As expected by many, Russia and China have refused to back even a watered-down UNSC resolution on Syria, the only two of 15 member states on the council to vote against the resolution.

Susan E. Rice, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, said after the vote that the United States was “disgusted” by the Russian and Chinese vetoes. The council has “been held hostage by a couple of members,” she said, adding that “these members stand behind empty arguments and individual interests while seeking to strip” any resolution of meaningful terms.

From the NYT:

A record number of Afghan civilians were killed in the conflict here last year, the majority at the hands of the Taliban and other insurgent groups whose use of homemade bombs became more prevalent and whose suicide bombers killed more people each time, according to the annual United Nations report on civilian casualties.

Although the number killed — 3,021 civilians — represented a relatively small 8 percent increase in casualties over 2010, it was the fifth straight year in which civilian casualties rose. The overall trend suggested that the fighting was worsening and that, for all the talk about peace efforts and a drastic increase in the number of insurgents that NATO had killed and captured, day-to-day dangers for Afghan civilians were rising.

Here's the rub: the fact that most civilian casualties are caused by the insurgency doesn't matter. NATO and its allies are supposedly still there because they are protecting the Afghan populace so they get the blame from Afghans for failing to do so. That means they become ever more disenchanted with the coalition and ever more likely to aid the Taliban and other groups, enabling them to make more attacks that kill more civilians and thus driving the cycle ever further down. It's been that way for several years now.

That's just one of the reasons why "Hastening the day Americans stop dying for a lost cause is the right call".

Around here there is much consternation about why Obama hasn't started another war in Syria. No not a direct one but a Libyan NATO-style war. What's holding them up anyway?

Me, I figure that's it's just about oil. Or rather the lack thereof. But that's an easy armchair analysis. What I really want is something way more cynical. So a post in Counterpunch titled Cynicism Around Syria quickly grabbed my attention. And a subtitle of "Russia as Smokescreen" was more icing on the cake. It did not disappoint so I'm going to quote about a third here and mention that there are still additional good morsels in the rest.

...I think we can all (hopefully) get behind.

PS I work with Mayors Against Illegal Guns. And the ad is still funny :)

By now, you've no doubt heard about Facebook's IPO (intial public offering, or in lay parlance, going public.)

How big is this thing going to be? Well, put it this way: way back in the dim dark past of 2005, an artist was commissioned to paint a mural for the company headquarters.

Since Facebook hadn't even really become a national phenomenon beyond college campuses yet, CEO Mark Zuckerberg offered the artist, local graffititian David Choe, the ludicrous option of stock options instead of cash. Two-tenths of one percent of the available shares.

Those options could be worth $200 million at execution, meaning the company could be valued as high as $100 billion dollars.

As the media continues to run lurid stories about perfidious Persians in what Brian Katulis of the Center for American Progress describes as a "coercive public diplomacy campaign", it's worth examining our basic assumptions again. Does Iran want a nuke in the first place, is there the political backing for a strike to prevent it doing so, how easy would such an attack be to execute and what would be the blowback?

Congressman Kucinich writes at the HuffPo today:

The headline number from the Unemployment Report this morning showed 243,000 jobs were created, more than the highest estimated increase by any of the economists surveyed before the report was released (the average expected increase from the economist survey was 120,00 jobs). The unemployment rate fell to 8.3%, again lower than predicted, and certainly good news for President Obama. Job growth was nearly across the board – in retail, construction, manufacturing, business services, and the hotel and restaurant industry. You can believe all this if you want, or you can go into the details in the report for some interesting context.

Some good news.

"We want to apologize to the American public for recent decisions that cast doubt upon our commitment to our mission of saving women's lives," a Komen statement said.

Nice to see that people power can still make a difference on occasion in this corporate oligarchy of ours.

Update Oops, not so fast. Greg Sargent and Sara Kliff are both skeptical about whether Komen's statement is anything more than a PR move.

Then there's this:

In addition to pulling funds from Planned Parenthood for The Susan G. Komen Foundation also decided to stop funding embryonic stem cell research centers making it fully transparent the organization has evolved from non-political non-profit to a partisan advocacy organization.

That means the loss of $3.75 million to the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, $4.5 million to the University of Kansas Medical Center, $1 million to the U.S. National Cancer Institute, $1 million to the Society for Women’s Health Research, and $600,000 to Yale University. That’s a loss of nearly $12 million dollars in research money to eradicate breast cancer this year alone.

I hate when my optimism, scarce as it is, is so misplaced.

As the years-long drought in Texas subsides, I feel this would be a good time to remind everyone that water is not only precious, but scarce.

Indeed, Africa is seeing some of the worst droughts in recorded history. Drought doesn't only affect humanity, afflicting us with thirst, famine, and war, but wildlife too. And while the famine in Somalia (not directly water-related, but...) has been declared "over", countries like Burkina Faso and Sierra Leone face dismal prospects for the near future.

An Internet meme of which I am not aware.

Would one of you commentariat please be so kind as to enlighten me to this new trope?

TIA

The aftermath is never as full of rose petals and candy as neo-whatever advocates of the intervention told us it would be.

(Tripoli) - A Libyan diplomat who served as ambassador to France died less than 24 hours after he was detained by a Tripoli-based militia from the town of Zintan, Human Rights Watch said today. Dr. Omar Brebesh, who was detained on January 19, 2012, appears to have died from torture.

A preliminary autopsy report viewed by Human Rights Watch said the cause of death included multiple bodily injuries and fractured ribs. Photos of Brebesh's body, seen by Human Rights Watch, show welts, cuts, and the apparent removal of toenails, indicating that he was tortured prior to death. Human Rights Watch also read a report by the judicial police in Tripoli, which said that Brebesh had died from torture and that an unnamed suspect had confessed to killing him.

Quiet admiration for a gentle boy.

I missed this at the time, but it's too good not to share.

Last week, Sir Richard Branson, high-profile head of the Virgin Group, told a select group of senior British lawmakers that drugs should be legalized.

Branson began, naturally, with cannabis. He insisted that the decriminalisation, regulation and taxation of the drug libertarians have traditionally seen as a start-point for reform would reap widespread rewards for society as a whole. Responsibility for drugs policy should shift from the Home Office to the Department of Health, he argued, quite compellingly enquiring of his inquisitors whether, upon finding out that their own son or daughter had a drug problem, would they rather seek medical help or be having to deal with the police? Tellingly, they offered no answer. In Portugal, where even heroin addicts are hospitalised rather than arrested, drug use has fallen by 50% as a result of legalisation. Each year some 75,000 young Britons have their futures ruined by receiving criminal records for minor drugs offences. Treating drug users as patients rather than criminals would be an important first step to a more effective drugs policy.

@MikeBloomberg tweets:

Politics has no place in health care. Join me in standing with #PlannedParenthood: http://bit.ly/y2HHjl

The post on his own website he links there says "Mike Bloomberg will match every donation to the Planned Parenthood Breast Health Fund dollar-for-dollar up to $250,000."

Nice one.

A good backgrounder on the Komen Foundation/Planned Parenthood controversy is here.

There's a rather large "feetsball" game, as Tom Swift called it* on Sunday or so I'm informed.

Allow me to save you four hours of rooting and drinking. Here's the best commercial of the evening.

Right? The entire show is about who paid their $3.7 million and got the biggest bang of the night?

*Mega street cred points to anyone who works out the origin of that.

Romney charges that the Obama administration's announcement of a 2013 end to combat missions in Afghanistan and 2014 pull-out date "makes absolutely no sense."

One of the few moderate, sane Republicans left, James Joyner, responds:

Critics who worry that this announcement of a withdrawal severely undercuts our negotiating position with the Taliban are surely correct. They can easily bide their time now that they have a date certain.

So how can a decision that undermines our allies and our own negotiating power nonetheless be the right one? Because the alternative is to continue getting people killed -- not to mention inadvertently killing innocents -- in a fight we can't win.

I wonder why the UN is dragging its feet here.

I'm trying to think of a sovereign leader who, in the face of international pressure of the nature that Assad faces and without the support of his own people, has stayed in power for very long.

Qaddafi certainly had the grudging support of the Libyan people until he unmasked as the monster that he was. Hussein had to only deal with "No Fly" zones for much of his tenure.

Anyone else?

Losers endorse losers.

Now, no one was surprised by Trump's endorsement of Gingrich, for a few reasons: a) Like Trump, Gingrich has been divorced and married multiple times and committed adultery with his current wife while married to another, 2) Gingrich wants to drop the capital gains rate to zero, which benefits a real estate typhoon...pardon me, tycoon...like Trump and c) they're both colostomy bags of the highest order.

TP Green notes that Mitt Romney is climbing aboard the denialist crazy train in his search for GOP primary votes, attacking Gingrich in a public email for appearing in a 2008 ad for Al Gore's climate campaign.

Romney’s campaign spokesman Ryan Williams bashed Gingrich as being part of the “Soros agenda” for the advertisement:

"It is interesting to see the latest attack from Speaker Gingrich and his disintegrating campaign. Unlike Newt Gingrich, Mitt Romney never sat next to Nancy Pelosi in an ad funded by George Soros on behalf of Al Gore’s global warming initiative. As recently as 2008, the Soros agenda had no better friend than Newt Gingrich. Nice try, Mr. Speaker."

For most of the world, anthropogenic climate change is settled science.

Yaakov Katz | Jerusalem, Israel | February 2

Jerusalem Post - US secretary of defense is concerned Israel will launch an attack before Iran enters so-called "immunity zone" when military strike won't bust Iran's nuclear facilities, 'Washington Post' reports.

United States Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta believes that Israel will attack Iran in April, May or June, the Washington Post reported Thursday.

According to the report, written by the paper’s senior opinion writer David Ignatius, Panetta is concerned that Israel will launch an attack before Iran enters the so-called “immunity zone” when its nuclear facilities will be heavily fortified and a military strike will no longer succeed.

So here's an interesting hypothetical proposed on a foreign policy list I'm a member of: suppose Israel unilaterally and pre-emptively attacks Iran at some stage during the last two months of run-up to the US election this November. Suppose Iran retaliates.

There's been a lot of pushback from the Pentagon on the notion of an Israeli attack, up to and including Gareth Porter's reporting yesterday that Gen. Dempsey told the Israelis they'd get no U.S. support in such a scenario. The military really doesn't want to get involved in another Iraq or Afghansitan for the4 forseeable future and Iran would certainly be as bad or worse than those two. But even so, would Obama be forced to intervene on Israel's behalf even if he would rather punish Israel, to placate his own Israel Lobby and to prevent the Republicans from using it against him?

In other words, who has more clout, the Pentagon or the Israel Lobby? Your thoughts please.

(photo courtesy, and is not of PunxPhil but of Staten Island Chuck because this blog needs moar "Noo Yawk" attitude and Chuck chomped our "assteamed" Mayor Mike three years ago)

When is she ever?

By the way, has there even been more inspired casting for a docudrama than Julianne Moore as Sarah Palin?

OK, yea, Tina Fey does a spot-on parody, but given HBO's close ties to the corporatocracy, parody was not what they were going for. My suspicion is we'll watch this and complain about how "nice" she comes off, while she'll enlist Bristol and the other Wonder Twin to complain about how Mommy comes off.

"Never Complain, Never Explain."

"Sometimes things don't come out exactly the way you'd like them to," he explained. "That's not exactly what I meant to say. My focus is on middle income Americans. We do have a safety net for the very poor, and I said if there are holes in it I want to correct that."

Opponents on the left jumped on it, saying it shows Romney is out of touch.

Conservative radio host Rush Limbaugh noticed, as well. "Everyone knows what he was trying to say," Limbaugh observed, "but he didn't say it. He makes himself a target with this stuff. He comes across at the prototypical rich Republican. ... It's gonna make it harder and harder and harder to go after Obama."

C.J Chivers | Feb 1

NYT -

Today, At War journeys into crowd-sourcing to ask for readers’ help identifying a weapon found on the battlefields of Libya last year. Followers of this blog know that we have spent considerable time identifying and sometimes tracing the tools of war in several recent conflicts back to their sources. But this time, we are stumped.

The items in question are what ordnance professionals call submunitions, but are more widely known among lay readers as cluster bombs. The photograph above shows one found in November at the ruins of an arms depot a few miles outside of Mizdah, in the desert south of Tripoli. read more

JPD please pick up the courtesy phone...