The US government says that its goal is to not to overthrow the Syrian government militarily, something it could do easily if it were not for overwhelming public opinion against such a move. It also says that it is not allied with the Syrian rebels, an understandable public distancing since some reports indicate that about half of that motley group consists of extremely undesirable elements, including violently anti-US groups. [Read more…]
I apologize for the trouble that disrupted the blog for much of the day. It was out of my hands and seems to be fixed now.
I have also been a little busy the last few days and so missed this series of three good clips in the Syria issue from The Daily Show that were shown last Friday. They are a little dated but worth watching. [Read more…]
So Larry Summers will not be the next chair of the Federal Reserve. He has withdrawn his name from contention, stating that the confirmation process would be too acrimonious. Whether he chose to do this on his own or whether president Obama nudged him to do so because he could not afford another bruising fight with Congress and his own party supporters who objected to Summers is not clear. [Read more…]
It should have come as no surprise that US secretary of state John Kerry scurried over to Israel as soon as he could after reaching a deal with the Russians that averted the bombing of Syria, at least for now. Israel and its lobby in the US had been going flat out for the US to bomb Syria. AIPAC went all-out in support of the congressional resolution authorizing bombing Syria, after being signaled by the Obama administration that it needed help in getting the legislation passed. Back on September 5, when it looked like Congress was going to balk at going to war, the lobby went into overdrive. [Read more…]
In general, I find that the next generation to be more tolerant, more accepting of diversity, less religious, and less warlike than the earlier ones, which gives me some hope for the future. But on a recent visit to Israel, Philip Weiss finds (admittedly based on personal experiences and not as part of a scientific survey) that the younger generation there was more warlike about Syria than the old-timers. [Read more…]
Bill Maher is puzzled by it.
New rule: 12 years after 9/11, and amidst yet another debate on whether to bomb yet another Muslim country, America must stop asking the question, “Why do they hate us?” Forget the debate on Syria, we need a debate on why we’re always debating whether to bomb someone. Because we’re starting to look not so much like the world’s policeman, but more like George Zimmerman: itching to use force and then pretending it’s because we had no choice. [Read more…]
It looks like a workable deal has been reached on what to do about Syrian chemical weapons.
The United States and Russia agreed Saturday on an outline for the identification and seizure of Syrian chemical weapons and said Syria must turn over an accounting of its arsenal within a week. [Read more…]
Can anyone harbor even the slightest illusion that the US Senate is the ‘world’s greatest deliberative body’, as it frequently boasts itself to be, after this latest episode. It happened when Louisiana senator David Vitter decided that he would block senate business until he got his way. [Read more…]
ProPublica had a disturbing report about an attempt to censor a Johns Hopkins University computer science professor Matthew Green, an expert on cryptography, who blogged about the NSA’s efforts at breaking encryptions. The university, which is physically located very close to the NSA’s headquarters at Fort Meade, Maryland, does a lot of work for the NSA, especially in its Applied Physics Laboratory. [Read more…]
Bill Di Blasio won the Democratic primary for the mayoralty of New York City and will likely be elected mayor in the general election. He is reputedly a progressive who has opposed things like the random ‘stop and frisk’ tactic by police that targeted young men of color and was favored by outgoing mayor Michael Bloomberg. [Read more…]