McClatchy notes that Palestinians boycott meeting with Israel’s Netanyahu that would have been first in 20 months. Essentially the Palestinians said that Netanyahu hasn’t done a single thing to move the peace process forward, and done several things that have made a settlement of their issues less likely.

The Likud concept of negotiations is very similar to that of the House Republican caucus. In both the other side must agree to everything they propose before there will be a meeting, and then they will add new conditions at the meeting. Nothing the other side proposes is to be considered.

Take the negotiations with the Iranians. The Israelis want the new underground complex at Qom dismantled before any negotiations can take place, and having meetings to establish the agenda for a future meeting of the principals just gives the Iranians more time to work on the nuclear weapons that even Israeli intelligence agrees they haven’t been working on since 2003.

The Iranians are expected to prove a negative, just like Saddam Hussein. Since Saddam couldn’t prove he didn’t have WMDs he was attacked. Knowing that Iran can’t prove that it doesn’t have a nuclear weapons program, the Israelis want to attack it.

Dr Cole covers one of the current Israeli talking points in Iran’s Forbidden Nukes and the Taqiya Lie.

If Zero would like to reduce the price of gas, and to at least show that he isn’t going to embarrass the Nobel committee even further with yet another war, he should make a strong statement. This should suffice: “The United States will respond to any unprovoked attack on the nation of Israel.”

Don’t comment on it. Don’t explain it, beyond saying that it is the US policy. Let the Likud worry about what it means. That’s how NATO got involved in Afghanistan, and is the guarantee of the NATO treaty. Israel isn’t even an ally of the US, like the members of NATO, it is just a ‘friend’, like Saudi Arabia.

The CBC reports that Fracking causes earthquakes, studies confirm.

Wow, who would have expected that injecting fluid into sedimentary rock with sufficient energy to shatter the rock layers might cause earthquakes? [/snark]

The real question is how ignorant to do you have to be not to realize that this would be an obvious outcome of the process? The layers are under stress from the continual movement of the various tectonic plates. If you shatter the rock that makes up one to those plates, the stress will be released. That is pretty much a textbook definition of an earthquake … and the process of fracking.