Saad Eddin Ibrahim has issued a statement through his Ibn Khaldun Center website “clarifying” his position on the succession following extensive criticism in opposition circles of his signing the proxy for Gamal Mubarak. It includes the following (emphasis is in the original):
While I uphold the right of all Egyptian citizens to run for office, I have also made known my own personal preferences in terms of the currently announced and widely speculated potential candidates for the office of President. I have clearly stated my personal preference for Dr. Muhammad El-Baradei, as I believe he is the person most capable of leading the transition to democracy in Egypt. He is followed in this respect by Dr. Ayman Nour and others. Gamal Mubarak, however, is not on my own personal list of preferred candidates.
I’m not sure this will dampen the controversy, but it is fairly clear.
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Now posters are appearing in Cairo promoting ‘Omar Suleiman for President. You’ll recall that as long ago as last summer, a website sprung up promoting the idea.
The “anonymous” group prmoting Suleiman remain a matter fof speculation: are they just anti-Gamal, or is there some genuine effort by the army or the security services to influence the succession? The fact that Suleiman still has his job suggests either that he’s not behind it, or that the regime may not be as committed to the Gamal succession as most people think. I suspect the former.
The idea of Suleiman as a transitional figure probably appeals to some in the US government as well, but it’s hard to see a career intelligence man as a democratizing figure. (Though to be fair, General Intelligence has a far better reputation than State Security, which is under Interior Minister Habib al-‘Adly and is the really feared agency.)
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“For the moment, there does not seem to be much prospect of a moderate Islam in the Muslim world. This is partly because in the prevailing atmosphere the expression of moderate ideas can be dangerous—even life-threatening. Radical groups like al Qaeda and the Taliban, the likes of which in earlier times were at most minor and marginal, have acquired a powerful and even a dominant position.”
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“Huge numbers of migrant domestic workers, mostly from Asia and Africa, are employed throughout the region. Some 1.5m work in Saudi Arabia, 660,000 in Kuwait and 200,000 in Lebanon. Many work very long hours and receive little food, no time off and pay that is a fraction of any minimum wage, if it materialises at all. Human Rights Watch (HRW), a New York-based group, says at least one domestic worker died every week in Lebanon between January 2007 and August 2008. Almost half were suicides and many were as a result of falling from high buildings, often while trying to escape their employers. Mistreatment is so widespread that the Philippines, Ethiopia and Nepal no longer let their citizens go to Lebanon to work as maids, though such bans have had little effect.” (thanks Khelil)
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“An Ethiopian soldier serving at an Air Force base in southern Israel petitioned the High Court of Justice Thursday over racial slurs hurled at him by a senior officer. The soldier asked the court to order IDF officials to explain why disciplinary action was not being taken against a major whom he claims called him an “annoying nigg*r.”" (thanks Olivia)
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AP says more Democrats are reluctant to allow taxes to rise on the rich.
It is a matter of despair to me that the constituents of these Democrats don’t put their feet down on this issue. Allowing tax rates on the rich to go back to Reagan-era levels will not derail the economic recovery. What, are they going to cut back on their yacht-buying? Some heiresses seem to be sending the extra money they save on paying taxes down to Colombia for coke, which doesn’t exactly help the US economy.
And, you can’t be for fiscal discipline or for a balanced budget and also be in favor of lower taxes on the super-wealthy. This analysis made the rounds in the blogosphere, but it is worth reprinting the conclusion of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.
The fact is that the Bush tax cuts for the super-wealthy are the main reason for the large size of our current budget deficits, and if the cuts weren’t abolished, they would go on bankrupting government into the distant future.
A tax cut on the rich is a way of stealing from the middle class.
Their chart is eloquent. Is it that the public doesn’t know how to read it?
The tax cuts dwarf the wars and make TARP and the stimulus packages look minuscule as a source of the federal budget deficit.
So, voters, put some steel in the spines of the Democrats.
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Not exactly the conclusions reached at WINEP. Via WarInContext, this from MERIP
“… But by its own reckoning, the attack has resurrected Hamas as a political player in the West Bank. In its attacks on settlers on two consecutive nights in different parts of the West Bank, Hamas demonstrated its reach despite a three-year, US-backed PA military campaign and exposed the fallacy of the PA’s claims to have established security control in the West Bank. “It’s not muqawama (resistance) against Israel,” says ‘Adnan Dumayri, a Fatah Revolutionary Council member and PA security force general. “It’s muqawama against Abbas.” It also enabled the Islamists to catch seeping popular disaffection across the political spectrum toward a process of negotiations that appeared to Palestinians to be leading into a blind alley of continued Israeli control. Should Abbas fail to negotiate a halt to settlement growth, Hamas in its armed attacks against settlers would emerge from its three-year political wasteland to offer Palestinians an alternative.
In contrast to the international media, where the attack was roundly condemned, in Palestine the attack earned plaudits not only from Hamas’ core constituency, but also from a broad swathe of Fatah and secular activists, including some senior actors, disillusioned by 19 years of negotiations based on an ever flimsier framework. Unlike the Annapolis process or the “road map,” the twin Bush administration initiatives that the Obama administration chose to ditch, the current negotiations lack any terms of reference or agreed-upon script. Palestinians ask why Abbas agreed to meet Netanyahu given that none of the Arab targets required to turn proximity talks into direct ones were reached prior to the Obama administration’s announcement of the meeting. When American elder statesman George Mitchell presented the parties with 16 identical questions on the core issues requiring yes or no answers, Israel responded to each with a question of its own. In his August 31 press briefing before the White House meeting, Mitchell again declined to specify if Israel had agreed even to extend its (partially honored) settlement freeze past the September 26 expiration date…”
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AFP – The Palestinian Authority and Christian leaders on Thursday signed an accord to repair the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem on the traditional site of Jesus’s birth.
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