Crap

I read this today in the Washington Post. "Khamenei, the unelected cleric who holds ultimate power in Iran, told Mashal that all Muslim countries should contribute to the Palestinian Authority to ensure Hamas's political success.
'Such voluntary aid will create a psychological connection between the Muslims and the Palestinian issue and will have a great effect on the world,' Khamenei said, according to Iranian state television."
Yeah. Cutting off aid is really dumb.

Not a real post

This isn't a real post. I noticed that another site had a deficit counter and a "cost of the war in Iraq" counter. I don't have either the expertise to do that or the money to pay someone who can, so I will just update constantly from now on.

Maybe the whole world is stupid

Probably every month or so when I lived at home, I would get into a political argument with my parents. Usually, it came down to them saying something along the lines of hey, you're too young to understand everything.
I don't really agree with this attack on my omnicience, but I still try to avoid looking like I think I know everything. But there are some things that, like the noble groundhog, sort of force me out of this den of artificial humility to stand up, look around, and say, "wow, the world has chicken-shit for brains."
The way the US is dealing with Palestine is one such situation.
I don't know why we are this dumb. Seriously, the way we are handling this is reminiscent of some hormone driven teen trying to impress the girl with whom he is "goin' steady." We are so afraid of looking weak that we are willing to let the whole middle east go to hell in a poorly made handbasket.
Anyway, here's why I think this. Basically, you want the palestinians to not want to kill us and to not follow fundamentalist groups. But the reason they are following fundamentalist groups is because they have been the palestinian people's biggest supporters. Seriously, Hamas has helped palestinians, whether through schools, etc, and help = influence. That's why they are a problem, and it's why they are popular. They are like the YMCA with guns.
What we should do is eliminate the monopoly Hamas has on helping people. Give them some competition. But instead we pull everything out of palestine. If anything, we are making Hamas the only option for aid there is, only strengthening them.
Now, their thinking is that by pulling help out of palestine, we can force the palestinian people to associate their ever-worsening situation with their leaders. That or Hamas will give in. There are several problems with this idea.
First, we aren't the only sources of support. Middle eastern countries are going to help them, and the last thing we need is a palestine that is more closely aligned with Iran, the Saudis, etc.
Second, it's immoral. We are playing global chess with people's lives. Being manipulative is a cruddy thing to do, but it's worse when it begins hurting already hurt people.
Third, it polarizes people. What this does do, even they agree, is polarize people onto one of the two sides. The problem is that this doesn't help anyone. We don't want intense polarization, even if the average public opinion shifts toward us. Say you have country a. In country a 5% dislike the US enough to be violent. 10% doesn't like us, but not enough to be violent. 70% is sort of neutral. Another 10% likes us/hates violence. Another 5% really, really, likes us and does something active to stop violence.
Then you polarize is. So it looks like this: 10%, 15%, 30%, 20%, 15%. In terms of an average, we're doing a lot better. A lot more people like us more than their current leaders. Problem is that given that the method of terrorism dispropotionately assists small numbers of radical people in terms of effectiveness, a benefit to terrorists is much more efficiently used than a benefit to non-terrorist groups. This is because it's easier to strap a bomb around oneself than it is to defend against this person.
Ultimately, though, the current ideas on dealing with Palestine come from bad assumptions. It assumes we need to treat other countries as secondary to our amazing "superpower"-ness. It assumes that we should be playing global chess. It doesn't allow for the fact that we don't need to be these people's parents and that the reason it's that fucked up with to begin with is because we've tried in the past. The "tough love" thing doesn't work on the international scale and it has failed before. Now we are trying again. What's the definition for insanity again?

Len Munsil and the other Goldwater

I don't know how closely you are following the gubernatorial race in AZ, but it's looking like it's going to be a rather close race. For those of you who, unlike myself, have lives, here's the basic rundown.
First, we have the current Governor, Janet Napolitano. She was one of the Time Magazine top five governors, yada yada yada, that stuff all sounds nice, but the important thing to remember is that she's basically the reason AZ has not gone to hell in a handbasket in a variety of unpleasant ways. Case in point, the ELL bill(s).
Then there's this Len Munsil guy and he's involved with the Center for Arizona Policy. It's more or less your standard "let's prevent gays from being happy" outfit, but they do other things too, like letting uncertified people act as behavioral counselors (Clergy exemption from behavioral health licensing,) preventing state funding to cloning operations (most likely after seeing the second star wars movie,) and, according to their site http://www.azpolicy.org/html/billsintolaw.html, eliminating the "marriage penalty" tax twice, in both 1997 and 2005. They also have a really creepy "prayer center" on the site as well http://www.azpolicy.org/html/prayer.html. I'm no lawyer, but that may violate clean elections laws since you have to consider God's pro-bono work as an "in-kind" donation.
After Munsil (and of course J-Nap), there's sort of the will-call line for who gets to become Governor. These are the people that could become gov if Munsil and J-Nap were discovered to be operating an elite squad of call girls trained to steal people's organs during sex.
The front runner of the people that won't win is this guy by the name of Don Goldwater. He's the real Goldwater's nephew or something, and that's about it. He has this rather empty list of supporters on his website that has been made fun of by all of the AZ bloggers http://www.goldwater4governor.org/. I won't mock it now, because so many others have and he'll lose anyway, so it sort of seems petty, but it sort of makes sense that it's so empty. All he's done is post a suspicious Internet poll on his website that shows he will beat J-Nap.
But we're ok with that. Don Goldwater, like the person who's fame he is leeching, Barry Goldwater, is one of those libertarian Republicans. Personally, I'm ok with them. Not because I like what they think (I like poor people,) but because they never win. Like the real Goldwater, Goldwater 2 will do nothing other than lose and hopefully dilute the resources the Republicans put into the Gov race.