Ramzy Baroud -- World News Trust

May 19, 2011 -- As the Palestine Papers demonstrated, the major obstacle to a real, lasting and just peace in Palestine is the Israeli leadership's unwillingness to accept anything less than full domination over the Palestinians. Not only do Israeli leaders refuse to partake in any serious peace talks, they also refuse to agree on universally accepted notions, for example, the law.

On 13 Nov. 2007, then Israeli foreign minister Tzipi Livni told chief Palestinian negotiator Saeb Ereikat that she despised the very notion of law. According to the Palestine Papers, published by Al-Jazeera and the Guardian, Livni said: "I was the Minister of Justice. I am a lawyer ... But I am against law -- international law in particular. Law in general."

Livni is often contrasted with current rightwing Israeli leader Binyamin Netanyahu, and has been described as a "dove" when compared to him. This unfounded reputation caused many broken hearts when Netanyahu became prime minister of Israel in March 2009, as chances for real peace supposedly diminished.

Such Israeli obduracy was a prime reason for Palestinians to unify their ranks. The signing of the Hamas-Fatah unity agreement in Cairo on 27 April was indeed a fitting response to Israel's incessant attempts at dividing the Palestinians.

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This is one of Kesey's last writings, penned just after 9-11 (includes spelling errors):

snip

Because we are talking not just about war, this time, but about the war above
the war: the Real War. This war has already been been waged, and it's not
between the US and the Taliban, or between the Moslems and the Isralies or
any of the familiar forces, but between the ancient gutwrenching bonebreaking
fleshslashing way things have always been and the timerous and fragile way
things might begin to be. Could begin to be. Must begin to be, if our lives
and our children's lives are ever, someday, in the upheaving future, to know
honest peace.

True, the warriors on our side of this Real War seem few and flimsey, but we
have a secret advantage: we don't fight our battle out of Hate. Anger, yes,
if we have to, but anger is enough. Hate is the flag the other side battles
beneath. It is the ancient flag of fire and blood and agony, and it waves
over the graves of millions and millions.

Our side's flag is a thin, airlight blue, drifting almost unseen against the
sky. Our military march is a meadowlark's song among the dandolions. And our
Real War rally isn't given any space at the United States Congress. Where can
you hear it? Lots of places, if you listen. Across Dairy Queen counters. In
the careful post office talk. The e-mail is where I've been hearing it, for
days now, and the entries are getting clearer and more numerous. At first
only ten or fifteen. Then fifty or sixty. And this morning more than three
hundred! Here are a few chunks and pieces that I printed out:

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Skinned goats, phantom love and the providence of prostitutes

Joe Bageant -- World News Trust

-- A fellow expatriate told me recently when I left Belize, Central America, which I now consider my home: "America is a sticky place, Joe, hard to get out of again, even from a short visit. The everyday money and business stuff alone will trap you like fucking flypaper." And that keeps ringing in my head during this current return to sell my house and fulfill my promotional obligations for the book I just published here. Which could take months.

But it's sticky in other ways too, some of them rooted in the hearts of its working class people. Last week I found myself in Philadelphia, a working class town if ever there was one. In this sprawl-and-mall age, it's surprising for non-metro people like me to run into whole neighborhoods of folks who are not full of suburban self-important horseshit and three-car garages, and when you do they always seem to be immigrant or working class neighborhoods. But then, maybe I was just around too many bland American "sluburbs" for too long before I skipped the country.

Old men see a lot of phantoms when they revisit the scenes of their youth. Philly is like that for me. I was stationed at the now-defunct South Philly Naval Base in 1965. And it was in roaming that city during off-duty hours that I experienced my first intellectual awakening, or at least the first one that had other human participants. I hung out at places like the Artist's Hut or the Guilded Cage off Rittenhouse Square, learned of the folk music and peace protest movements and heard poetry read live by real poets for the first time. The people introducing me to those things had a strange similarity, one I couldn't quite put my finger on. So one night during a very stoned conversation with Rachel, my newly acquired girlfriend, I asked just what the hell that similarity our circle of friends had was. "We're all Jewish, silly!" she replied. Until then, I'd thought Jews were some extinct people from the Bible. And so an intellectual life and scene was opened up for a country boy who was used to reading and thinking alone in a musty small town library, wondering if people like Marcuse and Genet were for real. But in 1965 America still offered my generation a world full of promise and growth. We drank cheap Chianti by candle light, then stuck candles in the empty bottles and talked of Bertrand Russell and world peace and played Odetta and Charlie Parker records. And I got my first blowjob. Not in her student artist's apartment, but under an alcove of Penn Center on a warm night in June. There was no telling just what might happen, even to a fundamentalist Christian-raised redneck kid in 1965, in a sensual world so full of art, belief and promise.

Anyway, it is early April 2007 in Philly and I am copping a smoke in Philly's Italian Market with 66-year-old Fredo "Freddy" Vento. Freddy, like about half the older menfolk of the Italian Market, resembles Danny Aiello, but in work clothes. A butcher, Freddy sells everything from veal to "turkey parts" and whole skinned goats with the eyeballs still in the sockets. "The Latins like it that way and the tourists always stop to stare at 'em," he laughs as he spits the stub of his filterless Camel onto the sidewalk. We are talking about the fight game because in places like Philly and Kansas City you can still do that with no PC police to jump your ass. Philly is a real fight town. I've always liked boxing (though I watch the Latin American lightweights these days on Belizean TV, fighters with real moves, combinations and artfulness, none of the heavyweight tanks crashing together stuff) partly because I learned to like it from my dad, partly because it was the only athletic thing in the U.S. Navy I seemed to be good at -- I'd watched a lot of combinations, footwork and moves with my dad, and practiced in the coal shed behind our rented dump in Winchester, Virginia. But also because it distills the most primal human struggle, skill under pressure, and sheer graveyard will. Boxing is life in the raw, and yeah, yeah, I know it causes brain damage. But so does nearly everything else I've enjoyed in my life, drugs being one, but divorce being the worst.

It's never a good idea for a writer or reporter to open a conversation with a serious question. So I bait Freddy for conversation with the most cliché question I can come up with.

"OK, who's the best fighter to come out of Philly?"

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Mary Lyon, From The Left -- World News Trust

Jan 16, 2008 -- I don't know, we must all just be crazy. It's not bad enough that slams of sexism and racism are flying through the air between the Clinton and Obama camps. That's just a little bit of it. But all of it bothers me.

We Democrats are on the rough end of what could be the most revolutionary, history-making, and and earth-shaking presidential election ever. If our side prevails, at least from the assessments this early in the game, we would be witnessing the ascendence of either the first female president or the first African-American president. EITHER ONE would symbolize a huge leap forward for our country, considering how both women and blacks have been the largest groups to live with disenfranchisement through our history, and what distance both groups have had to travel toward equal footing in our society.

Clinton and Obama/Obama and Clinton, should NOT be sniping at each other. For one thing, the knee-jerk media loves nothing so much as a fight. Guess what will keep getting all the coverage? Now, it's stories about "Democrats in Disarray" when we're supposed to see that label laminated to the GOP now. For another thing, if that's all reporters and pundits can see, that means no attention whatsoever paid to other worthy voices like John Edwards and Dennis Kucinich, who are as deserving for their views and policy proposals as the so-called "top two." We're not only better than this, we have much better things to do. We should be making history, and preparing the talking points and perceptions NOW: that the new century is effectively starting THIS November -- a few years late, almost a full decade into the second millennium. The years we've just been through since January 2001 should go down in history as little more than an aberration, a large but temporary boil on the skin, perhaps an abnormal pimple on the complexion of our young country, a bad, but momentary flare-up of political acne, if you will.

No outbreak of leprosy. Just a big, fat zit.

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