Israel called on the United States and a number of European countries over the weekend to curb their criticism of President Hosni Mubarak to preserve stability in the region.

Jerusalem seeks to convince its allies that it is in the West’s interest to maintain the stability of the Egyptian regime. (Read more from haaretz.com)

* Government prevents credit card companies from raising rates, so they now have higher starting rates. Very typical of government regulation.

Illinois is one of the states with the toughest laws against audiotaping a conversation between you and another party without their knowledge. The law [text] states that you can face up to 15 years in prison for committing the offense.

Christopher Drew, a 60-year-old artist and teacher living in Chicago, is facing the charge after audio taping a conversation he had with the police. In an interview with The New York Times, he remarks on his potential 15 years of hard prison time, “That’s one step below attempted murder.”

He adds, “Before they arrested me for it. I didn’t even know there was a law about eavesdropping. I wasn’t trying to sue anybody. I just wanted somebody to know what had happened to me.”

He is not alone. Other Chicago residents, including Tiawanda Moore, a 20-year-old former stripper, face similar charges. They all have one thing in common — their charges follow audio taping conversations with police. The law is seldom applied in other situations – in fact, most don’t even know it exists. The law even makes it a lesser offense to tape a civilian once (a Class 4 felony) or twice (a Class 3 felony), versus taping a law enforcement officer (a Class 1 felony).

Ms. Moore’s story is among the most alarming. She is being charged with the Class 1 felony of eavesdropping using a digital device after recording on her Blackberry a conversation she had with two internal affairs officers. The conversation occurred during her attempt to report a separate police officer for sexual harassment. Now she’s set for a February 7 trial in Cook County Criminal Court and may spend more than a decade in prison.

Contrast this state of affairs with the fact that Chicago police officers have one of the most stained reputations for police brutality. According to a 2007 CNN report, 10,000 complaints — many of them involving brutality and assault — were filed between 2002 and 2004. (Read more from www.dailytech.com)

Shaked considers the West’s demands for more openness and democracy in Egypt to be a fatal mistake. “It is an illusion to believe that the dictator Mubarak could be replaced by a democracy,” he says. “Egypt is still not capable of democracy,” he adds, pointing out that the illiteracy rate is over 20 percent, to give just one example. The Muslim Brotherhood is the only real alternative, he opines, which would have devastating consequences for the West. “They will not change their anti-Western attitude when they come to power. That has not happened (with Islamist movements) anywhere: neither in Sudan, Iran nor Afghanistan.”

Ultimately the choice is between a pro- or an anti-Western dictatorship, says Shaked. “It is in our interest that someone from Mubarak’s inner circle takes over his legacy, at any cost.” In the process, it is not possible to rule out massive bloodshed in the short term, he says. “It would not be the first time that riots in Egypt were brutally crushed.” (Read more from spiegel.de)

Pay attention the protester at 0:45 and his wholly secular message, contrary to CNN’s Muslim Brotherhood spin.

Great photo collections here and here. Also, this video of protesters crossing a bridge and cops giving way before them demonstrates the scope of these protests.

There’s a good protest timeline on Al Jazeera, which is usually better than CNN.

What do the protesters want? Don’t ask Biden.

The White House may stand behind the protesters in Tunisia, but demonstrators in Egypt haven’t gotten the presidential blessing. Appearing on PBS NewHour last night, gaffe-prone Vice President Joe Biden remarked that he doesn’t consider Egyptian leader Hosni Mubarak a dictator—despite his 29-year rule—and isn’t sure what exactly protesters want.

(source)

I wonder how much of the US’s luke warm view of the protests has to do with the Israel Lobby. I can imagine them wanting a tyrant whom the US more or less controls over a popular movement.

Obviously, government repression doesn’t like internet freedom of information. By the way:

Internet ‘kill switch’ bill will return
A controversial bill handing President Obama power over privately owned computer systems during a “national cyberemergency,” and prohibiting any review by the court system, will return this year. . . . Portions of the Lieberman-Collins bill, which was not uniformly well-received when it became public in June 2010, became even more restrictive when a Senate committee approved a modified version on December 15. The full Senate did not act on the measure. (Read more from news.cnet.com)

Riot control agents used against the Egyptian protests seem to be Made in the USA. Are you proud, chest-thumbing neo-cons? Wait, don’t answer that.

See Also:
The US government has spent hundreds of millions of dollars over the years to equip the Egyptian security forces with high-tech military hardware.

But unless things get really, really bad there, it’s unlikely that any big-ticket American military hardware will be used directly against the Egyptian demonstrators. A selection of Defense Department contracts dating to the mid-1990s reveals weapons sales to Egypt that include a Black Hawk helicopters (Sikorsky), a dizzying variety of missiles (Raytheon), Abrams tanks (General Dynamics), Humvees (AM General Corp.) and all manner of ammunition. . . .

Now, if through some incredible circumstance Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak decides to flee the country, à la Ben Ali, there’s a good chance his first-class flight would come courtesy of the American taxpayer.

Pentagon contracts show that the US government has spent at least $111,160,328 to purchase and maintain Mubarak’s fleet of nine Gulfstream business jets. (For those keeping score, Gulfstream is a subsidiary of General Dynamics.) (Read more from warisbusiness.com)

* State of the Union will be known as delusional once the collapse comes.

* Congressional Budget Office upgrades this year’s deficit projection by $400 billion. (So much for Obama’s $100 million cut.)

* President’s central planning — education, high speed trains, etc. — is wasteful central planning. No one knows future.

* Fed voted unanimously to do more of the same: quantitative easing, 0% interest. Full steam ahead on financial suicide. Fed printing will soon eclipse tax revenue.

* Government panel on financial crises was a complete farce. Financial crises was used as excuse to grow government. Concluded housing bubble *not* caused by Freddie, Fanny, low interest, government forcing banks to make bad loans. Panel concluded instead it was a lack of regulation.

(Here the NY Times gives voice to the inquiries fraudulent findings.)

Jack Hunter notes the response to the State of the Union, and the palpable shift of conservative rhetoric away from war and toward fiscal sanity:

See also, Visualizing Obama’s Budget Cut:

“The president’s team is going to take 90 days to find some way to take this [1/4 of one penny], out of that [those thousands of pennies on right].”

I think an excellent start would be firing the team.

* Chief Medicare Actuary on President’s health care claims: “I would say false, more so than true”

I wonder what Paul Krugman is thinking. In his latest attack on the Austrian school, Great Leaps Backward, he notes the rising tide of its popularity and describes it as a repudiation of 75 years of economic progress since the work of John Maynard Keynes.

Robert Murphy of the Mises Institute has been trying to shame Krugman into an economic debate by raising over $60,000 for charity should Krugman accept.

In this fantastic essay, Murphy rebuts Krugman’s latest assault. I highly recommend the essay, it includes the clearest explanation of Austrian Capital and Interest theories I’ve seen, followed by an exhaustive rebuttal.

While some Americans assume this is a “Arab affair”, the fact is that Egypt’s president Mubarak is a yes-man to the U.S., and the fall of the Tunisian and now Egyptian leaders are really the ouster of U.S. puppet regimes in the Middle East.

. . .

Mainstream Islamist parties in the Mideast have nothing to do with al-Qaida (which barely exists any more) or anti-Western programs. Their primary concern is getting rid of the western-backed oligarchies that keep the Muslim world backwards and in thrall. Their platform is sharing resource wealth, social welfare, education, uprooting thieving oligarchies and fighting endemic corruption.

The big question now is will Tunisia’s dramatic events be a harbinger of other explosions across the volatile Arab world? All eyes are on Egypt, the home of a third of all Arabs. Egypt’s 83-year-old military ruler, Husni Mubarak, is a giant version of Tunisia’s Gen. Ben Ali.

Mubarak was engineered into power by the US after the killing of longtime CIA “asset” Anwar Sadat. Gen. Mubarak has ruled Egypt like a modern-day pharaoh ever since, crushing both violent extremist and legitimate political opposition. Mubarak’s rigged elections, winked at by Washington, are every bit as egregious as Tunisia’s.

So could the flames of Tunisia’s revolution spread to Egypt?

Today, we got the answer. (Read more from washingtonsblog.com)

Documents to show ‘intimate level of covert co-operation’ between Israel, Palestinian Authority

“Desperate” Palestinian negotiators offered Israel almost all of Jerusalem as part of a peace deal, only to see the offer rejected as inadequate, leaked official Palestinian documents show.

Documents leaked to Arabic news channel al-Jazeera and obtained by the Guardian show that senior Palestinian negotiator Ahmed Qureia made the offer to Israeli negotiators in June of 2008, at a meeting attended by then Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and then Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni.

Qureia’s offer would see all of East Jerusalem, except one neighborhood — Har Homa — handed over permanently to Israel as part of a peace deal.

“This is the first time in history that we make such a proposition; we refused to do so in Camp David,” Qureia reportedly said, referring to the peace negotiations held under President Clinton, which fell apart in 2000 with the start of the Second Intifada.

In response, “the Israeli side refused to even place Jerusalem on the agenda, let alone offer the PA concessions in return for its historic offer,” al-Jazeera reports.

The Guardian reports:

Israeli negotiator Tzipi Livni is recorded as dismissing the offer out of hand because the Palestinians had refused to concede Har Homa, as well as the settlements at Ma’ale Adumim, near Jerusalem, and Ariel, deeper in the West Bank. Israel’s position was fully supported by the Bush administration.

“We do not like this suggestion because it does not meet our demands, and probably it was not easy for you to think about it, but I really appreciate it,” Livni said.

“These documents could discredit among Palestinians the very notion of negotiation with Israel and the two-state solution that underpins it,” Jonathan Freedland wrote in a comment piece at the Guardian. (Read more from rawstory.com)

Also, via Twitter: Al Jazeera will release the 1st of more than 1,600 documents related to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. 20GMT

The late Leslie Nielsen first gained comic notoriety for the 1980 film Airplane!, which is often portrayed as a parody of 1970s-era disaster films like Airport. In fact Airplane! was a satirical remake of the little-known 1957 film Zero Hour! Filmmakers Jerry Zucker, David Zucker, and Jim Abrahms were taping late-night television commercials, looking for material to spoof, when they realized the movie that was airing “around” the commercials — Zero Hour! — provided a riper target.

A number of scenes and dialogue in Airplane! are lifted directly from Zero Hour!, as this montage demonstrates:

The Zucker-Abrahms group acquired the legal rights to Zero Hour! to avoid any problems. But the point here is that far from devaluing the original film or “pirating” anyone’s “intellectual property,” the Airplane! creators took an otherwise forgettable movie and reworked it into a modern comedy classic. Sure, the initial idea wasn’t original. But artistic success isn’t about “originality” so much as it’s about having the talent to execute — or re-execute — an idea in such a way as to create value in the minds of consumers. (Read more from blog.mises.org)

This link to an Open Europe News Summary Blog reveals that any country in the Euro Zone can print as many Euros as it wishes simply by notifying the European Central Bank. This is why Ireland was able to print 51 billion Euros last week to bail out its banks. Here’s the quote from the Open Europe blog:

The Irish Independent learnt last night that the Central Bank of Ireland is financing €51bn of an emergency loan programme by printing its own money… …A spokesman for the ECB said the Irish Central Bank is itself creating the money it is lending to banks, not borrowing cash from the ECB to fund the payments. The ECB spokesman said the Irish Central Bank can create its own funds if it deems it appropriate, as long as the ECB is notified.

This is very disturbing. In effect it allows mutliple, legitimate counterfeiters to print as much money as they wish; therefore, hyperinflation will ensue very quickly, because each Euro Zone member will have a great incentive to print money as fast as possible before prices go up. This could be the very quick end of the Euro, and it could create chaos in Europe and around the world.

American readers can consider this analogy: it is as if each state of the union could print as many dollars as it wished simply by notifying the Fed. Does anyone doubt that the dollar would collapse into hyperinflation overnight?
(Read more from patrickbarron.blogspot.com)

VIA Kevin Drum, Keith O’Brien reports in the Boston Globe on a new study showing positive results from Portugal’s nine-year-old experiment in drug decriminalisation. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, rates of hard- and soft-drug usage in Portugal were soaring, along with hepatitis and HIV rates.

Faced with both a public health crisis and a public relations disaster, Portugal’s elected officials took a bold step. They decided to decriminalize the possession of all illicit drugs—from marijuana to heroin—but continue to impose criminal sanctions on distribution and trafficking. The goal: easing the burden on the nation’s criminal justice system and improving the people’s overall health by treating addiction as an illness, not a crime.

But nearly a decade later, there’s evidence that Portugal’s great drug experiment not only didn’t blow up in its face; it may have actually worked. More addicts are in treatment. Drug use among youths has declined in recent years. Life in Casal Ventoso, Lisbon’s troubled neighborhood, has improved. And new research, published in the British Journal of Criminology, documents just how much things have changed in Portugal. Coauthors Caitlin Elizabeth Hughes and Alex Stevens report a 63 percent increase in the number of Portuguese drug users in treatment and, shortly after the reforms took hold, a 499 percent increase in the amount of drugs seized—indications, the authors argue, that police officers, freed up from focusing on small-time possession, have been able to target big-time traffickers while drug addicts, no longer in danger of going to prison, have been able to get the help they need.

Some researchers caution that Portugal’s results may be due not so much to tolerance for drug possession as to making more treatment available. But of course these two always go hand in hand, in any harm-reduction strategy for drug use: it’s only by decriminalising possession that you get problem users to come in for treatment.

Portugal is far from the only country that’s embraced such harm-reduction strategies, and the verdicts everywhere seem to be similar: they may lead to greater usage of soft drugs, they don’t seem to lead to significant increases in hard-drug usage, and they significantly reduce the costs of drug addiction to society. That doesn’t mean that drug policy disappears from the political agenda in countries that move towards harm reduction. The newspapers in the Netherlands reported today on a very American-seeming scandal: a website set up by an association of heroin users in Amsterdam, intended to provide addicts with advice on health and safe non-infectious usage, could be read as effectively providing how-to advice on how to shoot up, accessible to web surfers of any age. A conservative-leaning Dutch youth expert wants the site to be somehow restricted to those over the age of 12. But it’s instructive to read the reaction of a council member from the right-wing, laissez-faire VVD party, which currently leads the Dutch governing coalition:

On the one hand, we must ensure that the lowest possible number of people use that stuff. On the other hand, if they do, they should use clean needles, not borrow them from each other. And they should try to limit the health risks. That’s the perspective from which I look at the site.

This is a perfectly rational conservative perspective. And the fact is that Amsterdam’s heroin-addict population has been stable or falling for two decades. That’s even though, since 2002, the Dutch authorities have been doing something even more radical than Portugal’s for heroin users: they’ve been giving them free heroin, as long as they show up to inject at government-run “safe injection points”, under the eyes of police and health staff. Dutch drug researchers now say that the youth population “doesn’t relate to hard drugs at all”, and that there’s no danger that Dutch kids reading the advice site will find heroin use attractive. They’re more likely to find it pathetic.

Drug abuse is driven to a significant extent by fashion. If there’s one thing government has going for it, it’s the ability to make anything unfashionable. (Read more from economist.com)

Bolivia has embarked on an international mission to try to end the ban on chewing coca leaves. But the United States plans on getting in its way.

Coca has been used in the Andes for thousands of years as a mild stimulant and herbal medicine, but it is also a raw ingredient in the drug cocaine.

Bolivia, which argues that chewing coca leaves is part of indigenous culture, hopes to take coca leaves off a UN treaty on banned drugs, BBC News reports.

President Evo Morales, a former leader of a coca growers’ union, argues that it is discriminatory to classify coca as an illicit drug and launched a global campaign after his election in 2005 to legalize it.

. . .

Spain has already given its support to Bolivia’s campaign.

. . .

The United States plans on formally objecting to Bolivia’s proposal on Wednesday, AP reports. It argues that changing the convention would pave the way for other nations to challenge the inclusion of certain narcotics based on parochial reasons. (Read more from globalpost.com)