Taylor Marsh has up links to some Lebanese blogs as well as a running compentary on the Middle Eastern open sore. They seem to all be blogs written by Lebanese Christians and at this point they're angrier at Hezbollah and they are at Israel. I would be careful, however, about reading too much into this. Some people seem to be taking this to mean "the Lebanese people are turning against Hezbollah". Unless the Shia base of Hezbollah turns against Hezbollah, even if everyone else does, that's only a slim majority.

Remember, the reason "Lebanon" hasn't disarmed Hezbollah, is that the Lebanese army would lose a confrontation against Hezbollah. If the other Lebanese factions cooperate with Israel in breaking Hezbollah, they'll start another 20 year internicine civil war in Lebanon. It's not possible to stop weapons from getting into Southern Lebanon from Syria (and thus Iran), the Shia are outbreeding the Lebanese Christians and Sunni, and they are poor and tough. They don't have nearly as much to lose as the northern Lebanese and they have no real liking for the rich Christians who abandoned them to Israel last time around. They know they won against Israel, they know it took a long time, and while weary, they probably think they can do it again.

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Stratfor thinks that Israel, who has called up their reserves, are going to move full into Lebanon and try and break Hezbollah. They reason that the US thinks this is in its interest; that from the Israeli point of view they need to the forward ground which is being used to launch rocket attacks; and that if Israeli troops are in danger of being kidnapped anyway, then they might as well put the troops out there in Lebanon and create a buffer zone to protect civilian Israel. They further argue that Israel believes that at this point they're going to be condemned no matter what by the international community and that if they're in for a penny, they're in for a pound - the consequences of condemnation are no more severe for invading Lebanon than for what they've already done.

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As everyone knows by now, Hezbollah captured to Israeli soldiers, and in retaliation the Israelis have been on a bombing spree in Lebanon - hitting the main airport in Beiruit, and hitting bridges, a TV station, and various other infrastructure in southern Lebanon.

Leaving aside the ethical issues for the time being, let's examine how this plays out.

Facts on the ground:

1) Palestinians and Arab Israelis are outbreeding Israeli Jews.

2) Lebanon is not capable of disarming Hezbollah. Hezbollah is the actual government of southern Lebanon, whether it is recognized as such or not - it provides law, civil defense and most of the social welfare services.

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A few days ago, President Bush announced "good economic news": the deficit was shrinking because of his policies!  Everybody in the Right Wing Noise Machine was happy and thrilled.  There would soon be peace in the land etc....  There is one problem with this.  If the deficit is decreasing, why is total debt outstanding increasing?

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The Republicans are so excited about the increase in tax revenues.  "The Laugher Curve Works!  The Laugher Curve works!" they all sound in joyous unison.  "We were right!"  To quote one of the more famous commercials of all-time: sorry Charlie.  As usual, you are wrong.  Let's look at the actual trends and facts to get a complete picture.

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US politicians are remarkably poll deaf on certain issues. Those issues are almost always those where they are being paid well to ignore polls. (A correlation has been shown on the oil subsidy vote, I suspect someone enterprising could find the same thing on most votes. In fact, if some poli sci academic hasn't done it, I'd wonder why not.)

As an outsider, I really found it remarkable the extent to which Democrats ignore poll esults that indicate a majority of people upport things like universal health care. It really floored me.

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David Sirota, over at the Huffington Post, notes that Congress is considering passing a Korean free trade pact which would include a:

joint-venture Kaesong industrial complex in North Korea" that "combines South Korean capital with North Korean labor" (read: combines multinational corporate cash with exploitable slaves). By the time the complex is in full operation in 2012, "it could employ more than 750,000 North Koreans" – again, North Koreans who are literally enslaved and barred from leaving their prison.

Here's the deal. Low wage labor, even slave labor, is what helps keep US inflation down. Economists who blather on about how such deals with developing countries help US consumers (as long as they aren't also the workers who lose their jobs, or get bad jobs rather than good manufacturing jobs) aren't wrong. At the same time, the record corporate profits of the last 5 years are driven by both labor arbitrage (moving production jobs to places where they can be done cheaper, and keeping as much of the cost savings as profit as possible) and by old fashioned money arbitrage. Banks like the Fed and the Bank of Japan spent most of that period essentially giving money away. It's not hard to make money when you can borrow it at zero or one percent and loan it at 4 or 5 percent - or invest it in oil and make 200% returns in a year with proper leverage.

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How much is your life worth to you?

Anything?

Or damn near anything, anyway.

How much would you pay to save your life, or that of your son or daughter, or you husband or wife? Your mum or dad?

There are, basically, two types of pricing. There is "cost of production" pricing, and there is "need" pricing.

Cost of production pricing is the price for food in normal times. It costs you about what it costs to grow it, prepare it and ship it, plus a few percentage points for profit. Because if anyone tries to charge more, another seller will just undercut him.

But when food becomes rare - when there isn't enough to go around, suddenly the price of food isn't how much it costs to make and ship - it's whatever those who have it are willing to take. How much will you pay to eat another day?

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In California Governor Schwarznegger was going great guns, until he attacked the nurses. The nurse's union turned around and rallied to help defeat every single one of Schwarzneggers ballot initiatives.

It turns out that people generally like nurses more than they like Governators. And no one believes that nurses are overpaid fat cats sitting on their butts.

Enter the National Labor Relations Board - which is set to remove the right to belong to unions from all Registered Nurses. As Nathan Newman observes:

The core of the problem derives from the 1947 Taft-Hartley Act which denies labor rights to "supervisors", meaning that anyone deemed a supervisor can be fired at will if they say anything nice about unions or try to take action to support unions in their workplace.

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This definition of the Gini Index is from the CIA World Factbook:

This index measures the degree of inequality in the distribution of family income in a country. The index is calculated from the Lorenz curve, in which cumulative family income is plotted against the number of families arranged from the poorest to the richest. The index is the ratio of (a) the area between a country's Lorenz curve and the 45 degree helping line to (b) the entire triangular area under the 45 degree line.

Among countries with modern economies, the United States is the clear leader in income inequality under the gini measure.  Income inequality in the U.S. is more comparable to the third world.

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New York Magazine has out an article on Kos and the netroots in general. It's not a bad article and it is one of the few that get the point that the netroots isn't all that ideological in who it is supporting. Any group of people who can support Jim Webb and Paul Hackett, obviously aren't a bunch of ideologically pure left wingers.

But John Heilemann is only about half right. The left wing blogosphere is broadly pretty progressive. If you took a poll of any of the major sites, I'm willing to lay bucks against any sucker willing to take the bet, that the majority of the regulars are, for example, pro-universal healthcare, believe in doing something about global warming, would like to see an increase in the minimum wage and believe in progressive taxation.

However having George Bush as president has made the issue not ideology, but integrity and competence. Do you live in the real world where things are getting worse in Iraq, the Iraq war was sold on lies, the scientific consensus is that global warming is real and the deficit is out of control or do you live in a world where denial of reality is job 1?

And if you live in the real world, do you have the balls to actually stand up and be counted? Will you bend over for George Bush and for incompetent delusional unethical Republican policies, or will you fight?

The netroots - the blogosphere, understand what Churchill meant when he said "Without courage, all other virtues lose their meaning."

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Larry Kudlow is at it again - using really bad economic analysis to tell Republicans "It's all OK.  Our policies work.  Everybody is fine"  Powerline and Instpundit (who claims "I've always found Kudlow to be reliable") have of course linked to the article, further reinforcing the right wing echo chamber.  Unfortunately, Republicans take this guy seriously.  So, it's time to put on the waders and walk through another pile of Kudlow's bullshit.

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