The Return of the Roundup

[I'm not saying the blogging hiatus is done for sure....but suddenly I had the energy to do a regular post, as opposed to the lazy stuff I've been doing the last couple post (for the MySpace blog at least).

In good news, I finally did what I should have done long ago: I uninstalled and then re-installed Firefox. God, I LOVE Firefox!! Internet Explorer is horrible. I mean, how is it that I updated to a newer version yesterday and its actually slower, and more prone to crash and lose all tabs than the older version? Maybe its no coincidence that today is the day I chose to start blogging again.]

[End of Post Update: I decided against adding a Miscellaneous section, opting to add those in a latter post, or perhaps in a stand alone post]

For todays roundup I have a few things in store:

- The Middle East Peace Summit in Annapolis
- Immigration and Racism
- Miscellaneous (but interesting stuff)

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The Middle East Peace Summit in Annapolis

Recently Israel and the Palestinians (and by that I mean only the Fatah-run Palestinian Authority...more on that in the next story) have come together, along with with the US and representatives of various Arab governments in an international summit to revive the stalled Peace Process. (AFP)

Israel and the Palestinians opened a major international conference here Tuesday with a pledge to immediately resume talks frozen for seven years and seek a deal by the end of 2008.

Flanked by Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and Palestinian leader Mahmud Abbas, US President George W. Bush read out a joint statement agreed just moments before the meeting began in Annapolis, Maryland.

"We agree to engage in vigorous, ongoing and continuous negotiations and shall make every effort to conclude an agreement before the end of 2008," the statement said.

Abbas said the conference and international climate presented an exceptional opportunity for peace that would "not repeat itself," while Olmert vowed Israel was prepared to make a "painful compromise" to achieve peace.

Launching the biggest initiative of his presidency to revive the Middle East Peace process, Bush, who is nearing the end of his eight-year term, said the time was now ripe for an end to the six-decade conflict.

"In light of recent developments, some have suggested that now is not the right time to pursue peace. I disagree," Bush told delegates from more than 50 countries and organizations.

"I believe that now is precisely the right time to begin these negotiations -- for a number of reasons," he insisted, citing a new willingness among the leaders of both sides, and global support for fresh negotiations.

Also he added "the time is right because a battle is underway for the future of the Middle East -- and we must not cede victory to the extremists."

Now, I'm not sure how this international summit will end, but I have nothing but all the best wishes that President Bush (and I have no choice but place my faith in him here...), the Israelis, Palestinians, and the surrounding Arab countries can really come together and hammer a peace deal.

Such a deal would be such a great achievement and development in the Middle East (and for perceptions of the US in the Middle East).

In an administration that has failed in everything, and deservedly wrought the shame and criticism of the whole world, I seriously would not mind one bit if he partially saved his legacy and pulled out something good with this summit...in fact I would be ecstatic for a true deal.

With that said, it should never be forgotten that the deterioration of Israel/Palestinian relations was enabled in no small part by the "green-light" President Bush gave at the beginning of his administration for Israel to "get tough" with the Palestinians. Well, they certainly did, and violence ensued for quite a while, making coming together for negotiations again extremely unlikely until now.

But there are some concerns with the conference. For one neither Hamas will attend, nor will Iran attend.

Hamas has denounced the conference and thousand of Hamas supporters waving the group's green flag demonstrated in Gaza City Tuesday to reject the US-championed conference.

Why is this a problem? Well, you may remember a while back that there was a mini-Palestinian civil war between Islam-oriented Hamas and the secular-oriented Fatah, the end result being the forceful expulsion of Fatah from the Gaza Strip.

In other words, the Palestinians and their lands are divided. There is no one person controlling or purporting to speak for all Palestinians. And that complicates the international summit because, without the presence of Hamas (which I doubt the US would accept anyways) at the summit, any agreement entered into by the Palestinian Authority (Fatah) would not cover or bind the other Palestinians in the Gaza Strip. And that is problematic.

And Iran, as one of the big backers of Hamas, and a significant (and ever increasing) power in the region, really should be at that conference as well. Again, I doubt the US would let them in...they would probably think it was rewarding Iran with legitimacy or something...

Actually, I might have jumped the gun a bit since the next link in the roundup deals with the reactions of many foreign policy heavy-weights: Hamas and Iran should be involved in the Summit

Via Steve Clemons of TPMuckracker:

This tidbit just appeared in Robin Wright's recent reporting on the Annapolis Summit in an article titled "Iran: The Uninvited Wildcard in Mideast Talks":

Iran will still have leverage in the event of peace, Arab officials concede. Saudi Foreign Minister Saud al-Faisal said yesterday that any peace agreement would eventually have to include Hamas, since it controls Gaza and half the Palestinian Authority. Moreover, the two major Palestinian parties -- Hamas and Fatah, which controls the West Bank -- would need to join a national unity government, he said.

An agreement signed by Israeli and Palestinian leaders would need ratification by their respective parliaments, and Hamas still controls the Palestinian parliament.

"Unless you bring Hamas in tune with what is happening on the peace side, you are really not fulfilling a basic requirement," Faisal said. "One man cannot make peace; not even half a people can make peace," he told a roundtable of U.S. journalists. "There has to be consensus about peace among the Palestinians for this to go smoothly."

I just thought it worth noting that people ranging from former Secretary of State Colin Powell to former New Jersey Governor and Bush administration cabinet member Christine Todd Whitman (who headed the National Democratic Institute election monitoring mission of the 2005 Palestinian elections) to former US Army Chief of Staff Eric Shinseki to former National Security Advisors Zbigniew Brzezinski and Brent Scowcroft to former Senators Nancy Kassebaum Baker, Gary Hart, Lincoln Chafee, Larry Pressler, Birch Bayh and many others from both sides of the aisle agree with the Saudi Foreign Minister.

And that is why it is so important to have Iran at the table: The leverage they have with Hamas, and the pressure only they could put on Hamas could make a deal palatable to both sides that much more likely. Of course this all assumes that Iran would be invited...

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Immigration and Racism

Pat Buchanan is back, and he's coming out with a new book. For those who don't know Pat Buchanan all too well he can properly be described as a big time nativist on immigration, and I would argue...well, he's kinda racist. Let's read what he had to say on Sean Hannity's show.

Buchanan: "America [is] committing suicide" while "Asians, Africans, and Latin American children come to inherit the estate"

MSNBC political analyst Pat Buchanan appeared on the November 26 edition of Fox News' Hannity & Colmes to discuss his new book, Day of Reckoning: How Hubris, Ideology, And Greed Are Tearing America Apart (Thomas Dunne Books, November 2007), in which he writes that America is "on a path to national suicide" and later asks: "How is America committing suicide?" answering: "Every way a nation can." He proceeds to claim that "[t]he American majority is not reproducing itself. ... Forty-five million of its young have been destroyed in the womb since Roe v. Wade, as Asian, African, and Latin American children come to inherit the estate the lost generation of American children never got to see."

On Hannity & Colmes, Buchanan asserted: "You've got a wholesale invasion, the greatest invasion in human history, coming across your southern border, changing the composition and character of your country. You've got the melting pot that once welded us all together, which has broken down." Co-host Sean Hannity went on to ask him: "Do you really believe that America, the country we all love as we know it, is in jeopardy of existing?" Buchanan responded: "I think America may exist, but I'll tell you this: I do believe we're going to lose the American Southwest. I think it is almost inevitable." He continued: "If we do not put a fence on that border ...you're going to have 100 million Hispanics in the country, most of them new immigrants from Mexico, which believes that belongs to them.

There are several things here which set me off.

First is this whole nutball conspiracy that grips the imaginations of Republicans, conservatives, and anti-immigrant people that Mexicans coming into the US want to bring the Southwest US back to Mexico and they are achieving this by demographics first, and when there are soooo many Mexicans you can't go 2 steps, they suddenly secede back to Mexico....

Yeah, I KNOW that sounds crazy!!! But these people live in real fear of such a ridiculous notion...as if that would ever happen!!

That's just crazy, but it is the next thing which really rubs me the wrong way about these people.

Read what he says again: The implicit assumption, the implicit argument that Buchanan and people like him make are that anybody that is not from the white-majority (even US citizens by birth like myself who happens to be Mexican-descended) is not really American like white people are the "real Americans."

"as Asian, African, and Latin American children come to inherit the estate the lost generation of American children never got to see."

And this is what makes some of these nativists racist: They believe, I mean it goes without saying for them, that only Americans of the "majority" (i.e. White) are true Americans. What it also means is that Buchanan and his type would never consider me, my family, nor most of my friends as "real Americans." Because my parents where both from Mexico, am I not an American like all others?

And that really does piss me off. The nerve of this jackass to tell us who is the real American and who isn't!!

And if you think about it, it's so amazingly ridiculous: Unlike many countries, being American has never been about any particular race or ethnicity. It is the very nature of this nation that it has served as a place where many peoples, races, colors, and religions have come together, all at once different, and at the same time all American.

Because being American is not about any race, it is about what binds all these people of such diverse backgrounds as one people: It is not any one religion, or race, but a shared abstract identity of being American.

Our shared American history, our shared perception as being American, and our shared veneration of our "civic-religion" that is our knowledge, respect, and veneration for The American System as it is embodied in the system passed down to us from the Founders in the United States Constitution.

This is not Japan, where ethnicity and nationality are more closely involved in what goes into definining what "being Japanese" means. In America, it is more abstract...and in that way it has the potential to be much more inclusive. One of the reasons, I suspect, that this nation has always benefited and gained from every wave of immigration it has seen, and not suffered so much as in many European nations:

Here it doesn't matter where you come, or where your parents came from because any and all people can become Americans.

And they are all "real" American, no matter what people like Buchanan have to say.

Link Dump - Otherwise Known as a Roundup

I've had a pretty eventful weekend. I had little time (and sleep) for blogging until tonight, and even now this is more of a link dump than hard-core analysis. Rummage around the post...see a link you like or think is interesting and follow it and presto...you're that much smarter!! lol

I've broken it up into 5 different categories for easy browsing: (In order)

-Iraq
-Threatened Invasion of Northern Iraq by Turkey
-Iran
-The War on Terror / Case Against Torture
-Immigration / Illegal Immigrations Effects
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Iraq

-"The Real Iraq We Knew" (Oct. 16) - An Op-Ed in the Washington Post written by 16 Army Captains who have all served in Iraq. They all paint a very stark and none-too-optimistic picture of the situation on the ground on Iraq as they saw it and as they see it now. A choice quote:

Against this backdrop, the U.S. military has been trying in vain to hold the country together. Even with "the surge," we simply do not have enough soldiers and marines to meet the professed goals of clearing areas from insurgent control, holding them securely and building sustainable institutions. Though temporary reinforcing operations in places like Fallujah, An Najaf, Tal Afar, and now Baghdad may brief well on PowerPoint presentations, in practice they just push insurgents to another spot on the map and often strengthen the insurgents' cause by harassing locals to a point of swayed allegiances. Millions of Iraqis correctly recognize these actions for what they are and vote with their feet -- moving within Iraq or leaving the country entirely. Still, our colonels and generals keep holding on to flawed concepts.

I wonder if Rush Limbaugh has gotten around to calling these former Army officers "phony soldiers" yet...

Iraq has recently finished its own investigation of the Nisour Circle shooting involving Blackwater mercenaries and the deaths of many innocent civilians.

-Iraq's has concluded its own probe of the incident and concludes that Blackwater mercenaries randomly shot at civilians without provocation...and they want Blackwater out

That conforms with other investigations into that incident that I've read about...but I can't seem to find that link so don't take my word for that just yet.

Blackwater likely to be out of Iraq (Oct. 17) - According to this (which may be outdated by now) Blackwater may well be on the out but that it would be a while for that to happen. I say good ridance. Of course, if its not Blackwater it will be another mercenary company filling the gap. And no doubt many former Blackwater employees in Iraq will suddenly become "DyneCorp" or some other private army's employee. Same crap different label, so it's more like PR.

Threatened Invasion of Northern Iraq by Turkey

Kurdish regional government (Iraq) vows to retaliate if Turkey enters Iraq - While Turkeys aim (supposedly) is to kill and stop PKK terrorist who take refuge in northern Iraq, no one could really have expected the Kurdish regional government (which is just about autonomous from Iraq proper) to simply take it without some kind of response.

Rising tensions on the Turkey-Iraq border are snowballing into a possible outbreak of war, as the president of the Kurdish region in northern Iraq said his people will defend themselves if Turkey attacks Kurdish rebels based in Kurdistan.

Turkey has put forward a condition for staying away from confrontation, saying that the Iraqi government should eradicate Kurdish rebel bases and extradite rebel leaders. However, Baghdad, already battling a bigger enemy in the mainland, has expressed its helplessness by saying that the country does not currently have the resources to defeat the guerrillas.

And what will the US do? Defend the Kurds from an attack and you lose a longtime ally and fight a fellow NATO member (among the dozens of bad repercussions). Stand by and the Kurds will certainly remember that abandonment with some resentment (to what effect I don't know).

Well, I deal with this issue more in my last post, I don't feel like rehashing it all here.

Kurds in Northern Iraq protest Turkish Parliaments force authorization (Oct. 20) -

Rebel leader threatens strike on oil pipelines if attacked - Turkey stands to be hurt bad economically in case of a strike in northern Iraq. It would be bad to see Turkey's economy go sour.

The flames of conflict are being flamed, and attempts to peacefully solve this situation seem dimmer and dimmer.

The fact that 12 more Turkish soldiers are killed by Kurdish rebels will only further flame pressure for an incursion. I say again that I sincerely doubt the Turkish leadership truly wants to enter into northern Iraq (who the hell would?). The article notes that the resolution of force may be attempts at leverage to get the US or Iraq to do something to stop the PKK, but as I have said before in my previous post, such action is unlikely on the part of the part of the US and Iraq. Then what?

Iran

Iran polls are interesting. They show that the America people are not interested in war with Iran. And the issues of WMD's, nuclear programs, and supposed support for terrorist groups killing US soldiers does not change that. The sentiment for no war is very strong. A couple interesting ones (hmm...doesn't let me copy and paste so check out the first poll). In previous months the feeling had been for more support of aggressive action against Iraq, but the trend in America is against it.

The War on Terror / Case Against Torture

FBI is having trouble bringing cases against terror suspects due to the suspect nature of evidence and intelligence gathered through torture. Its pretty well known that tortured evidence is highly suspect...people literally will say anything, admit to anything under torture, which is why most nations (including ours) do not accept evidence gathered by it. Remember, the Spanish Inquisition managed to produce an astounding amount of "confessions" back in the days. Were they really that good at catching heretics or where they just really good at torturing their victims into "confessing" their heresy? hmm....

Immigration / Illegal Immigrations Effects

In yet another study detailing the effects of immigration (including illegal immigration), we find that in Arizona, immigration of all types has been good for the Arizona economy - (Daily Kos diary by Duke 1676 citing the study)

We can now add Arizona to the long list of states in which recent studies prove that the current influx of immigrants, both legal and undocumented, have contributed far more to the economy and tax base than they receive in government services.

Joining studies from California, Texas, Florida, New Mexico, Washington DC, and Long Island, NY, a new report from Udall Center for Studies in Public Policy at The University of Arizona looks at the contributions and costs of Arizona's immigrant population and finds not only an overall net gain for the state, but that the loss of this population would likely cause long term economic problems....(Snip)

Based on this study, the total state tax revenue attributable to immigrant workers was an estimated $2.4 billion, of which about $1.5 billion came from for non-citizens. Balanced against estimated fiscal costs of $1.4 billion (for education, health care, and law enforcement), the net 2004 fiscal impact of immigrants in Arizona was positive by about $940 million.

An economic reality that some cities have come to realize the hard way when they attempt to get tough on illegal immigration. I'm reminded of the case of Riverside, New Jersey, who had to pull back on its "tough" immigration laws, in part, due to the heavy economic blow their city took in the wake of passing its tough immigration laws. A law it never enforced, but that nonetheless prompted an exodus by illegal immigrants, and exodus that economically hurt the town.

Although no fines were levied, the impact was severe on this former industrial town, which in recent years has seen an influx of Portuguese and Brazilian immigrants. Residents and business owners said that many in the immigrant population scattered in fear when the law was passed, leaving vacant storefronts in a once-thriving downtown.

“This is a pretty busy day,” Ed Robins, the owner of Scott Street Music, said on Tuesday afternoon. He was pointing to a nearly empty Scott Street, Riverside’s main business district. “It took $50,000 a week off our streets. That’s what was being spent by the Brazilians and Spanish.”

Many localities of late have tried to crack down on illegal immigration, prompting similar exodus' out of their cities. They are likely to similarly start feeling the hurt. I'll keep up with those stories...

That's it for the night. It's off to watch some Adult Swim or maybe finish reading that 'Blackwater' book I've been reading at a snails pace. Maybe some Fruity Pebbles first...well, anyways. Good night