To everything (turn, turn, turn)

Harriett Sherwood, The Guardian:

Video testimonies by around two dozen ex-soldiers – some of whom are identifying themselves for the first time – will be posted on YouTube. The campaign by Breaking the Silence, an organisation of former soldiers committed to speaking out on military practices, launches with English subtitles on Monday.

Some of the former soldiers describe the “neighbour procedure”, a term for the use of Palestinian civilians, often children, as human shields to protect soldiers from suspected booby traps or attacks by militants. The procedure was ruled illegal by Israel’s high court in 2005.

Others speak of routine harassment of civilians at checkpoints, arbitrary intimidation and collective punishment.

Isa. 1:16b-17a: Stop doing wrong, learn to do right! Seek justice, encourage the oppressed.

And today, Israel fired on unarmed protesters who marched toward the border to commemorate the establishment of Israel. Matthew Kalman, Independent:

Israeli security and intelligence chiefs traded accusations yesterday over who allowed more than 100 protesters to cross the heavily guarded border with Syria, as Palestinians marked the “catastrophe” of Israel’s founding in a string of incidents that left 15 unarmed protesters dead and Israel’s doctrine of border deterrence in tatters.
…
Israel’s border deterrence was shattered by Sunday’s marchers, who simply walked through a minefield thought to be deadly. Not a single landmine exploded.

Think about it. People living outside of Israel marched, unarmed through a minefield and broke down a fence to protest injustice. They were shot down. Apparently the Syrian army is otherwise occupied, and distracted from its complicity in oppressing the Palestinians in Syria. (See also Juan Cole).

God is not going to like this, nor will He bless those who use violence against those who reprove the doing of wrong.

Time to turn to peace.

Brainserfs

One of the saddest sights of all is academics whose work is compromised by ideological funding. The last line of defense in preventing the coal and oil company global warming denialists from overwhelming the debate has been independent peer review. But when corporate whores (with apologies to all honest sex workers) are injected into universities, then they are the ones doing the peer review. It’s like injecting cancer cells into a healthy body.

Lee Fang of Think Progress has an important piece describing how the Kochs have managed to use their money, and the destitution of academia to create just this situation. Here’s a list of the Koch brainserfs:

George Mason University
West Virginia University
Brown University’s Political Science and Economics departments
The Economics Department at Florida State University
Troy University’s Center for Political Economy
Utah State University’s Huntsman School for Business
Beloit College’s Student Research Program

And more sad

Usually I like listening to Dahlia Lithwick, one of the least toxic of the punditocracy. But in her recent show on BlogTalk radio, she tells us that the reason that justices like Thomas and Alito are so extreme is that they were brutalized in their Senate hearings.

I would point out three things: first, if someone takes revenge on completely unrelated parties because of what some Senators said about them years earlier, are they fit to sit on the Supreme Court?

Second: does Dahlia Lithwick not understand that Senate hearings for candidates for the Court constitute a job interview for a great job, with a high salary, plenty of benefits, and enormous power? Does she think that judges should not have to answer questions that are no more severe than those asked of many a job applicant?

Third: Hasn’t everything alleged against Clarence Thomas been proven to be true?

Our media: sucks. Even the best of it.

In which it is proven that America has no historical memory

Sad (read the comments and learn how I wasted an afternoon).

Rick Perlstein: smart. Not smart enough to realize that there is context to a historical situation that needs to be considered when talking about things that happened before you were born.

No nukes is good nukes

McClatchy, some time ago:

The U.S. intelligence community has completed a new National Intelligence Estimate for President Barack Obama and Congress on Iran’s nuclear program. The key judgements, however, aren’t being released like those of a November 2007 NIE that concluded that Iran had halted the development of a nuclear weapon four years earlier.

So, now the line is that Iran has stopped developing nukes (as of 2003, if I recall), but could decide to restart any time, and we might not know if they do re-start, so…. You get the drift.

Have some Moomins

(via Echidne of the Snakes)

Mr. President, Put the People’s Budget on the Table

The Campaign for America’s Future has a message for us all:

There’s only one deficit reduction proposal clearly backed by the American majority: the “People’s Budget” from the Congressional Progressive Caucus. Yet none of the authors of the “People’s Budget” are currently part of the White House-led bipartisan budget negotiations. The Progressive Caucus has just written a letter to President Obama asking to be part of the budget talks. Now the President needs to hear from the rest of us in the American majority. Use the form below to send a letter to the President, saying “Put the People’s Budget on the Table.”

Exactly. Why does the commission have immensely wealthy inherited-wealth guys like Baucus and Simpson, yet nobody who is advocating intelligent deficit reduction?

Friday Cat Blogging

Things That Make Us Say “Hmmm”

A Republican member of the Federal Communications Commission, who voted to approve the NBC-Comcast merger, is leaving the FCC to become senior vice president of government affairs for NBCUniversal.

But I’m sure her vote was based on the best interests of the American people, not on the prospect of personal gain.

Why Do Our Legi$lator$ Favor Dirty Energy? Ca$h. Lot$.

Earlier this week, I briefly touched on how in hock our elected representatives are to Big Oil, Big Coal and Big Gas — a fact that is keeping America from fully implementing a clean-energy future.

Over at Renewable Energy World, Tor Valenza has some data on just how much dough the dirty-energy crowd tosses at politicians: “How can you tell? Easy. Go to www.dirtyenergymoney.com and find out how much $$$ your own representative or senators are $upported by oil and coal companies.”

To no one’s surprise, prominent Republicans like Paul Ryan, John Boehner and Mitch McConnell turn out to have got a lot of money from the dirty-energy lobby, and are quite friendly to dirty energy as well as quite hostile to clean energy. But what is a pleasant surprise, is that Henry Waxman, a Democratic congressman from California, gets nearly as much as Boehner et al do, yet manages to be a very good friend to solar energy. As the late great Texas Democratic House Speaker Sam Rayburn once told a freshman congressman who wanted to be excused from vote because he wanted to please his biggest contributors: “Son, if you can’t take their money, drink their whiskey, screw their women, and then vote against ‘em, you don’t deserve to be here.”

(Crossposted to Renaissance Post.)