The four Supreme Court justices (Samuel Alito, John Roberts, Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas) who voted for tyranny in America are all Republicans. They all came out of the Federalist Society, a highly subversive group of right-wing lawyers who are determined to elevate the powers of the executive branch above Congress and the Supreme Court.
The Republican Party has morphed into a Brownshirt Party. The party worships “energy in the executive.” If the Brownshirt Republicans are re-elected, they only need one more Supreme Court appointment in order to destroy American liberty.
That is what is at stake in the November election. As bad as Obama is on important issues, his election will signal rejection of the tyranny to which the Republicans are committed.
Where is the hope when Obama endorses a foreign policy that benefits only Israeli territorial expansion and an economic policy that benefits only multimillionaires and billionaires?
The answer is that Obama’s election would signify the electorate’s rejection of Bush and the Republicans. Considering the cowardice of the Democratic Congress and its reluctance to hold a criminal regime accountable, electoral defeat is the only accountability that the Bush Republicans are likely to experience.
It is not sufficient accountability, but at least it is some accountability.
If the Republicans win the election and escape accountability, the damage Republicans have done to the U.S. Constitution, civil liberty and a free society will be irreversible. The Bush regime and its totalitarians have openly violated U.S. law against spying on Americans without warrants and U.S. and international laws against torture. The regime and its totalitarians have violated the Constitution that they are sworn to uphold. Bush’s attorney general, Alberto Gonzales, even asserted to the Senate Judiciary Committee that the U.S. Constitution does not provide habeas corpus protection to American citizens.
When federal courts acted to stop the regime’s unconstitutional practices and abuse of prisoners, the Republicans passed legislation to overturn the court rulings. The Republican Party has shown beyond all doubt that it holds the U.S. Constitution in total contempt. Today, the Republican Party stands for unaccountable executive power.
To re-elect such a party is to murder liberty in America.
The June 12 Supreme Court decision pulled America back from the abyss of tyranny. For years, hundreds of innocent people have been held by the Bush regime without charges, a handful of which were set to be tried in a kangaroo military tribunal in which they could be convicted on the basis of secret evidence and confession extracted by torture.
The Court ruled 5 to 4 that detainees have the right to appeal to civilian courts for habeas corpus protection. The Bush Republicans, claiming “extraordinary times,” had created a Gestapo system in which the government could accuse, without presenting any evidence, a person of being a threat and on that basis alone imprison him indefinitely. Justice Anthony Kennedy reminded the Republican Brownshirts that “the laws and Constitution are designed to survive, and remain in force, in extraordinary times.”
Bush’s current attorney general, Michael Mukassey, said he would proceed with his kangaroo trials.
President Bush indicated that he was inclined to again seek to overturn the Court with a law.
Brownshirt Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham said he would draft a constitutional amendment to restore the executive branch’s tyrannical power.
Republican presidential nominee John McCain said that the Supreme Court decision protecting habeas corpus “is one of the worst decisions in the history of this country.”
The four Supreme Court justices (Samuel Alito, John Roberts, Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas) who voted for tyranny in America are all Republicans. They all came out of the Federalist Society, a highly subversive group of right-wing lawyers who are determined to elevate the powers of the executive branch above Congress and the Supreme Court.
The Republican Party has morphed into a Brownshirt Party. The party worships “energy in the executive.” If the Brownshirt Republicans are re-elected, they only need one more Supreme Court appointment in order to destroy American liberty.
That is what is at stake in the November election. As bad as Obama is on important issues, his election will signal rejection of the tyranny to which the Republicans are committed.
Obama's Refusal Of Public Funding
Why doesn't McCain offer to match him? Surely he's not admitting that even a Democrat, hell even a black Democrat, hell even a black Democrat whom AIPAC doesn't like, can out-fundraise him? Is he?
How Dare The Israelis Want Peace! Who Do They Think They Are?
The Israelis themselves are on the cusp of peace both with Syria and with Hamas, basically by recognising Zionism as part of their past rather than their present. To the incandescence of the likes of Melanie Phillips and the Harry’s Place crowd. To whom I say: why aren’t you happy for them? Why do they have to organise their affairs in order to suit your prejudices? Who do you think you are?
Israel long since gave up on being a Jewish State and became just an obsessively non-Arab one which flies in all and sundry (Russians who won’t eat kosher food and insist on taking their IDF oaths on the New Testament alone, Russian Nazis, East Africans who have invented a religion based on the Old Testament brought by Christian missionaries but who make no claim to Jewish descent, Peruvian Indians “converted to Judaism” and put on the plane as a single act, all sorts) in order to preserve a non-Arab majority.
But the single most common name for newborn boys inside the pre-1967 borders is still now Muhammad. So the Jewish Establishment is Israel has decided, “Sod this. We are in the Levant, where Jews have historically done well anyway, so let’s get on with it. What have the Crown Heights and Golders Green lot ever done for us? If they’d really cared about a Jewish State, then they’d have come here and never required us to import all these funny people.”
Good for them, and I hope it pays off. I think it will. And the likes of you will just have to deal with it. People who cannot win elections in Israel, and people who will do anything for (a fantasy version of) Israel except live there, have wildly disproportionate influence in the US, in the UK, and increasingly also in France, though mercifully not in Israel.
But not for much longer in the US, thankfully. So for how much longer here or in France, either?
In Russia, on the other hand...
Israel long since gave up on being a Jewish State and became just an obsessively non-Arab one which flies in all and sundry (Russians who won’t eat kosher food and insist on taking their IDF oaths on the New Testament alone, Russian Nazis, East Africans who have invented a religion based on the Old Testament brought by Christian missionaries but who make no claim to Jewish descent, Peruvian Indians “converted to Judaism” and put on the plane as a single act, all sorts) in order to preserve a non-Arab majority.
But the single most common name for newborn boys inside the pre-1967 borders is still now Muhammad. So the Jewish Establishment is Israel has decided, “Sod this. We are in the Levant, where Jews have historically done well anyway, so let’s get on with it. What have the Crown Heights and Golders Green lot ever done for us? If they’d really cared about a Jewish State, then they’d have come here and never required us to import all these funny people.”
Good for them, and I hope it pays off. I think it will. And the likes of you will just have to deal with it. People who cannot win elections in Israel, and people who will do anything for (a fantasy version of) Israel except live there, have wildly disproportionate influence in the US, in the UK, and increasingly also in France, though mercifully not in Israel.
But not for much longer in the US, thankfully. So for how much longer here or in France, either?
In Russia, on the other hand...
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