Blood and Ash the Price We Will All Pay For This

Again, I woke up to war this year. This started around 2:14 AM EST (via Amir-Hussein Radjy at AP News):

Two residents reported hearing the sounds of strikes echoing across the capital. A resident in the area of Mehrabad airport reported the sounds of “two heavy explosions” shaking windows just over half an hour ago. In central Tehran near Vanak, another resident reported the sounds of “blasts and war” coming at almost the same moment.

The more comprehensive AP report by Brian Melley:

The U.S. and Israel attacked Iran on Saturday in a massive operation that President Donald Trump said killed Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei while targeting military capabilities and aiming to eliminate the threat of Tehran creating a nuclear weapon.

There was no comment on Khamenei by Tehran, while Trump urged Iranians to seize the moment and “take over.”

In counterattacks, Iran fired drones and missiles at Israel and aimed strikes at U.S. military installations in Bahrain, Kuwait and Qatar. Exchanges of fire continued into the night. Iranian state media, citing the Red Crescent, on Saturday evening said at least 201 people had been killed and more than 700 injured.

Iran has also been attacking civilian targets in Dubai and other parts of the Arabian Middle East. Iran is threatening to blockade the Strait of Hormuz if they haven't started already, something that can easily cut off a massive amount of oil needed for global energy needs, spiking gas prices here in the U.S. as well as other nations.

At the moment, it doesn't look like trump and his gung-ho war buddies are going to commit any troops to a ground invasion, contenting themselves with a massive bombing campaign alongside Israel to perform "decapitation strikes" to destabilize the regime. Essentially the same thing trump ordered when using the military to capture Venezuela's president a month ago.

Thing is, any serious attempt at regime change is going to NEED boots on the ground and an occupying force to rebuild things. trump may have captured Maduro but all that did was promote Venezuela's Vice President to the top job. If the US bombing did succeed in killing Khamenei - who was 86 and dying anyway - all we've done right now is promote another cleric to the Ayatollah job and that person is hiding in the deepest basement he can find.

And even then, our nation's track record at nation-building after war and occupation hasn't been all that great post World War II. We tried in Afghanistan and failed (trump made sure of that). We tried in Iraq and failed (lying us into war over fake WMDs made sure of that). The biggest - the most horrifying - argument in the halls of power in DC over trump's campaign against Iran is how there's no real plan involved. Tom Nichols at the Atlantic spells out the hazards:

To think about the possible courses of this war, we should start by clearly understanding three realities: First, Iran is a terrible regime that deserves to fall. The regime recently murdered thousands of its own citizens who were seeking freedom from their oppressive rule, and no one should be shedding tears for the mullahs hiding in their bunkers.

Second, “success” is not impossible—if by “success” we mean the fall of the ayatollahs and the rise of a better, more humane, pro-Western government that does not seek to destabilize the Middle East; dominate Lebanon, Iraq, and Yemen; and eradicate Israel. But the path to that success is exceedingly narrow and mined with significant hazards. Destroying the regime’s capabilities is relatively easy, but nothing permanent—as Americans learned in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan—is achieved by bouncing rubble and piling up bodies. Destroying the regime itself is a far trickier business; dictatorships have a high pain tolerance, especially when the hapless citizens, not the leaders, bear the brunt of that pain.

Third, the president has not offered a strategy, or identified any conditions that would signal that U.S. goals have been achieved. Yes, he has vowed to prevent Iran from gaining nuclear weapons, but beyond that, he seems to be arguing for just inflicting military damage on the regime, on the assumption that enough ordnance on enough targets will weaken the grip of the ayatollahs. Once the theocrats are on the ropes, the thinking seems to go, the people of Iran will finish the job of regime change for us...

America twice had its hands full in Iraq, a nation of 37 million, even with the assistance of several countries. The U.S., France, and Britain managed to subdue tiny Libya, a nation of 7.5 million, and left its dictator to be raped and beaten in the streets. This time, conditions are different and more challenging: The target is two and a half times the size of Iraq, America has exactly one openly declared ally in this enterprise, no serious armed rebel force exists in Iran, and no coalition of nations is assembling to march into Tehran...

In short, the United States and Israel - both driven by neocon fantasies of purging the Middle East in blood and fire - are doubling down on the chaos thinking a shinier better world will emerge. That we will be - yet again - "greeted as liberators" even though we're destroying the village nation in order to save it us. This is in spite of the evidence that we're going in mostly alone, going into a territory and terrain far harsher than we've dealt with before, and with no real clue where the exit doors are when it's time to flee for our lives.

All of these problems were ones I'd pointed out back in 2019, during trump's first reign of error, when it was clear even then that going to war in Iran one way or another was a bad idea. Nothing had changed since then, except for trump's growing dementia, arrogance, and desperation to *win* at something to confirm his own self-worth at everyone else's expense.

Topping all of this is the fact trump's actions are illegal - he does not have authorization from Congress for this - and that we're already getting reports from Iran of high civilian casualties (aka war crimes). There is no other way to say this, America: WE are the bad guys here.

And GODDAMN every media pundit who proclaimed trump 'a dove' while defaming Hillary and Kamala as warmongers. You lied to yourselves as well as to the nation about who the real warmonger has been - and which party (hint, not the Democrats) has profited from these wars ever since 2001.

Without a clear agenda, without true and honest goals, without a sincere desire to do what is right for the poor suffering citizens of Iran - and the other lands that trump and his thugs would desecrate for their own greed and lust - this war that has begun poorly will end much worse, with more suffering and dismay than our own nation will be willing to bear.

Goddamn every one of you bastards who supported trump the last ten years, because the next ten years of blood and ash are the price we're all paying for your fear and rage. 

The Reckless Reprisal

Update: Again, thanks to Steve in Manhattan for sharing this article on Crooks & Liars' Mike's Blog Round-Up. Stay safe and abolish ICE, America.

We're going through the turmoil of having donald trump rattle sabers - again - at Iran, using more direct and dangerous language than he used back in 2019 (via Rebecca Rosman and Franco Ordoñez at NPR):

President Trump on Wednesday declined to say whether the United States is moving closer to a decision to strike Iranian nuclear facilities, after Iran's supreme leader warned the U.S. against an attack and rejected Trump's call to surrender.

"You don't seriously think I'm going to answer that question," Trump said when a reporter at the White House asked whether the U.S. would attack Iran. "I may do it. I may not do it. I mean, nobody knows what I'm going to do..."

"We're the only ones that have the capability to do it — but that doesn't mean I'm going to do it," he told reporters in the Oval Office after an unrelated event. The president said he would be meeting in the Situation Room — which he also referred to as the "war room" — about the crisis...

This comes amid nearly a week of fighting between U.S. ally Israel and Iran, and amid signals from U.S. and Israeli officials that Trump could be considering an attack on Iran.

In a string of social media posts on Tuesday, Trump demanded Iran's "UNCONDITIONAL SURRENDER" and boasted, "We now have complete and total control of the skies over Iran," raising speculation that U.S. forces were already more involved than previously acknowledged.

Khamenei responded to the demand in his address Wednesday, his second public appearance since Israel launched strikes on his country last week.

"This is a nation that will never surrender to any form of imposition," he said.

On Tuesday, Trump also issued a direct threat against Khamenei. "We know exactly where the so-called 'Supreme Leader' is hiding. He is an easy target, but is safe there – We are not going to take him out (kill!), at least not for now."

Again, this could all be the bluster of an overgrown bully that we've seen from trump when he's trying to force a deal on others. However, trump is also impulsive, and currently irritable over how disastrous his birthday parade turned out. he's in a mood to hurt somebody, and dropping bombs on civilians over in the Middle East would seem too easy a move for him to make.

You have to remember what happened during trump's first tenure in the White House: sporadic missile attacks on certain Islamic targets, followed by our Army quitting the battlefield and our regional allies to struggle against Russian-backed Syrians, followed by a targeted attack on a high-ranking Iranian official on Iraqi soil that aggravated regional tensions.

All of this impulsive, unfocused acts of a desperate man trying to pose as an elite Alpha Male on the global stage; with no consideration of the consequences and harm those acts imposed on our nation and whatever allies we have left. Most of this getting imposed on our nation by the only "ally" we are counting on in that region, as Israel - led by a genocidal schemer in Netanyahu who's trying to avoid getting kicked out of power again - is forcing the United States to commit to a military action that will honestly lead into another quagmire for us.

I wrote about this the last time around, back in 2019 when I posed seven reasons we shouldn't invade Iran. All of the arguments I made then are still relevant today, with the added possibility that modern technological boosts to drone warfare will expose our Navy fleets and our regional military bases to potentially disastrous (for us) yet effective (for Iran) ends.

We also have to consider trump's flippant attitude towards our own nuclear stockpile, and that if this situation worsens - and considering how inept our current Defense leadership is, that's likely - trump could well exercise that option. Even one nuke dropped on any place in Iran would kill thousands of civilians and leave literal fallout, while the metaphoric fallout would be the entire world turning the US into a pariah state.

If trump thinks this can push Iran to the negotiating table to hammer out a no-nukes agreement to replace the one he blew up, he's wrong. It won't placate Netanyahu, and the escalation will continue to where we'll be back at the "bomb 'em all" brinksmanship only at a more extreme and irrational level.

This was never going to end well with trump in charge. None of you 77 million voters realized that? /headdesk

The Fall of Assad, and the Fate of Syria and the Middle East

This had been happening over the past two weeks, but I didn't want to say anything about it because I'm tired of getting ahead of myself on historic events as they occur, but in the Middle East - alongside all the fighting and bloodshed - we're witnessing the swift and sudden downfall of a tyrannical regime in Syria (via Willem Marx at NPR):

A rapid advance by Syrian rebel groups on the country's capital has led to the collapse of Bashar al-Assad's control of a nation his family had ruled for half a century.

Crowds celebrated the seismic political shift in the streets of Damascus overnight and into Sunday, as Syrian state television broadcast a statement from a group of rebels, one dressed in a black hoodie, who announced that all Syrian prisoners had been freed from jail and Assad had been deposed.

The man reading that statement on television, just hours after the city's fall, had echoed calls from the leading group in this lightning rebel offensive, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, demanding that citizens and fighters alike ensure the country's national institutions were protected. He ended his statement with a declaration after more than 13 years of bloody civil conflict: "Long Live a Free Syria..."

The British-based war monitoring group, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, said Assad had left the country to an undisclosed destination.

Hours later, Russia, which had long used its military to prop up the Assad regime against wide-ranging opposition forces, also said that the toppled president had left the country. The Russian foreign ministry did not say where he had gone.

There's a timeline at AP News that helps highlight just how quick this whole turnabout moved. A lot of foreign policy think tanks are working overtime - like this Atlantic Council - to figure out the massive implications that Assad's fall means not just for Syria but for the entire Middle East region.

We're talking about a key Arab nation that had long contributed to the violent instability and chaos in the region well back into the 1950s. Syria - alongside Iran, and backed by Russia - were themselves backers for such extremists groups like Hezbollah in Lebanon, which contributed to ongoing violence with Israel and leaving Lebanon in political and economic turmoil for decades.

Syria itself has been broken by a decades-long civil war since 2011 - among a number of uprisings going back to the 1980s - that sent millions of civilians fleeing as refugees to avoid the indiscriminate bombing and gassing that Assad's regime deployed as means of putting down resistance. Gods, I last blogged about this civil war in 2015 when I pledged some financial support to help those refugees, and the war itself in 2013 when Obama's presidency attempted to defuse Assad's use of chemical weapons in that civil war.

The end of Assad means only a temporary respite in that war, unfortunately. Syria as a nation was cobbled together by a mix of differing ethnicities and religious groups - Kurds, Turks, Sunnis, Shi'a, Christians, dozens of smaller cultural communities - some of whom remain hostile towards each other even in this moment of possible nation-building into functioning coalitions.

This is the thing a lot of Western nations are dreading: the potential of Syria to backslide much like Iraq or Afghanistan or Libya into still-broken internally squabbling states that could become home to corruption and religious extremists.

In opposition to that dread, there looks to be a sizable amount of hope. The HTS rebels who claimed victory are posing - at the moment - as functional moderates looking to legitimize their rule. In the years that they've received training from their Turkish handlers, there is the decent possibility that they've learned how Turkey handles religious tolerance and can placate the larger Christian populations in Syria. The Turkish government - looking to reduce or end the ongoing Kurdish separatist movement in their own borders - would want Syria to take the burden of dealing with the Kurds: This would require genuine coalition-building.

A stabilized Syria should mean an end to one of the largest refugee crises facing the Middle East (and Europe/United States). Fourteen million displaced Syrians could start moving back - hopefully within weeks - just as long as serious rebuilding efforts are funded by foreign aid to rebuild cities and homes to move back to. Ending this crisis could well relieve a lot of discontent among the sanctuary nations - especially across Europe - that had their Far Right parties spewing racist outrage to promote their own agendas.

There is also the possibility that the end of Assad's regime - which was hostile towards Israel and a major backer of Hezbollah and Hamas - could shift the dynamics of the ongoing bloodshed that Netanyahu's government has been inflicting on Palestinian and Lebanese civilians over the past year. Cutting off Syrian support of Hezbollah ought to weaken their position in Lebanon to where the broken power-sharing system falls apart. Pacifying Lebanon ought to mollify Israel... although letting up on the ethnic cleansing in Gaza and the West Bank is going to require different tactics.

A lot of this is going to involve diplomacy - and money - and gods help us if any of this drags long enough until trump is back in the White House to break it all out of his greedy self-interest, but let's not stress about that just yet (get on Air Force One NOW Biden, and get to Damascus to hammer out a deal before Christmas goddammit!).

The most obvious thing to note out of all this is how broken Russia is right now. As Michael Scollon and Frud Bezhan at Radio Free Europe point out:

When Vladimir Putin took the reins of power in a post-Soviet Russia in shambles a quarter-century ago, he immediately set about restoring Moscow's status as a global power.

It took 15 years, but Russia heralded its military intervention in the Syrian civil war as proof of its return as a force to be reckoned with on the international stage.

Moscow leveraged that image to expand its influence throughout the Middle East and beyond as a counterweight to the West.

Now, the fall of the government of President Bashar al-Assad, a key ally of Moscow, has dealt a serious blow to Russia's great-power ambitions.

"Putin's military adventure in Syria was designed to demonstrate that Russia is a great power and can project its influence abroad," said Phillip Smyth, a Middle East expert. "Losing Syria is a huge slap in the face for Putin."

Assad's ouster represents not only a reputational hit to Russia but likely a major strategic setback.

Syria is home to two major Russia military installations: an air base in Hmeimim and a naval base in Tartus. The latter is Russia's only warm-water naval base and provides Moscow access to the Mediterranean Sea...

Reports were fast and furious on social media that Russia's fleet at Tartus sailed out days ago - abandoning Assad even then - arguably forced to travel the long way around to the Atlantic and Baltic Sea, as getting back into the Black Sea means facing an eager Ukrainian torpedo boat drone attack that would happily sink it (that is if Turkey reopened the path through Istanbul's waterway for them).

Moscow capitalized on its involvement in both Syria and Ukraine to sell itself as a power capable of challenging the United States, NATO, and the West in general while expanding its global reach from the Mediterranean to Africa and Latin America.

Following Russia's all-out invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Syria became more of an asset for Moscow, experts say, while also presenting the challenge of maintaining military campaigns on two fronts...

Syria's fall quickly makes it clear that Russia can't handle a two-front war. Putin is so obsessed and focused on conquering Ukraine that he can no longer provide manpower or equipment or time to any of the client states he's been propping up across the globe. Russia - aside from their nuclear missiles, and there's even some serious doubt about that - is no longer a military powerhouse. Their political and economic influences are just as diminished.

In fact, he's been vacuuming up equipment and manpower from those client states - look at all the weapons manufactured in Iran, look at the North Korean troops "volunteered" to slam into the meat grinder in Kursk - in a desperate attempt to force Ukraine to a negotiation table where Putin hopes to retain his land gains to justify retreating and repairing his losses. Putin dares not make any more mass conscription efforts among his own Russian people without risking draft riots. And he can't provide any mercenary support - bye, Wagner! - overseas (especially now that his long-range bases are cut off).

It used to be from the Cold War onward that Soviet Russia - and Putin's Russia - were militarily and financially capable of spreading their influence and support across the entire globe. Putin was attempting to market Russia as an alternative to other global powers like France and the U.S. across Africa, but now those efforts seem empty and likely unfulfilled. Client states like Cuba and Venezuela are now literally struggling to keep the lights on. Other nations that could be allies in Russia's time of need - China and India - are now too self-sufficient and too powerful themselves to where they can stand on the sidelines and see what benefits them most as things fall apart.

There's a lot of chaos still out there - not just in Syria and in Ukraine - and a lot of it can get worse when a meddling and incompetent trump gets back into office.

Keep hoping the good things happen before then.

There Was No Sense

It was a time of great and exalting excitement.
-- Mark Twain, The War Prayer

Well. File this under the category of HOLY SHITH (via Joe Hernandez at NPR): 

Iranian state media is reporting that a helicopter carrying President Ebrahim Raisi and other top officials suffered a "hard landing" Sunday, with no immediate word on casualties.

The state-run IRNA media outlet reported that the aircraft carrying Raisi, Foreign Minister Hossein Amir Abdollahian and other senior officials went down in a mountainous part of northwestern Iran as they returned from an event along Iran's border with Azerbaijan.

Two of the three helicopters on the trip reportedly reached their destination safely, but crews were still searching for the one carrying Raisi, according to state media.

Iran's Interior Minister, Ahmad Vahidi, reportedly confirmed the "hard landing" of the president's helicopter and said the search-and-rescue operation is underway...

And by "hard landing" they mean "holy (expletive) this is gonna be messy." (These are religious extremists, they don't get to curse like us Unitarians).

Rescue efforts by all reports are hampered by massive fog and bad weather. To which my response was "what the HELL were they doing flying through bad weather in the first place? Just delay the next meeting and wait for clearer skies."

So why is this a Holy Shith moment?

Because Iran's leadership is riled up by the current Israeli-Hamas-Hezbollah conflict, stirred by decades of mistrust between the hardline Israeli government and the hardline Islamic Shi'a government that has backed the likes of Hamas to prevent any successful two-state solution involving Palestine. We just dealt with the two nations attacking each other in April:

When he came into office, Raisi said Iran would continue to honor its nuclear deal with the U.S., despite former President Donald Trump's decision to pull out of the agreement in 2018.

Still, Raisi has been viewed as more of a hard-liner than his predecessor, former Iranian president Hassan Rouhani.

Last month, Raisi celebrated Iran's attack on Israel following an airstrike in Damascus that killed seven members of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. Iran blamed Israel for the bombing, but Israel never claimed responsibility. Israel said it intercepted 99% of the missiles and drones Iran fired during its retaliatory strike. (personal note: in truth the US and regional allied forces helped shoot those missiles down)

Iran's president is the head of its government, but the country is ruled by (Ayatollah Ali) Khamenei, its supreme leader...

Raisi is (maybe was) considered next in line for the Ayatollah position as Khamenei is up there in years (85 years old, hey New York Times tell him to retire). If Raisi turns up dead from the crash, the immediate effect is that the Iranian Vice President takes over as acting President for 50 days while a special election takes place.

The political effects would be Iran ramping up their level of mistrust to full-blown paranoia. They reacted to that targeted Israeli strike on Damascus with a missile spam of their own. It won't even matter if this helicopter crash was a legitimate accident - due to weather or to mechanic failure - because the death of one of the top leaders is a casus belli (cause for war) the hardliners want.

Think I'm exaggerating? Look up the War of Jenkins Ear. The Brits went to war with the Spanish over that. The United States almost went to war with France in 1797 over the XYZ Affair. We did go to war with Iraq in 2003 over unfounded claims - in some respect outright lies - around Weapons of Mass Destruction that turned out didn't exist.

Just think what a nation like Iran - controlled by authoritarians desperate to keep their restless and angry citizenry under heel - would do triggered by their President's (possible) death: Willing to blame Israel (and the U.S. and other regional powers) and escalating the madness and bloodshed in Gaza and the rest of the Middle East. Even if Raisi survives, don't be surprised if Iran claims the crash was an assassination attempt.

We are as a planet stuck in the Middle East because of terrible regional factions - Iranian vs. Saudi vs. Israeli vs. Syrian vs. Turkish vs. religious extremists vs. authoritarians across multiple nations vs. Russians vs. Americans - all eager in their own way to resolve their differences through blood, because no one dares want to try peace or diplomatic resolution to end the cycle of violence and hate.

There's thousands of civilians dead across Israel and Gaza and the West Bank and Lebanon and Syria, with more to follow. All because the drumbeats go on...

It was believed afterward that the man was a lunatic, because there was no sense in what he said.
-- last line of the War Prayer

Update 5/20: This morning, waking up to confirmation Raisi and others died in that copter crash. It's too early to point to a specific cause, and U.S. Senator Schumer is telling reporters that our intelligence agencies are finding no evidence of foul play. But the Iranian leaders will draw their own conclusions. Things can well escalate to more violence from here. Gods help us. 

Blood And Fire Across the Middle East This April Evening

Damn. While I'd been busy writing a previous article, it looks like the War between Israel and Hamas expanded to include Iran sending missiles and drones to strike targets in Israel (via Becky Sullivan at NPR):

Air raid sirens sounded across Israel and the occupied West Bank and Israeli officials urged people to seek shelter after Iran launched dozens of drones toward Israel late Saturday night in an attack that marked a major escalation of conflict in the Middle East.

Iran had vowed to retaliate after an airstrike on an Iranian consulate in Syria earlier this month killed seven Iranian military officials. It is the first time that Iran has launched an attack on Israel from Iranian soil, Israeli officials said. Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps said the attack also included missiles.

There was already international outrage that Israel struck a foreign embassy, but this is Netanyahu we're talking about: Any excuse to expand the war so he can stay in power:

In a Saturday night address to Israelis, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said that his country was ready for "any scenario, both defensively and offensively."

"We have determined a clear principle: Whoever harms us, we will harm them. We will defend ourselves against any threat and will do so level-headedly and with determination," Netanyahu said.

Caught in the middle of all this was the United States, bound by treaty and historical obligations to defend Israel. While our military in the region responded by shooting down as many of the drones and missiles as possible to reduce civilian targets, there now comes the dread that we're getting caught in an escalating cycle of retaliation between two sides: Israel backed by the U.S. and European allies vs. Hamas and Hezbollah backed by Iran... and Russia.

It's pretty clear that Russia and Iran are closely tied: Russia is relying on Iranian drone manufacturing to supply the ongoing bombardment of civilian targets in Ukraine. It's also clear - once you step back and look at the bigger picture of the global chaos all this fighting in Gaza and Israel generates - that the ones who profit most in any escalation of hostilities between Israel and Iran are Putin and his lackeys (both in Russia and here in the United States).

I've argued before against any American involvement in a war against Iran. The dynamics were different then: The reason to avoid it now revolves around how we dare not get suckered into a fight that can distract us from aiding Ukraine.

If Biden is smart enough, if he can see the bigger picture here - that the real threat remains PUTIN, and that we need to bolster aid to Ukraine - then we can hope that the United States will play a more moderating conciliatory role in the coming days. Biden needs to - with whatever force and influence we've got left - rein in Netanyahu's warmongering here and now, and end the human rights abuses in Gaza and the West Bank to signal Iran to step back on their saber-rattling (the Ayatollahs should worry about engaging in a fight that could trigger political protests at home).

Biden may try to use the moment to bring Republicans over to his side on providing aid to Israel - which he and the Democrats are tying to aid for Ukraine and Taiwan - but given how too many of trump's allies - along with trump himself - are already Putin's puppets, that's unlikely to happen. 

As an aside in one of those grand ironies: If Biden tries to get authorization from Congress to expand our military's efforts against Iran (and Russia), those same Republicans could vote against it out of fear that Biden will win over 2024 voters as a war-time leader, and thus prevent the U.S. from getting dragged into another Middle East quagmire.

All in all, it's another complete mess where the simplest solution is to get Hamas and Hezbollah and Israeli Right Wingers to STOP KILLING EACH OTHER SO THAT NORMAL ISRAELIS AND PALESTINIANS COULD JUST GET ON WITH THEIR LIVES, THAT WOULD BE GRAND AND DANDY. 

(deep inhale)

In the meantime, we can hope that Biden's diplomacy works its way through the narrowest of paths to a solution of some kind that doesn't involve nuking half of everything between Cairo to Tehran.

Good luck.

Returning to the Cycle of Violence

Today wasn't a good day. (via Juliette Kayyem at The Atlantic)

The attacks by Hamas against Israel beginning early this morning, some of which are ongoing, will be met by Israel with force. How all of this will unfold, and its impact on domestic and global politics, is not clear, but a simple answer may suffice for now: It will not go well. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has already warned his citizens that they are at war; civil reservists have been called up; videos are showing hand battles on the streets. The country is on lockdown, with the potential for future strikes in the south by Hamas and new ones by Hezbollah in the north...

To focus on Israel’s preparedness in no way excuses the Hamas attacks and is not meant to blame the victim. Some on social media are carelessly suggesting that the failures can be explained only as some evil “wag the dog” effort by Netanyahu to unify the country by going to war. Israel has been attacked, and civilians are dead. As in any nation that encounters such a horror, it is essential for the government to determine—without the interference of politics or religion—why. Otherwise, enemies will take advantage of this devastating day for Israel’s counterterrorism strategy...

...Just a few days ago, the Gaza border seemed to have been stabilized after some unrest, and nearly 20,000 workers were able to travel across it again. Today, thousands of rockets, which must have been obtained and hidden, were launched by Hamas. It did not end there. Hamas used drones to strike at Israeli targets. It sent its fighters on foot, by boat, and by air on motorized paragliders. Images have emerged of Hamas attackers on the streets of Israeli towns terrorizing citizens, and worse. This is as much a physical attack as a performative one: Watch us, Hamas seems to be saying. Hamas surely planned for the attack to take place on the Jewish holy day of Simchat Torah and on the 50th anniversary of the Yom Kippur War...

How the Hamas group was able to pull this off - and to subvert a lot of the technological advances the Israelis have and to deploy a multi-pronged attack with military precision - points to an even larger effort by other forces opposed to Israel - like Iran - or opposed to Israel's allies - like Russia - in order to escalate instability and violence in the Middle East for their own twisted ends.

Hamas' actions are coming after decades of open conflict between Israelis and Palestinians for control of that tiny corner of the globe, spurred on by political ambitions and policy failures of both the imperial powers of previous centuries and then the failures of post-world war agendas to create equitable and peaceful homelands for both nations. Ever since the end of the Cold War, it's fallen to a dominant Israeli government to govern the region, with what outside observers like the Human Rights Watch compared to an apartheid state. It didn't help that Netanyahu's government refused to stop illegal settlements in areas that should have gone to Palestinian control. And yet Israel needed to maintain that system because nothing had succeeded - not the Oslo Accords, not any attempts to achieve peace with neighboring Arab/Muslim nations, not the underwhelming efforts by western allies to check Hamas' corrupt and violent control of Gaza - to curtail the threats to their own civilians.

This is all coming as Europe (NATO) is trying to refocus their efforts on keeping Ukraine armed and trained to continue fighting against Russia's invasion, with Israel attempting to settle a peace deal with Saudi Arabia that could have undercut the regional extremists, and the United States currently embroiled in a political crisis with the Republican-controlled House - and intentional sabotage by Republican Senators to block needed leadership appointments at State and Defense - that threatens to shut down our funding support - for Ukraine specifically, but it could affect our direct allies like Israel - and military readiness abroad.

For now, the best we know is that hundreds of Israeli civilians are dead and hundreds more held hostage. Further strikes by Hamas are possible, depending on how well-stocked they are (and how the hell did they get so many rockets and drones for their strikes?). The likelihood of Israel's army to go storming into Gaza - and flattening everything including Palestinian civilians and Israeli hostages - within the next 48 hours is pretty much a given: This is open war now against Hamas, and Israel has to fight back - in as punishing a method as possible - just to survive.

Whether this escalates into a broader war - bringing in Syria and Iran directly; dragging Egypt, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia if they want war or not; depending on whatever benefits Putin sees in the coming fight - depends on wiser diplomacy and any rationality among the regional leaders to avoid their own losses.

Things that have sadly been missing every fucking time we all had a chance to make peace in the Middle East and instead let the crazies blow it all up again. Too many global powers are profiting from all this. Goddamn us all.

Update: I just want to add this Twitter post from friend Emily - a member of the TNC Horde - who's lived in Israel, has written about Israel, and is constantly moved by the violence there that never ends.

I don't even rly know what I feel, a kind of numb horror, the cellular-level awareness that things will only get worse but that I don't even rly know what that means, a shattered, mourning, terrified heart, trying to hold space for my people & the Palestinians. I'm devastated.

— Emily L. Hauser @emilylhauser.bsky.social (@emilylhauser) October 7, 2023

The Far Right War Against the Rule of Law Reaches Israel

I've only recently noticed in the past month that Bibi "Bribe Guy" Netanyahu had returned to political power as Prime Minister of Israel, during the end of 2022 when I was distracted by the holidays.

And my first thought finding out he was back was "What the hell? I thought they kicked you out of the damn house!" 

My second thought was "What the hell? Isn't he STILL on trial over bribery charges???"

Anyway, the reason why I even noticed Netanyahu was back in power was because Israel is currently racked by massive protests over Netanyahu's plans to gut Israel's legal system to ensure his authoritarian rule never ends. Via Jonathan Guyer at Vox:

Hundreds of thousands of Israeli protesters have been demonstrating against the extreme-right government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu since January. The protests have become some of the biggest in Israeli history and are drawing out the country’s most famous faces.

On Thursday, protesters plan to disrupt Netanyahu’s travel to Rome in a sign of defiance of his ultranationalist, illiberal government. They’re calling it a “day of resistance to the dictatorship.” This builds on two months of mass mobilization across Israel that have been squarely focused on the Netanyahu government’s set of judiciary overhauls, which would weaken the independence of the country’s high court and create the conditions for unchecked majoritarian rule.

The backlash to these proposals has reached even staunchly establishment groups in Israel: A group of fighter pilots are on strike, tech workers staged a work stoppage, and former prime ministers have joined the protests...

Netanyahu was elected to a sixth premiership this November, but this time with the most extreme, nationalistic, and exclusionary government in Israeli history.

From the get-go, the Israeli government has sought to make significant changes to the high court that would hollow out its independence and its power to serve as a check on the Israeli parliament, or the Knesset. The several bills put forward would restrict the court’s ability to overturn laws it sees as unconstitutional and allow a simple majority in the Knesset to reject its decisions. It would also give government lawmakers and appointees effective power over the committee of nine individuals that appoints judges, and rescind key authorities from the attorney general. These and other changes would weaken the independent judiciary’s power in a parliamentary system that otherwise lacks checks.

This is all complicated by the fact that Israel doesn’t have a constitution, but a set of regulations passed as the Basic Law. The proposal’s backers, like a group of Israeli academics who recently published an open letter in support, say the court has grown too powerful. But, according to a recent survey by the Israel Democracy Institute, “66 percent of Israelis think the Supreme Court should have the power to strike down a law if it is incompatible with the Basic Laws...”

I'd also question Netanyahu's motivations for backing these efforts against a legal system that's poised to hit him with felony convictions that could dash his efforts to stay in power for life. But then, this is what dictators do: Break the Law so that the Law only benefits themselves.

This is all part of a disturbing trend the past 10-20 years where even the most stable and respectable democratic nations - some of them having gone through decades of Cold War tensions to establish genuine rule of law - suffering the indignity of organized, deep-funded Far Right conservative movements taking control of their governments - through legal elections no less - and then for their own benefit gutting the legal systems they abused to gain power in the first place.

It's only when these Far Right politicians take a sledgehammer to the courts - where every nation's system of justice plays out - do the voters realize they've given power to dangerous demagogues. The protests will be massive, the majority of the citizens will be outraged... but the bastards now in power will hear none of it and happily wreck their nation's foundations all so they can hold onto that power a little while longer (before their own corruption collapses on them like a ruined house).

We're suffering it here in the United States as well, where extreme gerrymandering and a power structure that skews towards small-populated states has us in the grip of a Minority Party (hint: Republican) rule, even with Democrats (currently) in control of the Presidency and half of Congress. Israel may lean Conservative/Right in terms of politics, but even they have extremist factions - all of them now in power as Netanyahu can't form coalitions with anyone else - that do not honestly speak for the interests of the Israeli people.

The effects of the Far Right Israeli efforts to weaken their legal system is coming with a wave of violence and disenfranchisement of the Palestinian population that makes up a significant portion of Israel's voting base, and yet are getting driven out of their communities in Gaza and the West Bank with annexation efforts that threaten global efforts to resolve centuries of Jewish/Palestinian conflicts over the land they both claim as home. We're looking at the reality that yet other uprising by disenfranchised Palestinians re-sparking the horrors of Middle East violence will flow across the entire region and drag the United States (and other allies) into that mess all over again.

All because a goddamned crook kept getting elected back into the Prime Minister's office.

What the hell, Israeli voters. You let Bibi back into that house. What the actual hell.

They Don't Want You There, Bibi. Get Out of the House w/Update

Remember when I blogged about the possibility of donald "Loser of the Popular Vote (Twice)" trump refusing to leave the White House after he lost to Biden? The possibility that trump would physically cling to the building itself crying out "I don't wanna leave!" Sadly, it never sank to that level of stupidity and we missed out on some great PPV opportunities there...

Well it turns out it's another authoritarian SOB who lost his job as leader who's throwing his own temper tantrum in that regard. Heading over to Israel where ousted ex-Prime Minister Benjamin "On Trial for Bribery" Netanyahu has camped out in the PM's official residence until next month (per AP newswire link through NPR): 

Netanyahu was unseated as prime minister earlier this month. Foreign Minister Yair Lapid and Prime Minister Naftali Bennett succeeded in cobbling together a government in the aftermath of Israel's fourth consecutive election in two years.

Netanyahu, who served for 12 years as prime minister until Bennett's government was sworn in last week, has yet to move out of the prime minister's residence in Jerusalem.

The residence on Balfour Street was the scene of weekly protests calling on Netanyahu to resign while on trial for corruption charges in the past year. Netanyahu refused to step down from office and has denied any wrongdoing. The country's repeated elections were largely a referendum on his fitness to serve.

In a joint statement late Saturday, Bennett and Netanyahu's offices said they had agreed that the Netanyahu family would leave the residence no later than July 10. Thereafter, the statement said, "the residence will transfer to the use of Prime Minister Bennett..."

Anybody willing to bet on that? They're giving him and his family enough time to barricade every door and window for the next three weeks.

Netanyahu has repeatedly vowed to topple the newly formed government, which he has called a "dangerous leftist government." It is comprised of eight parties, including several headed by former allies and proteges of Netanyahu, smaller liberal parties and an Islamist faction.

Guarantee you, Netanyahu is scheming up ways to sabotage the government to force another election before he's literally forced out of that home and likely forced out of his seat of office. It's a big tell that Bibi is calling the new government "leftist" even when it's being led by Naftali Bennett, who is more Far Right than Netanyahu himself.

Netanyahu is showing a lot of signs of refusing the reality that his political power is waning. Ever since the corruption charges came out against him, he's been unable to form a stable parliament with four elections in two years mostly revolving around his corruption as a major voting issue. His Likud Party may be a major power in Israel, but it's been weakened by his own presence, and yet he's got such a dominant cult-of-personality type hold on it that they dare not kick him out to save their own skins.

...Sounds a little familiar here at home, don't it...?

Anyway, the drama in Israel isn't over by any means. Netanyahu's trials ought to continue soon. Bennett's harsh pro-settlement and anti-Palestinian stances suggest the ongoing bloodshed and poisoning of Gaza and the West Bank won't end soon. 

You'd hope the new leadership won't fall into the same traps and corruption the way Bibi's did. Time will tell on that...

Update 7/11: Spiteful little bastards, aren't they?

#Breaking: Netanyahu left.

A Netanyahu family spokesman issued a statement at 2:28 am announcing that "shortly after midnight, the Netanyahu family left the Balfour St residence." pic.twitter.com/lnflvU7ynw

— Noga Tarnopolsky (@NTarnopolsky) July 11, 2021

The whole family held out until the last fucking minute. What the hell they waiting for, impending Amazon deliveries or something?! /headdesk

trump Keeps Banging That War Drum in the Middle East, November 2020 Edition

It's like these fuckers WANT to start a war they know Biden would have to resolve on his own. Reported just today via The Week:

Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, a nuclear scientist who has been suspected of leading Iran's nuclear weapons program, was shot and killed Friday while traveling in a vehicle east of Tehran, Iranian state media said. He was apparently taken to the hospital for treatment, but doctors were unable to save him. Fakhrizadeh has long been a top target of the Israeli intelligence service Mossad, and Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif believes Jerusalem was behind the assassination, but a spokesperson for the Israeli military refused to comment. Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, vowed retaliation against the perpetrators. Not much is known about Fakrizadeh, believed to be 59, but a 2007 CIA assessment said his role as a physics professor was likely a cover story, and it later became clear he was in charge of Iran's warhead development, The New York Times reports.

Refer back to what happened at the very start of this year, when trump and his administration ordered a public strike in Iraq killing a top Iranian military official. What I said then:

This isn't like the strike Obama called on Bin Laden back in 2011. Bin Laden by then was a pariah figure among most Muslim power brokers and nations with few allies to defend or mourn him. The backlash against his death was meager (and in some ways welcomed) across the Middle East. This is different. Soleimani was a high-ranking figure within the Iranian government itself, a major player with ally Syria, and someone well-connected among the Shi'a militia forces threatening much of Iraq and Kurdish areas not yet flattened by Turkey/Russia.

This is like Iran calling an airstrike on the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs. The kind of thing that would trigger a major political and military response from us. The kind of thing where a declaration of war would be a rational response.

And yet it wouldn't surprise me if trump and his remaining foreign policy/military advisors would welcome this move. trump thinks war is a game and probably thinks this is the kind of thing that will win him more support and silence his Democratic critics.

But war for political gain is no longer a smart move. War for conquest and resources ends up squandering both...

It's telling that the cooler heads prevailing from that mess were the Iranians, who know damn well getting into a straight-up fight with the United States will hurt them as much as it would hurt us. Most evidence seems to point to Iran doing their best to survive trump's bullying until Biden enters the Presidency and resumes diplomatic efforts that would benefit them.

Today's attack - suggested to be an Israeli strike but with U.S. and Saudi backing, considering the reports coming out that Netanyahu and his head of Mossad (intelligence agency) secretly met with U.S. Secretary of State Pompeo and the crown prince Bin Salman of Saudi Arabia about four days ago - is another attempt to goad Iran into war, something that would fulfill trump's self-promotion as a military genius who knows better than the generals as well as start a quagmire he wouldn't have to worry about after January 20, 2021.

This is serious shit. Again.

Referring to Cheryl Rofer at Balloon-Juice, who has a background in foreign policy and nuclear proliferation, this is not good news:

Israel, and the Trump administration, have been trying to break the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) so that it cannot be revived. The JCPOA froze and even pushed back Iran’s nuclear weapons program, putting it under greater international scrutiny than any nuclear program in the world.

But war with Iran is what Mike Pompeo and other Trump advisors have wanted. It is also what Netanyahu wants, as long as the losses are primarily America’s.

On top of the devastation of the Iraq War, a war with Iran would tear the Middle East apart. Those desiring war imagine that it would destroy Iran without extreme damage to themselves...

I'm not an expert on these matters the way Rofer is, but I'd wager she would agree with every point I've made about why a war with Iran is a bad idea.

How much of this is trump thinking a declaration of war against Iran - if he can provoke them into making a massive attack against U.S. forces in the area - would allow him to suspend the election transition is pure speculation. It wouldn't work because the election is hard-wired into the Constitution and he can't stop what's coming this January 20th. 

We should consider this is trump's way of getting his mobs to cheer him on as a war hawk, while leaving the bills to get paid by Biden as a vindictive Fuck-You parting gift.

The year that is 2020 isn't done with us yet...

How the Year 2019 Ends: In Fire

I woke up this morning to reports of the US Embassy in Baghdad under siege by protesters angered up by recent military strikes on Shiite strongholds in Syria and Iraq.

For almost a month now, the entire continent/nation of Australia has been on fire due to prolonged drought, rising ocean temperatures, and an ungodly heat wave (it's Summer on that side of the Equator) that are all part of the climate change nearly every scientist has been screaming was coming to kill us all. Those eco-disaster movies from ten-twenty years ago? THEY ARE HAPPENING NOW IN REAL LIFE.

India is on fire this month due to their nationalist Hindu government pushing a citizenship law that would specifically exclude Muslims. It doesn't help that the nation is roiling from a growing rape gang crisis threatening the safety of every woman who lives there.

Over the past ten days the number of antisemitic attacks in America have gotten worse, ranging from vandalism to street assaults to someone with a machete stabbing Orthodox Jews at a rabbi gathering in Brooklyn.

Boris Johnson has cleared out nearly every obstruction in his quest to fulfill a Hard Brexit pullout from the EU, which is now including efforts by the Tories to privatize their National Health Service and make it more like the United States (welcome to medical bankruptcy, Brits!). We are looking at a January 31 2020 where a No-Deal Brexit will happen because the EU won't cave on any of Boris' demands.

Israel is forcing itself into yet another general election because the last three tries failed to form a unified government. It does not help that current PM Netanyahu is facing corruption charges... but refuses to leave office and indeed got an overwhelming vote of confidence from his own party meaning that unless enough voters break with their own parties to support an opposition majority they are stuck in gridlock.

China has entered its umpteenth month (since June at least) of Hong Kong protests over the city/region's autonomous status, which is a serious civil/human rights fight that China will never recognize. Not to mention the ongoing human rights abuses of concentration camps punishing millions of Uyghurs for their religious/ethnic differences.

We're still coping with the ongoing Impeachment of President Loser of the Popular Vote and Eternal Shitgibbon donald trump. With additional evidence showing that members of his foreign policy team - Sec of State Pompeo, Sec of Defense Esper, and NSA John Bolton (!) - confronted trump in late August (before the Whistleblower concerns got to Congress) to convince him to release Ukrainian military aid (trump refused). Not only reaffirming other evidence of trump's extortion racket but that key members of his administration have evidence they still need to present for the Impeachment proceedings.

Everything is chaos.

Everything is on fire.

Welcome to 2020.

It's going to get crazier from here.

trump, Blasphemous King of Ashes

The Implications Are Horrifying. Via Emma Goldberg at The Guardian:

There’s a sordid history to charges of Jewish dual loyalty in the U.S. In the early years of the Second World War, Isolationists opposed to American involvement dismissed the war as little more than a “Jewish cause”. Charles Lindbergh berated Jewish leaders for “agitating for war”. Decades later, when the US senator Joe Lieberman ran on the Democratic ticket for vice-president, pundits questioned whether he was more loyal to Israel than to the US. During the democratic primaries in 2015, the Vermont senator Bernie Sanders was challenged on his “dual citizenship” with Israel...

Which is all to say that this week Donald Trump finds himself in broad, though unfortunate, company. On Tuesday, the president said that any Jewish person who votes for a Democrat is guilty of “great disloyalty”. Then Trump repeated his smears against the congresswomen Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib, following his impassioned demand last week that the Israeli government block their entry to the country due to their support of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement.

“Where has the Democratic Party gone?” Trump said. “Where have they gone where they are defending these two people over the state of Israel? And I think any Jewish people that vote for a Democrat, I think it shows either a total lack of knowledge or great disloyalty.”

Trump’s latest statement, laced with centuries of antisemitic tropes, is no surprise for a president who has fraternized with avowed white nationalists and blamed white supremacist violence on “mental health”. Still, Trump’s rhetorical gymnastics would be impressive if it weren’t so threatening – he manages to weaponize Zionism, dog-whistle antisemitism and land on his feet, calling himself “the king of Israel”. He’d haul home all the medals if bigotry were an Olympic sport...

trump lays bare his opinion of Jewishness: It's only "good" if it centers around Israel, and only if it aids Israel - actually if it aids Evangelical Christianity - in the ongoing war against Muslims.

As a result, he's opening up the Jewish Americans who don't support this view - which is a vast majority of Jewish Americans - to accusations of "disloyalty" not so much to Israel but towards the United States... which increases the likelihood of direct assaults on their persons and their communities.

There has already been an uptick in violence and vandalism directed toward Jewish communities. A lot of it already tied to trump's support of neo-Nazi supremacists who revel in his diatribes against "The Other" that justifies their violence towards every Non-White ethnicity (which includes Jews in the supremacists' opinions).

Adding onto this is trump's obsessive need for adulation and worship (in this moment, literal). he eagerly tweeted out a reply from a Far Right media host who proclaimed "Israeli Jews love trump like he's the King of Israel. They love him like he is the Second Coming of God." It's irrelevant in trump's worldview that A) Israeli Jews don't believe in Kings anymore and B) Jews do not share the Christian/Evangelical idea of the Second Coming. All that matter is trump buys into the worship that he's the Chosen One... and the rest of us are screwed.

In the last two days, trump insulted Jewish Americans, Jewish faith overall, and the patriotism of Jewish Americans who remain loyal to America.

And he's not finished. trump's work to destroy the faith of every honest Christian and the hearts of every living soul is not yet complete.

Gods help us.

Elections Matter: The Past, The Present, The Future

Elections are in the news here and there and everywhere.

To the past, a previous election from weeks ago is still making the news because it just only had gotten resolved about 50 minutes ago in real-time (I was about to write something else and blamm-o, deal got done).  I speak of the Israel election:

With just an hour to spare before a deadline, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced late Wednesday that he has succeeded in forming a coalition government.
According to Israel Radio, Netanyahu came to an agreement with the final party required for a coalition, the right-wing Jewish Home party, at 10:30 p.m. local time...
...Netanyahu had six weeks to form a government after the March 17 elections in which his Likud party won 30 seats. They beat his main rival, Zionist Union's Isaac Herzog, who won 24 seats. Netanyahu now has one week to present his coalition and Cabinet to the Knesset.
Netanyahu's government is likely to be a right-wing government with 61 seats out of a 120 seats in the Israeli parliament, the bare minimum to form a coalition.
One of his primary coalition partners, Avigdor Liberman of the Yisrael Beiteinu party, announced in recent days that he was leaving the coalition and resigning his post as foreign minister, which would cut Netanyahu's coalition from a strong 67 seats to a weak 61 seats...

Coalitions matter in Israel and other nations because the proportional voting system combined with their parliamentary form of government means multiple parties spread across a finite voting populace: creating several large parties with pluralities but not majorities, and giving the smaller parties chances to form coalitions and extort prizes and favors.

This means the strength of the prime minister in a coalition majority depends entirely on how many parties he can pull together to form enough votes to avoid a government collapse.  As of now, Netanyahu is about one vote away from a defection on any key legislation into a tie vote, and two defections away from a failed vote.  I'm not entirely sure if a single failed vote would be construed as a no-confidence that could collapse the entire coalition and force a new election, but I think I've seen that happen before... a lot... with Italy's government.

Netanyahu may well be on the hardest tight-rope walk ever of his long - and questionably corrupt - prime ministerial career.  He's formed a hard-right coalition, but each party is led by a factionalist some of whom aren't entirely fond of Netanyahu on a personal level.  He has to placate some factions more than before to keep them happy... but doing so risks the possibility of outraging the rest of the nation and alienating one of the more centrist coalition members into quitting the group.

That election may be in the past, but the results of it - close and as far from a solid majority as any government would want - will haunt Netanyahu's current coaltion for the next year, if it even lasts that long.

It helps an election if the results are clear-cut and obvious.  Like the one that just happened in the Canadian province of Alberta.

The news about it since last night has sent shockwaves across Canada and even into the U.S.  Not because of the results - polling ahead of time showed the New Democratic Party was going to win over the once-controlling Tories/Progressive Conservatives - but because of the crushing decisiveness of the results and how it signaled leadership change to a region that hadn't switched hands in over 40 years:

The NDP, a party that had never won more than 16 seats, captured more than 50 to secure a majority in the 87-seat legislature.
The Wildrose party took second place and will form the official Opposition, while Prentice and his battered PCs were relegated to third.
It was a crushing defeat for the Tories, who had steered the ship of state since 1971—longer than any party anywhere in the country...
...(Outgoing leader Jim Prentice) took over a party in September that had been stung by scandals under former premier Alison Redford. Legislature members and the premier were using government planes for party business and Redford ordered that a penthouse apartment be built for herself on top of a renovated government building.
The party had also failed to build promised schools and was criticized for lavish salaries and severance payouts to political staff and government executives...

While the real causes of the switch between the conservative PC party and the more liberal-labour NDC are many, it basically breaks down to one thing: the Progressive Conservatives had been in office too long (over 40 years!), took their hold on power for granted, did little to keep the populace happy, got corrupted, and got bent.  That corrupt attitude and failure to respond to the electorate shows in the shocking fortunes of the Wildrose party - a more hard-core conservative group - that won second place.  People were so fed up with the Conservatives that they fled to the more wingnut party out of spite.

Still, this is a huge seismic shift in electoral favor.  Alberta had long been one of the more conservative provinces (not state, they ain't like up Oop North) in all of Canada.  When the Red State/Blue State divide in the United States back in 2004 created homogeneous blocks of Conservative/Liberal zones, the mapmakers of the so-called Jesusland would add Alberta as part of that Red State empire (with the Blue States and the rest of Canada labels the United States of Canada).

You have to admit, having one party in control of anything - a state or province, the nation as a whole - for more than two decades is pushing the limits of effective and responsive leadership.  Parties that stay in power calcify, get lazy, get to thinking nothing can topple them, get to thinking they know what they're doing even if they keep repeating the same mistakes.  Fresh ideas become fewer, needed reforms less likely as they butt against the status quo.  Not to say that turnover for the sake of turnover is good - that way leads to losing too many people who do know what they're doing, and disrupts any long-term fixing of problems - but if the same clowns have been in power for more than four decades, I guarantee you things have gotten sloppy and stupid.

This is still a big deal.  This is akin to a state like South Carolina - long a home of conservative ideology regardless of which party (Democrats before 1964, Republicans after 1972) ran it - suddenly voting out every Confederate flag-waver and replacing them with pro-choice civil rights advocates who all attend Unitarian services (in short, beyond impossible).  The seating went for 16 for the New Democrats all the way up to 50 out of 87 seats: about 20 percent up to 60 percent, about as solid a majority as the Republicans here in Congress controlling the House.

Alberta's election has long-term implications.  The reigning national Conservatives long counted on Alberta as their base of support: if they've lost that many voters this year, it's not likely those voters will turn around and vote for them in the national elections this autumn.  And this election has ramifications for other future elections, not just for who controls Ottawa.

It's not entirely clear if what happened in Alberta will affect the major partner of the British Commonwealth, but the United Kingdom elections that are happening tomorrow (or today depending on your time zone, a big hello to any of the UK readers I get if any) may see some voters inspired by the conservative kick-out by their Canadian cousins.

The UK Parliament is up for vote for the House of Commons, and right now the whole thing is a literal dead heat with an unlikely majority.

The three major parties - conservative Tories, socialist Labour, liberal Democrats (no relation) - are in somewhat bad shape.  The Conservatives under Cameron have had a messy, destructive five years of coalition rule: their austerity measures of social spending cuts and tax hikes on middle-income people hurt their economy.  The Liberals under Clegg made the mistake of selling their collective souls to the conservatives to become part of a coalition, and got caught defending bad conservative policies that hurt their own standing and weakened them for this cycle.  Labour is being touted as the least evil of the three now - which is telling you something - but are led by a bland figure in Miliband whose lack of charisma hurt the national campaign, while the party itself still has not recovered its reputation after the disastrous end of the Blair/Gordon years.

The likelihood of another coalition government gets scarier when you factor in the other once-smaller "third" parties that are more wingnut than the major parties.  In particular, the rise of what's known as UKIP, which was polling at a popularity percentage of 13 percent.  Try to picture it this way, America: UKIP is anti-EU (which for British politics isn't too crazy actually), anti-regulation (libertarian/Randian), anti-Arab (neocon hater wannabes), anti-immigrant (uh-oh), racist (hoo-boy)... Lemme put it another way, America: picture the Klu Klux Klan with 13 percent of the voting base and you've got an idea what the UKIP represents.

Here's the thing: if the Conservatives win just enough over Labour but not enough for its own majority, and the UKIP is sitting there with just enough seats to form a coalition... yeah, be afraid America, our best international ally just went Teabagger on us.  The irony of it may be lost in the trans-Atlantic transition...

There's also the possibility that if Labour wins just a few seats over Conservatives but not enough to control, they'd have to see about forming a coalition with the Dems (no relation), if Clegg's party is able to hold enough seats of their own.  It's more likely Labour could form a coalition with the Scottish National Party, which is poised to clean up most of Scotland's seating in Parliament... but which Cameron claims is an "illegitimate" move, leading to an international crisis on a scale equal to Election 2000.

Part of me is wondering if the British voters paid attention to Alberta: having seen an ineffective conservative government get ousted by the voters had to have given them the same idea among the non-affiliated voters.  It's a question if it happened too soon or if it happened at exactly the right time for it to have an effect in Great Britain itself...

I mentioned before how Alberta's election can affect the national Canadian elections set for October.  The potential downturn in support for the national Conservatives does not yet translate into gains for the other major factions, but the New Democrats have to be energized by their win here to motivate turnout everywhere else - where more liberal/left-of-center voters reside.  It may yet shock the national Conservatives into moderating their message rather than react more radical (although that's unlikely: the hard-core members are too set in their ways by now).

And even though Alberta's election was only in Canada, it has an effect across the border here in the United States.  The New Dems campaigned on a strong pro-environment anti-oil platform.  The incoming leader, Rachel Notley, promised to end the aggressive push for the controversial Keystone pipeline (calling it now an American problem, not Canada's).  That she won a decisive majority in what had been a province overly reliant on the energy corporations means that the climate change argument is a winning one even in pro-oil markets.  I would think the Koch Brothers and other energy conglomerates pushing the Climate Denial are reconsidering their options.  ...Nah, the Teabagger faction here in the U.S. is too far gone...

But there are other lessons to learn here for American politics gearing up for the major 2016 Presidential elections (with key Senate races as well).  First off, the conservative message of the last forty years - deregulate, cut taxes, cut social spending, worship the rich - is not as potent as it was under the Age of Reagan.  Voters who lived for decades in a free-market, far right region like Alberta have gotten sick of it and finally tuned out.

We're about due to see the same thing here in the U.S.: the same amount of decades of massive tax cuts and diminishing social services are starting to adversely affect places like Kansas and other Red States.  Decades of unchanging political leadership like here in Florida are starting to show signs not only of corruption but also complacency and ineptitude, and worse tuning out on the needs of the local voters crying for leadership on health care and climate change.

There's an irony here because the conservative Republicans are charging headlong into the Presidential race on the belief that they are due for taking back the White House.  People are wondering why so many Far Right GOP'ers are putting their names up for consideration this primary season need to consider the myth of the Pendulum Swing: the idea (ignoring actual history) that the White House tends to swing back and forth from one party to another.  That after a two-term Presidency, the party in opposition is poised to take over the Presidency for their own two terms.

As I noted, that ignores actual history.  External factors - weak national parties leading to constant one-termers that dominated much of the mid-19th Century, Presidents dying in office leaving weak replacement Veeps in charge, ongoing national moods such as the post-Civil War "Bloody Shirt" dominance by Republicans (1861 to 1912, barring exceptions) and post-Depression dominance by Democrats between 1932 to 1968 (with Ike the exception) - have more to do with which party controls the Presidency.

What really matters is performance in the White House: if one party does well, the voting electorate will continue to back that party until things fall apart for it, much in the way 40-plus years control of Alberta fell apart for the Conservatives.  The reasons Bush the Lesser won after the Bill Clinton two-terms had more to do with Al Gore avoiding his campaign to link to the still-popular Clinton, as well as a broken voting system in Florida that threw the results into chaos.  The reason Obama won in 2008 after two terms of Bush the Lesser had a lot to do with the disasters of the Bush II administration - collapsed economy, bad wars, failed policies.  Nixon won in 1968 because LBJ's disastrous administration led to the end of the New Deal era that carried over through the FDR, Truman, and Kennedy administrations (and also through the Eisenhower Republican tenure, which is telling).

In all other cases, a popular Presidency leads to the successor candidates gaining their own terms.  Jefferson begat Madison who begat Monroe (who benefited from an era where the opposition party died away) who begat Adams... who flopped as President.  Jackson led to Van Buren... who flopped, and at this point the one-terms moved into play as the regional factions divided the nation (and the dominant Democratic party) up towards the Civil War.  The alienation of the Democrats post-war pretty much gave Republicans control of the White House from Grant to Hayes to Garfield to Arthur... and that was with Grant's administration being one of the most corrupt in political history and with Hayes honestly losing but eking out a corrupt deal due to the Republicans wielding enough political clout to pull it off.  Cleveland becomes the Democratic hiccup between Arthur (Harrison kinda shouldn't count) and McKinley, who begat Teddy on his own successful two-terms who begat Taft (broken up by Wilson due to the GOP schism between Teddy and Taft) leading to Harding and Coolidge and Hoover... at which point the Great Depression shatters Republican control for the next 40 years...

The lesson here is: successful and popular Presidency continues the control of the White House to that President's party.  It's one of the reasons why Republicans still scream about Obama being a failure when he's not, and it's one of the reasons they need to be afraid of the fact Obama is still more popular than they are.

Hell, Hillary is still more popular than the Republicans.  This is not at all like Alberta, or Israel, or the UK, where the leadership's popularity took collective hits and weakened their parties.  Israel is one bad vote away from collapse: who knows how the UK elections will go.

We need to see how the British elections hold up tomorrow... I mean today... I mean, ah damn you Greenwich Mean Time!