Salon.com > Nina Burleigh

Israel’s huge reward

Fri, 11 May 2012 19:40:00 +0000

As progressives total up the ways Obama dashed their hopes for the elusive change we can believe in, there is one big, broken change-promise that no one mentions these days.

Three years ago this month, Obama met with Israeli Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu and told him that the West Bank settlements had to cease. "The settlements have to be stopped in order for us to move forward," said Barack Obama, at his first presidential meeting with the Israeli leader. A month later, the new president reiterated the criticism, in a Cairo speech that was supposed to herald a re-boot of U.S.-Muslim relations. “The United States does not accept the legitimacy of continued Israeli settlements,” Obama said from a podium at Al Azhar. “This construction violates previous agreements and undermines efforts to achieve peace. It is time for these settlements to stop."

But the settlements have not stopped and, rather than rebuking Israel, the U.S. government is preparing to reward it more than ever before. This week, the U.S. House Subcommittee on Appropriations passed a bill handing over the most money ever in one year to Israeli defense: just shy of a billion dollars toward three Israeli missile defense projects, called Iron Dome, David’s Shield and Arrow. Last year’s appropriation for the same projects was $235 million. “I don’t know of any joint defense programs in the last 10 years -- probably no program with any other country – that has approached a billion,” said a staffer who works with the subcommittee.

Online dating king embraces Limbaugh

Wed, 07 Mar 2012 16:54:00 +0000

Some progressives may dare to dream that the day is coming when Rush Limbaugh's bray no longer cranks out of every wavelength orifice in the American radio dial. In the wake of his attacks on Sandra Fluke, blue chip advertisers like Netflix, Allstate, John Deere and Capital One are either dropping him as fast as they can, or publicly saying their ads on his show have been “mistakes.”

But, the formerly oxycontin-addicted, thrice-married broadcaster is only now finding his true friends. One businessman eager to replace those who cut and run is Brandon Wade, the founder of a website called SeekingArrangements.com that pairs college girls needing money (Sugar Babies) with older men (Sugar Daddies) needing, well, “an arrangement.”

Yesterday, the dating site offered to start buying 30- and 60-second spots on Rush’s show. If approved, the ads will run next month.

In a plot twist Stephen Colbert’s writers might have dreamed up on a slow news day, Wade hailed the doughy bellower as a model for guys who like ‘em young, hot and financially needy.

“I don’t think Mr. Issa has ever taken birth control”

Thu, 23 Feb 2012 21:45:00 +0000

The assault on women’s healthcare in the effort to legally limit women’s reproductive rights is fast becoming the defining element of election 2012. Republican presidential candidates have been racing to see who can support the most regressive idea. Congressional leaders like Darrell Issa are holding all-male hearings on contraception, and the state of Virginia just passed, then rescinded, a law forcing women seeking abortions to undergo invasive tests.

In the cross hairs: Planned Parenthood, the 91-year-old organization that provides birth control, cancer screening, STD testing and abortions to 3 million women a year, from 750 clinics in 49 states. In the last month, Planned Parenthood was again in the headlines when the Susan G. Komen Foundation announced it wouldn’t fund Planned Parenthood anymore, then reversed itself.

Climate scientist admits swiping documents

Tue, 21 Feb 2012 15:40:00 +0000

MacArthur Award "genius" grant winner and Berkeley climate scientist Peter Gleick last night confessed to posing as a Heartland Institute board member in emails to the right-wing organization to extract embarrassing internal documents, including the group’s annual budget. Gleick said he was motivated after an anonymous source sent him what was supposed to be the group’s strategy plan.

As Salon reported last week, Heartland called the strategy document a fake, while tacitly admitting the other documents were authentic.

Read Gleick’s statement on Hufffington Post.

Secret papers turn up heat on global-warming deniers

Fri, 17 Feb 2012 14:00:00 +0000

With Al Gore way down in Antarctica inspecting melting glaciers, and America’s unusually mild winter providing a respite from seasons of freakish droughts, floods, Nome-style whiteouts and the hurricane that ravaged Vermont, the issue of man-caused global warming has been out of sight and mind.

But virtually all scientists continue to believe that most indicators suggest the world as we know it is slowly ending, and that humans are to blame. Nature – oceans, deserts, crops, animals and insects – is in the process of being transformed by rising temperatures due to the fuel we burn to stay warm or cool, and to power factories, cars and jets. In the academies, the argument now is only between experts who predict “bad” and those who predict “catastrophe.”

Some people don't want to hear it. Supporters of industries that profit from the fossil-fuel status quo routinely challenge those facts, and treat them as political talking points. This week, a dirty trick played on one of the chief industry front groups, the Heartland Institute of Chicago, a major source of “climate denialism,” as the fact-based scientists like to call it, revealed just how politicized the issue has become.

Bernie Sanders’ war on the banks

Tue, 25 Oct 2011 14:33:00 +0000

The Occupy Wall Street movement has been accused of being politically incoherent and leaderless, but among its many salutary effects is something that previously existed only in Rush Limbaugh’s worst, oxycodone-detox nightmare: OWS is making an American socialist politician look mainstream.

For two decades, U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders has been saying much the same things that OWS is saying, but hollering from Capitol Hill not Zuccotti Park. Sanders, whom Vermonters first sent to the House in 1990 and elected to the Senate in 2006, has been talking about corporate greed and the need for national healthcare since he first went to Washington. With his professorial glasses and doughy face and two white tufts of hair, and vaguely working-stiff accent -- part Brooklyn mouthful of marbles, part New England –- Sanders has always operated out of a trench on no-man’s land somewhere between ignored gadfly and Fox News punch line.

Anita Perry, closet liberal?

Sun, 02 Oct 2011 19:04:00 +0000

The monarch butterflies on their way down to Mexico drift like autumn leaves above the barren cotton fields of Haskell, Texas, like they do every fall. But the cotton gins behind the field where the Indians will play football on Friday nights are idle, the white tufts on the grass mere remnants of last year's crop.

Haskell County farmers planted last spring just like every year, but nothing green came up. No rain. Most people say it's to do with natural weather cycles. A few say it's the good Lord, indicating his displeasure with them for not sharing the Word. It's hard to find anyone who puts much stock in the idea that human behavior has anything to do with what's going on with the weather.

Haskell, population 2,681, located in cotton and ranch country north of Abilene, is a place where people can spot a fake a mile away. It's also the place where Anita Thigpen Perry grew up, third of four kids of the town doctor, interested enough in medicine that she went on rounds with him before she was 10. She went on to be voted the 1970 Haskell High Homecoming Queen and though she went away to nursing school, she came back to Haskell right after. It's the place where Anita and Ricky met and got married in 1982, in the Howards' barn, just outside of town, after a packed service at the Methodist Church, Anita wearing her mother's wedding dress from the 1950s.

What no-drama Obama could learn from no-hysterics Eric

Sun, 25 Sep 2011 14:01:00 +0000

The man New Yorkers elected as their latest Sheriff of Wall Street seems so much smaller than one expects a man in such an outsize job to be, sitting behind his huge desk flanked by a potted rubber plant on one side and the state flag on the other. Behind him, the behemoth black iron shell of the Freedom Tower -- Manhattan real estate's rough, unfinished rebuke to terrorists -- hogs the sky and blocks out the sunset.

Low-key and boyish-looking at 55, New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman is the American progressive movement's best and probably last hope for some kind of public retribution against the banksters, some righting of wrongs -- rolling of heads -- as far as the Great Recession. Yet, he is the anti-Spitzer, in style, if not substance. He has none of Eliot's dominating physicality, none of the hawk-eyed vigor of the man striding around town with everyone's high hopes riding on his shoulders, until he fell, quite literally, on his own figurative sword. This reasonable character could not, one hopes, turn out to be Client 10.

Amanda Knox’s captivating womanhood

Thu, 04 Aug 2011 01:01:00 +0000

People often wonder why, since three suspects were convicted of killing Meredith Kercher, most can only remember the name of the woman. One, not the only, reason is the Italian attitude toward women. The story starts with a spirituality based in sex and the worship of the female. Our word "veneration" comes from Venus, goddess of fertility, called in Italian, Venere. The primeval object of "veneration" was the goddess with the power to call forth desire from men, and to make barren women fertile.

Despite the fact that the Pope resides among them, Italians are not as Catholic as one might expect. Italy remains, as the journalist Luigi Barzini put it, "gloriously pagan." In Italy, "Christianity has not deeply disturbed the happy traditions and customs of ancient Greece and Rome" but is a "thin veneer over older customs."

Pagan pantheism survives in the Italian proliferation of saints. But in Italy, one feminine deity has always been venerated above the rest. Throughout Italy, one confronts images of a beatific young mother holding or nursing a baby, gazing down mysteriously from a roadside edicola -- tiny shrine -- or from a niche in a church, or from the walls of art museums.

The maternal is the political

Tue, 23 May 2006 11:53:00 +0000

Whatever we think of the perennial quest, undertaken most recently by Caitlin Flanagan and Judith Warner, to unpack the political, social, sexual and economic ramifications of American motherhood, we can agree on one thing: All the verbiage has not yet produced a more family-friendly nation. Now comes Joan Blades, co-founder of MoveOn.org, with an idea she says whose time has come: a Web-based, grass-roots attempt to weld mothers into a coherent political force. Earlier this month, Blades launched a multimedia campaign to spark this mother's movement. The centerpiece of the effort is the Web site, MomsRising.org, which signed up 40,000 members during its first week online, after it was advertised in an e-mail blast to the 3 million members of MoveOn.org.

Country boy

Mon, 17 Apr 2006 11:30:00 +0000

When people give directions to the upstate New York hamlet of Narrowsburg, they always refer to the big red brick schoolhouse at the stoplight. Narrowsburg Central Rural School has been on the hill on School Street since 1929, educating four generations of local children.

Hardly anybody in town remembers a time when the campus -- with its white doors, sloping green lawn, and Stars and Stripes snapping in the breeze -- was not there. But last year, bankrupted by local fiscal mismanagement and the woes of the post-9/11 New York state economy, the little school was shuttered. When the last student skipped out of its double doors in the summer of 2005, janitors moved in with packing tape and boxes from a nearby egg farm to empty the classrooms. Among the pupils left behind was my son, a member of the last kindergarten class.

Down with “LEPENIS!”

Thu, 02 May 2002 23:22:00 +0000

The French do love an excuse to march dans les rues. About every few days, wending our way around Paris, we find inexplicable traffic blockages, heralded by truckloads of idling police buses. The cops in riot gear occasionally get out and smoke on the sidewalk, but otherwise they do nothing to either harass or encourage the protesters.

We've stumbled upon security unions marching for better bulletproof vests, rollerbladers rolling in the streets to demand more street space, Tunisians marching to draw attention to political prisoners in Tunis. Sometimes it turns out it's the Gypsies burning someone in effigy, or other assemblages with purposes too obscure for us to even understand. No grievance is too minor to take to the streets. They have a pet name for these strikes, "manif" -- short for "manifestation." Cabdrivers will mutter "petit manif!" as they hit the brakes, encouraging passengers to get out and walk. Traffic comes to a halt, banners fly, slogans are chanted and Parisians just step around it all.

An Ugly American rejoices

Wed, 24 Apr 2002 19:59:00 +0000

I'm sorry I was in bed when the tear-gassing of the anti-fascist protesters was underway Sunday at the Bastille a few blocks away. I'd like to have been there, if only to witness Parisians' impassive hauteur disintegrate into something approaching embarrassment.

For Ugly Americans living in Paris, the Le Pen upset is cause for celebration.

It's been a long winter here fending off righteous French indignation about Bush's belligerence and our "overreaction" to the Sept. 11 attacks without sounding like Pat Buchanan. The extreme right's surprise showing cheers me because it should go a long way toward wiping the smirk of moral superiority off the Parisian face where America is concerned.

Now, to my delight, I and the entire world learn the French not only have their own Pat Buchanan, but an even greater share of like-minded idiots. I know I should be concerned about rising European neo-fascism, racism, anti-Semitism. But all I can think of is the face of the obnoxious anonymous Frenchwoman I encountered on my last flight into Paris.

Bush, oil and the Taliban

Fri, 08 Feb 2002 23:44:00 +0000

In a new book, "Bin Laden: The Forbidden Truth," two French intelligence analysts allege the Clinton and Bush administrations put diplomacy before law enforcement in dealing with the al-Qaida threat before Sept. 11, in order to maintain smooth relations with Saudi Arabia and to avoid disrupting the oil market. The book, which has become a bestseller in France but has received little press attention here, also alleges that the Bush administration was bargaining with the Taliban, over a Central Asian oil pipeline and Osama bin Laden, just five weeks before the September attacks. The authors, Jean-Charles Brisard and Guillaume Dasquie, see a link between the negotiations and Vice President Dick Cheney's energy policy task force, with its conclusions that Central Asian oil was going to become critical to the U.S. economy. Brisard and Dasquie also claim former FBI deputy director John O'Neill (who died in the attack on the World Trade Center, where he was the chief of security) resigned in July to protest the policy of giving U.S. oil interests a higher priority than bringing al-Qaida leaders to justice. Brisard claims O'Neill told him that "the main obstacles to investigating Islamic terrorism were U.S. oil corporate interests and the role played by Saudi Arabia."