Patrick J. Ford

A few years ago the Israel Lobby was worried. Barack Obama was winning an election against John McCain, and that worried them because Obama had spent the Democratic primary posturing himself as a peace candidate who was opposed to the Bush legacy in the Middle East. The Bush Doctrine, which entails unilateral preventative war, forcing regime change on countries that have harbored terrorists, and spreading democracy throughout the Middle East at the point of a bayonet, so to speak, could have easily been named the Israel Doctrine. Every American military action in the Middle East during the Bush years was for the direct benefit of Israel, significantly moreso than it was for the benefit of the United States.

A man much smarter and accomplished than I recently stirred up controversy with his scathing column on the divergent interests of the United States and Israel. Most Americans don't realize quite how humiliating the Israel Doctrine is to the United States and its reputation. Take, for example, Ehud Olmert's boasts after the US did an about-face on a Gaza cease-fire resolution at the UN in early 2009. The story:

While DC seems overwhelmed with news and rumors about the Health Care Reform debate, pieces have been set in motion to push amnesty through Congress sooner than many thought. Pro-Amnesty group America's Voice released the following in a press release on March 11th (underlines in the original):

Alternative Right—being the magazine of “radical traditionalism” that it is—carries with it tendencies that are inherently reactionary and backward-looking. And with good reason! The modern world has been marked primarily by cultural decay, uprootedness, and the elevation of the worst aspects of humanity. The answers to most of man’s problems may indeed be found in the classical reactionary and anti-revolutionary works of the West.

So if we adopt the term “reactionary” without fear, as Evola recommends, we need to have some sort of idea what we are looking back towards. And because many answers are to be found in pre and post Christian Europe, it seems tempting to extend this impulse to pre- and post- Christian spirituality, represented most prominently by Neopaganism.

 

Charlie Rangel stepped down from his chairmanship of the Ways and Means Committee due to mounting ethics investigations yesterday, and to significantly less attention than other notable political criminals. Politico reports:

 

Rangel says he's stepping aside only temporarily, but he officially resigned the post in a letter submitted to the House Wednesday morning. Technically, he could be restored by a future House vote, but that's a political long shot given that he was forced aside by ethics troubles.

It was not immediately clear who would take the committee’s reins in Rangel’s absence, with some insiders predicting it would be the next man in line, California’s Pete Stark, and others predicting it would be Sander Levin of Michigan. Under House rules, Stark is chairman unless Democrats act affirmatively to put someone else in his place, according to a House GOP aide familiar with House operations.

A race to succeed Rangel in the next Congress — if Democrats hold onto their majority — could be a wild donnybrook involving several potential candidates, including Stark, Levin, Jim McDermott of Washington, John Lewis of Georgia and Richard Neal of Massachusetts. Xavier Becerra of California, vice chairman of the Democratic Caucus, could also be a factor, as he has won a party leadership election before.

Rangel chose to step down, he said, because the matter “is bringing so much attention to the press and [I want] ... to avoid my colleagues having to defend me during their elections.”

Those electoral pressures had put Rangel in a bind: Either resign or face being forced out by a Republican-written resolution that was quickly gaining Democratic support, both in public and in private.

Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s (D-Calif.) statement on Rangel Wednesday morning had a certain tone of finality to it.

“Chairman Charlie Rangel has informed me of his request for a leave of absence from his duties and responsibilities as chairman of the Committee on Ways and Means. I will honor his request,” Pelosi said. "I commend Chairman Rangel for his decades of leadership on jobs, health care and the most significant economic issues of the day."

The catalyst for Rangel’s removal came last week, when the ethics committee ruled that he had broken House gift rules by accepting corporate-sponsored travel to the Caribbean.

PBS host Smiley calls meeting to urge black agenda, from the AP:

Two months after ending his annual State of the Black Union conference, Tavis Smiley is gathering African-American advocates to press the case for a "black agenda."

The decision was motivated by what Smiley called recent statements from some black leaders downplaying the need for President Barack Obama to specifically help African-Americans.

"I was compelled to do it because of this debate," the activist and PBS talk show host said Wednesday.

The panel discussion will be March 20 at Chicago State University. Panelists include advertising pioneer Tom Burrell, professors Michael Eric Dyson and Cornel West, Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan, the Rev. Jesse Jackson, and Bennett College President Julianne Malveaux.

The meeting is free and open to the public. Negotiations to televise the event are in progress, Smiley spokeswoman Leshelle Sargent said.

Some black politicians and activists have recently begun to question Obama's longtime stance that helping the overall economy will improve the fortunes of blacks who are disproportionately poor and unemployed.

West, for example, gave Obama a grade of C minus on policies and priorities focused on poor and working people, saying, "He has really not come through in any substantial and significant way." Members of the Congressional Black Caucus have blocked some legislation until their demands were met.

Last week, Smiley and the Rev. Al Sharpton had a fierce argument about the issue on Sharpton's radio show, with Sharpton taking heated exception to Smiley's claim that the reverend was giving Obama a pass on black issues.

When Smiley ended the State of the Black Union after 10 years, he said black issues were now being addressed elsewhere.

Apparently, however, not enough to his liking.

"This is not about Obama. It's about us," Smiley said in an interview.

He said that the Obama campaign and black leaders asked African-Americans for help during the election, but that "now that he's elected, what are black people being asked to do to hold him accountable to our agenda?"

Eric Deggans, who writes about the media and race for Florida's St. Petersburg Times, said Smiley's new event is consistent with his record of criticizing Obama's race-neutral stance. But there is a perception that Smiley is personally invested in the issue, he said, because Obama declined to attend Smiley's 2008 State of the Black Union event during the presidential campaign.

"It could be hard for people watching this to see Tavis as an honest broker," Deggans said. "He's playing an odd game," he continued. "He's trying to make great television and also present something that effects social change. That's often two different things."As far as I can tell, AP never reported on a similar event being cancelled several times due to death threats

AP never reported on the cancellation of a similarly-intentioned event held by a different group, but I'll give them the benefit of the doubt and assume their standards of reporting would be the same in the event of threats to Smiley and his ilk.

Vanity Fair has an interesting article on the life and death of The eXile, the delightfully subversive English-language Russian newspaper. An excerpt:

Faxed to the offices of the newspaper late on a Friday afternoon the spring before last from somewhere within the bowels of Rossvyazokhrankultura, the Russian Federal Service for Mass Media, Telecommunications, and Cultural Heritage Protection, it announced the imminent “conducting of an unscheduled action to check the observance of the legislation of the Russian Federation on mass media.” The Exile, a Moscow-based, English-language biweekly, stood accused of violating Article Four of that legislation by encouraging extremism, spreading pornography, or promoting drug use. The letter scheduled the unscheduled action to take place between May 13 and June 11. This being Russia, it wasn’t faxed until May 22.

An Exile sales director, about to leave for the day, received the fax and phoned an editor, who called the real target of the letter, Exile founder and editor in chief Mark Ames, at that moment a world away in Los Gatos, California. Ames in turn promptly called a few lawyers in Moscow, who warned him he might be arrested if he returned. Someone, apparently, had it out for The Exile.

But who? Ames likes to indulge a grandiose paranoia whenever possible, and did. A functionary? An enraged oligarch? Someone on President Dmitry Medvedev’s staff, or, more to the point, in Prime Minister Vladimir Putin’s circle of spooks? (The Exile’s first cover story on Putin, in 1999, grafted the man’s head onto the body of a latex-clad dominatrix over the headline putin commands mother russia: kneel!) Egotism aside, the possibilities were in fact endless. Since its debut, in 1997, The Exile, which read like the bastard progeny of Spy magazine and an X-rated version of Poor Richard’s Almanack, had pilloried, in the foulest terms possible, almost everyone of importance, and no importance, in Russia, and had made a point of violating not one but all of Article Four’s provisions. But everyone knew that.

So why now?

No one seemed to know that.

The one thing that Ames did know: he was going back to Moscow. Putin’s Russia is an infinitely more dangerous place for journalists than the crumbling country that had drawn Ames 15 years before from the same suburban town where he paced about now, but still it was Russia, and not America, that was his spiritual home. It was not for nothing he’d named his paper The Exile.

Several days after Ames returned to Moscow, the dour Federal Service officials, three men led by a woman, arrived at the paper’s office. When they walked in, a staffer old enough to remember some of the worst parts of the Soviet era, crossed herself and simply ran from the office, Ames says. The officials questioned Ames for more than three hours, going through issue after issue of The Exile, by turns offended, disgusted, baffled. Ames suppressed his urge to start cursing at the officials in mat, Russian’s profane slang, as he watched them thumb through his life’s work, but his restraint meant little: news of the interrogation soon got out, and stories appeared in the Russian press, The Wall Street Journal, and Reuters. Ames’s investors broke off contact. The distributors stopped sending trucks. “They worried that everybody would be sent to Siberia,” Exile sales director Zalina Abdusalamova says.

Just like that, The Exile’s era was over.

You can follow the eXile staff at a new site that follows world news, The eXiled.

The connection between health care reform and immigration, from the Center for Immigration Studies:

California Democratic Congressman Xavier Becerra on Sunday spoke of the connection between President Obama’s efforts to reform medical care and Obama's commitment to reforming immigration law. Becerra sees the two as complementary.

"It is time to reform the immigration laws, so that we never have to debate if a person, a human being, should be included in this reform of medical care," Becerra said on the Spanish-language Univision program "Al Punto." "Let's hope that the president applies the same determination to reforming the immigration laws that he has applied in this matter of health care."

In the meantime, Becerra sees reasons for Latinos to be grateful for President Obama's efforts on the health care front.

"We have to keep in in mind that if we accomplish this (health) reform, the community that will benefit more than any other in this country will be the Latino community." He said Latino citizens and legal residents "are the population that doesn't have health insurance."

The idea is straightforward. First enact health care reform to provide care to the most needy; then enact immigration reform to ensure that those who would otherwise be excluded because of their illegal status no longer have that problem.

Ron Paul is coming off of a straw poll victory at CPAC this past month, not to mention a strong showing by Campaign for Liberty and Young Americans for Liberty, two groups founded by his acolytes. But despite--or perhaps because of--this, it appears Paul may not coast to victory in his congressional primary race, according to Politico:

It’s an unusual turn of events for a veteran congressman who has reached stardom in conservative populist circles and who just last week emerged as the victor of the presidential straw poll at the Conservative Political Action Conference.

Yet despite his solid anti-establishment credentials and non-conformist views, Paul finds himself under siege from three Republicans who are embracing many of the themes that have defined Paul’s career. At the heart of the resistance is the notion that the 10-term Paul has gone Washington, abandoning his constituents as he pursues his white whale—the presidency.

“To be honest, I was surprised when these guys started coming out of the woodwork,” said Fort Bend County GOP Chairman Rick Miller. “They’re trying to tap into the idea that it’s time for a new face. It’s a sign of the times. It’s what’s happening in our country.”

Paul remains the favorite in the race but the opposition clearly has him looking over his shoulder.

In a January email alert titled “They’ve Turned Their Attack Dogs Loose On Me!”, Paul warns that both parties are “doing everything they can to make sure I am defeated.”

“These candidates include three Republicans in my own primary on March 2,” he wrote, “and they will stop at nothing to tear down and destroy all we have worked for.”

Richard Murray, a University of Houston political scientist, said strong anti-incumbent winds are buffeting even members like Paul who have never been embraced by the political establishment.