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Nobody who follows the Middle East can be surprised to find out that Israel is apparently considering an offensive attack on Iran. Why is Israel considering attacking Iran? Because the Iranians are trying to develop nuclear weapons. Who already has nuclear weapons? Israel.

The Iranian government is made up of fundamentalist religious nuts. I’m not thrilled about the idea of them having nuclear weapons. But I’m also not happy about Israel having nuclear weapons — or Pakistan or India or France or Russia or the United States. If you want to get brutal about reality, there’s only been one government so far that has shown the willingness to kill and maim hundreds of thousands of civilians with nuclear weapons — and that wasn’t Iran.

If a war between Israel and Iran (and possibly other neighbors) starts, it seems very likely that the United States will be pulled into the mess. It seems even more likely that the flow of oil to the U.S. economy will be disrupted. Gasoline and heating oil will become massively more expensive, which will probably create cries for price controls, leading to shortages and possible rationing. Even if you disregard to tremendous human cost to the participants, the price for the rest of the world will likely be huge if a full-scale war erupts.

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If this video of a judge beating his 16-year-old daughter in a fit of profane rage doesn’t disturb you, there’s something wrong. Judge William Adams can’t even control himself, but he’s had power over other people. He’s a perfect example of why it’s immoral and scary for a few to have power over others.

This video was made in 2004, but it was only posted to YouTube last week. Hillary Adams was 16 when she set up a camera in her bedroom to finally catch her father on videotape during one of his angry rampages. She finally decided to post the video last week. You can read her comments to a Corpus Christi television station here — along with her father’s admission that it is indeed him in the video. (You’ll have to scroll down the page to find comments from both of them.) Police are investigating to decide whether the beating was a crime.

There are a lot of things to read and digest about this story. In the video, the father is angry at the girl for something involving a computer. She now says it was because she was downloading music over the “file sharing” service called Kazaa, which wasn’t legal at the time, so this is the “stealing” that the father was upset about. You have to wonder what the man would have been like if she had don’t something really serious.

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When politicians want more money, their favorite words are, “It’s for the children.” Even those magic words didn’t work in Colorado Tuesday, as voters rejected a $3 billion “temporary” tax hike for government-run schools. Penn Pfiffner, chairman of the underfunded group opposing the tax, showed his joy last night at a celebration in the Denver suburb of Littleton.

Is this a preview of the 2012 election? Republicans hope so. Democrats hope not. I don’t think you can draw a conclusion other than saying that many voters are angry and don’t intend to vote for anything they see as a sacrifice for them. Conservative voters are going to reject even the most well-intentioned tax hike. (Check out this story if you want to know what the Colorado tax would have done.) Liberal voters are going to reject anything they see as being favorable to people who they believe already have money or privilege.

In other words, it’s going to be an especially polarizing election in 2012 in many places. In their anger, people aren’t going to be voting for someone as much as they’re going to voting against someone who represents something they hate.

Republicans will end up nominating one of the usual suspects (such as Mitt Romney), and Democrats will presumably stick with Barack Obama. Republican voters won’t love their nominee, but they will hate Obama and work passionately to defeat him. Democrats won’t love Obama, for the most part, but they will hate the Republican nominee, who they will see as a representative for “the rich.”

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