The Secretary of State’s wildly belated trip to the Palestinian territories raises a few questions. First — what on God’s green earth is a “provisional” state? Something like the Irish Free State? I don’t know. Why, one wonders, would you bother making this proposal to President Abbas at a time when due to his domestic political weakness he couldn’t possibly accept? Well, I suppose I do know the answer to that one, namely that for the next five years suggestions that the US should be aggressively involved in forging an Israeli-Palestinian settlement will be shot down on the theory that “Abbas was offered a state and turned it down.” Something like that.

Then we get to the small matter of “State Department proposal for $86 million in ‘nonlethal assistance’ to enhance the Palestinian security forces directly under his political wing — as opposed to those loyal to Hamas.” The distinction between “lethal” and “nonlethal” assistance to security forces escapes me. Perhaps more to the point as you’ll recall several years ago the Palestinian Authority was a corrupt and authoritarian structure, ruling undemocratically over the Palestinian people with the aid of its security services. The United States government insisted on reforms, democratic elections, etc. Hamas — which, to be clear, everyone understood to be the only realistically possible alternative to Fatah — won the election. And now we’re pumping money into those very same Fatah security forces so that they can re-establish the autocracy we insisted they dismantle? Yet another “I don’t see any method at all, sir” moment from Team Bush.

Here’s some more on the American military raid on that Iranian consulate in Kurdistan. Obviously, Iran complaining about violations of diplomatic protocol is a bit rich. By the same toke, Americans complaining that a foreign country’s military is meddling in Iraqi affairs is a bit rich.

The arrests of the Iranians “is an illegal act and if such an act took place in another country there would have been grave consequences,” said Nouri Talabani, a member of the parliament in Kurdistan.

Is this Nouri Talabani related to Jalal Talabani?

No real rationale for linking to this two year-old article except a lot of people don’t know it exists. Suffice it to say, however, that the Bush administration wasn’t the first one to fib a bit about Iraq’s WMD programs.

This is interesting. Via John Quiggin, ExxonMobil seems to have decided that global warming’s real after all and should dedicate its lobbying efforts to designing CO2 control rules that spread the burdens of compliance widely rather than focusing in on energy firms (I think I may agree with this position on the merits and am certainly willing to explain why I agree, but before I do I think I’ll hold out for a check from Exxon) narrowly. As part of the flip, Exxon is no longer going to fund the Competitive Enterprise Institute, producers of the hilarious “they call it pollution, we call it life” pro-carbon ads. CEI actually has a very broad pro-business, anti-regulatory agenda so they’ll presumably be able to raise money from elsewhere.