I hope they succeed. I am not a Jew and I am neither a friend nor an enemy of Israel. I can fully understand and appreciate peoples desire to have a place to live where they are not discriminated against, marginalized, and/or persecuted as the Jews were in Europe (which stretches from the Atlantic to the Urals). It seems to me this is THE fundamental human right (...life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness...).

That said, let me make a few observations.

1. The present State of Israel was created by foreign invaders by force of arms. After clearing the land of its indigenous population, a veritable flood of foreigners came to take over the land stolen from the original occupants. This was not a propitious start and explains Palestinian/Arab anger.

2. The Jews do not have a "right" to a kingdom in the Levant. The Jewish tribe lost their kingdom to the Romans 2,000 years ago and then they left. Other tribes took their place - notably the Philistines (whom you've heard of from the Bible, I'm sure). A personal revelation moment came when an Iranian friend of mine, speaking to me in English, in Iran, used the Farsi word for Palestinian instead of the English word - it's Philistine.

3. Israel currently treats the Palestinians in much the same way that the Jews were treated in Europe with all the discrimination, marginalization, and persecution that implies. I guess that merely demonstrates that all members of humanity can exhibit the inability to learn the lessons of their own history.

Nonetheless, I'm hopeful that things can work out if everybody recognizes a few concepts.

1. Israel cannot be the theocratic state it is now. If you doubt that statement, the recent NYT article about the Israeli law banning either the production or the display (depending on who is reading the law) of leavened bread during Passover should remove all doubt. Such an edict (however you read it) is the product of a theocracy, not a secular state. If the state of Israel insists on being a theocracy, it will go the way of the Christian kingdoms carved out of the Levant during the Crusades a 1,000 years ago - it will survive a hundred years or so before being overwhelmed by the indigenous population.

2. Any resolution will have to respect the sensibilities of the indigenous Palestinians. It will also have to respect the existence of Israel (which everybody focuses on) but the original occupants seem to get short shrift in this whole discussion.

The Jews may not want this, I don't know. But I do know that continuing to follow the path they have for the last 60 years will not work forever.

If she had taken her shoe off and pounded it on the lectern at the end of her statement and screamed "We will bury you".

The US doesn't leave a country we've attacked until either (a) they capitulate totally and unconditionally to what we want or (b) we are effectively or actually defeated.

The Army is still pissed about Vietnam. Just a few more hundred thousand troops and unrestricted bombing campaigns.....

And the central, and still unknowable, variable is whether the citizenry -- driven by the belief that our country is fundamentally off-track and that the GOP is responsible -- will be able to rise above the two-headed Right-wing/media monster and thereby refuse to elect as President a candidate who will continue policies that the vast majority of them hate.

Because I've said largely the same thing while being more critical of the citizenry for failing to see through the bullshit. Reading your post, however, made me wonder if maybe the citizenry hasn't actually begun to respond. Two things connected for me while reading your post. One was that most of your examples were from newspapers - WAPO and NYT. The second was the report in the NYT that newspaper circulation and profits were continuing their downward spiral.

Could it be that the citizenry is rejecting the fluff and seeking news sources that don't endlessly repeat the chatter? I don't know. It could also be that newspapers circulation loss simply reflects a shift to the internet versions of the newspapers but I'm hoping that it reflects a desire for real news and not heavily biased trivia.

The federal tax is on the producers, regardless of where they sell the gas or who sells it. It is embedded in the wholesale price of gas sold at the refinery. The Illinois tax was a form of sales tax collected at the pump.

In a competitive industry, the refiner doesn't say, "Lessee, it cost me x dollars for the oil, y dollars to refine it (calculating the cost to refine a barrel of oil is itself complex), z dollars in federal tax, and my profit is p, so the wholesale price I'm going to charge is x+y+z+p." Things simply don't get priced that way. If McCain's proposal became law, would the price of gas go down 18.1 cents? No, but it would probably go down, at least temporarily. If Three Name's proposal became law, the price of gas wouldn't go down at all because from the oil company's perspective what's the difference? Tax the gas or tax the oil, it's still a cost of doing business and it will be passed on to the consumers. And by the way, getting into the producer's accounting system to try to enforce the x+y+z+p scheme has another name - the Communist Command Economy. We should all know how well that worked.

A sales tax, collected from the seller is different. If the seller doesn't have to pay it, he doesn't have to collect it. The price of gas will go down.