The State Department has threatened to withdraw the $1.3 billion it sends every year to Egypt because the Egyptians are holding US citizens connected with pro-democracy groups the Egyptians claim have instigated the Tahrir Square movement.

Specifically, the Egyptian military government prevented a half dozen Americans -- including Sam LaHood, director of the US International Republican Institute in Cairo -- from leaving the country. LaHood is the son of US Secretary of Transportation Ray LaHood. The State Department’s goal in supporting groups like Mr LaHood’s is to encourage democracy friendly to the US.

Before this incident. President Obama warned Egyptian military strongman Field Marshall Mohamed Hussein Tantawi that the upcoming installment of US military aid was contingent on his playing ball with US interests. The snatching of LaHood and the others turned the situation into a diplomatic incident. LaHood was quoted in The New York Times as wondering whether he would be brought to trial for meddling in Egyptian affairs.

“[T]he whole thing is ludicrous,” he said.

That may be true, but even more ludicrous is the failure to provide a similar warning on the other side of the 1979 peace treaty between Egypt and Israel. That is, according to several recent reports, Israel’s top leaders are making it known they feel a massive air attack on Iran by Israel is a manageable thing -- that suggestions such bombing attacks would lead to a major conflagration are all bluff. A Sunday New York Times Magazine article by Israeli journalist Ronen Bergman concludes "Israel will indeed strike Iran in 2012."

Why do US leaders threaten to withhold patronage military funds when Egyptian militarists drag their feet on democracy, but not when Israeli militarists seem ready to drag us into World War Three?

Of course, we know the answer to this. Egyptians are backward brown Arabs with a history of living under the thumb of British colonial rule and US imperial hegemony. We know the drill: Bernard Lewis and the failures of Arab modernization. Israel, on the other hand, is just like us, a western garrison state run by a Prime Minister who went to Cheltenham High School just outside of Philadelphia and who likes to mentally link Iranians with Nazi Germany and the holocaust.

By Brazil's Carlos Latuff

With the middle east in upheaval, the fact Israel finds itself a vulnerable fortress state wound so tightly it won’t even budge an inch to recognize obvious Palestinian grievances is a global tragedy.

To say it did not have to be this way and that there were other choices from the very beginning is at this late date pointless. That’s the nature of tragedy; decisions are made and one has to live with them.

I made a mistake.

An article I wrote recently for TCBH about the Pennsylvania prison system’s latest punitive assault on now ex-death row inmate Mumia Abu-Jamal (unnecessarily continuing his solitary confinement) contained a factual misstatement.

Most journalists consider any inaccuracy an error, regardless of how small.

The Code of Ethics of the Society of Professional Journalists calls for admitting “mistakes” and correcting them promptly.

This journalist’s inaccuracy-as-error standard contrasts with court systems, where appellate courts too often dismiss mistakes made during trials by prosecutors and judges without correction by using the court-invented legalistic term: harmless error.

The Abu-Jamal case is fraught with such misconduct and mistakes that appellate courts have not only not corrected, but have allowed to fester and get worse. But you won't see the courts or the prosecutors ever admitting those things.

In my article, I inaccurately listed Pennsylvania state prison officials as being the prime movers in keeping Abu-Jamal on death row instead of transferring him into general prison population after a federal judge had voided his death sentence in a December 2001 ruling converting that sentence to a life in prison.
Pennsylvania prisoners are put in "the Hole" for their politics, for protesting prison conditions, and for racist reasons

On my Yahoo home page today, there was a picture of the globe, and an instant poll asking me to check one of two choices: Yes or No, Do you believe global warming is a real threat?

I don’t usually waste my time on these things, but there was that tantalizing link to “See the results,” and you had to vote to see them, so I voted.

Having recently looked at some depressing satellite images of the pathetically reduced Arctic ice from this past summer, read an account of the rapidly melting glaciers in the Himalayas (sometimes known as the Earth’s third polar region), and read some really frightening articles about the plumes of methane erupting from the Arctic sea floor and the Siberian and North American tundra, I of course voted “yes.”

The results, though, of the 214,849 other people who participated in that ballot, were 51% yes and 49% no.

Who are these “no” voters? What are they watching, reading, or, for god’s sake, what are they seeing when they walk around outside (or maybe they never do that)?

I walked out my door yesterday here in southeastern Pennsylvania, and saw the daffodil shoots poking up two inches above the unfrozen ground in our front garden--something they usually start to do in early March!
Summer 2011: What's Left of the North Polar ice sheet (note all the actual green around the edge of Greenland, where lately locals say they're suddenly able to grow tomatoes for the first time)

On Thursday, January 5, I was waiting for the elevator in the lobby of my building when I was joined by a woman who lives up the hall from me. She was carrying a grocery bag with The New York Times poking out the top. “Why did you buy it?” I asked. “They just raised the price to $2.50. Who can afford that for a daily newspaper?”

“I have a very large birdcage,” she said. “It’s the only newspaper that fits the bottom of my birdcage.”

My neighbor is a classical musician who makes a living at it. She pays attention to politics and votes. She buys things. She’s a little older than the actors playing obedient yuppies in the NYT commercials that beg for subscriptions, but is otherwise their ideal reader.

“The only thing I don’t like about the Times is all the color pictures,” she continued. “One of my budgies is listless, and I think it might be chemicals leaching out of the pictures. So I cut them out before I put the paper in the cage. I may have to take my budgies to the vet.”

Afterward I sat in my apartment and thought, “Wow, that was the perfect lead to a Thomas Friedman column, one of those deals where he has a chance encounter that resonates with symbolism for some earth-shaking problem, like the death of print. Would Friedman see the budgies as upper management at the Times, making disastrous business decisions for the entire 21st century and crapping on journalists by cutting their benefits? Or would the budgies be the readers, listless with their diet of toxic ink? Or would the budgies be reporters caged by corporatism? The world is a flat birdcage, and the metaphors would drop like turds from the sky. Is it for Tom or myself that I cry?”

Perhaps I was being unfair, I further thought. Perhaps the Times had changed and I didn’t notice because I hadn’t read it regularly since the last millenium. Oh, I glance at it almost every day online. But a careful read? Nah. I hadn’t bought one outside of an airport for years. So, for $2.50, I bought a paper copy—“the world’s best journalism in its original form,” as the commercials say— the very same issue that my neighbor put on the bottom of her birdcage.

Are even birds dropping the habit of reading The Times?

Spies and Provocateurs: Police Spying on Occupy Movement not Likely Limited to Los Angeles
The spies and provocateurs sent into the Occupy encampment in Los Angeles by the LAPD are certainly just the tip of the iceberg, says Dave. We need to find the rest of them. It seems likely most of any violence coming from Occupiers was actually the work of those police provocateurs.