Take a look at Steven David’s commentary in today’s L.A. Times (obtrusive registration required, or just sign in as “laexaminer”/”laexaminer”).
Short version:

As long as the Palestinian Authority is unwilling or unable to curb those who deliberately seek to kill innocent Israelis and bring these attackers to justice, it is up to Israel to do so. Targeted killing does this, and at a cost that is far less harmful to the Palestinians than its alternatives.
Targeted killing will not bring peace to the Middle East. Only a political solution that calls for an independent Palestinian state can do that.
A policy of targeted killing also must carry with it adequate safeguards, including civilian oversight. Targeted killing must focus only on combatants. Political leaders, no matter how odious, must be spared. And targeted killing cannot be carried out forever. It is a policy that makes sense only during war or armed conflict. Once a peace settlement is reached, it must end.
For a region going through a horrendous time, targeted killing is the worst possible policy–except for all the others.

I haven’t blogged about yesterday’s Israeli attack that killed Hamas military leader Salah Shehada (I’ll assume everyone knows the basic facts, if not, click here), partly because there’s not much new to say, and partly because I’ve been trying to figure out how I feel about it.
Short version: Israeli intel showed a major terrorist leader’s location, and they sent an F-16 to take him out with what is variously described as a bomb or missile. Whatever it was, it got the bad guy and leveled his apartment building, killing 14 others, including women and children.
I’ve turned my head when Israel has assassinated Palestinian terrorists; it’s a dirty war as all wars are. And there is a part of me that genuinely roots for the Israelis to simply wipe out the bastards who are sending Palestinian youth to blow themselves and innocents up in Israel.
But I’ve always been uncomfortable with it.
I’ve talked in the past with friends who argue for war by assassination…make the political leaders backing the war as vulnerable as the scared kids they send to the front lines, they say. And there’s something to that.
And in the Israeli’s defense, their enemies don’t exactly live on bases, surrounded by uniformed military, and drive vehicles with distinguishing markings, as contemplated by the Geneva Convention.
And now…to blow up a building to get the one guy inside it…seems like a dangerous thing for the Israelis to do.
Let’s be clear. It would take Israel two, maybe three hours to demolish every structure in the West Bank and Gaza. The limit would be how fast they could rearm and turn around the aircraft. They could do it with conventional munitions and would easily have enough left over to defeat the armies of Egypt, Syria, and Jordan and mount a credible threat to the Iranians.
They haven’t. Why? Because they have to live with themselves, and because they are smart enough to realize that they ultimately have to live with their neighbors. The fact that they would mightily piss off the United States might factor into that as well.
So how do I feel about this? Confused, unhappy. The Israelis have the high moral ground exactly because everyone knows they could flatten Palestinian-administered territories and haven’t.
That moral capital is worth something, even in the face of all the anti-Semitic and anti-Israeli sentiment abroad in the world.
So how do I feel?? Confused, concerned. Glad they got him, and sad they didn’t get him in another way. Sad that they have to get him at all.
For some other views, check out Protein Wisdom in support and Jeff Cooper not.

Via Yourish:
Calif. governor calls for crackdown
on anti-Semitism at state universities.

In the comments on my post on Rall, below, Demosthenes takes exception to my position:
AL: I think you’re glossing over Andy’s valid point, and missing the fact that this is neither the Harding administration, and historical comparisons are limited by other, differing factors. At this point, we’ve got a combination of factors that hasn’t really happened in history: we’ve got a tightly integrated worldwide system of capital flows, a lot of “rank and file” investors, the presence of an abundance of other ways of capitalizing companies, and proof that corporate bosses were playing around with the numbers in an attempt to make themselves look good. Some of these have been present before (Harding administration, for some, 1929 for others) but I believe the combination is unique, as are all the other social, political, etc. forces involved nowadays. (Hell, this is happening in the middle of a war… isn’t that new?)
Well, one could argue that every historic moment is different from every other moment; there’s truth in that. I’m suggesting that the current situation has more in common with similar situations in the past than not; that’s partly my philosophical approach to life…I learned early on that the exceptionalist argument made by my generation didn’t hold much water. I think we’re in for an interesting time of it on a lot of fronts, but don’t believe that the current round of market scandals nor the (to me inevitible, if only I’d had the nerve and cash to back it up…) decline in the markets represents The End Of Things As We Know Them (or as my gun nut friends are fond of discussing TEOTWAWKI – The End Of The World As We Know It). I’m actually more interested in why it is that so many people seem to long for the Catastrophe, and wonder if that’s somehow unique or related to the philosophical crises I’ve tried to discuss before.
As for that silly bit against Rall… I realize you don’t like the guy, but dislike doesn’t mean dismissable. I think Rall had a valid point in that this could mean a significantly lowered role for stock markets for a long time to come, and it plays into the hands of those young protestor critics of global capitalism awfully well. I think the only reason they haven’t had a bigger presence is because of the WoT, but if that changes, they’ve got ready-made examples for their charges.
I don’t dislike the guy, I’ve never met him. I think that he tends to write stupid things, and since he nominally plays on my team (liberals) that annoys me. I think that markets will play a lower role in corporate capital formation than before, but that’s a good thing, because five clowns and a Yugo can no longer go public at an immense market cap. There’s a reason old-fashioned investment and lending strategies tend to survive: they work pretty well.

Kevin Raybauld asks (in the comments below):
I guess I am just not sure why information qualifies as a different category. Like I said, to me, it seems to fit the category of a natural resource, at least in behavior. How is information different than say, steel? In the 19th century, one could have argued that control and manipulation of steel was just as important to economic success as information is today.
Kevin, steel is information – the information on how to make steel, plus the natural resources (iron ore, coal) plus the labor needed. It’s all one unified process, distinguished only by the way we try and analyze it (candle flame: chemical process or physics problem?).
I argued below that Marx screwed up because he divided everything into two categories: labor and capital (land and frozen labor). I’ll argue there is a third category, information, and that the history of modernity is in part the trumph of the information-wranglers (think clerks, bankers, engineers and scientists) over the landowners and the laborers.
Of course the wranglers are themselves laborers…so the analysis gets kinda complex.
But to quote Dante (the clerk, not the poet) “I’m not even suppsed to be here today…”
Back to looking for projects…

In a world beset by terror and violence, it’s good to know that a simple pun can still make you queasy. A ‘tip’ of the hat to the Wall Street Journal‘s ‘Best Of The Web Today’

Military Operations
Turkish troops leading the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) for Afghanistan won friends among hundreds of Afghan families Tuesday after army doctors carried out a mass circumcision of boys who had missed the important Muslim ceremony for one reason or another,” Reuters reports from Kabul:
“It takes about five to eight minutes to do each person,” an army doctor told Reuters. “If you want, I would be happy to do you and your colleagues.”
The dispatch doesn’t say if the wire service took the doc up on his offer. Nor does it say if the doctors received payment for their work, though we suspect they only took tips.

I’m speechless. Laughing really hard, but speechless. This is almost a Feghoot (let’s see who remembers those)…
.

In Brad DeLong’s Semi-Daily Journal: George Bush Predicts P/E Ratios Will Rise. Megan McArdle Disagrees.
Two more fans of regression to the mean.

Kevin Raybould, over at Lean Left digs down to the roots of what the Democratic Party claims to stand for.
I think his analysis misses a few things…it’s no longer labor vs. capital, but labor vs. capital vs. information…and I’ll argue that this recent bubble is the fleecing of capital by the information workers. But deep down, I’ve always felt that the Democrats should be the party that could help my old administrative assistant…a 32-year old single mom, making about $26,000/year, with minimal benefits and no clear career track.
Who speaks for her??
Certainly not the current crop of Democrats…
A.L.

OK so I asked the one health-care blogger I know of, Alwin Hawkins of View From The Heart what he thought about my post, and he answered in the comments section below. It’s too good to risk folks missing it, so here it is:

OK, first question: do we have national health insurance? No, of course not. You answered that question yourself in your example; LA county hospitals are financed by a complex web of county, state, and federal grants to support the system – a system almost ready to collapse and due for major cutbacks.
(BTW, LA county health system is a great model for how such systems collapse. Currently there is a huge budget problem. The solution? Close the public health clinics, which provide primary care. Why? Because you have to provide emergency medical care; it’s a federal law. So you shut the inexpensive, cost-effective preventive services and keep the expensive emergency services going. It doesn’t have to make sense; it’s the law.)
As Ross pointed out, government health money only pays a fraction of the cost of services, and federal law prevents the hospitals/docs from getting the patient to pay the difference. That means that the private patients – both the insured and the un/underinsured – make up the difference. Whether it’s directly out of your own pocket or indirectly out of your employers pocket, individuals subsidize government mandated health care and federal/state reimbursements.
Government sponsored healthcare is one of those beasts that works only because the government sets the standards. Run out of money? Don’t pay and let the administrators decide which service gets cut, who doesn’t get paid, what capital expenditure gets deferred, what medications aren’t available. After all, sick people don’t bitch much- and if you cut off services, they don’t complain long, either.
To answer your final question, we do it better by requiring every government mandated program or law passed also have the money to provide those services. If we want universal health care, fine. But we have to also agree to pay for it, and to understand that it will be really, really expensive as the Boomers hit the Medicare barrier. We pay as we go, and we pay whatever it takes to provide the services so that employers aren’t left holding the bag.

Bob Morris, who writes the usually sensible ’Politics In The Zeroes’ blog, takes Ted Rall’s hook and gets reeled in (no permalinks, so just scroll down) with this:

Ted Rall on why it’s different this time
Wise words from Ted Rall, an investment banker turned cartoonist/political columnist.

The trouble is that the accounting scandal that brought down Enron, WorldCom and Xerox is something far more serious than a short-term cyclical correction. It threatens to undermine the foundation of market-based capitalism itself. Bush addressed investors twice in one week, but his assurances that help is on the way only drove jittery securities exchanges to record lows. “For lack of a better description, you have as much full-fledged panic as you are going to get,” commented Tony Cecin, director of institutional trading at U.S. Bancorp Piper Jaffray in Minneapolis. “The negative mentality is as pervasive as I have ever seen it, and I went through (the) `73 and `74 bear market.”
The panic is real and it is rational: Investors finally realize that they can’t trust earnings and other “audited” figures released by corporations. Absent that information they can’t evaluate stocks, which leads to only one logical conclusion: sell everything and stay out of the market.
“Independent accounting” was BS all along; even companies that didn’t bribe their auditing firms outright with lucrative consulting deals controlled them via the millions of dollars in fees paid out for their signing off on company financial statements. It’s hardly a unique moment in history to discover that some shepherds have been munching on lambchops from a flock they swore to protect.

Rall, sadly is no better on business history than military reportage. Off the top of my head, from the turn of the century to the 90’s:
Teapot Dome (and pretty much the whole Harding Administration)
Julian Oil, here in L.A.
Ivar Krueger, in Sweden
I.O.S. (Bernie Kornfeld)
Equity Funding
Cendant
People have always cheated; capitalism has survived, Rall’s apocalyptic fantasies notwithstanding.