A 10-ship flotilla of boats seeking to challenge Israel’s blockade of Gaza is setting sail from Athens any day now. NPR had an account of the flotilla on today’s morning news show.

Pulitzer-prize winning author Alice Walker is among the fifty or so Americans planning to be on one of the boats. Former CIA analyst Ray McGovern is another and he writes about the real possibility of a repeat of the violence that Israel unleashed on the Mavi Marmara a year ago when it was part of a similar flotilla.

Of course, when it comes to Israel, the US government abdicates its role of trying to protect its own citizens. Recall the way it did not protest when a US citizen Furkan Dogan was killed by Israeli forces on the Mavi Marmara. Hillary Clinton seems to be giving the green light for Israel to attack the flotilla and the US State Department is warning Americans taking part in the flotilla that they may be prosecuted.

Israel initially warned any journalists on the flotilla they that they would face a ten-year ban on entry to Israel, presumably to discourage them so that there could be no independent reports of what may transpire. But they later rescinded that order.

In yesterday’s post I said that Huntsman’s entry into the Republican race did not make much sense in terms of 2012. But if you think beyond the 2012 elections and look to 2016, it may be a smart move. For starters, few outside Utah have heard of Huntsman and name recognition is important in winning elections. By running now, even if he loses, by the time 2016 campaign starts he will be seen as a familiar face. John McCain, Bob Dole, George H. W. Bush, and Ronald Reagan all had losing runs for the Republican presidential nomination before they later succeeded, and the latter two then went on to win the presidency on their first try.

Furthermore, the first time you enter the national political scene by running for major office, you face a sudden scrutiny of your past life, both personal and professional, that can throw up awkward information that needs to be explained away and distracts from your campaign. Just ask Sarah Palin whose family life and career became the stuff of soap opera. Since the media craves novelty, it is good to get all that baggage out of the way early on when the stakes are not so high, so that it becomes old news by the time the races that really matter come around. So running in 2012 allows Huntsman to see what is the worst that can be thrown at him.

But the most important factor is the general political dynamic at play. The economy is not doing well, unemployment is high, and the nation is draining its resources by waging three increasingly unpopular wars. These factors would normally doom an incumbent president running for re-election. George H. W. Bush lost his re-election bid in 1992 when conditions were not nearly as bad as they are now. But the Republican party is not in a position to take advantage of this prime opportunity because the tea party movement, although it is splintering into factions and is likely to become irrelevant soon, still has enough residual strength to wield veto power over the 2012 nominee and seems determined to want a true believer as the Republican candidate. Bill Clinton was able to win in 1992 by being a political chameleon and seizing the political center (in addition to being aided by Ross Perot’s independent candidacy) but the Republicans now seem determined to only nominate someone whose swears allegiance to a long list of right wing extremist positions.

The supposedly serious elements in the Republican party who have been alarmed at the unserious direction the party has taken seem to have resigned themselves to the fact that the party nomination will go to someone who is either just plain nuts or is not nuts but has to take so many nutty positions to win the nomination that his candidacy is doomed in the general election. This seems to be the fate of Mitt Romney, whom I pick to be the eventual 2012 party nominee based on a simple but reliable political model which is that the candidate with the most money wins.

Obama winning re-election in 2012 may be viewed with horror by the Republican base but not by the oligarchy. The serious elements in the Republican party realize that Obama’s policies on all except some social issues (like gay rights and abortion) are highly congenial to the oligarchy, so they can easily live with him. I see the medium term strategy of the Republican party traditionalists being to concede the 2012 election to Obama and focus on finding someone for 2016. The expected defeat in 2012, especially if it is a rout that drags down Republican candidates for the Senate and House of Representatives, will hugely diminish the influence of the tea party leaving the so-called ‘adults’, currently marginalized, in a position to regain control.

So after the 2012 debacle, expect the Republican party to blame the loss on too much adherence to the tea party agenda and to look for an ‘adult’ to be their next candidate, someone who is anti-abortion (which will continue to remain non-negotiable for the Republican party) but is not locked into an increasingly unpopular anti-gay and anti-science agenda, someone who is pro-business and for lower taxes and will look after the interests of the wealthy but can also appeal to a broader constituency simply by not appearing to be a nutcase. In short, an anti-abortion Republican Obama. Someone like Jon Huntsman.

So based on that rather convoluted analysis, here is my prediction. Most likely Romney will gain the nomination by being a faux loony, being pushed into that losing position by a semi-loony (Tim Pawlenty) and real loonies (all the rest of the current field except Huntsman), and will then handily lose the presidential election. This will be followed in 2016 by the party selecting a more ‘adult’ candidate.

I have been paying only the most superficial attention to the specifics of the race for the Republican presidential nomination because it is far too early in the process for it to serve as anything other than fodder to fill the inexhaustible appetite of television and the blogosphere for content-free political speculation.
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Robert Parry sets the record straight.

The anarchic hacker group LulzSec that I wrote about just a few days ago announces that it is disbanding. Whether this is a temporary or permanent move is unclear but it is inevitable that similar loose confederations of hackers will form and reform.

The Daily Show looks at the hacking issue.

Despite a Republican controlled state senate and opposition from the powerful Catholic Church, gays have won the right to marry in New York state, joining Vermont and the District of Columbia as the only places where this happened legislatively. In four other states (Connecticut, Iowa, Massachusetts, and New Hampshire) the change came about because courts ruled that denying gays this right was unconstitutional.

This is major progress in the march for equality for gays, a goal that is undoubtedly going to be attained. Like slavery, denying equality for gays is so manifestly unjust, so lacking in any rational basis, that future generations will shake their heads and wonder how the hell it could have taken us so long to realize that it was wrong.

In the midst of a generally reactionary political climate in the US, we should savor this achievement.

So congratulations, New York!