The U.S. government gives about $5 billion dollars per year in military aid to Israel. We shouldn't give any of it. There are many compelling reasons:

1) Israel's War on Gaza has killed hundreds of civilians
2) This makes them, and by extension us, look extremely bad
3) This image problem is one of the main reasons why we are vulnerable to terrorism.

So Obama, if you really want to make a change, you need to send a message to Israel: disproportionate violence is not acceptable. Break the cycle of violence, or loose your military aid.

The USA gives about $5 billion per year in military grants to Israel. Right now that aid is being put to work slaughtering Palestinians, largely civilian men, women, and children.

This must stop. It's not only wrong, but it's a waste of tax money and makes us vulnerable to terrorism.

If you want to give out financial aid, give it to struggling students, not the Israeli war machine.

I haven't been able to get to this site for a while now . . . great to be back!

Look, this Israeli operation in Gaza has to stop. It's just killing a bunch of civilians. The USA is giving around $5 billion in military grants to Israel every year. That should stop too.

The Gaza rockets are deplorable but we all (should) know this conflict has been going on a long time.

Two wrongs don't make a right. Send Gaza food and medicine, not bombs. Revenge leads to more revenge, it's like pouring gasoline on a fire . . .

I have to laugh when I read coverage of the recent incident where an Iraqi journalist threw his shoes at George W. Bush at a press conference. They almost always say something like "in Arab culture throwing shoes at someone is considered an insult".

I'm pretty sure it's considered an insult in American culture too. Maybe a little rare, but solidly in the insult category.

The question is: how long does Obama want to be in Bush's position? Sustaining an occupation that the Iraqis don't want is beyond foolish, it's shoe-throw-worthy.

In the wake of the Mumbai terrorist attacks, pressure is mounting in India to respond in a "tough" way, similar to that of the United States. Accusations are flying, and many are being directed towards Pakistan, India's twin state with which it has been fighting on and off since the states became independent of British imperialism after WW2.

It's too bad that we have set a precedent that will result in an escalation in the cycle of violence that will only make things worse. India, like us, has two choices: respond to the attacks by fighting a war and creating plenty of fresh victims. Or, pursuing the better path, to treat terrorism like the crime that it is. Of course that means that state terrorists should be treated as such and prosecuted (e.g. George Bush).

Treating terrorism like a crime instead of like a war is better because it implies a narrow, appropriate scale of force that will create a minimum of innocent victims, and hence a minimum of new terrorism as a result.

"A true revolution of values would lay hands on the world order and say of war: this way of settling differences is not just."

"A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death."

- Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. (1967)

If MLK were alive today, would he still be our hero? He spoke these words during the Vietnam War, but they resound through the ages and touch on our wars today.

"Don't ask, don't tell" is a shameful policy that should be eliminated immediately. The military must be open to all who want to fight regardless of sexual orientation. If people are willing to risk their lives for the military, the least the military can do for them is allow them to openly be who they are.

After 9/11 it became clear that the policy actually resulted in gay Arabic translators being fired, RIGHT WHEN WE NEEDED THEM THE MOST!

It all goes back to the fact that we bash gays as a society. We need to get over that and give them equality, respect, and an apology.

What if CA passed a law banning heterosexual marriage?

People would be rioting in the streets because that would be a stupid, discriminatory idea that nobody would stand for.

People might realize how ridiculous it is to take a minority group, like gays, and ban them from getting married. It's the same thing, except gays are a historically persecuted minority group. Multiple religions and secular bigots owe gays an apology for bashing them into closets.

So, when can gays vote on your marriage?

"General, a man is quite expendable.
He can fly and he can kill.
But he has one defect:
He can think."

-Bertolt Brecht


They say imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. So why has Obama promised to imitate George W. Bush's surge strategy in Afghanistan? I thought they were supposed to be totally different. So, we've been over there for seven years and we're still not done eh? When do we get a timetable for withdrawal from that war?

I wouldn't mention it except that in war, people die. And in humanity's recent wars civilians do most of the dying. Also, I thought we were supposed to be better than terrorists. Terrorists have no regard for civilians, they think everybody in America is guilty. Guilt by association. We wouldn't stoop to that would we?

Oops, we already did . . .

A new report contains convincing evidence that Gulf War Syndrome is real, affects around 175,000 soldiers, and was caused by anti-nerve gas treatments and pesticides that soldiers were exposed to by the U.S. military during the 1990-91 Gulf War.

The LA times reported this news today:
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-sci-gulfwar18-2008nov18,0,7557540.story

The government has been denying that the syndrome, which causes neurological problems, is real since the early 90s. I guess it's more important to deny incompetence than to help veterans get the health care they need.

America is a violent place with a violent culture and a violent history. Given this, it's hard to work for non-violent solutions to problems in this country. Too many people assume that peaceful solutions are not solutions, that they are "weak".

Look at where violence has gotten us in 8 years. Nowhere.

We aren't safer.
Hundreds of thousands of people have died.
We are going broke.
But at least we can feel tough.

It's time to grow up. Politicians love to talk about violence as a last resort, but they don't really mean it. They turn to it whenever it can distract people from their real problems or please their corporate masters, who make a killing off the killing. You want a change? Have the courage to stand up for peace.

See how quickly you get shouted down by angry ignorance. Finally, to all you so-called Christians out there: who would Jesus bomb?

Check out this story Al Jazeera just broke:
http://english.aljazeera.net/news/asia/2008/11/20081117143940228385.html

The Taliban refuses to negotiate peace while foreign troops are in the country. Gee, maybe we should leave. Finding Bin Laden is police work. We don't need to take over whole countries to do it, and doing so makes us more enemies.

"If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it."

-Joseph Goebbels (1897-1945), Hitler's Minister of Propaganda


Our great lie is that a violent response to terrorism is making us safer. Every innocent person killed in our wars leaves behind a family filled with grief and, often, hate. This is the root of new violence. We must stop the cycle of violence and hold ALL of the criminals accountable in international court. This is about Afghanistan and Iraq. We must end both wars now.

What's more shocking? The word "fuck" or the unseen innocents who have paid the ultimate price for our revenge?

You're probably used to hearing about "free trade" and "fair trade". I don't like the first term because it has too many positive connotations. What it really means is that companies have an incentive to produce services wherever the cheapest labor and and weakest environmental protections are. This race to the bottom should be called what it is, "tariffless trade", or trade without import taxes. I also have problems with the term "fair trade" because it is too vague.

We need trade that is fair and environmentally sustainable: "fair-sustainable trade". By fair I mean trade that doesn't give an advantage to countries with cheap labor. By environmentally sustainable I mean trade that doesn't give an advantage to countries with weak environmental protections.

We could do this by giving each country a score, like in school: A, B, C, D, or F on both labor standards and environmental protection. The countries that score As on both would be able to trade with us with no tariffs. The countries that scored the lowest would face the highest tariffs when they export to us.

We could start ourselves and then spread this idea around by negotiations and better trade treaties. It's a good approach because it protects American products from imports made in countries with cheaper labor and weak environmental protections while allowing free competition among products that were made under roughly equal conditions.

To sum up, we need fair-sustainable trade, not tariffless trade.

We're living in a time of massive, panicky, unfair, ineffective corporate welfare bailouts. People are scared and they want to help the economy, but we can and must do better than dumping money into a hole.

Let's take just $150 billion and instead of spending it on the banks that got us where we are today, lets start to transform our nation's power plants to solar, wind, and other clean-renewable, home-produced energy. This will create MASSIVE AMOUNTS OF NEW JOBS that will lift us out of the current troubles. Furthermore, it will put us well on the path to CONFRONTING THE CLIMATE CRISIS. This will benefit everyone.

If we spent half of that $150 billion on wages that would come to 1.5 million workers making $50,000 per year for one year. Talk about stimulus!

I say $150 billion because that is the sum Obama has said he wants to spend in 10 years to confront our environmental problems. I say, if we're going to do it anyway, let's speed that up to one or two years and start spending it now when we need the stimulus. This would address two problems at once (jobs and the environment) and contribute less to the national debt, which has to be paid back by us.

Let's face it. GM, Ford, and Chrysler would be in much better shape if we had single-payer health care in the United States. Guess what? Japan, you know, the country that Nissan, Honda, and Toyota are from, has single-payer health care and those companies aren't worried about their employee's health care costs.

Health care for retirees isn't the problem. The problem is that we don't prioritize health care as a country. So let's have single-payer like every other rich country in the world. If not for the sick, for the auto industry!

Let's be smart and solve two problems at once: decline in manufacturing jobs and the climate crisis. Instead of bailing out whoever sends the most lobbyists to Washington lets use public money to build windmills and solar panels. Let's pay the workers well and do it in Detroit, a city that has been suffering economically for decades. A government job building windmills to solve the climate crisis will clean up the environment, pay well, stop Detroit's long-term decline and CAN'T BE OUTSOURCED!

Or we could bail out the company that thought making a Hummer was more important than fuel economy (and it's own survival).

Thanks to Michael Moore for the idea.

Demand for vehicles has fallen sharply. The government can't change that with a taxpayer-funded bailout. Car companies should sink or swim on their own merits. The government's limited resources should be used to stimulate the economy in a way that benefits everyone, like infrastructure investment.

I don't want to make car payments unless I buy a car. With this bailout, I'll be paying the shareholders of GM and Ford through the higher taxes and lower government spending which will be necessary to pay off the bailout debt, with interest. We don't really care much about fiscal discipline in this country. But, I guess that's why we are where we are economically.