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Pipes: To Get Obama To Act, Netanyahu Should Threaten To Nuke Iran

By Matt Duss on Jul 25, 2010 at 12:53 pm

In a recent interview with the right-wing Christian Zionist Friends of Israel Gospel Ministry, neoconservative pundit Daniel Pipes shared his view that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu should threaten to use nuclear weapons against Iran as a means of “applying pressure” on the United States.

“I think it’s realistic for the Israelis to attack and do real damage,” Pipes said. “Now, what constitutes success, I’m not exactly sure. There are many, many questions“:

PIPES: If I were [Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu, I would say to [U.S. President Barack] Obama, “Why don’t you take out the Iranian nukes? Or else we will And we will not do it by trying to fly planes across Turkey and Syria or Jordan or Saudi Arabia. We will do it from submarine-based, tactical nuclear weapons. You don’t want that; we don’t want that; but that’s the way we can do this job for sure. You do it your way so we don’t have to escalate to that.” That would be a way of applying pressure. There are so many details which I’m not privy to. But that would be my kind of approach if I were the Israelis.

Neoconservatives have long desired a war with Iran, even though U.S. officials like Defense Secretary Robert Gates and Joint Chiefs Chairman Adm. Mike Mullen have stated that such a war would have disastrous consequences for U.S. troops and interests in the region.

Ignoring these views, the neocons have recently begun to openly exhort Israel to attack Iran as a means of spurring American action. Pipes’ suggestion that Israel should threaten to nuke Iran represents a significant escalation in their rhetoric.

Climate Progress

Hockey Stick fight at the RC Corral

By Joe Romm on Jul 25, 2010 at 12:15 pm

Schmidt to Curry: “In future I will simply assume you are a conduit for untrue statements rather than their originator.”

UPDATE:  Judith Curry comments below — including this new puzzler.  I reply.  Feel free to do the same.

As a general rule for scientists, one shouldn’t hitch one’s wagon to long-debunked purveyors of disinformation.  Because then you might end up circling the wagons with the wrong … tribe (see “The curious incident of Judith Curry with the fringe“).

I’m on a plane today, so I commend to you an outstanding Real Climate post, “The Montford Delusion,” by Tamino — and the stunning comments section.  NASA scientist Gavin Schmidt and Tamino are in the role of Wyatt Earp, Doc Holliday and company.  Judith Curry (and Peter Webster) have apparently thrown in with the Clantons.  Like all analogies, this one isn’t perfect, but I’m afraid the outcome is pretty much the same.

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Yglesias

The Right’s Muslim-Bashing

By Matthew Yglesias on Jul 25, 2010 at 9:58 am

I’ve already written about the insanity of the campaign to prevent the construction of a mosque in lower Manhattan, but Robert Wright’s piece on the matter goes deeper into the McCarthyite smear campaign the right wing is wages against the organizers, typically of their efforts to beat down any kind of political or cultural activities by American Muslims:

But if you think Rauf’s good intentions are going to keep him safe from the Weekly Standard, you underestimate that magazine’s creative powers. Its latest issue features an article about Park51 chock full of angles that never would have occurred to me if some magazine had asked me to write an assessment of the project’s ideological underpinnings. For example: Rauf’s wife, who often speaks in support of the project and during one talk reflected proudly on her Islamic heritage, “failed to mention another feature of her background: She is the niece of Dr. Farooq Khan, formerly a leader of the Westbury Mosque on Long Island, which is a center for Islamic radicals and links on its Web site to the paramilitary Islamic Circle of North America (I.C.N.A.), the front on American soil for the Pakistani jihadist Jamaat e-Islami.”

Got that? Rauf’s wife has an uncle who used to be “a leader” of a mosque that now has a Web site that links to the Web site of an allegedly radical organization. (I’ll get back to the claim that the Westbury Mosque is itself a “center for Islamic radicals.”)

Think about how insane that is. Think about all the people who are more closely related to you than your wife’s uncle is. There’s your wife. Your wife’s brothers and sisters. Your wife’s parents. Your own parents. Your aunts and uncles. Your grandparents. Your cousins. Your brothers and sisters. Unless your family is extremely odd this set of people is going to contain a wide range of political opinions. My grandparents were card-carrying members of the Communist Party for a good long while. What does that have to do with my current political views?

Politics

Tarryl Clark on Bachmann’s Social Security plan: ‘Why on earth does she want to take away our money?’

By Amanda Terkel on Jul 25, 2010 at 9:36 am

Yesterday at Netroots Nation, ThinkProgress spoke to Minnesota state Sen. Tarryl Clark (D), who is challenging Rep. Michele Bachmann (R) for Congress, and asked her about the disconnect between what Tea Party profiteers say and what the needs are of people who attend these rallies. Clark pointed to the fact that Bachmann has said she would like to “wean everybody off” of Social Security — even though that would be taking away money Americans have been paying for years:

CLARK: Because one of the best examples is Michele Bachmann has said that Americans need to be weaned off Social Security and Medicare. Well, I’ve now been paying into Social Security since I was a teenager — so for about 25 or 30 years — seems to me that’s my money. Why on earth does she want to take away our money? It’s money that we’ve worked hard for, and it’s money that’s supposed to be there for our retirement. Well, why would she want to do that? It is the opposite of what I think people are mad about. We should be making sure that the government is going to have it be solvent and have it be available for us, instead of having people like Michele threatening to get rid of it. Because she’s long supported privatization and other things.

Watch it:

In February, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) welcomed Tea Party members to join progressives in fighting special interests.

Transcript: Read more

Yglesias

But Is The Pizza Any Good?

By Matthew Yglesias on Jul 25, 2010 at 8:31 am

This sign at Netroots Nation rubbed this New Yorker’s sensibilities the wrong way:

IMG_0002 1

I feel like it would be impossible to make a really giant pizza any good. What kind of oven could you cook it in?

Climate Progress

Friedman on climate inaction: Were Gonna Be Sorry

By Joe Romm on Jul 25, 2010 at 12:35 am

For any first time visitors here because of Tom Friedman’s column in the Sunday NY Times, “We’re Gonna Be Sorry,” you might start with “An Introduction to Climate Progress.”

When I first heard on Thursday that Senate Democrats were abandoning the effort to pass an energy/climate bill that would begin to cap greenhouse gases that cause global warming and promote renewable energy that could diminish our addiction to oil, I remembered something that Joe Romm, the climateprogress.org blogger, once said: The best thing about improvements in health care is that all the climate-change deniers are now going to live long enough to see how wrong they were.

We’ll always have gallows humor!

For some reason, the NYT is home to a large fraction of the U.S. opinion columnists who get global warming.   Nicholas Kristof had a terrific piece last week, “Our Beaker Is Starting to Boil,” on global warming and the work of David Breashears to document “stunning declines in glaciers on the roof of the world.”

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