By Colleen Gillard, Bikyamasr.com, Jan. 8, 2012

Vigilante gangs of ultra-conservative Salafi men have been harassing shop owners and female customers in rural towns around Egypt for “indecent behavior,” according to reports in the Egyptian news media. But when they burst into a beauty salon in the Nile delta town of Benha this week and ordered the women inside to stop what they were doing or face physical punishment, the women struck back, whipping them with their own canes before kicking them out to the street in front of an astonished crowd of onlookers [.....]

(Hat Tip: Issandr el Amrani)

....Using analysis of orbital data as well as samples from rock cores drilled in the ocean floor, Dr Skinner's team identified an episode called Marine Isotope Stage 19c (or MIS19c), dating from about 780,000 years ago, as the one most closely resembling the present.

The transition to the Ice Age was signaled, they believe, by a period when cooling and warming seesawed between the northern and southern hemispheres, triggered by disruptions to the global circulation of ocean currents.

If the analogy to MIS19c holds up, this transition ought to begin within 1,500 years, the researchers say, if CO2 concentrations were at "natural" levels.....

Every cloud of noxious gas has at least a little silver lining!

Transcript, Special Press Briefing by Daniel Benjamin,
Coordinator, Office of the Coordinator for Counterterrorism, U.S. State Dept.,

Jan. 4, 2012

MS. NULAND: Good afternoon, everybody. Before we do the daily briefing, we have a special briefing today on the next stage of implementation of Secretary Clinton’s Quadrennial Diplomacy and Development Review, the establishment in the State Department of a Bureau of Counterterrorism. As you know, we’ve had an office under Ambassador Dan Benjamin. It is now about to become a full-up bureau. So to tell you more about that, Ambassador Daniel Benjamin [....]

Editorial Board, New York Times, Jan. 8/9, 2012

Chantell and Michael Sackett’s case against the Environmental Protection Agency before the Supreme Court on Monday might appear to be David versus Goliath. But those supporting the Sacketts with friend-of-the-court briefs are corporate Goliaths like General Electric and real estate developers eager to weaken the E.P.A.’s ability to protect wetlands and waterways under the federal Clean Water Act [....]

"Prior to the 2003 invasion and occupation of Iraq, US and other western oil companies were all but completely shut out of Iraq's oil market," oil industry analyst Antonia Juhasz told Al Jazeera. "But thanks to the invasion and occupation, the companies are now back inside Iraq and producing oil there for the first time since being forced out of the country in 1973."

Juhasz, author of the books The Tyranny of Oil and The Bush Agenda, said that while US and other western oil companies have not yet received all they had hoped the US-led invasion of Iraq would bring them, "They've certainly done quite well for themselves, landing production contracts for some of the world's largest remaining oil fields under some of the world's most lucrative terms."
...
Juhasz explained that ExxonMobil, BP and Shell were among the oil companies that "played the most aggressive roles in lobbying their governments to ensure that the invasion would result in an Iraq open to foreign oil companies".

"They succeeded," she added. "They are all back in. BP and CNPC [China National Petroleum Corporation] finalised the first new oil contract issued by Baghdad for the largest oil field in the country, the 17 billion barrel super giant Rumaila field. ExxonMobil, with junior partner Royal Dutch Shell, won a bidding war against Russia's Lukoil (and junior partner ConocoPhillips) for the 8.7 billion barrel West Qurna Phase 1 project. Italy's Eni SpA, with California's Occidental Petroleum and the Korea Gas Corp, was awarded Iraq's Zubair oil field with estimated reserves of 4.4 billion barrels. Shell was the lead partner with Malaysia's Petroliam Nasional Bhd., or Petronas, winning a contract for the super-giant Majnoon field, one of the largest in the world, with estimated reserves of up to 25 billion."
...
But there are complicating factors. As a spasm of violence wracked Baghdad in the wake of the US military withdrawal and political rifts widen, Iraq's instability is evident.

"Iraq has lots of cheap-to-get oil, but it also has a multitude of problems - political, ethnic, tribal, religious etc - that have prevented them from exploiting it as well or as quickly as the Saudis," says Tom Whipple, an energy scholar who was a CIA analyst for 30 years. "Someday it may turn out that Iraq has more oil underground than Saudi Arabia. The big question is how stable it will be after the US leaves? So far it is not looking all that good."

[McCain complained on Face the Nation last weekend that we had left Iraq too soon, but given what we did in Iraq, I'm not sure we could have ever left without trouble in our wake.]

I have to admit I didn't see this Santorum surge coming.  Even if Mitt wins the nomination, that someone like Rick is can reach 18, passing our friend Paul who stuck below 15, says there are serious issues in our electorate, as if we didn't know already.  I mean are people so tweaked about voting for the Mormon that they'll put a stop to contraception?

What will be interesting if SC keeps things undecided, whether the people of Florida will fall in love with Santorum in any sizable numbers.

By David Sirota, Salon.com, Jan. 6, 2012

The Montana AG explains why his state's challenge to the controversial decision could hold up in the Supreme Court.

Both edited transcript & full podcast of radio interview available.

Opinion by Michael Lind, Salon.com, Jan. 3, 2012

[....] By equating the Civil Rights Act, which expanded American civil liberty, with the Patriot Act, which reduced it, on the grounds that both are federal laws with sanctions, Ron Paul displays the moral idiocy of someone who declares that a person who pushes a little old lady out of the path of a bus is just as bad as a person who pushes a little old lady into the path of a bus, because both are equally guilty of pushing little old ladies around.

Like other libertarians, Ron Paul does not understand American values.  The American experiment is an experiment in creating and maintaining a democratic republic, not a minimal state.  American political culture is founded not on the theories of Ayn Rand or Ludwig von Mises but on the reasoning of natural rights theorists like John Locke [....]

By Charlie Cook, National Journal, Jan. 6, 2011

Iowa culled the unwieldy herd of Republican presidential contenders but raised some new questions about what will happen next. To use the NCAA basketball tournament analogy, third-place finisher Ron Paul advances to the next round as winner of his own libertarian/isolationist bracket. Former Sen. Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania wins the more conservative bracket, while former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney prevails in the more moderate mainstream bracket. The problem for Paul is that his bracket never really intersects with the other two. The Texan’s rather exotic positions on issues attract a fervent niche but also limit his ability to expand. In short, Paul isn’t particularly relevant to other candidates or to the shape of the race itself.

[....]

The truth is that polling does not show that Romney’s negatives are particularly high. The conservatives and evangelicals who have supported the other candidates were expressing a preference for the bolder and zestier brand of conservatism.

The $64,000 question is whether they will settle for anything less—whether it is just a preference or if it is a deal-breaker. Will voters insist on someone more strident than a button-down, corporate-style Republican? At this point, I think Republicans are unified by their opposition to President Obama and fervent desire to defeat him. They have preferences about how to beat him, but the ultimate goal is to evict him from the White House.

This is where Gingrich comes into play. [....]

Robert Brandon, op-ed, Politico, today.

Many news stories have focused on efforts of new Republican majorities in state legislatures around the country to pass laws viewed as suppressing the vote of traditional Democratic constituencies.

But recent actions by some secretaries of state look even more disturbing, given their traditional role as a state’s chief elections officer, with a mandate to administer elections fairly.

The secretaries of state in Colorado, Kansas, Maine and New Mexico all used their office last year to throw doubt on their state’s election system. To support more restrictive voting laws, these officials called into question the eligibility of hundreds, sometimes thousands, of registered voters — though there is little evidence to support their claims of people illegally registering and voting.

Secretary of State Scott Gessler of Colorado, for example, asserted before Congress that as many as 11,000 noncitizens could be registered to vote in Colorado. He drew that conclusion by comparing people who used noncitizen documentation to obtain a driver’s license to voter registration rolls.

But the likely discrepancy, aside from clerical errors, is that those noncitizens became legal citizens after receiving their driver’s license. During the same time period, 32,000 people became legal citizens in Colorado....

• 1920's - the record business complained about radio. The argument was because radio is free, you can't compete with free. No one was ever going to buy music again.
•  
• 1940's - movie studios had to divest their distribution channel - they owned over 50% of the movie theaters in the U.S. "It's all over," complained the studios. In fact, the number of screens went from 17,000 in 1948 to 38,000 today.
•  
• 1950's - broadcast television was free; the threat was cable television. Studios argued that their free TV content couldn't compete with paid.
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• 1970's - Video Cassette Recorders (VCR's) were going to be the end of the movie business. The movie businesses and its lobbying arm MPAA fought it with "end of the world" hyperbole. The reality? After the VCR was introduced, studio revenues took off like a rocket.  With a new channel of distribution, home movie rentals surpassed movie theater tickets.
•  
• 1998 - the MPAA got congress to pass the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), making it illegal for you to make a digital copy of a DVD that you actually purchased.
•  
• 2000 - Digital Video Recorders (DVR) like TiVo allowing consumer to skip commercials was going to be the end of the TV business. DVR's reignite interest in TV.
•  
• 2006 - broadcasters sued Cablevision (and lost) to prevent the launch of a cloud-based DVR to its customers.
•  
• Today it's the Internet that's going to put the studios out of business. Sound familiar?

 An informative article comparing the Soviet Union's and the U.S. invasion and occupation of Afghanistan.