Needlenose

Check out South Knox Bubba’s wonderful coverage of the protest against King George the Witless’ visit to Knoxville! His photoblog of the event is quite amusing, especially the pic of the lone wingnut counterdemonstrator. Just to tantalize you, very soon Needlenose will be privileged to offer its loyal readers a special election coverage feature similar to SKB’s on-the-scene Bubbacam!

But getting back to Knoxville, Juan Cole had an interesting post recently, based on a Robert Sullivan article, that made the case for the importance of Appalachia as a voting block for the outcome of the Presidential election. SKB’s lil’ protest gives me hope for the a Democratic victory in the ’04 Presidential election and greater respect for the region.

Righty site that is honest about Sistani
Daily Misleader
Zeyad on atrocity
A creepy coincidence is that just this afternoon I heard that a friend of mine was badly injured by another American unit in Baghdad last night during a wedding when people started to celebrate iraqi style by shooting in the air. It was a mistake yes but the doctors say my friend may not be able to walk again. I am at the moment too overwhelmed with bad news so I may sound incoherent to you.
Zeyad on Basra
I read today in the papers an account of the murder of Bashir Thomas Elias, an Iraqi Christian who ran a liquor store in Basrah. It was Christmas Eve and he was heading back home from the market to celebrate with his family when someone shot him in the head and walked away amid onlooking Basrawis.

There were about 200 licensed alcohol dealers in Basrah before the war, today there is none, and we were there to see for ourselves. Most of these stores were looted and burnt during the last few months and the rest were forced to close under murder threats from hardliners and Shi’ite extremist groups such as Hizb Allah (The party of Allah), Intiqam Allah (The revenge of Allah), and Munadhamat Qawa’id Al-Islam. These groups are powerful and influential in Basrah and already have many of their members in local municipal councils. Faysal Abdallah a leader of one of these groups stated that Allah will reward the virtuous who seek Shahada fighting vice in his name but he described these summary executions of Iraqi Christians as ‘unacceptable behaviour’.

Basrah is populated by 100,000 Christians. About 2000 of them have already left their hometown and migrated to other cities such as Baghdad and Mosul, the rest are living in fear for their lives. Some of them are wondering if they were not better off with Saddam and the secular Ba’ath in power.

“Our daughters are persecuted in college” said Wisam Abdalahad a store owner in Basrah. “They are being intimidated by their teachers and professors and told to wear Hijab”.
Zeyad on BaghdadI wrote earlier today about Calpundit‘s brief essay on reactionaries conservatives hiding behind liberal rhetoric to pursue their evil goals. Atrios picks up a depressingly perfect example from MoveOn.org’s Daily MisLeader, which in turn cites a Wall Street Journal news item:

Late last year, President Bush promised retirees that “if there’s a Medicare reform bill signed by me, corporations have no intention to dump retirees [from their existing drug coverage]…What we’re talking about is trust.” The White House and its congressional allies backed up Bush’s assertion by claiming the bill included a special tax subsidy to “encourage employers’ to retain prescription-drug coverage” for their retirees and not to cut them off.

But just three months after Bush’s pledge, the Wall Street Journal now reports that the White House quietly added “a little-noticed provision” to the bill that allows companies to severely reduce – or almost completely terminate – their retirees’ drug coverage “without losing out on the new subsidy.” In other words, the president did not just break his promise to sign a bill that prevents seniors from losing their existing drug coverage. He actually acted to reward companies who cut off their retirees with a lavish new tax break.

The provision was no mere oversight by the president. The major backers of the provision were Lucent Technologies, General Motors, Dow Chemical and SBC Communications – all major campaign contributors to the president. According to the non-partisan Center for Responsive Politics, executives from those companies have donated almost $140,000 in hard money and $2.5 million in soft money to Bush and his party since 2000.

There had to have been some high-fiving going on in Bushite circles after this one cleared Congress. To sneak through yet another big-money giveaway to their corporate buddies, but pass it off as a “compassionate conservative” shoring up of a famed liberal social program? For the cynics around Dubya, it can’t get much better than that.

This is why people love to mock Thomas Friedman:

As my friend Dov Seidman, whose company, LRN, teaches ethics to global corporations, put it: The cold war ended the way it did because at some bedrock level we and the Soviets “agreed on what is shameful.”

See? And maybe you thought it was because the Soviet economy collapsed, or something like that. Silly you!

In other news, an earthquake today ended when local residents and the Earth agreed on the proper location of tectonic plates . . .

P.S. Then again, you’d have to believe that anyone whose scam job it is to “teach ethics to global corporations” is more or less accustomed to saying things that have no connection to reality.

Palestinian leaders have responded to Sharon’s threats to unilaterally impose the boundaries of a Palestinian ‘Homeland’ with the promise to call for a “single Arab-Jewish state.” Colin Powell dismissed the idea of a one-state solution (although he opposes a two-state solution for Iraq), saying:

“We’re committed to a two-state solution,” Powell said in Washington. “I believe that’s the only solution that will work: a state for the Palestinian people called Palestine and a Jewish state, state of Israel, which exists.”

What a cunundrum! The Sharon alternative, potentially featuring a torturously gerrymandered and discontinuous Palestinian state similar to the Bantustans of Apartheid, or a single country where extremists on both sides could continue to use acts of terror to advance their ‘no compromise’ positions.

Personally, I don’t see how the Bantustan solution would really stop the violence. A reactionary-dominated Israeli government would most likely choose to keep many of the older settlements in place, along with their water sources. Denied water, numerous Palestinian villages and towns would not be economically viable. With no access to ports (except in Gaza, where goods would have to pass through a foreign country to get to the West Bank), the Palestinian Homelands would not be an attractive manufacturing center. Who would invest in such a place? Where would its inhabitants work? How would they feed their families? Pushing the Arabs farther into the corner at a time when extremists are on the verge of acquiring dirty bombs and potentially even nuclear weapons strikes me as a recipe for disaster.

The linked article goes on to point out the ‘demographic’ issue; the Jewish population of the country, at 5.5 million, would hold only a slight majority over the theoretical Arab population of a unified state – 4.7 million. With a higher Arab birthrate, along with limited ‘right-of-return’ legislation that future ‘coalition’ governments might pass, Israel would be quickly looking at Jews returning to the minority in the region.

Along with sticky issues such as ‘right-of-return’ or compensation for lost property, the new, presumably secular state would need to deal with the extreme poverty of its new citizens, major infrastructure development and water rights. Security and crackdown on extremist elements of both sides would be another major challenge.

‘Flat-Earth’ libertarians and reactionaries continue to remain in denial, but scientists are converging in agreement that human activity is the most significant factor in global warming over the last century. What is worse is that the ‘wailing Cassandras’ of the environmental movement were right – global warming will lead to a tremendous numbers of extinctions.

Of course there is a rhetorical silver lining for the SUV-huggers; the scientists also determined that the Kyoto protocol was by far too wimpy to have a serious impact on global warming, so in blowing off the treaty, President Asteroid-Impact hasn’t significantly influenced the final outcome.

I’ve been a little to busy to fire up my own brilliant-thoughts generator this morning (though I do have a topic picked out for a post a little later today). Fortunately, though, it seems like everyone else in the blogosphere is saying even more insightful things than usual on various topics:

DailyKos says what needs to be said about the latest bad news out of Iraq (another mortar attack on a base, another helicopter shot down).

Juan Cole has a compelling post about his mixed feelings regarding the war.

Calpundit has two excellent posts — one on George Bush’s greatest sin (“Bush decided not to use 9/11 as a chance to forge a bipartisan consensus on fighting terrorism … but instead used it as a partisan club by going to war in a way ruthlessly and deliberately calculated to drive the largest possible wedge through the Democratic party”), and another on how conservatives hiding their goals behind liberal rhetoric shows that liberalism is far from dead.

On the lighter side, Matthew Yglesias has the only sensible reaction anyone could have to the prospect of a five-part series by New York Times columnist Tom Friedman on “A War of Ideas,” as well as a tasty one-paragraph satire.

Go check these out if you haven’t already.

Riverbend makes a strong argument against a plan to create a Kurdish autonomous region that includes the city of Mosul, where Kurds are a minority. Similarly, Salam Pax decries Iraqi Federalism, but concentrates more on the process of developing a Federal solution that he contends is being carried by the CPA in a most undemocratic fashion.

It really does seem that poor, trashed Iraq is headed for another train-wreck a la Yugoslavia. Juan Cole has been doing an excellent job covering the rising tide of ethnic violence in Northern Iraq, with uber-nationalists of various stripes increasingly taking to the streets as it becomes ever more apparent that the Kurdish nationalists have the ‘upper hand’ in the CPA’s high-stakes poker game.

I want to revisit my previous amateur attempt at Realpolitik, the “Green Boy Iraqi Strategy.” Philisophically, Juan Cole, Riverbend and Salam Pax are right and I was wrong – endorsing the aims of uber-nationalists of whatever stripe is just plain wrong, and secular, plural government is always preferable. Sadly, however, decades of oppression at the hands of Arab, Turkish and Persian nationalists, along with convenient, recent arming and training of the Peshmerga by King George the Witless, have sown the seeds for the inevitable conflict as the Kurds play their hand in an attempt to win their own state.

If a serious civil war “blood-bath” over land develops, or if a victorious Kurdistan prompts an invasion and occupation by Turks and Syrians, even the most Jingoistic Americans may finally stop muttering “but nobody can say that things were better under Saddam.”