I think the song was called,

"The Art Fag Shuffle":

"I met Andy Warhol at a really neat party."

Blow it out your ear, cause you work at Hardee's!"

and I concur with the commenter who suggests our letter writer's coding skills are sub-par, given his many continuity errors.

"...when you look at the style of violence on the Muslim side -- the suicide bombing -- that can really only be made sense of in religious terms. Once you accept some of the core propositions of Islam -- once you accept the metaphysics of martyrdom and the principle of jihad -- then it becomes perfectly reasonable that a mother could celebrate the suicidal atrocities committed by her son because she thinks he's gone to paradise and he's killed infidels in the process. And he's paved the way for the whole family to get to paradise. If you actually believe these things, this behavior becomes quite understandable."

This is garbage. Harris may know his neuroscience, but his sociological understanding leaves something to be desired. Jewish terrorists attacked the British in the 30s and 40s, when they faced a similarly overwhelming foe.

If your neighbors might abruptly plow down your trees or your home without any apparent provocation, or there's a good chance your kid will be shot by an IDF soldier just for playing too close to a guard tower, your day-to-day life may be so soaked with humiliation and desperation that you might prefer that your kid die by being a suicide bomber. People struggle to make meaning of their lives, in any context.

"The United States for its part is strangely marginal. Its chosen policies have lined it up squarely with Israel. It has sanctioned and thus cannot even talk to Iran, Hezbollah and Hamas, and it has pressured and threatened Syria for years without any real success. The world's sole superpower is peculiarly powerless in the current crisis in the Middle East."

Rami Khouri is far more diplomatic than I would be. The US has had an impotent Middle Eastern foreign policy post-1980, and especially post 2000, because Ameican presidents have handed US foreign policy decision making over to Israel. The last US predident who stood up to Israel was Jimmy Carter.

a reminder, here:

http://www.truthout.org/docs_01/01.05B.Klausutis.1.htm

Aluf Benn is undoubtedly correct in his assessment of the political trap that Olmert may have felt he was in, but Benn fails to note certain not-unimportant facts:

On June 9th A Gazan family was killed while at the beach, leaving only a small girl Huda Ghalia alive.(I've also seen the transliterations Hoda and Ghaliya.)

According to Al-Jazeera, she was reported to have said she didn't know what she did to make God take her family away from her, and wished she could be with them. (At first she thought her father was asleep, but then she saw the blood coming out of his head.)The Gazans said that this was due to Israeli shelling.

The IDF investigated(!) and about a week later said this was not possible. Amnesty International and other groups called on Olmert to investigate, and he refused. Hostilities started shortly after that, something the US press has been remiss in not mentioning. Try doing an in-site search for Huda Ghalia on CNN, MSNBC or FoxNews websites, and you will see a great dearth of info.

In the prisoner swap that Benn mentions, Israel held on to three prisoners. It is noteable that the two kidnapppings resulted in three soldiers being abducted.

One of the commenters asked if Salon readers would be so sympathetic if the casualty nos. were reversed. A fair enough question, at least on the surface, and the fact that Benn provided the numbers speaks well of him. But as far as the commenter goes, he ignores the point that we are speaking of such lopsided casualty figures precisely because we have two adversaries who are so lopsidedly mismatched. Israel is hardly an underdog in this battle.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/israel/Story/0,,1799558,00.html

"what have I done wrong to live without my parents?"

http://www.aljazeera.com/me.asp?service_ID=11535

On the surface it sounds innocuous enough-- but aren't there lots of people who are disabled who are nevertheless willing to work and want to work, and could do this stuff? I mean as bona fide employees, making at least 7 or 8 bucks an hour instead of these "hobbyists" who say they're doing it out of boredom rather than need.

Thank you very much for this article. I will admit, I'd never heard of these units either before this piece. Nevetheless it occurs to me that if more Americans knew about these MiTTs, they would be more supportive of their deployment, as opposed to the seemingly random snipe-hunts for insurgents that mainly kill ordinary Iraqis.

So I have to wonder: is the administration reluctant to truly support this program precisely because they want it to fail, because should it actually succeed the Neocons could no longer demonstrate how much we're needed there?

If there are problems in November and they get swept under the rug and dismissed, the marquee democrats like Hillary and Joe Biden will have a sizeable portion of the blame, as far as I'm concerned.

These brewing problems aren't even on the radar for most people, and given the general crappiness of US television news, these issues will continue to be essentially invisible unless the half a dozen or so bigshot democrats that cable tv treats as the the face of the party decide to step up and talk about it before we have another highly questionable election. If they wait until the day after the election to make any noise about this, democratic objections will seem like sour grapes to casual observers(and casual voters).

Having said that, thank you for this article. I am waiting with bated breath for Manjoo's glib refutation in a day or two.