For rich nations, the temptation to substitute air power for ground troops is irresistible. However, as the US occupation of Iraq has shown, air power can only do so much. It can kill civilians and demolish infrastructure, but it cannot bring a territory with a hostile population under control. For that, you need an army with soldiers as determined to conquer territory as the guerrillas fighting them are to defend it.

From the very start of Israel's brutal campaign against Lebanon, the question was: why are they responding so disproportionately? The pretext Israel gave—reprisal for the kidnapping of two soldiers—was given no credence anywhere but in America, with its airwaves saturated as they are with Bush-Israeli propaganda. Since battle plans for this operation were drawn up long before, other, more sinister explanations were proposed: destruction of southern Lebanon to create a buffer zone, weakening of the Lebanese state to reduce any threat it may pose. Now a simpler explanation is emerging: sheer incompetence.

The (true) conservative Paul Craig Roberts has been one of the most outspoken critics of the Bush administration, calling for Bush and Cheney's impeachment long ago. He has now written an incisive piece on what is happening in the Middle East.

Israel has ordered all the villagers [in southern Lebanon] to clear out.  Israel then destroys their homes and murders the fleeing villagers.  That way there is no one to come back and nothing to which to return, making it easier for Israel to grab the territory, just as Israel has been stealing Palestine from the Palestinians.

The article goes on to say what are the implications of what Israel is doing in Lebanon, with US support, for the rest of the Middle East. The prospects are not good; we may have reached a turning point.

From Truthdig::

Congressman Dennis Kucinich (D-Ohio) will introduce a resolution Wednesday that calls on President Bush to appeal to all sides for a cessation of hostilities in the Israeli-Lebanon conflict and to commit the United States to multiparty negotiations, along with support for an international peacekeeping mission during the talks.

Florida Democrat has posted a diary urging people to call their Representatives to demand a stop to the bombing in the Middle East. His diary includes their phone numbers. When you call, I suggest that you mention that you urge your Rep to vote for Kucinich's resolution.

I just found out that Ron Suskind has a new book out which is very damaging to the Bush administration. I haven't seen it yet, but Democracy Now posted an interview with him last Friday in which he mentions some of the main revalations of the book. It should be useful to summarize them in one place, which is what I'll do here.

Suskind wrote the celebrated New York Times magazine article which quoted "a senior adviser to Bush" as pointing out that the Bush administration does not belong to "what we [BushCo] call the reality-based community. So he is a very serious journalist. His book "is one in which more than a hundred sources, all throughout the government, FBI, CIA, even inside of the White House, cooperated. There are people inside of those buildings who believe that truth matters, and they want to embrace it." So one can be confident that the claims Suskind makes are well documented.

Kos wrote yesterday that the Net Neutrality amendment was defeated yesterday in the Commerce Committee, and there have been several diaries about that since. A bill that was kept however has not been remarked upon here. This is the revival of the broadcast flag, which the FCC had mandated several years ago but was struck down by a court. Now the entertainment industry is trying to bring the broadcast flag back with a new law.

It is worth not forgetting the broadcast flag provision when considering the intended ellimination of net neutrality, because considering both together starkly exposes the Republicans' stand on these issues, with regards to government regulation.

I don't have cable but I recently got DSL, and I like Keith Olbermann, so I decided to see what videos from Countdown are available on MSNBC's Web site. There's a number of "Oddball" segments linked to on Countdown's main page. So I watched a few.

Imagine my dismay that after each one, I was exposed to an interview by Tweety of Ken Mehlman, chairman of the RNC. This was followed by interviews with John McCain, David Vitter, Trent Lott, Lamar Alexander, George Allen, and Bill Frist. Only after all that do we finally get back to Olbermann, with today's Oddball, "Wacky Japanese Video".

It goes without saying that since Tweety was interviewing Republicans, the interviews were as hard as marshmallows.

Matthew's Web page tonight looks like something redirected from the RNC home page. Apparently, tonight's Hardball, according to its Web page, was a "scouting report of possible GOP presidential candidates" made "at the GOP leadership conference in Memphis".

A couple of days ago, I posted what turned out to be a controversial diary. The diary paraphrased an article in Harper's, a magazine with impeccable progressive credentials, since it has published articles both demonstrating that the 2004 election was stolen and, in its latest issue, demanding Bush's impeachment.

I got so heavily troll-rated on this diary that I lost my super-user status, so that I can't even read some of my own comments anymore, ones defending my diary in a way that people who disagreed with it didn't like. The troll-rating system was used to censor my responses to critical posts, thus giving the impression that I was stumped at finding an answer to my critics, and censoring out information and links supporting my position.

The troll rating system is broken, if it prevents diarists from posting responses to comments on their diary.

Two things about AIDS had always puzzled me. One was that such a completely new kind of disease—one that infects and destroys the very system whose function it is to fight off infections, the immune system—would appear virtually simultaneously with the discovery of the kind of infectious agent that transmits AIDS. The other was that despite claims that AIDS is the latest epidemic, the incidence of AIDS remains essentially restricted in the US and Europe to the groups in which it was originally discovered: gay men and intravenous drug users.

An article in the March Harper's finally clears up these puzzles. It turns out that when there is big money involved, science in America functions not so differently from our politics. There is scientific controversy about whether HIV actually causes AIDS, but the media has kept this from us. And according to the dissenting view, the standard therapy for HIV infection kills people who might be perfectly healthy, and the vast body of AIDS research and medicine has been one huge waste of resources.

The annual Davos World Economic Forum—the prime venue for the spread of the gospel of globalization among world business and political elites—met last week. (Kerry issued his last-minutte call for a filibuster of Alito's nomination from there.) But this year, the mood there was anything but cheerful. The proponents of globalization are finally beginning to realize that globalization hurts workers in rich countries, and thus, the vast majority of Americans.

That was not the plan. The Internet is the reason.

thereisnospoon made a good argument that Alito getting put into the Supreme Court is not such a bad thing, since American women will still be able to get abortions somehow, no matter how he votes. I agree that the reason the Alito candidacy is repulsive relates to "women's issues", but I think that to focus on abortion rights misses the more fundamental point.

With only two women on the SCOTUS, Alito will replace one of those two women. What does that say to the country and the world about America's attitudes about women??? Roughly half of the students that are enrolled in law schools are women now. So women have been coming through the system in significant numbers for quite some time. So it is not as if Bush could not find a qualified woman to replace O'Connor.

Something I have been hearing over and over from the talking heads of late is that even if Bush, Cheney & Co. thought that there were WMDs in Iraq, so did everyone else, including the French and Germans. This is one of those lies that is endlessly repeated in relation to the Plane affair, like the lie that Joseph Wilson said that Cheney sent him to Niger.

After election night 2004, I essentially stopped writing diaries at dKos. It seemed pointless. I was in shock because the most plausible explanation of what happened was that the election was stolen. Many people here felt the same way, and I understand that there was quite a debate at dKos on the validity of the election, although I missed that because I was off the Internet at the time.

But now all that seems to have settled down, and people are acting as if things are back to normal: as is usual, BushCo is up to no good, and Dems, ever optimistic, are looking forward to trouncing the Republicans in Congress in 2006.

The sense of unreality is staggering. A collective denial seems to have set in about the possibility that there are no real national elections in this country any more. There is absolutely no reason to think that the Republicans will not keep themselves in power in 2006 and 2008 as they have  done recently -- through election fraud. But the Dem leadership is doing absolutely nothing to stop this, and virtually no progressive commentators are willing to even discuss the problem.

There has been a lot of talk about framing on dKos recently. Hudson has even broken new ground in this discussion with his introduction of the concept of "fencing", which is what Republicans do when they pre-empt our framing by not letting it reach that sector of the public whose thought they control.

But Noam Chomsky in a recent speech shows that there is a different way of seing the problem faced by Dems, one according to which the major hurdles we face are put up not by the Republicans, but by the Dem Party itself. On the issues, most voters are to the left of both Bush and Kerry. If Kerry had spoken on issues people really care about, such as health care, and given specific proposals, voters would have started to take him seriously, so that he would have had a good chance of winning on his own merits.

But both parties studiously avoid talking about the issues, because they do not want voters' real desires and values to interfere with the political process.

Those of you who have been following the march of freedom will be aware that in the recent follow-up election in Ukraine that was called as a result of discrepancies between the election results and exit polls, a significant factor was allegations that the opposition candidate -- who emerged victorious in the follow-up election -- had been poisoned by a Russian-produced poison. A candidate whom the Bush government opposed won; then the Bush government claimed that the election that had just had been held was rigged, because exit polls contradicted the official results; finally, when a new election was called, the US-favored candidate on the second go emerged victorious, largely because of allegations that he had been poisoned by officials of the government he opposed.

Now however it emerges that politics were by no means absent from the way in which these conclusions about poisoning were reached and conveyed to the public. As we learn from a Washington Post story, it was American doctors who came up with the diagnosis of dioxin poisoning, although that fact was hidden from Ukranian voters "so as not to influence the elections".

The excellent TomDispatch has an article by the sociologist Michael Schwartz about why the US occupation of Iraq is failing. Ironically, Rumsfeld hit on the core of the problem when he said: "You go to war with the Army you have."

The basic problem is that the US army was designed to fight conventional enemies, with a well-defined command-and-control structure. But in Iraq, they are fighting guerrillas, against which the army's equipment, training, and strategies have limited effectiveness.

This much has been written about before. What Schwartz adds to this is some organizational theory: when faced with a threat, organizations will see that threat through the filter of their own capabilities.

What is puzzling everyone at the moment is the discrepancy between the exit polls and the votes that are being reported. The way the pundits are framing this issue is: what went wrong with the exit polls?

But what reasons do we actually have for thinking the exit polls were wrong? Previously, exit polls have reflected fairly closely the finally recorded vote. (On MSNBC, I heard Matthews suggesting that Republicans not liking to talk to pollsters explained the discrepancy: that's a new one to me.)

The technology of exit polling has not changed. There has been a change in voting technology, however -- namely, electronic voting machines. Neither electronic voting machines nor exit polls leave a paper trail. (Actually, exit polls do leave a paper trail, but it has no legal import.) So why should we believe electronic voting machines more than exit polls?

I don't think anyone has processed bin Laden's video fully yet. It is inscruitable, and utterly postmodern. Why did he make it? What did he hope to accomplish by intervening with such sangfroid and finesse in our election?

To me, it had always been clear that bin Laden wanted Bush to win, since Bush had played so totally into bin Laden's hands. But in this video, bin Laden did three things: 1) he addressed the American people; 2) he used a rhetoric new to him, one of freedom; 3) he mocked Bush. Mocking Bush in this way that is spot on is hardly the best way of helping him get elected. I was somewhat caught off balance by that.

I thought I'd check out the freepers to see if they're getting fidgity, this is what I found: Florida: Kerry Leads Big in Early Voting. The source is NewsMax, which I believe is a fairly unreliable right-wing outfit.If what Kosians have been saying about polling having an inherent Republican bias is correct, Bush being ahead in general, but behind among people who say they have already voted, is exactly one would expect. A poster on the FreeRepublic thread said, "This was reported in the local papers this morning." Anybody here hear that?