Ben Slade

By Peter Beinart from The New York Review of Books:

"Among American Jews today, there are a great many Zionists, especially in the Orthodox world, people deeply devoted to the State of Israel. And there are a great many liberals, especially in the secular Jewish world, people deeply devoted to human rights for all people, Palestinians included. But the two groups are increasingly distinct. Particularly in the younger generations, fewer and fewer American Jewish liberals are Zionists; fewer and fewer American Jewish Zionists are liberal. One reason is that the leading institutions of American Jewry have refused to foster—indeed, have actively opposed—a Zionism that challenges Israel’s behavior in the West Bank and Gaza Strip and toward its own Arab citizens. For several decades, the Jewish establishment has asked American Jews to check their liberalism at Zionism’s door, and now, to their horror, they are finding that many young Jews have checked their Zionism instead."

A great analysis of the political motivations for Israel going to war against Hezbollah, by Aluf Benn in Salon.com:

"Olmert's decision to fight back was in part a result of his political weakness: Israel's new Cabinet, sworn in on May 4, is led by a freshman team lacking battlefield experience and hangs on a loose coalition. It is a byword of Israeli politics that weak governments tend to hit harder. A former war hero like Ariel Sharon, Yitzhak Rabin or Ehud Barak, "Mr. Security" at the top, could afford politically to be more flexible. But Olmert, who was smeared by his right-wing adversary Benjamin Netanyahu as a leftist weakling, could not. Along with the new defense minister, Amir Peretz, Olmert had to show the weary public and the military leaders that he had balls."

From an article in Salon.com by Helena Cobban:

But President Bush's decision to invade Iraq was never just about Iraq, anyway. The intellectual authors of the decision -- Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and his civilian aides in the Pentagon, and the powerful neoconservatives outside government -- intended the invasion of Iraq to send powerful messages throughout the Middle East and the world. For these men, the invasion was a high-stakes roll of the dice in a strategic game of global proportions. In the arenas of the broader Persian Gulf, the Israeli-Arab theater, the campaign against terrorism, and the worldwide relationship with other existing and emerging powers, the invasion of Iraq was intended to decisively reverse what the neocons had seen as a worrying erosion of U.S. power and influence.

While my gut says that free trade is generally good, this article does make some powerful points.

From the article:

While there has been some media coverage of NAFTA's ruinous impact on US industrial communities, there has been even less media attention paid to its catastrophic effects in Mexico:

• NAFTA, by permitting heavily-subsidized US corn and other agri-business products to compete with small Mexican farmers, has driven Mexican farmers off the land due to low-priced imports of US corn and other agricultural products. Some 2 million Mexicans have been forced out of agriculture, and many of those that remain are living in desperate poverty. These people are among those that cross the border to feed their families. (Meanwhile, corn-based tortilla prices climbed by 50%. No wonder so many Mexican peasants have called NAFTA their "death warrant.")
• NAFTA's service-sector rules allowed big firms like Wal-Mart to enter the Mexican market and, selling low-priced goods made by ultra-cheap labor in China, to displace locally-based shoe, toy, and candy firms. An estimated 28,000 small and medium-sized Mexican businesses have been eliminated.
• Wages along the Mexican border have actually been driven down by about 25% since NAFTA, reported a Carnegie Endowment study. An over-supply of workers, combined with the government-sponsored crushing of union organization, has resulted in sweatshop pay along the border where wages now typically run 60 cents to $1 an hour.

I'm sure this is just a coincidence, but...  

1. The Iranians marched in the Olympics to the apparently incongruous theme of Funkytown.  
   
   
2. An article in Time magazine talks about a French nuclear power company named Areva using Funkytown as the background music for it's "nukes are cool" advertising campaign.  From the article:
   

   [Anne Lauvergeon, CEO of French nuclear power company Avera] has sought to create a positive image for the firm and for nuclear power in general by sponsoring the French yacht in the America's Cup race and by launching a worldwide corporate-branding campaign that uses animated figures set to the 1980 disco hit Funkytown. The intended message, company officials say: Nukes are cool.

From the May 05 article in The New Republic (subscription required):

...here is something you would never guess from watching the news: War has entered a cycle of decline. Combat in Iraq and in a few other places is an exception to a significant global trend that has gone nearly unnoticed--namely that, for about 15 years, there have been steadily fewer armed conflicts worldwide. In fact, it is possible that a person's chance of dying because of war has, in the last decade or more, become the lowest in human history.

By Tom Barry for AxisOfLogic.com Apr 22, 2005
http://www.axisoflogic.com/artman/publish/article_16990.shtml

A detailed an insightful review of Jon Bolton, the Bush administration's candidate for Ambassadorship to the UN. Bolton is described as being similar to the extremist "red meat" hawkish neo-cons, but more politically involved.

By Michael Lind, Whitehead Senior Fellow for The Financial Times, January 25, 2005 (a copy is available at NewAmerica.net)

In a second inaugural address tinged with evangelical zeal, George W. Bush declared: "Today, America speaks anew to the peoples of the world." The peoples of the world, however, do not seem to be listening. A new world order is indeed emerging - but its architecture is being drafted in Asia and Europe, at meetings to which Americans have not been invited...