One of the six Israeli extremists arrested for the vigilante/revenge killing of an Arab teen in East Jerusalem has reenacted the crime for Israeli police investigators.
Probably not a good idea to use the N-word in a newspaper oped headline.
Seems ages ago. But Eduard Shevardnadze was the Soviet Foreign Minister who helped implement the end of the Cold War. He died today at 86.
From TPM Reader ES …
Thanks for the link to the Forward article. That really brightened my day. Especially because it seems that all we hear and see from Israel is de-humanizing, tribal talk of vengeance. That being said, the fundamental problem is that the Fraenkel parents are living in Gush Etzion. Not that it diminishes the horror of what happened to their son, but maybe, just maybe, as a matter of practicality, it’d be worthwhile reconsidering the very existence of a place like Gush Etzion. It is nothing but a religious perversion of Zionism.
I believe the Palestinians deserve a state. But as a Jew and a Zionist I’ve long believed that you don’t have to care about justice or fairness or anything else for the Palestinians or care anything about the Palestinians at all to support the creation of a Palestinian state. It is obviously in Israel’s interest. To be clear, I’m not at all indifferent to the Palestinian people and their aspirations for a state and the dignity of self-determination. Quite the opposite. My point is simply to say that if your thing is the fate of Israel and the Jewish people, self-interest is – or should be – entirely adequate to come to this conclusion.
For the past several days we’ve been running a series from the Scholars Strategy Network on the future of the Republican Party — a bunch of fascinating stuff. Read all of the pieces below.
Here’s video of a massive fireworks ceremony filmed by a drone flying through the show.
To see a larger version, which I strongly recommend, click ‘read more’ to see the full post.
The iconic image of the Marines raising the flag on Mount Suribachi on Iwo Jima and some of the story behind the photo
Richard Mellon Scaife died this morning at the age of 82. The cause was cancer, a diagnosis he announced in his newspaper less than 2 months ago. His national profile had diminished considerably since the middle 90s when he became a Koch brothers like figure, vilified by Democrats as the funder and propagator of various conspiracy-theory peddling groups attacking then-President Clinton, and cheered for the same reasons by conservatives. Oddly Scaife and Clinton himself managed a reconciliation of sorts during the late Bush years. There were also less known aspects of Scaife’s philanthropy: he was a major supporter of and a contributor to Planned Parenthood.
One note: Scaife’s fortune was recently reported as $1.3 billion. Obviously that’s an astronomical sum – enough to keep numerous organizations humming along for a lifetime, as he did. But this strikes me as another sign of the impact of the last twenty years. In today’s terms, he would only make it into the mid-tier of major politics-playing plutocrats.
Postscript: A good portrait of the man in this WaPo obit.