(Remember when. . .?) The price of a barrel of oil just hit $76.70. The price of the average gallon of gas in the U.S. is now $3.10 and rising. This doesn’t even figure in the cost to taxpayers of huge financial aid packages to Israel, Egypt and the Palestinians.
Hezbollah’s entry into the already tense situation between the Palestinians and Israel is a major escalation of an already bad situation. While I think that Israel has responded disproportionately in its incursion into Gaza, I think that the firing of rockets from inside Lebanon into Israel changes Israel’s moral position to a degree.
Joe Wilson has just sent TWN and other journalists interested in the Fitzgerald investigation of the White House outing of Valerie Plame Wilson’s covert CIA role a statement regarding Robert Novak’s effort to “justify the unjustifiable”: Robert Novak, some other commentators and the Administration continue to try to completely distort the role that Valerie Wilson…
Kevin Phillips, author of American Theocracy: The Perils and Politics of Radical Religion, Oil and Borrowed Money in the 21st Century, recently spoke at a New America Foundation program I chaired.
(Nicholas Schmidle on trip to India.) A good friend and collaborator in organizing last September’s mega-conference on reframing the terrorism challenge, “Terrorism, Security and America’s Purpose” — Nicholas Schmidle is a smart, ultra-blonde, Lawrence of Arabia type combined with the tough travel-journalistic instincts of a Robert Kaplan.
(Oakley the Amazing Weimaraner Not Thrilled with Clunky Blogs that Don’t Load) Last night, good friends of TWN managed the move of files and DNS of this blog to a new internet service host. TWN will now have significantly more bandwidth and more stability of access for all readers.
I think Asst.
The Los Angeles Times ran a lead editorial yesterday: PURGING ANTIWAR DEMOCRATS even though the substance of the piece was about progressive Dems supporting Connecticut Senate challenger Ned Lamont against Joe Lieberman. First of all, editorialists should stop referring to everyone who OPPOSES THE IRAQ WAR as “anti-war”.
Despite the worsening morass in Israel-Palestine circumstances in which kidnapped IDF soldier Gilad Shalit still has not been recovered and Israel is wading deeper into its former role occupying and controlling Gaza, there are still some who see a possibility of restoring progress in place of constant deterioration.
