"Sacking" of Washington Mid East Hand Points Up Growing Rift Between Washington Ideology and Israeli Pragmatism

Former Clinton administration Middle East peace negotiator Rob Malley now heads the Middle East program of the International Crisis Group, an international conflict resolution non governmental organization. He has also been reported to serve as an informal advisor to the Obama campaign.

Through his work at ICG, Malley has talked with Hamas officials, according to a report in Sunday's Times of London, not so surprising given ICG's conflict resolution mission. But because of that revelation, the paper reports, Malley has now been officially "sacked" as an informal advisor to the Obama campaign:

One of Barack Obama’s Middle East policy advisers disclosed yesterday that he had held meetings with the militant Palestinian group Hamas – prompting the likely Democratic nominee to sever all links with him.

Robert Malley told The Times that he had been in regular contact with Hamas, which controls Gaza and is listed by the US State Department as a terrorist organisation. Such talks, he stressed, were related to his work for a conflict resolution think-tank and had no connection with his position on Mr Obama’s Middle East advisory council.

“I’ve never hidden the fact that in my job with the International Crisis Group I meet all kinds of people,” he added.

Harry Reid Promises Hearings on Pentagon Puppets

Harry Reid is at Firedoglake promoting his (well-received) new book — it's a real sign of the seriousness with which Washington's political establishment takes the blogosphere, by the way, when the Senate Majority Leader does an online book salon with a blog — and he was asked this question by a reader:

Lish: Senator, are you planning to hold hearings on the illegality of the Pentagon's propaganda training program of retired military officers that was recently exposed by the New York Times and Glenn Greenwald?

Reid's response:

Reid: The answer is yes. I have personally spoken to Chairman Levin and he is tremendously concerned as I. And we are proceeding accordingly.

That's good news. Lawmakers have been clamoring over the Pentagon puppets scandal, but the news media has largely been silent. If there are hearings, that will have to change.

McCain's Surrogates Get Confused

Think Progress has a great catch. Mitt Romney on CNN earlier today:

BLITZER: Does John McCain want to continue what Obama called the failed policies of the Bush administration?

ROMNEY: Well I think you’re going to hear that time and again, Wolf, throughout the campaign season. And I just don’t think it’s going to stick.

McCain surrogate Rep. Roy Blunt (R-MO) in the same program:

BLITZER: So it would be in effect a third Bush term when it came to pro-growth tax policies?

BLUNT: It would be. I think it would be. And I think that’s a good thing.

Good work out there, fellas. Here's video. Blunt is pretty adamant about that same-as-Bush thing.

In the Shadow of Mother's Day

Below is a guest blog entry in honor of Mother's Day by obstetrician-gynecologist Nancy Stanwood:

I am fortunate to have met many wonderful mothers. These women understand what it means to raise a child well. They make daily sacrifices to keep their children physically and emotionally healthy and happy. As a new mother myself, I find their commitment inspiring.

What I know about these mothers, though, won’t be celebrated on Mother’s Day. They came to me to have abortions.

I am an obstetrician-gynecologist, and in my 13 years of delivering babies and providing abortions, I have ended pregnancies for many women with children at home. These mothers account for the majority of U.S. abortions. Six out of every ten women who have abortions in this country each year already have at least one child.

In my experience, these mothers have abortions to meet their responsibilities for their children at home.

How To Win A Nobel

Log enough hours of Foldit and you might play your way into a cooperative Nobel. The new online game is designed to understand how existing proteins fold themselves, as well as to design new ones. The ultimate goal is to tap into that endless supply of human gaming energy to solve really hard problems. You might find yourself part of a cure for HIV or Alzheimer's or malaria. Or one of the many who designs a new protein to break up toxic waste, say, or absorb CO2 from the air.

There are more than 100,000 different proteins in the human body. They form every cell, make up the immune system, and set the speed of chemical reactions. We know many of their genetic sequences but don't know how they fold up into shapes so complex it would take all the computers in the world centuries to calculate them. Yet humans' natural 3-D problem-solving skills, utilized in an addictive gaming scenario, might solve the problems in only years. Or less. At least that's what a bunch of computer scientists, engineers, and biochemists from the University of Washington are hoping.

The game looks like a 21st-century version of Tetris, with multicolored geometric snakes filling the screen. A half-dozen UW graduate and undergraduate students spent more than a year figuring out how to make the game accurate and engaging. They faced challenges commercial game developers don't encounter, including not knowing the best results themselves.

At Least One Conservative Says McCain Should Renounce Rev. Parsley

At least one conservative Republican has come out and said that John McCain ought to denounce the Reverend Rod Parsley for his extreme anti-Islam rhetoric, and that's James Pinkerton, with whom I regularly appear on Bloggingheads.tv. Pinkerton, who was a domestic policy adviser for the first President Bush and who advised Mike Huckabee during his recent GOP presidential primary contest, says that McCain should reject the endorsement he's accepted from Parsley, a pastor at an Ohio megachurch who has said that it is the historic mission of the United States to see the "false religion" of Islam "destroyed."

For more on Parsley's anti-Islam ranting and to see the reverend in his full anti-Islam glory, click here for the video of Parsley's attack on Islam that was produced by Mother Jones and Brave New Films.

Up to now, McCain has steadfastly refused to renounce Parsley, an influential political force in the swing state of Ohio. Doing so could seriously hurt McCain's chances in the Buckeye State. So Pinkerton shouldn't expect McCain to heed his advice. Here's Pinkerton and I discussing the matter:

Let Them Eat Biofuel

Gas prices are rising and this could be great news. Even though it seems lousy in the short run. The truth is higher gas prices are already forcing people to drive less, skip trips, rethink vacations, and reject SUVs—part of a whole host of behavioral changes that add up to rare good news for our endangered atmosphere. LiveScience blogger Robert Roy Britt writes that some people are already slowing down on the roads as a means to save gas, as are some airlines. Higher gas prices are also saving human lives. Two thousand fewer people will die road deaths and 600 fewer will die from air pollution. One economist calculates that each $1 rise in gas equals 14 percent less fuel consumption over the long haul.

However, higher gas prices simultaneously feed biofuel fever. Why use oil when you can use corn? But biofuel is also associated with steeply rising food costs. The dilemma is that you and me can drive 1,000 miles or we can feed a person for a year, and people around the world are getting hungrier, writes Stan Cox on AlterNet. Our gas guzzling ways are about to drive the state of Iowa, the epicenter of agriculture, to import corn. How's that for weird? Apparently it's so weird that the politicos are scrambling to plow under last year's crop of legislature as fast as they can, writes Cox:

Now 24 Republican members of Congress, citing high food prices, have come out into the open to urge a retreat from the Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007, which mandates rapid increases in biofuel production... Gov. Rick Perry of Texas has formally requested that the federal government relax biofuel requirements imposed on his state… The Missouri legislature is considering a rollback of its own recently passed law requiring that gasoline must be mixed with a minimum percentage of ethanol.

Bureau Brews: Hook & Ladder

Welcome to the first in an occasional series called "Bureau Brews" (Too nerdy? What about "Keg Stands?") in which reporters and editors in Mother Jones' DC Bureau will do what we do best... drink beer. Really, it's our birthright as journalists, and we take the responsibility quite seriously. (Read our hero Jack Schafer's classic treatise on the subject here.) So, every once in a while, probably on Fridays after we've filed our stories for the week, we'll break out the bottle opener and let you know what we think of various imported beers and their domestic craft cousins.

Our first victim is a local craft brewery called Hook & Ladder, based in Silver Spring, Maryland. (Disclaimer: I happen to know their PR guy. He's a mensch.) The brewery was founded by two brothers—one a volunteer firefighter, the other an entrepreneur—who, in 1999, decided to combine their talents to open a craft brewery. They originally based it in the Bay Area, but the dot-com bust scared off investors, and the fledgling business fell on hard times. Since then, they've relocated to suburban Washington, DC, where, in 2005, they renewed their quest to quit the rat race and make beer for a living, this time with great success. As of October 2006, Hook & Ladder had only one distributor and was available only in the DC area; today, it's got 73 distributors in 20 states, mostly along the East Coast, although for some reason it's also available in Stockton, California, or so we've been told.

One thing to note before we proceed to reviewing the merchandise is that Hook & Ladder, true to its firefighter founders' wishes, donates one penny from every pint sold to local burn centers. In the last two years, this has amounted to no less than $30,000. Could it be that drinking beer has finally become tax deductible? We'll have to look into that...

MoJo Nukes Convo: Jonas Siegel Highlights

Jonas Siegel is editor of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, a media organization that focuses on the intersection of science and security, and has covered nuclear weapons and energy issues for the past five years.

Although Siegel is in awe of nuclear's amazing energy-generating power—"a pound of uranium 235 has more than 2 million times the energy content of a pound of coal," he says—he acknowledges that so far the industry has been hindered by safety issues. The industry must address the risk of nuclear proliferation and waste storage if it's to become a part of our future mix of energy-providers, Siegel says.

Check out some of Siegel's other views, below, as expressed in last week's Blue Marble expert-reader conversation:

"One of the most vexing aspects of the current system is that it allows ... the same uranium enrichment facilities that enrich fuel for power production can also enrich uranium for nuclear weapons. The plants that reprocess spent fuel after it is taken out of a reactor can be used to make additional fuel—or plutonium for nuclear weapons."

Comedy Bands: How Far Can they Go?

The New York Times thought they were pretty funny: New Zealand's "fourth most popular folk-parody duo" Flight of the Conchords are taking their HBO show about being, well, wildly unsuccessful, on a wildly successful tour, and they just played in New York to an appreciative crowd. The TV show, while not exactly a breakout hit, ratings-wise, was pretty much the second-best thing on HBO last year, both for the hilarity of their song parodies ("Bowie's In Space," anyone?) and for the low-key quirkiness of their heavily-accented banter. So, it's a good show on TV, but isn't there something a bit awkward about parody songs plopping down into the real-life rock context of an actual concert hall?

After the jump: What happens when the highest-charting death metal band of all time is, um, a joke?

Group Demands Marriott Turn Off the Porn

From citizenlink.com:

Focus on the Family Action is calling on families to co-sign a letter urging Marriott hotels to stop offering in-room pornography. The letter, signed by 47 family groups, will be presented at a meeting May 14 between pro-family leaders and Marriott International officials. It's the first time a major hotel chain has agreed to meet to discuss the issue. Tom Minnery, senior vice president of government and public policy of Focus on the Family Action, said Marriott can’t continue to present itself as a family-friendly hotel chain while peddling pornography. “Pornography is highly addictive and extremely destructive,” he said. “In the ‘secrecy’ of a hotel room, pornography can be especially dangerous because it creates a sexualized climate that puts men, women and children at risk.”

Focus on the Family Action then demanded Marriott remove all beds, comfy cushions and plush carpets from rooms, since those soft, inviting spaces just make addictive, dangerous fornication all the more likely. And don't get us started on those oh-so-sexy coffeemakers, heating things up! Hub-ba!

After the jump: I didn't mean to press "buy," really!

John McCain, No Environmentalist

In New Jersey today, John McCain called himself a "Teddy Roosevelt Republican" and said, "I'm proud of my environmental record." This is a line — a myth, really — that McCain is sure to push in the general election.

True, John McCain does talk about the environment more than other Republicans. But that doesn't make him an environmentalist, and his environmental record is nowhere close to the Democrats in the race. Take it from those who know best.

In 2007, the League of Conservation Voters rated McCain a zero on the environment because he skipped every vote the organization graded. (Vote-skipping is a serious problem for Johnny Mac.) At the time, Sierra Club Executive Director Carl Pope said:

"We were appalled two weeks ago when John McCain was the only Senator who chose to skip a crucial vote on the future of clean energy in America-dooming the measure to fail by just a single vote. As it turns out, this was merely the most recent example of a clear pattern of missing the most important votes on energy and the environment--as his abysmal LCV score clearly demonstrates....

"[John McCain has] a lifetime pattern of voting with polluters and special interests instead of consumers and the planet when it comes time to stand up and be counted. Or perhaps worse yet: a consistent refusal to stand up and be counted at all."

The President of the League of the Conservation Voters, Gene Karpinski, adds, "To his credit, McCain has made global warming a priority... [but] throughout his time in Congress, McCain's voted pro-environment only one out of four times.''

Clinton and Obama also suffered due to vote-skipping in 2007, with LCV scores of 73 and 67 respectively. But the lifetime scores of the three candidates tell the true story. Hillary Clinton's lifetime score is 87 percent. Obama’s is 86 percent. John McCain's is 24 percent.

As Obama Takes Lead in Superdels, Clinton Makes Unlikely Bid for Popular Vote

ABC News reports that Barack Obama has passed Hillary Clinton among superdelegates, with a current count of 276-275. A couple caveats: (1) Every major news outlet has a different count when it comes to Obama and Clinton's superdelegate totals, and ABC News is the first to say Obama has passed Clinton. Nevertheless, the other networks will likely follow close behind — most others have Obama trailing Clinton by five to 10, and Obama has been closing steadily since Super Tuesday. (2) These numbers are constantly in flux, with new superdelegate endorsements coming every day.

Nevertheless, ABC's announcement is a sign of things to come. We will soon reach a point where there aren't enough outstanding pledged delegates and undecided superdelegates for Clinton to win the nomination. At that point, she either has to drop out or try to convince Obama superdelegates that they need to switch to her.

One way the campaign might convince superdelegates to do that? Winning the popular vote. Clinton is campaigning in Kentucky, where her campaign chairman addressed the issue with reporters:

The Paulites Aren't Done Yet

Ron Paul deserves representation at the Republican national convention in proportion to the support he received in the primaries. And his supporters are prepared to fight like hell to make sure he gets it.

Across the country, at state and county GOP conventions, diehard supporters of maverick Ron Paul are staging uprisings in an effort to secure a role for Paul at the national convention in Minneapolis-St. Paul....

In Minnesota, Paul loyalists captured seven delegate slots at congressional district meetings, and in Nevada, the convention abruptly recessed on April 26 after balloting showed Paul supporters winning at least half of the initial contests for delegate slots to the national convention....

People are catching on.

Last weekend in Maine, McCain's forces were well organized, but Paul's activists nevertheless managed to pick up one of the 18 delegates at stake.

"They attempted fraud," [Julie O'Brien, executive director of the Maine Republican Party] asserted. "We knew what had happened in Nevada, so we really prepared in advance . . . to make sure everything was done by the book."

I say boooo to Julie O'Brien. I hope there are enough Paulestinians at the national Republican convention to rouse some rabble. To paraphrase one of our commenters, Ron Paul tried to save the Republican Party. Sometimes I wonder why he bothered.

Starbucks' Slutty Mermaid Making Waves

Lately, I've seen some changes at the two Starbucks that live less than a block away from the Mother Jones office. Last month, they both started pushing a new blend called "Pike Place Roast" as their regular drip coffee, as part of a campaign to compete with brisk coffee sales at Dunkin' Donuts and McDonald's. As part of the campaign, Starbucks re-introduced its 1971 brown-and-white logo featuring a two-tailed mermaid. Okay, technically it's a siren, but regardless, the image of a female figure brazenly spreading its tails has made a few Christians vow to boycott the company.

"The Starbucks logo has a naked woman on it with her legs spread like a prostitute," explains alarmist Mark Dice, of a Christian group called The Resistance. "Need I say more? It's extremely poor taste, and the company might as well call themselves Slutbucks."

While I'm curious what the value of a Slutbuck is relative to a Schrutebuck, I'm worried that Dice doesn't seem to understand the Starbucks siren is half-fish. She doesn't have legs to spread, much less a vagina to go between them. The fact that Dice doesn't get the difference between a fin and a foot may be an example of what abstinence-only funding does to education, but it's certainly not the first time spunky Christians have boycotted the multinational company.

Just last summer, a group of Christian ladies boycotted Frappuccinos because there was a homosexual-agenda-pushing Armistead Maupin quote on some of the cups. Others have boycotted the company because of anti-God quotes.

All I can say is that if Starbucks goes down, it won't be because of a handful of Christian boycotters. And it won't be because a friend of a CATO Institute vice-president couldn't buy a customized "Laissez Faire" gift card, either. As the WSJ tells it, a Starbucks slump will be due to oversaturation and a faltering economy that makes $4 lattes seem like less of a necessity. Whether that's an act of God or not is for you to decide.

Gag Order Lifted, Israel Obsesses Over Corruption Probe Targeting Prime Minister

As the sun set on Israel's 60th Independence Day celebrations tonight, Israeli media were partially liberated from a gag order that had restricted their reporting details of a fast moving and curiously timed corruption investigation of Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert. The probe's quickening pace now is curious given that it is focusing on financial transactions between Olmert and an American financier and philanthropist that date back to the 1990s when Olmert was mayor of Jerusalem and a cabinet minister in the government of Ariel Sharon.

"Olmert suspected of accepting illicit funds from U.S. businessman," a Ha'aretz headline proclaimed:

Oliver Stone's W: Will It Be Better than "Lil' Bush"?

Entertainment Weekly has a "first look" at Oliver Stone's W, the upcoming feature on our most awesomest president ever, starting Josh Brolin as the smirking W himself. Of course, by "First Look," EW is stretching things a bit, since, as they say, "shooting begins in less than two weeks." However, it sounds like Stone is trying to get the movie turned around in record time, with a release possibly coming "as early as October." EW's article is six long pages; so I've collected some highlights after the jump:

Grand Theft Auto IV Makes More Money Than Anything Ever

Well, almost. Billboard magazine reports that first-week sales for the latest installment in the "Grand Theft Auto" videogame series has outperformed even the most optimistic of predictions, making more than $500 million in sales the first week. Billboard says that's 6 million copies, but it's $60 on Amazon, and that works out to $360 million, but who knows how they count these things. Either way, it's a new first-week record for a game, smashing the previous high mark set by "Halo 3" of $300 million.

For comparison's sake, let's just take a look at some other cultural products and institutions and their associated monetary figures, after the jump:

Guns Don't Kill People, Irresponsible Gun Dealers Do

Eric Thompson sells guns on the Internet. Of course, you may already know that. After all, his Green Bay, Wisc.-based firm, TGSCOM Inc. (www.thegunsource.com), has had some high-profile clients, including Seng-Hui Cho, who massacered 33 classmates at Virginia Tech last year, and Stephen Kazmierczak, who killed five students at Northern Illinois University last February. And surely for this, Thompson feels sorry. But don't ask him to apologize for his business, for he's committed to placing firearms in the warm, living hands of as many customers as possible... at the lowest possible price.

Since the initial shock of learning he had played a supporting role in at least two school shootings, Thompson has turned infamy into a marketing strategy. In the spirit of there being no such thing as bad publicity, he's taken full advantage of opportunities to appear on television, including his recent FOX News sparring match with Paul Helmke of the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence. This followed Thompson's visit to Virginia Tech last month, where, almost a year to the day after the shootings, he spoke at an on-campus event sponsored by Students for Concealed Carry on Campus. A school spokesman called the visit "terribly offensive" and said "the organizers appear to be incredibly insensitive to the families of the victims who lost loved ones and to the injured students still recovering from this horrendous tragedy." But Thompson, who claims to have donated money to a Virginia Tech victims' fund, stands by his decision to appear at the university. It's all part of the "special responsibility" he's been given to "help change people's opinions."

Pigs Spared Med School Surgeries

NatureNews reports how doctors used to practise surgery on animals before being allowed to work on patients. Nowadays only a handful of US med schools maintain animal labs. The Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine in Ohio will shut its live-animal lab this month. Next semester, instead of practising on anaesthetized pigs, its med students will use technologies like virtual simulations. It's all part of a general phase-out of animal labs across the US. In 1994 live-animal experiments were on the curriculum in 77 of 125 medical schools. Now as few as eight use them.

Cost is a factor in the change, since it's expensive to maintain animals and veterinary staff. But simulations have also developed impressively in the past decade. The most advanced simulators now have 'haptic feedback,' providing the sensation that the students' instruments are touching real tissue—advances that make the use of live animals gratuitous, according to John Pippin, a cardiologist in Dallas who once used live dogs to study heart attacks but now works for the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine. The group continues its work to convince the 6% of US institutes that still use live animals to change their ways—notably the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. NatureNews reports that Jonathan Lissauer, a doctor recently trained at Johns Hopkins, says that sometimes animal surgeries were used "as just a diversion for people who won't be using those skills at all. I think then you cross the territory from appropriate medical education to something worse than that. There was no medical utility in having pigs die so that people going into psychiatry could play around."

According to Erin Williams and Margo DeMello in their compelling treatise on how animals suffer in institutional settings, Why Animals Matter: The Case for Animal Protection, the switch from live-animal experiments to simulations was driven in large part because "medical students around the country expressed reservations about killing animals as part of their education, and many refused to participate in dog labs and other classes in which animals were killed…" Could this be a way to identify the compassionate docs from the not so compassionate?

Julia Whitty is Mother Jones' environmental correspondent, lecturer, and 2008 winner of the Kiriyama Prize and the John Burroughs Medal Award. You can read from her new book, The Fragile Edge, and other writings, here.