She's [that's Sarah Palin] back

There is no denying that the woman has guts - even if little evident brain! Now on the circuit promoting a book of hers to be released this week, Sarah Palin has been hard at it making her usual uninformed and inflammatory statements.

Max Blumental, writing on TomDispatch in " The Palin Effect: How Sarah Palin Made Herself Indispensable While Destroying the Republican Party" provides a background to the woman and her re-emergence on the American political scene:

"Sarah Palin's heavily publicized book tour begins in earnest this Monday, but weeks before, her ghostwritten memoir, Going Rogue: An American Life, had already vaulted into the number one position at Amazon. Warming up for a tour that will take her across Middle America in a bus, Palin tested her lines in a November 7th speech before a crowd of 5,000 anti-abortion activists in Wisconsin. She promptly cited an urban legend as a "disturbing trend," claiming the Treasury Department had moved the phrase "In God We Trust" from presidential dollar coins. (The rumor most likely originated with a 2006 story on the far-right website WorldNetDaily.)

In fact, a suggested alteration in its position on the coin was shot down in 2007 after pressure from Democratic Senator Robert Byrd. Nonetheless, Palin did not hesitate to take up this "controversy," however false, since it conveniently pits a tyrannical, God-destroying, secular big government against humble God-fearing folk. In doing so, of course, she presented herself as this nation's leading defender of the faith.

In a Republican Party hoping to rebound in 2010 on the strength of a newly energized and ideologically aroused conservative grassroots, Palin's influence is now unparalleled. Through her Facebook page, she was the one who pushed the rumor of "death panels" into the national healthcare debate, prompting the White House to issue a series of defensive responses. Unfazed by its absurdity, she repeated the charge in her recent speech in Wisconsin. In a special congressional election in New York's 23rd congressional district, Palin's endorsement of Doug Hoffman, an unknown far-right third-party candidate, helped force a popular moderate Republican politician, Dede Scozzafava, from the race. In the end, Palin's ideological purge in upstate New York led to an improbable Democratic victory, the first in that GOP-heavy district in more than 100 years."

Justice? Not so fast!

The US Attorney-General has attracted both praise and severe criticism for his decision to prosecute the 9/11 offenders in New York rather than at Gitmo. Open justice you might think! Yes, but there is a fly in the ointment in all of this - as Glenn Greenwald, lawyer and blogger for Salon explains in his piece "Detainees to get the "state-always-wins" system of "justice":

"The problem is that this decision does not stand alone. Instead, it is accompanied by this:

'Holder will also announce that a major suspect in the bombing of the U.S.S. Cole, Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, will face justice before a military commission, as will a handful of other detainees to be identified at the same announcement, the official said.

It was not immediately clear where commission-bound detainees like al-Nashiri might be sent, but a military brig in South Carolina has been high on the list of considered sites.'

So what we have here is not an announcement that all terrorism suspects are entitled to real trials in a real American court. Instead, what we have is a multi-tiered justice system, where only certain individuals are entitled to real trials: namely, those whom the Government is convinced ahead of time it can convict. Others for whom conviction is less certain will be accorded lesser due process: put in military commissions, to which most leading Democrats vehemently objected when created under Bush. Presumably, others still -- those who the Government believes cannot be convicted in either forum, will simply be held indefinitely with no charges, a power the administration recently announced it intends to preserve based on the same theories used by Bush/Cheney to claim that power.

A system of justice which accords you varying levels of due process based on the certainty that you'll get just enough to be convicted isn't a justice system at all. It's a rigged game of show trials."

Peace process? - and meaningless gestures

Stephen Walt, professor of international relations at Harvard, writing on his blog on FP, reflects on the ever-growing stalemate which is said to be the peace-process in the Middle East. Indeed, the so-called two-State solution may also be dead in the water!

"The second problem, I fear, is that it is too little, too late. Having dithered, delayed and dissembled ever since the Oslo Accords -- while the number of settlers more than doubled -- we are about to face an entirely different problem. The sun is now setting on the "two-state solution" -- if it is not already well below the horizon -- and pretty soon everyone will have to admit that they are sitting around in the dark and pretending they see daylight.

Be careful what you wish for. Israel is going to get what it has long sought: permanent control of the West Bank (along with de facto control over Gaza). The Palestinian Authority is increasingly irrelevant and may soon collapse, General Keith Dayton's mission to train reliable and professional Palestinian security forces will end, and Israel will once again have full responsibility for some 5.2 million Palestinian Arabs under its control. And the issue will gradually shift from the creation of a viable Palestinian state -- which was the central idea behind the Oslo process and the subsequent "Road Map" -- to a struggle for civil and political rights within an Israel that controls all of mandate Palestine. And on what basis could the United States oppose such a campaign, without explicitly betraying its own core values?"

Another devastating [and disgraceful] Wall

From The Electronic Intafada's piece "Palestinians symbolically dismantle sections of the wall" :

"Tear down this wall!" then US President Ronald Reagan told Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev in 1987, demanding he tear down the infamous Berlin wall. Two years later, on 9 November 1989, media around the world broadcast images of crowds of Germans from both the east and the west climbing atop the barrier and tearing down large sections of the wall. For many, the event was highly symbolic as it was perceived as the end of the Cold War and the start of a period when the world was headed in a more just and peaceful direction, free of walls keeping peoples apart.

However, two decades later, walls of separation still exist throughout the world. Israel's wall in the West Bank is much bigger than the Berlin wall ever was, as it encloses more than two million Palestinians inside the occupied West Bank. This wall separates Palestinians from their families, land, natural resources and communities.

In a symbolic action, the protestors in Nilin on 6 November were able to knock down a section of the wall before the Israeli army arrived and fired tear gas at the crowd."

As Obama considers......

Credited to cartoonist Mike Luckovich

Who's calling the shots here?

Who says there isn't an Israel Lobby? - or at the very least a very well-organised group of Jews who exert significant influence and power far in excess of their numbers.

Paul Craig Roberts takes up the issue - including asking who calls the shots between the US and Israel - in a piece in Information Clearing House:

"It did not take the Israel Lobby long to make mincemeat out of the Obama administration’s “no new settlements” position. Israeli prime minister Netanyahu is bragging about Israel’s latest victory over the US government as Israel continues to build illegal settlements on occupied Palestinian land.

In May President Obama read the Israelis the riot act, telling the Israeli government that he was serious about ending the Israeli conflict with the Palestinians and that a lasting peace agreement required the Israeli government to abandon all construction of new settlements in the occupied West Bank.

On November 10 Obama’s White House chief of staff, Rahm Israel Emanuel, surrendered for his boss at the annual conference of the United Jewish Communities. The ongoing Israeli settlements, he said, should not be a “distraction” to a peace agreement.

Allegedly, the US is a superpower and Israel is a client state whose very existence depends entirely on US military and economic aid and diplomatic protection. Yet, in the real world it works the other way. Israel is the superpower and the US is its client state."

All too true.....

Credit to Larry Wright in The Detroit News

What an Indictment of the World!

CommonDreams republishes a piece from AP which is astounding. That in this day and age some 200 children in the world have stunted growth because they don't have enough to eat. And this in a world in which many, many countries spend untold billions just on military hardware alone.

"Nearly 200 million children in poor countries have stunted growth because they don't get enough to eat, according to a new report published Wednesday by UNICEF.

The vast majority are in Asia and Africa: more than 90 percent of children with stunted growth live on those two continents.

"Unless attention is paid to addressing the causes of child and maternal undernutrition today, the costs will be considerably higher tomorrow," said UNICEF executive director Ann M. Veneman in a statement.

More than a third of all deaths in children under five are linked to undernutrition, according to UNICEF. Children with nutritional deficiencies often lack the strength to fight off diseases and complications.

But little money has gone into ensuring kids in the developing world get enough food, compared to high-profile problems like AIDS. Though AIDS causes about 2 percent of all child deaths, it gets more than 20 cents of every dollar spent on public health."

Juveniles in jail...never to be released

The American justice "system" is quite astonishing.....

AlterNet, in a piece "Hard to Believe: 73 U.S. Kids Sentenced to Life Without Parole at 14 or Younger, and All Are Black" lays out some difficult facts to accept - in a country which prides itself as civilised.

"Today, Sullivan is one of some 109 prisoners in the country whose non-homicide crimes have condemned them to leave prison only in a coffin. No fewer than 76 of those prisoners are behind bars in Florida. (Until last month there were 77, but 29-year-old Travis Underhill, sentenced to life in 1999 for armed robbery, "collapsed while playing basketball at a Palm Beach County prison on Oct. 8 and died," according to the Miami Herald.) The vast majority -- 84 percent, in Florida -- are African American. On a national level, according to Human Rights Watch, African American youths are serving life without parole at a rate of about 10 times that of white youths."

Read the complete piece here - especially the facts surrounding the jailed Sullivan referred to above.