Here and There

A fifth day of rain here in soggy Atlanta. We need the rain but I'm starting to feel a real urge for 'fish and chips" if you know what I mean. The Congress is back in session and my optimism for a "wonderful new world" and "change I can believe in" is rapidly declining. Looks like politics and partisan gamesmanship are still the order of the day. Taking a quick break from the routine to hit the "tubes". Here is some of what I noticed.

Paul Krugman has some math on the stimulus package that seems to be forming. Not very encouraging if you ask me. These are bad times and going to get worse and this situation calls for bold action. It doesn't look very bold to me.
The thing is Obama seems to be doing a lot to get the GOP to climb on board. Recent history shows that trying to work with the GOP for the common good merely gets the Dems screwed. If that is what Obama wants then I guess he is going in the right direction but everything tells me it is a mistake. They(the GOP) don't care about anything but keeping their power and rich contributors happy. Government spending is fine and dandy when they or their wealth friends benefit but wasteful government intrusion and pandering to the neer do wells otherwise. Their Hoover economics got us where we are today and I am, for one, really tired of it.

Obama's team has leaked that Leon Panetta is the new man at the CIA and Dianne Feinstein and John Rockefeller have their shorts in a wad over it. DiFi is soon to be head of the Intelligence committee and thinks she should have been consulted. From everything I have read most people in the know think Panetta is a good choice. Personally, I think DiFi and the other naysayers are upset that the game is going to change and don't like it because both DiFi and JDR have much to answer for in how the CIA and the intelligence community as a whole have performed in the last 8 years. DiFi voted to confirm the idiot Porter Goss so we know her judgement is flawed in this area.

Cookie Jill over at Skippy's place is giving us some great news. For those of us worrying about presciption drug costs all we have to do is eat more vegetables. Seems that if you grow your vegetables using manure from cows/chickens that have had antibiotics and other drugs that the veges are just passing them along.

vegetables such as corn, potatoes and lettuce absorb antibiotics when grown in soil fertilized with livestock manure, according to tests conducted at the university of minnesota. - environmental health news

Just the news I needed.

If you are a Hemingway fan Jim DeRosa is pleased to let us know that thousands of his writings are now available via the internet. Cool!

Things are going from bad to worse in Gaza. CNN is reporting that IDF artillery fire has fallen near a UN school in Northern Gaza killing at least 30 and wounding many more.

Three artillery shells believed to have been fired by Israeli forces struck near the perimeter of a U.N. school in northern Gaza today, killing at least 30 people and wounding 55, a United Nations official said. Most of the casualties were outside the school in the Jabalya refugee camp, the official said.

Reports are that the Palestinian death toll since the start of this tragedy is now at 555.

Finally, just in case you haven't noticed...that light at the end of the tunnel is a train.

More On Gaza

There has been some lively discussion on my previous post It's Begun. Toward furthering that discussion I would like to bring your attention to a post at Salon by Glenn Greenwald. The entire post needs reading but I will excerpt two very important things.

The first is in regards to perspective on what the situation is really all about from a Palestinian point of view.

More to the point: for those who insist that others put themselves in the position of a resident of Sderot -- as though that will, by itself, prove the justifiability of the Israeli attack -- the idea literally never occurs to them that they ought to imagine what it's like to live under foreign occupation for 4 decades (and, despite the 2005 "withdrawal from Gaza," Israel continues to occupy and expand its settlements on Palestinian land and to control and severely restrict many key aspects of Gazan life). No thought is given to what it is like, what emotions it generates, what horrible acts start to appear justifiable, when you have a hostile foreign army control your borders and airspace and internal affairs for 40 years, one which builds walls around you, imposes the most intensely humiliating conditions on your daily life, blockades your land so that you're barred from exiting and prevented from accessing basic nutrition and medical needs for your children to the point where a substantial portion of the underage population suffers from stunted growth.

The second is a reference to George Orwell's Notes on Nationalism, which as Glenn notes is rather prescient when it comes to recent events.

All nationalists have the power of not seeing resemblances between similar sets of facts. A British Tory will defend self-determination in Europe and oppose it in India with no feeling of inconsistency. Actions are held to be good or bad, not on their own merits, but according to who does them, and there is almost no kind of outrage — torture, the use of hostages, forced labour, mass deportations, imprisonment without trial, forgery, assassination, the bombing of civilians — which does not change its moral colour when it is committed by ‘our’ side ... The nationalist not only does not disapprove of atrocities committed by his own side, but he has a remarkable capacity for not even hearing about them.

AN UPDATE TO GLENN'S POST: The Israeli Supreme Court several days ago ordered the Government to allow reporters into Gaza, yet Israel continues to block all journalists from entering. The reason, as casual_observer notes in comments, is clear:

The reason Israel has done this must be that they will do whatever they must--including ignoring their own high court--to limit evidence that Gazans are indeed human beings and that they are suffering the horrors that occur when war is unleashed on densely-packed urban civilians.

Israel knows full well that reporting from Gaza turns Gazans from vague abstractions to suffering human beings. And they will not allow that reality to be communicated to the world.

It's Begun

Israeli forces have begun the ground invasion of the Gaza Strip. AFP and others are reporting that Israel has begun heavy shelling of the northern sections of Gaza and there are unconfirmed reports that the tanks are rolling. There are reports that the area was blanketed with leaflets earlier warning residents to "leave the area immediately" to ensure their safety.

The Israel's seem to be effectively ignoring the UN and the thousands protesting around the world calling for a cease fire. The White House has signaled that they have no problem with the ground attack.

The Israeli press has reported that this action has been planned and underway since March of 2006 following a visit from Condi Rice. The plan is evidently to end the Qassam rocket attacks by the removal of tens of thousands of Palestinians from the northern Gaza Strip, the region that the resistance uses for the launch of these rockets, and to move them toward Gaza City and to confine them there. If this is the case, and it is looking more and more like it is, and couple the recent two months of forced starvation for the people of Gaza then you are looking at another Israeli violation of the Geneva Convention (pdf) that "Parties to a conflict shall at all times distinguish between the civilian population and combatants in order to spare civilian population and property. Neither the civilian population as such nor civilian persons shall be the object of attack. Attacks shall be directed solely against military objectives."

Such a plan of forced evacuation could also be defined as ethnic cleansing:

The United Nations Commission of Experts, in a January 1993 report to the Security Council, defined “ethnic cleansing” as “rendering an area ethnically homogenous by using force or intimidation to remove persons of given groups from the area.”

The casualty count in Gaza is already at 425, possibly more. How many more innocents on both sides are going to die before this ends?