Category Archives: Republicans

A skeptical physicist ends up confirming climate data

The Washington Post reports: Back in 2010, Richard Muller, a Berkeley physicist and self-proclaimed climate skeptic, decided to launch the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature (BEST) project to review the temperature data that underpinned global-warming claims. Remember, this was not long after the Climategate affair had erupted, at a time when skeptics were griping that climatologists had based their claims on faulty temperature data.

Muller’s stated aims were simple. He and his team would scour and re-analyze the climate data, putting all their calculations and methods online. Skeptics cheered the effort. “I’m prepared to accept whatever result they produce, even if it proves my premise wrong,” wrote Anthony Watts, a blogger who has criticized the quality of the weather stations in the United Statse that provide temperature data. The Charles G. Koch Foundation even gave Muller’s project $150,000 — and the Koch brothers, recall, are hardly fans of mainstream climate science.

So what are the end results? Muller’s team appears to have confirmed the basic tenets of climate science. Back in March, Muller told the House Science and Technology Committee that, contrary to what he expected, the existing temperature data was “excellent.” He went on: “We see a global warming trend that is very similar to that previously reported by the other groups.” And, today, the BEST team has released a flurry of new papers that confirm that the planet is getting hotter. As the team’s two-page summary flatly concludes, “Global warming is real.”Here’s a chart comparing their findings with existing data:

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Obama’s gift to the Koch brothers and curse to the planet

Jamie Henn, Co-founder and Communications Director of 350.org, writes: Here’s a unique political strategy for you: in the lead up to a crucial election, as anti-corporate sentiment is sweeping the nation, consider giving a huge handout to a major corporation that happens to be your biggest political enemy and is already spending hundreds of millions to defeat you and your agenda.

If that seems too crazy to believe, welcome to the Obama 2012 campaign.

Right now, President Obama is faced with the most crucial environmental decisions he is going to face before the 2012 election: whether or not to approve the permit for the controversial Keystone XL pipeline, a 1,700 mile fuse to the largest carbon bomb on the continent, the Canadian tar sands.

The Keystone XL isn’t just an XL environmental disaster — the nation’s top climate scientists say that fully exploiting the tar sands could mean “essentially game over” for the climate — it also happens to be an XL sized handout to Big Oil and, you guessed it, the Brothers Koch. You want fries with that?

Earlier this year, when Representative Henry Waxman (D-Calif.) attempted to investigate whether or not the Koch Brothers stood to gain from the pipeline, the chairman of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce, Fred Upton (R-Mich.) called the idea an “outrageous accusation” and “blatant political sideshow.” Is it even necessary to mention that reports show Koch and its employees gave $279,500 to 22 of the energy committee’s 31 Republicans and $32,000 to five Democrats?

As you might expect, Upton was completely wrong. Reporters at InsideClimateNews and elsewhere proved that the Koch’s stand to make a fortune with the construction of the pipeline. The brothers already control close to 25 percent of the tar sands crude that is imported into the United State and own mining companies, oil terminals, and refineries all along the pipeline route. You can bet that the champagne will be flowing in Koch HQ when toxic tar sands crude starts moving down the pipe.

Which brings us back to Obama. It’s not too late for the president to intervene and stop the Koch Brothers from pocketing another profit at the expense of the American people. Because it crosses an international border, in order for the Keystone XL pipeline to be built the Obama administration must grant it a “presidential permit” that states that the construction project is in the national interest of the United States.

President Obama can deny the permit, right now, and shut down this flow of cash to the Kochs. In doing so, he’ll show that our national interest isn’t always determined by the 1%, in this case a few big oil companies and the Koch Brothers, but by the 99% of us who have to pay the price for their greed.

Denying the permit will also send a jolt of electricity through President Obama’s base, the millions of us who went out and volunteered and donated to the campaign because we believed in a candidate who said that it was time to “end the tyranny of oil.” In fact, this November 6, thousands of us former believers will be descending on Washington, DC to surround the White House with people carrying placards with the President’s own words in an attempt to resuscitate the 2008 Obama who seemed capable of standing up to folks like the Kochs. You can join here.

I can’t say that I’m privy to what the Obama 2012 campaign will advise the president to do when it comes to the pipeline. But if I was sitting in Chicago watching the Koch Brothers assembled their army of lobbyists across the nation, I’d be thinking that XL handout wasn’t such a good idea.

The Keystone XL pipeline network of corruption revealed through an investigation by DeSmogBlog, Oil Change International, The Other 98% and Friends of the Earth (click on the image below to view the complete network):

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Obama plans to hijack Occupy Wall Street

The Washington Post reports: President Obama and his team have decided to turn public anger at Wall Street into a central tenet of their reelection strategy.

The move comes as the Occupy Wall Street protests gain momentum across the country and as polls show deep public distrust of the nation’s major financial institutions.

And it sets up what strategists see as a potent line of attack against Republican front-runner Mitt Romney, a former investment executive whom Obama aides plan to portray as a wealthy Wall Street sympathizer.

Many Democrats consider Romney, the former Massachusetts governor, the greatest threat to Obama when it comes to wooing centrist independents next year, and Romney this week has begun to present himself as a champion of middle-income Americans.

Obama aides point to recent surveys that show anger at Wall Street spanning ideologies, including a new Washington Post-ABC News poll in which 68 percent of independents and 60 percent of Republicans say they have unfavorable impressions of the big financial institutions.

But the strategy of channeling anti-Wall Street anger carries risks. Many of Obama’s senior advisers have ties to the financial industry — a point that makes Occupy protesters wary of the president and his party.

In recent days, Obama has ramped up his rhetoric. He took the unusual step of targeting an individual company when he attacked Bank of America for its new $5 monthly debit-card fee, calling it “exactly the sort of stuff that folks are frustrated by.” And his campaign and the White House have distributed messages blasting GOP candidates and lawmakers for wanting to repeal Wall Street regulations pushed by Obama and opposing the confirmation of a leader for the consumer protection bureau created as part of the overhaul.

“We intend to make it one of the central elements of the campaign next year,” Obama senior adviser David Plouffe said in an interview. “One of the main elements of the contrast will be that the president passed Wall Street reform and our opponent and the other party want to repeal it.”

“I’m pretty confident 12 months from now, as people make the decision about who to go vote for, the gut check is going to be about, ‘Who would make decisions more about helping my life than Wall Street?’ ” Plouffe added.

Romney, no doubt anticipating the White House’s new attack line, sought to show solidarity with the demonstrators during this week’s GOP candidates debate.

“The reason you’re seeing protests . . . is middle-income Americans are having a hard time making ends meet,” he said.

GOP leaders say the Wall Street law is government overreach, and Romney’s economic plan calls for replacing it with a “streamlined regulatory framework.”

Obama has tried this line of attack before, railing in 2009 against “fat-cat bankers” who he accused of taking excessive bonuses in the wake of the financial meltdown. But after complaints from Democrats on Wall Street and business leaders, the president has spent much of the past year courting companies — even hiring a new chief of staff, William Daley, from the banking industry.

And many on the left have attacked Obama and his administration for its ties to Wall Street, arguing that the financial regulatory overhaul fell far short of an industry makeover that many critics believed necessary.

Much of his top economic team has roots in the financial services industry, and in recent months Daley and top campaign aides have devoted much of their time improving the relationship with big-dollar donors on Wall Street.

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New York Times discovers Netanyahu has friends in Congress

“House Republicans Discover a Growing Bond With Netanyahu” says the headline in the New York Times.

Discover? This isn’t exactly news. What the headline should say (and I know I’m fantasizing about an imaginary New York Times whose headlines don’t pull any punches) is: “House GOP trusts Netanyahu more than Obama.”

The report does acknowledge: “Unbending support for Israel has long been a bipartisan fact of American politics, but Mr. Netanyahu’s popularity in Congress now runs deeper than ever.” Or, as Pat Buchanan would put it, Capitol Hill is still Israeli occupied territory.

When the Obama administration wanted to be certain that Congress would not block $50 million in new aid to the Palestinian Authority last month, it turned to a singularly influential lobbyist: Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu.

At the request of the American Embassy and Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, Mr. Netanyahu urged dozens of members of Congress visiting Israel last month not to object to the aid, according to Congressional and diplomatic officials. Mr. Netanyahu’s intervention with Congress underscored an extraordinary intersection of American diplomacy and domestic politics, the result of an ever-tightening relationship between the Israeli government and the Republican Party that now controls the House.

On Tuesday, one of President Obama’s potential rivals in 2012, Gov. Rick Perry of Texas, delivered a speech in New York criticizing Mr. Obama’s stance toward Israel as “naïve, arrogant, misguided and dangerous.” Mr. Perry said that he would be a guest soon of Danny Danon, the hard-right deputy speaker of the Israeli Parliament.

The relationship between the Israeli government and the Republican Party has significantly complicated the administration’s diplomatic efforts to avert a confrontation at the United Nations this week over the Palestinian bid for full membership as a state, limiting President Obama’s ability to exert pressure on Mr. Netanyahu to make concessions that could restart negotiations with the Palestinians.

One of the members of Congress who attended the meeting with Mr. Netanyahu in August, Representative Michael G. Grimm of New York, a Republican, said that it was carefully explained to the delegation that the money would be used for training Palestinian police officers who work closely with the Israeli government.

Mr. Grimm said he felt more comfortable receiving the explanation from the prime minister than from Obama administration officials.

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The 2012 contest to show who loves Israel the most

Daniel Levy writes:

[I]t is in the realm of background noise, more than votes or dollars, that Israel really features as a campaign issue. John Heilemann, in an excellent New York Magazine piece, puts it like this: “the outsize attention they command and the ear-splitting volume of the collective megaphone they (Jews) wield.” Having to deal with relentless calls, op-eds, congressional resolutions and meeting requests (a monumental waste of administration and campaign time) is probably what seals the deal for kicking the Israel issue into the long grass by kissing the ring (or maybe the tuchus, in this case).

While the way in which Israel plays out as an issue with American Jews will not move the dial on next year’s elections, it will have other effects – not least on US policy and interests vis à vis Israel, the region and beyond. On the Republican side, Israel will be the center piece of a narrative that seeks to portray the president’s foreign policy as being too forgiving towards adversaries (with Iran topping the list) and too harsh with allies (see Israel). This is clearly not lined up to be a foreign policy election, and a Bin Laden-slaying incumbent is less easily portrayed as being soft on terror. But to divide the world beyond America’s shores between Judeo-Christian forces of light and Muslim forces of darkness nicely dovetails with a growing (and ugly) theme in domestic politics – sharia law care-mongering. It also still acts as a dog-whistle for the “Obama is a secret Muslim” crew.

Of greater significance for America’s future is how the Israel issue, especially if spun as electorally useful, can help bind neoconservatism to Tea Party-oriented Republicanism. A small-government, no-tax and debt-obsessed Tea Party agenda is an unnatural match for the war-mongering and global domination fantasies of neoconservatives. These trends have clashed already – for instance, with regard to America’s continued role in Afghanistan or its involvement in Libya. If Israel is to be kept far away from this equation and the neoconservatives are to maintain their iron grip on Republican foreign policy, then it is terribly convenient to spread the idea that Israel not only plays well in the bible belt, but that it can also help win the borscht belt. The almost total disappearance of realist or internationalist Rockefeller Republicanism from the party’s foreign policy arena (think GHW Bush, Scowcroft, Baker, and later, Hagel, Powell, and Chaffee) has made Republican and Likud policies indistinguishable.

That is a problem not only for Democrats, but also for America. It used to be claimed that Israel was a cause above partisan politics. Any such notion is utter nonsense today. If one assumes that: (a) Democrat-leaning Jews do largely care about Israel but not from a fundamentalist or hawkish perspective; and (b) that leading Democratic politicians tend to be in the same boat (both reasonable hypotheses); then Democrats have two possible options in responding to this new political reality. They can either make the argument for a different kind of pro-Israel policy or be playing permanent catch-up with the Republican/Likud right. Leading Jewish public intellectuals have been making the case for the former approach, a new movement (J Street) generated momentum for that option, and in a seminal essay, Peter Beinart provided a strong theoretical underpinning for the idea that this made for both good policy and good politics, given Jewish generational attitude shifts. President Obama and some leading figures in his administration initially seemed to concur – that being serious and responsible towards Israeli and American interests meant pushing for a two-state solution immediately, and standing against obstacles to that outcome such as settlements.

But through a combination of insufficient attention to detail, insufficient courage when the going got tough and insufficient coherence inside the administration, the latter approach eventually won out. Administration policy has increasingly become “we’re as pro-Israel as the Republicans and they can define pro-Israel as whatever they like.”

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The GOP war on voting

Ari Berman writes:

As the nation gears up for the 2012 presidential election, Republican officials have launched an unprecedented, centrally coordinated campaign to suppress the elements of the Democratic vote that elected Barack Obama in 2008. Just as Dixiecrats once used poll taxes and literacy tests to bar black Southerners from voting, a new crop of GOP governors and state legislators has passed a series of seemingly disconnected measures that could prevent millions of students, minorities, immigrants, ex-convicts and the elderly from casting ballots. “What has happened this year is the most significant setback to voting rights in this country in a century,” says Judith Browne-Dianis, who monitors barriers to voting as co-director of the Advancement Project, a civil rights organization based in Washington, D.C.

Republicans have long tried to drive Democratic voters away from the polls. “I don’t want everybody to vote,” the influential conservative activist Paul Weyrich told a gathering of evangelical leaders in 1980. “As a matter of fact, our leverage in the elections quite candidly goes up as the voting populace goes down.” But since the 2010 election, thanks to a conservative advocacy group founded by Weyrich, the GOP’s effort to disrupt voting rights has been more widespread and effective than ever. In a systematic campaign orchestrated by the American Legislative Exchange Council – and funded in part by David and Charles Koch, the billionaire brothers who bankrolled the Tea Party – 38 states introduced legislation this year designed to impede voters at every step of the electoral process.

All told, a dozen states have approved new obstacles to voting. Kansas and Alabama now require would-be voters to provide proof of citizenship before registering. Florida and Texas made it harder for groups like the League of Women Voters to register new voters. Maine repealed Election Day voter registration, which had been on the books since 1973. Five states – Florida, Georgia, Ohio, Tennessee and West Virginia – cut short their early voting periods. Florida and Iowa barred all ex-felons from the polls, disenfranchising thousands of previously eligible voters. And six states controlled by Republican governors and legislatures – Alabama, Kansas, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas and Wisconsin – will require voters to produce a government-issued ID before casting ballots. More than 10 percent of U.S. citizens lack such identification, and the numbers are even higher among constituencies that traditionally lean Democratic – including 18 percent of young voters and 25 percent of African-Americans.

Taken together, such measures could significantly dampen the Democratic turnout next year – perhaps enough to shift the outcome in favor of the GOP. “One of the most pervasive political movements going on outside Washington today is the disciplined, passionate, determined effort of Republican governors and legislators to keep most of you from voting next time,” Bill Clinton told a group of student activists in July. “Why is all of this going on? This is not rocket science. They are trying to make the 2012 electorate look more like the 2010 electorate than the 2008 electorate” – a reference to the dominance of the Tea Party last year, compared to the millions of students and minorities who turned out for Obama. “There has never been in my lifetime, since we got rid of the poll tax and all the Jim Crow burdens on voting, the determined effort to limit the franchise that we see today.”

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Why the US military is the greatest threat to US national security

Lawrence Korb writes:

In Congressional testimony over the past week, several high ranking military officers, led by Army General Martin Dempsey, the nominee to become the next Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, have warned about the dire national security consequences that could occur if the defense budget is cut by more than a token amount. Their comments have been reinforced by several Republican members of the House Armed Services Committee. But there are at least five reasons why the defense budget can and should be cut substantially without undo risk.

First, in real or inflation adjusted dollars, it is higher than at any time since World War II, including the Korean and Vietnam Wars and the height of the Reagan buildup. The Korean War peak was $485 billion in FY 1952, Vietnam $409 billion in FY 1968, and the Reagan buildup $546 billion in FY 1985. The baseline defense budget for FY2012 is $585 billion. If one adds in funding for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the total defense budget for the upcoming fiscal year rises to about $700 billion.

Second, the baseline defense budget has risen in real terms for 13 consecutive years, which is unprecedented in American history. The Korean and Vietnam buildups lasted three years and the Reagan buildup but four. Since FY 1998, the baseline budget has risen from $360 billion to $585 billion or 63 percent. Moreover, the military snuck many items that had nothing to do with the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq into the $1.3 trillion war supplemental budgets, for example the F-22 and missile defense.

Third, despite the gusher of defense spending, the military in many ways is no better off than it was 13 years ago. In fact, it may be worse. Its equipment is older, and its forces are training less. This condition is the result of what Admiral Mullen, the current Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, called the failure to make hard choices. As a result, the Pentagon spent $46 billion on weapon systems it had to terminate and the cost overruns on systems it is currently buying went up by $400 billion. Finally, when pressed, the military leaders themselves have identified nearly $200 billion in savings that could be achieved in the FY 2012-2016 time frame if they operated more efficiently.

Fourth, the military budget must play a role in dealing with what Admiral Mullen calls the greatest threat to our national security, the burgeoning federal deficit which now totals $14.3 trillion. Defense spending now consumes more than half of the total discretionary budget, more than 20 percent of the total budget, up from 16 percent a decade ago, and is at the same level as Social Security and Medicare, which are funded by trust funds.

Fifth, the US is not dealing with an existential threat like we did in the Cold War.

Dempsey and his fellow officers say that cutting the baseline or non-war defense budget by $100 a year billion or by $1 trillion over the next decade will jeopardize our security. Hardly. A $100 billion cut will leave the Pentagon with a baseline defense budget of $480 billion. During the Cold War, the defense budget averaged $450 billion in today’s dollars. And even Secretary Gates admitted we do not need to go back to Cold War levels of defense spending.

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‘The Left has nowhere to go’

Chris Hedges writes:

Ralph Nader in a CNN poll a few days before the 2008 presidential election had an estimated 3 percent of the electorate, or about 4 million people, behind his candidacy. But once the votes were counted, his support dwindled to a little over 700,000. Nader believes that many of his supporters entered the polling booth and could not bring themselves to challenge the Democrats and Barack Obama. I suspect Nader is right. And this retreat is another example of the lack of nerve we must overcome if we are going to battle back against the corporate state. A vote for Nader or Green Party candidate Cynthia McKinney in 2008 was an act of defiance. A vote for Obama and the Democrats was an act of submission. We cannot afford to be submissive anymore.

“The more outrageous the Republicans become, the weaker the left becomes,” Nader said when I reached him at his home in Connecticut on Sunday. “The more outrageous they become, the more the left has to accept the slightly less outrageous corporate Democrats.”

Nader fears a repeat of the left’s cowardice in the next election, a cowardice that has further empowered the lunatic fringe of the Republican Party, maintained the role of the Democratic Party as a lackey for corporations, and accelerated the reconfiguration of the country into a neo-feudalist state. Either we begin to practice a fierce moral autonomy and rise up in multiple acts of physical defiance that have no discernable short-term benefit, or we accept the inevitability of corporate slavery. The choice is that grim. The age of the practical is over. It is the impractical, those who stand fast around core moral imperatives, figures like Nader or groups such as Veterans for Peace, which organized the recent anti-war rally in Lafayette Park in Washington, which give us hope. If you were one of the millions who backed down in the voting booth in 2008, don’t do it again. If you were one of those who thought about joining the Washington protests against the war where 131 of us were arrested and did not, don’t fail us next time. The closure of the mechanisms within the power system that once made democratic reform possible means we stand together as the last thin line of defense between a civil society and its disintegration. If we do not engage in open acts of defiance, we will empower a radical right-wing opposition that will replicate the violence and paranoia of the state. To refuse to defy in every way possible the corporate state is to be complicit in our strangulation.

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Republicans who excused extremism in the name of victory have unleashed a monster

Christopher Hitchens writes:

It is often in the excuses and in the apologies that one finds the real offense. Looking back on the domestic political “surge” which the populist right has been celebrating since last month, I found myself most dispirited by the manner in which the more sophisticated conservatives attempted to conjure the nasty bits away.

Here, for example, was Ross Douthat, the voice of moderate conservatism on the New York Times op-ed page. He was replying to a number of critics who had pointed out that Glenn Beck, in his rallies and broadcasts, had been channeling the forgotten voice of the John Birch Society, megaphone of Strangelovian paranoia from the 1950s and 1960s. His soothing message:

These parallels are real. But there’s a crucial difference. The Birchers only had a crackpot message; they never had a mainstream one. The Tea Party marries fringe concerns (repeal the 17th Amendment!) to a timely, responsible-seeming message about spending and deficits.

The more one looks at this, the more wrong it becomes (as does that giveaway phrase “responsible-seeming”). The John Birch Society possessed such a mainstream message — the existence of a Communist world system with tentacles in the United States — that it had a potent influence over whole sections of the Republican Party. It managed this even after its leader and founder, Robert Welch, had denounced President Dwight D. Eisenhower as a “dedicated, conscious agent” of that same Communist apparatus. Right up to the defeat of Barry Goldwater in 1964, and despite the efforts of such conservatives as William F. Buckley Jr. to dislodge them, the Birchers were a feature of conservative politics well beyond the crackpot fringe.

Now, here is the difference. Glenn Beck has not even been encouraging his audiences to reread Robert Welch. No, he has been inciting them to read the work of W. Cleon Skousen, a man more insane and nasty than Welch and a figure so extreme that ultimately even the Birch-supporting leadership of the Mormon Church had to distance itself from him. It’s from Skousen’s demented screed The Five Thousand Year Leap (to a new edition of which Beck wrote a foreword, and which he shoved to the position of No. 1 on Amazon) that he takes all his fantasies about a divinely written Constitution, a conspiratorial secret government, and a future apocalypse. To give you a further idea of the man: Skousen’s posthumously published book on the “end times” and the coming day of rapture was charmingly called The Cleansing of America. A book of his with a less repulsive title, The Making of America, turned out to justify slavery and to refer to slave children as “pickaninnies.” And, writing at a time when the Mormon Church was under attack for denying full membership to black people, Skousen defended it from what he described as this “Communist” assault.

So, Beck’s “9/12 Project” is canalizing old racist and clerical toxic-waste material that a healthy society had mostly flushed out of its system more than a generation ago, and injecting it right back in again. Things that had hidden under stones are being dug up and re-released. And why? So as to teach us anew about the dangers of “spending and deficits”? It’s enough to make a cat laugh. No, a whole new audience has been created, including many impressionable young people, for ideas that are viciously anti-democratic and ahistorical. The full effect of this will be felt farther down the road, where we will need it even less.

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There’s a war going on inside America

Robert Reich writes:

The deal the President struck with Republican leaders is an abomination.

It will cost $900 billion over the next two years — larger than the bailout of Wall Street, GM, and Chrysler put together, larger than the stimulus package, larger than anything that’s come out of Washington in years.

It makes a mockery of deficit reduction. Worse, the lion’s share of that $900 billion will go to the very rich. Families with incomes of over $1 million will reap an average of about $70,000, while middle-class families earning $50,000 a year will get an average of around $1,500. In addition, the deal just about eviscerates the estate tax — yanking the exemption up to $5 million per person and a maximum rate of 35 percent.

And for what?

Wealthy families won’t spend nearly as large a share of what they get out of this deal as will middle-class and working-class families, so it doesn’t do much to stimulate the economy.

The deal further concentrates income and wealth in America — when it’s already more concentrated than at any time in the last 80 years.

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Netanyahu assumes command in Washington

After winning the US midterm elections, Israel’s prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu hardly needs to worry about holding his own coalition government together. The fact that he so transparently now has Washington in his pocket should duly impress anyone who might have doubted America’s willingness to tolerate its increasingly servile relationship with Israel.

Even so, after the announcement that 1,345 new housing units will be built for Jewish occupants in Israeli-occupied East Jerusalem, President Obama’s reaction — to suggest that this move is “unhelpful” during peace negotiations — set off alarm bells. The White House was swift to assure those concerned, that the administration is not stepping out of line.

On a conference call with American Jewish leaders today, a White House official said the administration hadn’t sought a confrontation with the Israelis over a new construction announcement.

President Barack Obama answered a question at a press conference on the subject straightforwardly but hadn’t specifically planned to make a statement criticizing new Israeli building, National Security Council official Dan Shapiro said on the call, according to a participant.

Perhaps the press can avoid causing Obama any further embarrassment by henceforth not asking questions on such sensitive topics.

Still, this administration remains an object of mistrust and so when Netanyahu met his leading representative in Washington a few days ago, Eric Cantor, the congressman and likely GOP majority leader assured his prime minister that the Republican party will now be able impose the required discipline.

Eric stressed that the new Republican majority will serve as a check on the Administration and what has been, up until this point, one party rule in Washington. He made clear that the Republican majority understands the special relationship between Israel and the United States, and that the security of each nation is reliant upon the other.

Unfortunately, a few Americans might be perplexed by this claim that the security of the United States is dependent on the security of Israel. Cantor believes “most Americans understand that Israel’s security is synonymous with America’s security.”

Mutual dependence and the security of these two nations being synonymous are not quite the same thing.

It’s easy to see that Israel is capable of having such a disruptive impact on the Middle East that this will damage US interests and in that sense that the US depends on Israel not to undermine its national security even more than it already does.

But to say that Israel’s security is synonymous with America’s security suggests another possibility. If our interests do indeed so perfectly overlap, then we really don’t need to think about Israel’s security. If America focuses on its own interests, Israel’s — in as much as their interests are identical — will be taken care of. In as much as our interests differ — well that’s Israel’s problem, not ours.

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OPINION: Is Islamophobia the ticket to the White House?

Rudy and Pat: hate expectations
By Eboo Patel, Washington Post, November 11, 2007

You have to wonder how the conversation went: Did Rudy begin by convincing Pat that hating Muslims was more important than hating homosexuals? Or did he start by saying that hating Muslims should come before protecting fetuses?

One thing is crystal clear: Rudy knows Republican math. To win Republican primaries, you have to win the hearts of the Religious Right. And Rudy wasn’t going to do that with his life story (multiple marriages, multiple divorces) or his social positions (pro gay rights, pro choice). His only hope was to change the subject. And hating Muslims is a popular topic in Religious Right circles these days.

Here is what Rudy had to say about his new BFF Pat Robertson: “… he has a tremendous amount of insight into what the main issues are and how they should be dealt with.”

The main issue for Rudy is how to exploit the current fear of Muslims into a winning presidential campaign. Pat Robertson will offer his insights on that issue alongside America’s most prominent Islamophobes, including Norman Podhoretz, Peter King and Daniel Pipes. [complete article]

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