Democracy Now has a two part interview that begins with Henry Siegman, Leading Voice of U.S. Jewry, on Gaza: “A Slaughter of Innocents”

I previously blogged about a book that is mentioned in this interview – The State of Israel ‘My Promised Land,’ by Ari Shavit.

The second part of the interview is U.S. Jewish Leader Henry Siegman to Israel: Stop Killing Palestinians and End the Occupation.

The segment ends with an exchange that I was hoping someone would state.

AMY GOODMAN: Henry Siegman, I wanted to ask you about media coverage of the conflict right now in Gaza. In a comment to close the CBS show Face the Nation on Sunday, the host, Bob Schieffer, suggested Hamas forces Israel to kill Palestinian children.

BOB SCHIEFFER: In the Middle East, the Palestinian people find themselves in the grip of a terrorist group that is embarked on a strategy to get its own children killed in order to build sympathy for its cause—a strategy that might actually be working, at least in some quarters. Last week I found a quote of many years ago by Golda Meir, one of Israel’s early leaders, which might have been said yesterday: “We can forgive the Arabs for killing our children,” she said, “but we can never forgive them for forcing us to kill their children.”

AMY GOODMAN: That was the host, the journalist Bob Schieffer, on Face the Nation. You knew Prime Minister Golda Meir.

HENRY SIEGMAN: Yes, I did. I wasn’t a friend of hers, but I knew her, and I heard her when she made that statement. And I thought then, and think now, that it is an embarrassingly hypocritical statement. This statement was made by a woman who also said “Palestinians? There are no Palestinians! I am a Palestinian.” If you don’t want to kill Palestinians, if that’s what pains you so much, you don’t have to kill them. You can give them their rights, and you can end the occupation. And to put the blame for the occupation and for the killing of innocents that we are seeing in Gaza now on the Palestinians—why? Because they want a state of their own? They want what Jews wanted and achieved? I find that, to put it mildly, less than admirable. There is something deeply hypocritical about that original statement and about repeating it on the air over here as a great moral insight.

I am sick and tired of hearing this quote from Golda Meir as if it were a piece of wisdom.

The Real News Network has published the final epsisde Capitalism Will Hit the Wall Again, Hard – Heiner Flassbeck on RAI (5/5).

FLASSBECK: Yeah, but public ownership is politically blocked. And even public spending is blocked politically. So the capitalism are blocking themselves. They’re blocking themselves by blocking everything. They’re not investing themselves. They’re blocking the government from being the big spender and taking on government debt. They’re not giving income to the workers. So the whole system comes to an end. It hits the wall at a certain point.

So what I expect is a bigger crisis than we have seen.

And then again comes the question: do we find the politicians who are able to learn the lesson from this bigger crisis, maybe the big depression or however you may call it, to find a way out into a new system? Which, in my opinion, should not be a totally planned system or a socialist system or something like that, but again a mixed system, where we have a strong government that is regulating the most crucial things. The most crucial things are the financial markets and the labor market. This has to be regulated by the government. Otherwise it cannot work

Paul Jay is looking for the one easy solution, but Flassbeck refuses to buy what Jay is suggesting. If Paul Jay ever finds that easy solution, he would deserve at least a Nobel Prize.

Rather than looking for the one easy solution, it might be easier to come up with a number of things we definitely should not do.

The one thing that comes readily to my mind as something we should not do is to anoint Hillary Clinton as our next President in 2016. She may be the least likely Democrat to understand the issue and really want to take steps to fix it. People who have an inkling of a clue are Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, Jeff Merkley, Alan Grayson, and I am sure others of whom I am unaware.

In the Massachusetts Governor’s race, I am thinking that in order of awareness it might be Don Berwick, Martha Coakley, and sad to say Steve Grossman in last place. I was a fan of Steve Grossman until his recent turn toward Super PAC funded negative advertising over invented issues.

News.mic has the article The Supreme Court’s Baffling Science Illiteracy Is Becoming a Big Problem for America by Erin Brodwin  July 1, 2014

On Monday, the Supreme Court in their controversial Hobby Lobby ruling equated contraception to abortion. The problem with their decision is this: There’s absolutely zero science to back it up.

“The owners of the businesses have religious objections to abortion, and according to their religious beliefs the four contraceptive methods at issue are abortifacients,” Justice Samuel Alito said.

Of the four methods Christian company Hobby Lobby claims cause abortion (Plan B, ella, and two IUDs), exactly zero prevent a fertilized egg from implanting in the uterus. All four methods work by stopping fertilization from happening in the first place.

This illiteracy has bothered me for a long time.  What are the chances for long term success of a system that has 9 people without a clue making life altering decisions for 350,000,000 people?