Dear Friends of Mustafa and Ghazwan,

Last week was full of good news for this family. The SF Unified Schools agreed to fund Mustafa’s next year of school at the Hearing and Speech Center in San Francisco. Mustafa loves school, and has been excelling with his cochlear implant. He now has a vocabulary of 20 words, and can use language to communicate. It is very exciting.

Now that we know where they will need to be, we are madly raising enough funds to get them started in an apartment for 6 months. During this time Mustafa’s mother and brother will arrive, and Ghazwan can begin to look for work. We are confident that this will give them time to be happily reunited, and securely on their own. Please join those who have taken the lead on this leg of Mustafa’s journey and help them over the next six months. They will need to leave Ronald McDonald House by July 31st. No pledge is too small. All donations are tax deductible.

Pledges to date from friends of Mustafa are:

Darragh Kennedy, CEO, Hearing and Speech Center: $50.per month for 6 months.
Peter and Mark Anderson, Anderson Anderson Architecture: $100 per month for 6 months.
Brenda Cravens, Former board member Hearing and Speech Center: $500.
Hesham Alalusi, Alalusi Foundation, $300. Per month for 6 months.
Ruth Friend and Jim Hirst, Ruth Group, $100. Per month for 6 months.
Jackie Okamura, Ronald McDonald House Staff, $50. Per month for 6 months.
Amy Skewes-Cox and Bob Twiss, Ruth Group: $75. Per month for 6 months.
Will Kirkland, Ruth Group: $50. Per month for 6 months.

Thank you all for getting the ball rolling…..and to all of you who have given generously to this family before…..and to all of you who are going to give to them today to make their first 6 months rent in their own home.

Ruth Friend and Amy Skewes-Cox, Ruth Group

Make Checks payable to: Alalusi Foundation/Mustafa Fund
Mail checks to: Ruth Group, Box 722, Mill Valley, CA 94941

“Iraqi forces assumed formal control of Baghdad and other cities Tuesday after American troops handed over security in urban areas in a defining step toward ending the U.S. combat role in the country. A countdown clock broadcast on Iraqi TV ticked to zero as the midnight deadline passed for U.S. combat troops to finish their pullback to bases outside cities.

“The withdrawal of American troops is completed now from all cities after everything they sacrificed for the sake of security,” said Sadiq al-Rikabi, a senior adviser to Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki. “We are now celebrating the restoration of sovereignty.”

The Pentagon did not offer any comment to mark the passing of the deadline.

“Fireworks, not bombings, colored the Baghdad skyline late Monday, and thousands attended a party in a park where singers performed patriotic songs. Loudspeakers at police stations and military checkpoints played recordings of similar tunes throughout the day, as Iraqi military vehicles decorated with flowers and national flags patrolled the capital.”

Fireworks

“A car bomb in the northern Iraqi oil hub of Kirkuk killed at least 41 people and wounded 120 others on the day U.S. forces withdrew from all the Middle Eastern country’s cities.

“The blast occurred in the Aruba neighborhood, said Major James Rawlinson, spokesman at the U.S. encampment located in the Kirkuk Regional Air Base. Rawlinson said Iraqi police, who are on the scene, provided the casualty figures.

“The city of Kirkuk is populated by Iraqi Arabs and Turkmen and Kurdish minorities

Bombs

“With proven oil reserves of around 112 billion barrels and up to another 150 billion barrels of probable reserves, Iraq is the greatest untapped prize for international oil companies.

“To put that in context, if Iraq does turn out to have around 300 billion barrels of oil, it will rival the world’s biggest producer Saudi Arabia - which has around 160 billion barrels of proven reserves.

“So it is little wonder that giant international oil companies are lining up to get back into Iraq after the industry was nationalized in the 1970s and the oil majors were kicked out.

“On June 30 major companies - including Exxon, Shell, BP and Total - will gather at Iraq’s oil ministry in Baghdad for a two-day meeting to take part in the first bidding round for oil service contracts.

Oil

From Vanity Fair: via Raw Story

As Palin has piled misstep on top of misstep, the senior members of McCain’s campaign team have undergone a painful odyssey of their own. In recent rounds of long conversations, most made it clear that they suffer a kind of survivor’s guilt: they can’t quite believe that for two frantic months last fall, caught in a Bermuda Triangle of a campaign, they worked their tails off to try to elect as vice president of the United States someone who, by mid-October, they believed for certain was nowhere near ready for the job, and might never be.

The Vanity Fair piece asks some poignant questions about the significance of Palin’s vice-presidential bid last year. “What does it say about the nature of modern American politics that a public official who often seems proud of what she does not know is not only accepted but applauded?” the article asks.

“What does her prominence say about the importance of having (or lacking) a record of achievement in public life?” the piece continues. “Why did so many skilled veterans of the Republican Party—long regarded as the more adroit team in presidential politics—keep loyally working for her election even after they privately realized she was casual about the truth and totally unfit for the vice-presidency?”

– Daniel Tencer

Not just why did they remain loyal but how their GOP loyalty trumped loyalty to the country? Knowing what they discovered, how is it they were willing to jeopardize all of us with their bad choice and inability to stand up, once knowing, and shout: I was wrong! Do not elect this woman!

Coleman concedes Minnesota Senate race after court decision

Limbaugh says Minnesota is like Iran… Now let’s see, the Chief mullah at the time of the election would have been…..Republican Governor Tim Pawlenty!

Heckuva guy! Heckuva guy!

More “line-crossing” encounters admitted by Sanford. Hope he’s studying Spanish for his new home in Buenos Aires….

Guess that Capitol Christian group isn’t as prayer powerful as it’s been made out to be.

We shall see.

What does withdrawal mean? To the American? To the Iraqis?

How many Americans remain in Iraq? Where? Doing what? How will the Iraqi government and armed forces handle the new configuration of forces, hopes, anger and power?

From Glenn Greenwald

In the now famous “white firefighter” affirmative action case — Ricci v. DeStefano — the Supreme Court today, in a 5-4 ruling (.pdf), reversed the decision of a unanimous Second Circuit Court of Appeals panel (which included Judge Sonia Sotomayor) and held that the firefighters were the victims of unlawful racial discrimination. The Court split along standard ideological lines (Roberts, Thomas, Scalia, Alito and Kennedy in the majority), with Kennedy writing the Court’s opinion. Four Justices agreed with the Second Circuit’s panel, including David Souter, the Justice whom Sotomayor has been nominated to replace. Several points are noteworthy about this decision:

(Continued…)

“The Honduran president, Manuel Zelaya, was ousted by the army on Sunday after pressing ahead with plans for a referendum that opponents said could lay the groundwork for his eventual re-election, in the first military coup in Central America since the end of the cold war.

“Mr. Zelaya, who has the support of labor unions and the poor, is an ally of President Hugo Chávez of Venezuela. During his three years in office, opposition to the president has mounted from the middle class and the wealthy business community who fear that he is planning to introduce Mr. Chávez’s brand of socialist populism into the country, one of Latin America’s poorest.

Opponents of Mr. Zelaya charged that he was following the example of Mr. Chávez, who has repeatedly called Venezuelans to the polls to approve his re-election.

NY Times

” The arrest of local staff members at the British Embassy in Iran is “harassment and intimidation of a kind which is quite unacceptable,” British Foreign Secretary David Miliband said Sunday.

“About nine” staffers have been affected, he said, adding that some had already been released.

“We have protested in strong terms directly to the Iranian authorities about the arrests that took place yesterday,” but there has been no response, Miliband said.

Iran’s government-backed Press TV said earlier on Sunday that eight local British embassy staffers had been seized for their role in the unrest following the disputed presidential elections on June 12.”

CNN

So it passed and we’re simulaneously relieved and happy and disappointed and appalled. We’ve got more than nothing and less than enough. We got a dollar instead of the 20 we need to pay the bail.

I think Joseph Romm has it just about right.

While the bill’s targets may seem dramatic, they are in fact less than what the science tells us is required to avoid catastrophic warming. The 2020 target in particular is far too weak and quite easy and cheap for the country to meet with efficiency, conservation, renewables and fuel-switching from coal to natural gas. The definitive analysis of ACES by the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office found the cost to the average American household in 2020 of ACES would be about a postage stamp a day — despite repeated claims of conservatives using dubious industry-funded research that this bill would devastate the economy.

The GOP arguments against the bill, which included calling global warming a hoax, were so lame that one Democrat, Lloyd Doggett of Texas, who had announced his intention to vote against the bill because it was too weak, switched to supporting the bill after “listening to the flat earth society and the climate deniers, and some of the most inane arguments I have heard against refusing to act on this vital national security challenge.”

It is worth noting that the original Clean Air Act — first passed in 1963 — also didn’t do enough and was subsequently strengthened many times. Similarly, the 1987 Montréal protocol would not have stopped concentrations of ozone depleting substances from rising and would not have saved the ozone layer. But it began a process and established a framework that, like the CAA, could be strengthened over time as the science warranted. The painful reality of climate change is going to become increasingly obvious in the coming years, and strengthening is inevitable.

The bill’s targets are also less than what the Europeans would like to commit to and what developing countries have been demanding of us. Still, the bill is likely to be strong enough — if the Senate also passes it — to bring about a successful international climate deal in Copenhagen in December. Equally important, the bill should be strong enough to reach a bilateral deal with China — ideally before Copenhagen (and even more ideally, before the Senate vote).

Politically, the vote Friday is a stunning achievement, a rare alignment of the stars. This is the first climate bill either house of Congress has passed. This country hasn’t enacted a major economy-wide clean air bill since the Clean Air Act amendments of 1990. And that bill was focused on direct, obvious, short-term health threats to Americans, quite unlike global warming. Also that was a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, when the entire Republican establishment wasn’t dead set against any government led effort to reduce pollution.

We’re in the lifeboat we all know about, drifting further from safety. All we can do at the moment is get a thin string tossed to land and secured to a big tree. It’s no where near strong enough to pull us in and if the current or wind picks up in just a few hours the string will snap and we’ll be lost. It is strong enough to pull a slightly larger line aboard, and with that a slightly larger one until finally the hawser that will keep us from falling off the edge of the word is in our hands. The question is: can we keep hauling faster than calamity overtakes us?