Forces loyal to Libyan leader Muammar Qaddafi have driven back rebels to the eastern city of Benghazi this week. And after weeks of ambiguity about an official position on Libya, the Obama administration yesterday said the U.S. would support military action beyond a no-fly zone to prevent a humanitarian disaster. “We need to be prepared to contemplate steps that include, but perhaps go beyond, a no-fly zone at this point, as the situation on the ground has evolved, and as a no-fly zone has inherent limitations in terms of protection of civilians at immediate risk,” U.S. ambassador to the UN Susan Rice said.

With a UN Security Council resolution authorizing military action in Libya looming, Qaddafi today warned rebels in Benghazi, “We are coming tonight.” He promised amnesty for those who surrender, but added that his forces will show “no mercy or compassion” to those who resist.

But just minutes ago, the UN Security Council voted 10-0 to authorize the no-fly zone and any measures necessary to protect civilians from attacks by Qaddafi’s forces. Five countries abstained from the vote, including Russia and China. A UN source tells ThinkProgress that the resolution also demands an immediate cease fire and rules out any foreign occupation of any part of Libyan territory.

A French official said before the vote that the French and British, along with cooperation from some other Arab allies, would be prepared to begin implementing the UN resolution within hours of its passage. The official added that Britain and France were prepared to act with limited assistance from the U.S., which currently has five warships off the Libyan coast. However, “On the NATO side,” a senior NATO official said, “we’re not yet ready.”

Last week, the South Carolina state Senate approved an immigration bill similar to SB-1070 — the controversial Arizona legislation that was signed into law by Gov. Jan Brewer (R). However, South Carolina’s version, S-20, contains a few extra provisions that were not included in Arizona’s bill. One of the most troubling additions is a provision which creates the Illegal Immigration Enforcement Unit, a new police force meant to patrol the state’s borders. The Columbia Free Times reports:

South Carolina’s proposed Arizona-style immigration bill, passed last week by the Senate, would do more than require police to check the immigration status of anyone they suspect might be in the country illegally — it would also create a whole new police force to patrol the state’s borders.

Called the Illegal Immigration Enforcement Unit, the squad of officers would have their own insignia, patrol cars, uniforms and statewide jurisdiction while operating within the Department of Public Safety, but outside the S.C. Highway Patrol.

Given that it is probably pretty expensive to set up a whole new police force, South Carolina legislators decided to pay for the Illegal Immigration Enforcement Unit by taxing international wire transfers. Tammy Besherse of the South Carolina Appleseed Legal Justice Center believes that lawmakers are trying to tax undocumented immigrants who are sending money home to their families. Besherse also doubts that the tactic will work. “I assure you people are going to be smart and figure out some other way to send money home so they don’t get taxed,” she says. “So what happens when that funding source goes away? Then your funding source is going to dry up and you’re going to have to take it out of the general budget and cut other services that taxpayers may prefer.”

There are a couple of other problems with the tax. First of all, the whole purpose of the law is to drive undocumented immigrants out of the state. So, if S-20 actually fulfills its objectives, there would presumably be no one to tax under the logic that Besherse presents.

Yet, the thing is, undocumented immigrants are not the only people sending money wire transfers abroad. There are a lot of legal immigrant families (my own included) which send money back to their home countries through wire transfers as well. Although it’s estimated that 75 percent of business to business wire transfers are domestic, that still means that the remaining 25 percent could be taxed by South Carolina under this law. Ultimately, unless South Carolina wants to force wire transfer companies to verify the immigration status of their customers, a lot of other people who aren’t undocumented immigrants will have to deal with the economic burden of the tax.

Meanwhile, South Carolina state lawmakers reportedly have no idea how much an Illegal Immigration Enforcement Unit is even going to cost.

Today, two deficit-cutting bills will be voted on in the House of Representatives. One bill, introduced by Rep. Doug Lamborn (R-CO) and fellow Republicans, would end all federal funding to National Public Radio (NPR). The other bill, sponsored by Reps. Dennis Kucinich (D-OH) and Walter Jones (R-NC) and being pushed largely by progressive Democrats, calls for setting a strict timetable for withdrawal from Afghanistan that would mandate the end of combat operations in that country by the end of 2011.

Conservatives claim that defunding NPR would save taxpayers a great deal of money; former NPR employee Juan Williams even argued that NPR funding was taking away from “school breakfast programs [and] college scholarships.” Yet NPR receives only around 2 percent of its annual $161 million budget from federal grants, totaling approximately $3.2 million. Meanwhile, the FY2011 cost of the Afghan war has hit $113 billion.

Assuming that the costs of both the NPR funding and Afghan war would be the same for next year, that means that ending the Afghan war would save approximately 40,000 times more taxpayer dollars than defunding NPR’s grants from agencies such as the National Endowment for the Arts and Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

Additionally, as the National Priorities Project shows, ending the war could help free up money for countless domestic priorities, like hiring millions of teachers or funding health care for tens of millions of poor children. Here are just some of the alternatives that could be funded for the cost of one year of the Afghan war:

- Health Care For 55 Million Low Income Children

- 1.6 million Elementary School Teachers for One Year

- 1.9 million Firefighters for One Year

- 14.1 million Head Start Slots for Children for One Year

- 13.8 million Military Veterans Receiving VA Medical Care for One Year

- 1.6 million Police or Sheriff’s Patrol Officers for One Year

- 19.3 million Students receiving Pell Grants of $5550

- 13.6 million Scholarships for University Students for One Year

Americans recognize these truths about the relative costs of the Afghan war versus NPR. That’s why polling shows that only a quarter of Americans want to see cuts to funding for public broadcasting, while the vast majority of Americans no longer support the Afghan war and want a clear exit from that country. If Republicans really want to “listen to the American people,” as they pledged to do last fall during their campaign, they would support ending the war in Afghanistan and really saving taxpayers money, not endorsing gimmicks to please the more extreme members of their base.

In the wake of the horrific murders of five family members, including three children, in the West Bank settlement of Itamar, a number of conservative blogs have been pushing a story that crowds of Palestinians in Gaza turned out to “celebrate” the murders.

The story was picked up by the Washington Post’s neocon blogger, Jennifer Rubin, who wrote, “The initial reaction of Palestinians [to the Itamar murders] was grotesque, if not predictable“:

Ynet news reported, “Gaza residents from the southern city of Rafah hit the streets Saturday to celebrate the terror attack in the West Bank settlement of Itamar where five family members were murdered in their sleep, including three children. Residents handed out candy and sweets, one resident saying the joy ‘is a natural response to the harm settlers inflict on the Palestinian residents in the West Bank.’”

Teeing off Rubin’s post in an article subtitled “Islam is as Islam does,” National Review’s Andrew McCarthy transmogrified the story into a condemnation of all Muslims:

As the Israeli press reported, jubilant Muslims crowded Gaza’s streets, handing out candy and sweets in the wake of the murders. Jennifer Rubin notes that the outpouring of joy over the slitting of an infant’s throat was, according to one resident, “a natural response to the harm settlers inflict” on Palestinians.

It is a natural response, if you are a monster… And these positions, it bears emphasizing, do not represent some fringe Islam of al-Qaeda terrorists who have purportedly hijacked an otherwise peaceful religion. This is mainstream Islam.

A little research revealed that all of these claims are based on a single story from last Saturday in the Israeli tabloid Ynet.

When I contacted Elior Levy, the writer of the Ynet story, he responded that the item was originally “published in [the] ‘Safa’ web site. It is a news agency located in Gaza.” Safa is widely perceived to be Hamas-affiliated. Levy sent me a link, but noted that “I think that they don’t have [an] archive.” Levy also noted that the site “put a picture there of a man that gives candies on the road of Rafah to drivers. The title says ‘Candies in Rafah — celebrating the mission in Nablus.’” (Nablus is the Palestinian city near the Itamar settlement.)

I contacted a number of people who work in Gaza, none of them had seen or heard anything about “jubilant crowds,” or even moderately pleased crowds, thronging Gaza’s streets in celebration of the murders. A search of the Safa site didn’t turn up the story either, but photos of the man handing out sweets in Rafah, three of them in fact, were easy to find, as they’ve accompanied many of the blog posts condemning the Palestinian “celebrations.” Here they are:

Even if the photo caption is accurate, one guy handing out treats to celebrate murder is one too many. But do you see “crowds” of “jubilant Muslims” in those photos? I don’t. (And even if you did, would this say more about Islam than crowds of Jewish Israelis celebrating mass murderer Baruch Goldstein every year says about Judaism? I don’t think so.)

So it seems that what happened here is that a pro-Hamas website tried, lamely and offensively, to spin the Itamar murders as a bold, praise-worthy act of resistance. An Israeli tabloid then reported this (now disappeared) item in typically steroidal fashion. Conservative bloggers then swarmed on it. And that’s how a non-existent mass demonstration of anti-Israel hatred ended up under the Washington Post’s banner as an actual fact, probably to be repeated in op-eds and AIPAC fundraising letters for years and years to come.