If you’re going to San Francisco, Be sure to wear some flowers in your hair

The agreement forming the new Hamas-Fatah Palestinian government includes a standard phrase that there is a right to resist Israeli occupation. The United States opposes this, a State Dept spokesmodel saying, “The national unity government’s platform reference to the right of resistance is disturbing and contradicts the Quartet principles of renunciation of violence”. So it is official US policy that Israeli occupation of and military actions in Palestine may not be resisted.

The LAT has an editorial about the 2,264 ethnic Japanese people that the US took from Latin America, mostly from Peru, during World War II and interned in Texas. 13 countries cooperated with the US in this mass kidnapping, usually without putting anything down on paper, since it so blatantly violated international law. A few of them were exchanged for Americans captured by Japan, some were still interned in 1948, and very few were ever allowed to return to the countries that had connived in their seizure. When the US started paying reparations to interned Japanese-Americans in 1990, it refused to pay these internees (eventually some did get paid, 1/4 as much) for the reason – which the LAT doesn’t make clear enough – that they had been... illegal immigrants.

Moving on without any ironic segue whatsoever, Republicans are gearing up to object to any move to close down Guantanamo and move those prisoners into US military brigs on the mainland. Various congresscritters are saying they don’t want them in Florida or South Carolina or wherever. Says John Boehner, “If Democrats seriously want to import known terrorists -- captured in the field of battle against American troops -- perhaps we can set them up with a nice sunny spot in San Francisco?” Sunny spot? Has he ever been to San Francisco?

How come the WaPo quoted only part of a pro-war banner held by counter-protesters in Washington, “You dishonor our dead on Hallowed ground” (meaning Arlington), and left out the words above that, visible in a picture in the LAT, “Go to hell traitors”?

The WaPo, in an unrevealing article about how McCain is joined at the hip with the Iraq war, quotes a stump speech in Iowa, in which he claims that the people fighting us in Iraq aren’t really interested in Iraq per se: “I am convinced that if we lose this conflict and leave, [the terrorists] will follow us home. It’s not Iraq they are trying to take.” Then why don’t they just skip the Iraq segment of what McCain calls “this titanic struggle between good and evil” and come here now?