On Tuesday night, NBC Nightly News with Brian Williams and Newshour with Jim Lehrer presented two telling examples of how omitting information shapes public perception with regard to civilian casualties.

With Chief Foreign Correspondent Richard Engel, Williams explored the possible outcome of a U.S. or Israeli strike against Iran:

WILLIAMS: Despite all the denials, what happens if a military strike takes place?

ENGEL: Well, it all has to do with geography. Iran is in an incredibly strategic location. The Straits of Hormuz, one of the world’s most important oil shipping routes. Iran has threatened to disrupt traffic in the Straits of Hormuz. In Iraq, the situation has been somewhat calmer recently, but Iranian-backed militias in Iraq could quickly destabilize the situation there. And in Israel, Iran has allies in both in Lebanon - Hezbollah - and in the Gaza Strip. Iran is talking about creating a line of fire from Tehran all the way to Jerusalem. Full Story »

I know that I speak for all Americans. We’ll do everything necessary to try and rebuild their lives.

— Republican presidential candidate John McCain while inspecting flooding in Columbus Junction, Iowa, a town of 1,900 people; June 20; emphasis added.

The country stands with you. We’ll do all in our power to help you.

— President Bush, addressing residents of the Gulf Coast at the end of a Rose Garden press briefing on the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina; Aug. 31, 2005; emphasis added.
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The Cheney tag team is in the ring at the same time versus Iran.

In recent days we’ve seen headlines from Bush’s European farewell tour like this from the London Times: “President George Bush starts talking language of a dove.” Also, in an apparent admission that his beef with Iran might not be settled during his presidency, Bush, as reported by Agence France Press, said: “I’ll leave behind a multilateral framework to work this issue.” Full Story »

Hhaing The Yu, 29, in rain falling on the ruins of his home, in a township outside Yangon, Myanmar.

This is not about politics; it is about saving people’s lives. There is absolutely no more time to lose.

— United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, pressing the military junta in Myanmar to accept international assistance as hundreds of thousands of its citizens reel from the effects of a devastating cyclone earlier this month; May 14.
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Got hot links if you want ‘em!

Headline of the week: CLINTON CHALKS UP KEY MEANINGLESS VICTORY. At Asia Times Online courtesy of Muhammad Cohen. (Yes, that’s his real name.)

In her Los Angeles Times column, “My Winning Strategy,” Rosa Brooks writes of Hillary Clinton: “But they said I had to win by double digits to keep my campaign alive. . . . And I am alive! And kicking! And punching and biting and kneeing my opponent in the groin!” Full Story »

I’m Jewish. You don’t hear me blog about this much for a variety of reasons, one of the major ones being that you are then inevitably asked to take a stand on Israel–as if such a thing even needed to be discussed, like Marx’s odious asking of “The Jewish Question.”

My faith influences my thinking in a lot of ways, but it is not the sole arbiter of my thinking, and I don’t feel that I have to travel in lockstep with what any other Jew thinks–certainly not about Israel, which has every right to exist as a sovereign state, yet commits indefensible acts against peoples it (rightly or wrongly) perceives as implacable foes. As such, people like myself stay out of the debate, allowing it to be usurped and dominated by a cabal of crazy ultrahawkish right-wing Zionists who claim that anything short of total annihilation of Palestine will end with, as my father says, “the Jews being driven into the sea.”

Thankfully, there’s an alternative coming around, and it is called J Street. Full Story »

This is actually a boost to remind people that we can produce this kind of journalism at any time. We’re going to have a large enough newsroom to continue to produce this kind of quality journalism.

— Leonard Downie Jr., editor of The Washington Post, winner of six Pulitzer Prizes for 2008; The Post’s front-page story by media critic Howard Kurtz did not mention the paper has endured three rounds of staff cuts since 2003, but the AP’s story did; April 7; emphasis added.

I can only confirm that the route is dynamic.

— Nathan Ballard, a San Francisco city spokesman, as, said The New York Times, “The precise route remained in flux on Tuesday as the torch extravaganza threatened to become more civic migraine than celebration in the face of potential protests by those upset with China’s human rights record and recent crackdown in Tibet”; April 9.
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For those who believe that the key to lowering the political temperature in the Middle East lies in snuffing out the pilot light on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Senator Obama’s otherwise transcendent race speech offered little of his trademark hope.

A view “that sees the conflicts in the Middle East as rooted primarily in the actions of stalwart allies like Israel instead of emanating from the perverse and hateful ideologies of radical Islam,” as he characterized that of Reverend Jeremiah Wright, is “profoundly distorted.” Once again, whatever you may think of them, Israel’s policies toward Palestine were accepted as Bible. Full Story »

I’ve been in hibernation for the last few months, barely surviving another bleak Bushy winter, but today the intimations of spring in California—and of hopeful Obamamania throughout this fair land—have drawn me out of my lair to join the fun here at S&R. I do want to start again with something easy, and fortunately I found an amusing blog meme at Crooked Timber that looks like just the ticket. Now I know you’re not supposed to pick a meme randomly out of the digital ether, and Eszter Hargittai did not actually tag me, but I’m going to carry on anyway, as though all the webby proprieties had been observed.

Instructions:

1. Grab the nearest book (that is at least 123 pages long).
2. Open to p. 123.
3. Go down to the 5th sentence.
4. Type in the following 3 sentences.
5. Tag five people.

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How the heck does Obama’s letter to the US ambassador at the UN on January 23 (at bottom) jibe with his transcendent speech on January 20 (excerpt immediately below)?

“Unity is the great need of the hour — the great need of this hour. Not because it sounds pleasant or because it makes us feel good, but because it’s the only way we can overcome the essential deficit that exists in this country.”I’m not talking about a budget deficit. I’m not talking about a trade deficit. I’m not talking about a deficit of good ideas or new plans. Full Story »

It’s the holiday season - tomorrow is Christmas, so naturally, the thing we all want to talk about is cluster bombs. As if Weird Al’s Christmas at Ground Zero wasn’t bad enough - at least that’s just a song about the fictional end of the world. Cluster bombs are all too real. And today the BBC reported that Israel’s use of cluster bombs in last year’s invasion of Lebanon was legal.

I don’t know about the legal restrictions that apply to the use of cluster munitions. The facts of the matter are that Israel dropped a lot of them on Lebanon, and because of the relatively high failure rate of munitions, there are a lot of bomblets that are unexploded and doing massive amounts of collateral damage to innocent people more than a year after the invasion. Full Story »

A sergeant in the US Army Special Forces with whom I’m acquainted turned me on to an article on Israel’s Ynet in which a member of the Knesset responded to the Iran NIE.

Shas party minister Yitzhak Cohen has been called a key coalition partner in Olmert’s government. According to reporter Roni Sofer, during a security cabinet meeting, Cohen said, “In the middle of the previous century the Americans received intelligence reports from Auschwitz on the packed trains going to the extermination camps. They claimed then that the railways were industrial. Their attitude today to the information coming out of Iran on the Iranians’ intention to produce a nuclear bomb reminds one of their attitude during the holocaust.”

Ouch –- to the tune of three billion dollars! (That’s how much aid, mostly defense, the US bestows on Israel yearly.) Full Story »