A major impediment to progress is Washington's strange policy that dialogue on controversial issues will be extended only as a reward for subservient behavior and will be withheld from those who reject U.S. assertions.
Stop the Band-Aid Treatment We Need Policies for a Real, Lasting Middle East Peace
By Jimmy Carter Tuesday, August 1, 2006; A17
The Middle East is a tinderbox, with some key players on all sides waiting for every opportunity to destroy their enemies with bullets, bombs and missiles. One of the special vulnerabilities of Israel, and a repetitive cause of violence, is the holding of prisoners. Militant Palestinians and Lebanese know that a captured Israeli soldier or civilian is either a cause of conflict or a valuable bargaining chip for prisoner exchange. This assumption is based on a number of such trades, including 1,150 Arabs, mostly Palestinians, for three Israeli soldiers in 1985; 123 Lebanese for the remains of two Israeli soldiers in 1996; and 433 Palestinians and others for an Israeli businessman and the bodies of three soldiers in 2004.
So many superrich Americans evade taxes using offshore accounts that law enforcement cannot control the growing misconduct, according to a Senate report that provides the most detailed look ever at high-level tax schemes.
Among the billionaires cited in the report are the owner of the New York Jets football team, Robert Wood Johnson IV; the producer of the “Mighty Morphin Power Rangers” children’s show, Haim Saban; and two Texas businessmen, Charles and Sam Wyly, who the Center for Public Integrity found in 2000 were the ninth-largest contributors to President Bush.
In 1977 it opened Side Gallery, building the range and number of bodies of work through its own production, its commissions, purchases and acquisitions. These online exhibitions are drawn from this unique collection: some 2,000 documentary photographs are featured, here, in over 80 bodies of work by more than 40 different photographers.
It may be timely for the American people to ask what purpose the US Congress actually serves
From: John Whitbeck
TO: Distinguished Recipients
Transmitted below is a brief NATION article on how the US Congress "works".
It may be timely for the American people to ask what purpose the US Congress actually serves. Even with an egregious executive branch, would the country really be any worse off if the legislative branch ceased to exist?
An argument can be made (although, assuming that the NSA reads my e-mails, I would never dream of making it myself) that the full tragedy of 9/11 is that the three aircraft that reached their targets did so -- and that the one that didn't didn't.
In early March, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) held its forty-seventh annual conference in Washington. AIPAC's executive director spent twenty-seven minutes reading the "roll call" of dignitaries present at the gala dinner, which included a majority of the Senate and a quarter of the House, along with dozens of Administration officials.
As this event illustrates, it's impossible to talk about Congress's relationship to Israel without highlighting AIPAC, the American Jewish community's most important voice on the Hill. The Congressional reaction to Hezbollah's attack on Israel and Israel's retaliatory bombing of Lebanon provide the latest example of why.
But it's hard to imagine any Congress, or subsequent Administration, returning to the role of honest broker. What the region needs now, according to Brzezinski, is an American leader brave enough to say: "Either I make policy on the Middle East or AIPAC makes policy on the Middle East." One can always dream.
