. . . off topic. However, if you want to open that can of mealy worms, I don't have much to do at work today.

Israel has no historical "right to exist." Up until the modern exodus, there hadn't been a Jewish state for about 2,000 years. What became Israel post-1947 was land usurped from Arab peoples who had lived there in the overwhelming majority for hundreds of years. Had it not been for British weakness post WWI and WWII and the U.S. aiding and abetting Israel's actions since the Six-Day War to the tune of billions of dollars wasted, the world might now have an acceptable two state situation. More illegal settlements anyone?

You can go on and on about the rocketing and suicide bombers from Gaza, but for every Israeli killed or injured by Palestinian violence, Israel has killed and injured nearly ten times as many Palestinians in retaliation.

And, by the way, there is no such thing as a Jewish "race." Take away the religion, and all you are left with is weird dietary law, which, interestingly enough, you share with your Palestinian enemy.

http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/0,1518,634122,00.html#ref=nlint

Majority of Eastern Germans Feel Life Better under Communism

By Julia Bonstein

Glorification of the German Democratic Republic is on the rise two decades after the Berlin Wall fell. Young people and the better off are among those rebuffing criticism of East Germany as an "illegitimate state." In a new poll, more than half of former eastern Germans defend the GDR. (continues)

. . . provide that much electricity to begin with. The "worst offender" on the Columbia, Bonneville Dam, is no danger of being removed since it's hydroelectric production is just behind Grand Coulee's.

As much respect as I have for the great Thomas Engelhardt... ...I feel the need to remind him and his readers that it's very likely the vast majority of Michael Jackson fans who are in mourning ALSO mourn for the innocent dead in Bush's Wars.

-- BeatnikBob

I'd be willing to be that the majority of Salon readers shrugged or sighed at the most with the news that Michael Jackson had died. He hadn't made any music in a decade and really only had one-and-a-half albums worth of really good material, twenty years ago. Otherwise, he had become one of the creepiest freaks in show business.

I certainly find no equivalency between Michael Jackson's self-destruction and innocents killed by warmongers. But it is even less likely that anyone mourning Michael Jackson gives even a passing thought to all the death and destruction wrought in their names by the Bush, and now, Obama administrations.

I shudder to think of how many of my fellow Americans take her seriously. -- Kilchis

. . . that don't already watch FOX. And given that its viewers are generally older and more poorly educated, they probably don't even know anything about her SNL days. And then look what Dennis Miller's turn to the right did for his career?

It is an almost impossible line to walk for sensible people of any political bent - illegal immigration is a major and, now, national issue. We need to end immigration short of anyone willing to bring millions in investment with them. We don't need more low or unskilled labor. We don't even need people able to qualify on H1 visas. And, perhaps most important, we need to change the law (I dont' accept that this is constitutional) that gives anyone born here, regardless of the circumstances, citizenship. What made sense in 1869, as with many other laws, rules or social conventions, no longer makes today. I can't think of any other nation that allows something so patently stupid as this.

We do, however, have a responsibility to naturalize anyone that has been here illegally, particularly those with families, for five years or more as long as they are the proverbial contributing members of society. We created the problem through lax enforcement of the law, etc. But trying to track down and deport every illegal alien in the U.S. is, of course, an impossible task.

Finally, we need to spend more time and money helping Mexico and the rest of Central America build economies that employ the very citizens that feel a need to risk death in order to work shitty (if necessary) jobs that most native born Americans will no longer work. Why are we wasting billions of dollars in the Middle East and in South Asia in countries with which we are unlikely of ever having meaningful relationships and pose no credible strategic threat when the money would be much more productive is spent "in the neighborhood"?

Can we stop worrying about the fact that 90 percent of the world's big fish, including the prized-by-gourmet-sushi-lovers bluefish tuna, "have almost disappeared from the oceans since the advent of industrial fishing in the 1950s"?

As others have pointed out, farm raised salmon are inferior fish that cause significant environmental problems. Tuna are huge and require spaces so large that you couldn't create a netted "pen" large enough to keep them even reasonably healthy.

Remember, we are eating the muscle flesh of fish. If you confine them in spaces smaller than they normally inhabit, you are changing the nature of the fish.