The Israelis attacked and destroyed a shipment of cement coming from N. Korea to Syria.(Many media reports appeared.) Not mentioned was that the cement was to be used for construction of a mikvah, the ritual bath in Judaism, but the use of cement would have rendered the basin of water non-kosher.
This was, therefore, a strictly defensive action by the IDF, and explains the absence of a reaction from Syria and the silence from her Arab neighbors.

What - Barak Obama didn't lavishly praise Israel for bombing Syria? I don't see how he is presidential material.

my only quibble is with the "just" in the title.

this damn sure won't be the last time.

she's pathetic.

Senator Clinton's rich laugh at crazy old man Gravel's ravings against the Lieberman-Kyl amendment was enough to convince me that I will never, never, never, never, never (I can quote Shakespeare with the best of them) vote for her

But of course I thought that already

Can someone explain to me why she is in the lead, if everyone hates her? What does she have, besides name recognition? What has she accomplished?

Maybe Alan Smithee can stop by and tell us all what fools we've been for supporting her.

And KevinD asks a good question. Everyone I know hates her, but the people I know aren't a representative sample of American voters. My theory is that she appeals to the great mass of non-political people, who give little thought to policy, and simply associate the name "Clinton" with a time when we weren't in Iraq and they had not yet been evicted from their home.

OK, but what facts do the fact mongers have?
The IDF attacked something in Syria. But, what and for what reason(s)?
Speculations aplenty, esp. in UK and Israeli papers, but who knows?
The Zionist haters pick the interpretation that fits their ideology, the AIPAC slaves choose theirs.
Sifting through the stuff, what do we know?
It's fun being a sophomore again.
But where are the journalists?

speaking of events in the Tonkin Gulf (in a metaphorical sense), there's the following very even-handed account

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Liberty_incident

and as to what Senator Clinton would like to do, at HuffPost David Bromwich plausibly speculates

She thinks the next war is going to happen. She hopes the worst of its short-term effects on America will have died down before the election. She suspects the media and voters will show more trust for a candidate who supported than for one who opposed the war. She wants a ponderous establishment of American troops and super-bases to remain in the Middle East for years to come. If she wins the presidency, she will inherit the command of that army and those bases, and she believes she can manage their affairs more prudently than George W. Bush.

Hillary Clinton is consistent. Every move is calculated, her actual intentions are masked, but the total drift is easy to comprehend.

It's like somebody watched "Team America: World Police" and thought - "Hey, that's a good plot. We could use that."

Maybe Alan Smithee can stop by and tell us all what fools we've been for supporting her.

That's what's so transparently ridiculous about him. A real nihilist would just go do something more immediately gratifying. Alan Shittee hangs around places like this (when he's not humping IOZ's leg) hoping that someone more intelligent and dedicated than him will figure out a solution that he can follow along with. He wants to believe in the liberalism he sneers at so much, but that opens up the possibility of disappointment (as we all know so well), and he's too much of a weakling to deal with that.

I mean, really - with all the things a non-Republican could be outraged and horrified by these days, what is the point of devoting so much time to shrilly attacking the people who are ineffectively trying to stop them, other than as a sublimated way of dealing with his own feelings of helplessness? His "libertarianism" is just a typical adolescent attempt to stroke his own ego by pretending that he's so far above all the rubes on both sides.

We might very well be engaged in Sisyphean hopelessness here, but most of us have accepted that possibility and decided to do what we can in spite of it. Alan's still crying about it because he wants someone to convince him it's not true.

"If you assume that there is no hope, you guarantee that there will be no hope. If, however, you assume that there is an instinct for freedom and opportunities to change things, there is a chance that you may contribute to making a better world. That is your choice."

-Noam Chomsky