One of the things that’s causing Tig’s quick downslide is that he’s not eating much. So the vet had me try him on a quarter-pill of pepcid. I managed to get one down him this morning. And I think it’s working. Because Tig just ate his dry food twice in the last hour. And he ate nearly all of the Sheba tuna (which had the phosphor-binding powder mixed in). He’s just been licking the gravy off it lately.

And he’s showing an interest in chasing that wadded-up napkin.

I think I’m going to have to hold off on the eulogy.

He’s eating!

For that, we get a mid-week cat picture.

That was before the vet visit yesterday. I cleaned out the cat carrier and was airing it out. Tig, of course, had his own ideas of what “airing it out” consists of.

The NYT:

After widespread criticism of its decision to cut off supplies of industrial diesel oil required to run a power station that serves Gaza City and its hospitals, Israel resumed fuel shipments on Tuesday on what it said would be a temporary basis.The European Union, which pays for the fuel, called the cutoff “collective punishment,” but Israeli officials said they were simply trying to convince Gazans of the need to stop militants from firing rockets into Israeli towns and farms.

11 paragraphs down:

Israeli officials have made it clear, as one senior official said, that as long as rockets are hitting Israel, “the people of Gaza will be uncomfortable and know that life is not normal.” Israel, however, will not allow a “humanitarian crisis,” Mr. Olmert has said. About 13 Qassam rockets landed in Israel on Tuesday, the Israeli Army said, but did no damage.

Additional demerit: Mentioning the EU reaction without dissent. The Jerusalem Post observes:

Perhaps more European officials should visit Sderot before opening their mouths. Dutch Foreign Minister Maxime Verhagen did just that, and had this to say: “Hamas is deliberately intensifying the crisis in the Gaza Strip in order to create pressure from the international community on Israel.” The international community need not play Hamas’s game. If Western officials uniformly blamed Hamas instead of amplifying its propaganda, it might be forced to stop its aggression, ending the “humanitarian crisis.” As necessary as Israeli military and non-military measures are, the greatest pressure of all would be if the international community let it be clearly known that it was fed up acting as Hamas’s dupes.

The Washington Post:

Israel eased its blockade of the Gaza Strip for at least a day Tuesday, allowing the European Union and United Nations to truck in the first food shipments in five days, along with fuel to restart the Palestinian territory’s idled power plant.Gaza, which has a population of 1.5 million, had been cut off since Friday, when Israel closed entry points in response to an increase in rocket barrages from the strip last week. About half a million Gaza residents were without power for most of Sunday and Monday after the territory’s power plant exhausted its fuel reserves.

6 paragraphs down:

Israel has said since it began the blockade that it would allow in shipments only after individual review. Palestinians launched at least 17 rockets at Israel from Gaza on Tuesday, causing no damage, the Israeli military said.

Additional demerit: Including a slideshow that emphasizes Gaza without power but no views of damage to Sderot.

What’s clear is that when Israel tightened restrictions on shipments to Gaza the rocket attacks decreased. When Israel resumed shipments, the rocket attacks increased again. Idiots like Amira Hess excluded, sensible people would conclude that the fuel is being used not only for hospitals and other matters of public welfare, but also to fuel rockets.

It wouldn’t be the first time that the Palestinians were sacrificing the welfare of their population for the opportunity to attack Israel. Last year they were digging up sewage pipes to make Qassams regardless of the sanitation nightmare that it would cause.

But Hamas learned. The world would lean on Israel to avoid a “humanitarian crisis” and the terror could continue.

The NY Times and Washington Post have chosen, in the words of the Jerusalem Post to join the “Dupes of Hamas” and emphasize Israel’s reactions, portraying them in the worst possible light and all but ignoring the actions that precipitated Israel’s response and the success that could be credited to that response.

Special demerits to Secretary of State Rice:

SECRETARY RICE: Yeah. We have talked to the Israelis, yes. And I think that they are — they’ve said that they do not want a humanitarian crisis and that they understand the need to permit fuel and electricity in Gaza. So we will see. But my understanding is that they’ve said that they will try and respond in a way that will not allow a humanitarian crisis to unfold there. Ultimately, Hamas is to blame for this circumstance because if they were more responsible toward the international community, then there would be — Gaza would be connected to the outside world rather than cut off. But with that said, nobody wants innocent Gazans to suffer. And so we have spoken to the Israelis about the importance of not allowing humanitarian crisis to unfold there.QUESTION: But don’t you think it’s (inaudible) every time there is tension and (inaudible).

SECRETARY RICE: Well, I think the Israelis are trying to deal with also an untenable situation from their point of view, which is the firing of rockets from Gaza into Israel and the anxiety and the terror that that’s causing for the population. So I’m not surprised that this is a situation of tension. But I’m hopeful that perhaps people can look at different ways of dealing with Gaza. As you know, the Quartet has suggested that Salam Fayyad’s idea of allowing the PA to have more of a role on the — perhaps on the crossings might be something that could be examined. And I think people need to start to try to think creatively about how to deal with the situation in Gaza.

One wonders why the Old South comparisons fail her now? Would it be that impolitic to mention that armed extremists are keeping Israeli children from school as surely as armed guards once kept black children from school?

More from Boker Tov Boulder, Elder of Ziyon and Meryl Yourish.

Crossposted on Soccer Dad.

A missing cat, a stowaway, the wrong suitcase, and a happy ending.

PALM BEACH GARDENS, Fla. — Some kitty math: How many lives did little tabby Gracie Mae use up when she crawled into her owner’s suitcase, went through an airport X-ray machine, got loaded onto a plane, thrown onto a baggage belt and mistakenly picked up by a stranger far from home?

“She’s got to be at four or five now,” Seth Levy said after his 10-month-old pet was returned Sunday night by a kind stranger who went home to Fort Worth, Texas, with the wrong bag and Gracie inside to boot.

The last time Levy’s wife, Kelly, saw Gracie was before she took her husband to the airport. The 24-year-old went back to her house in Palm Beach Gardens late Friday to find the bottom step, where Gracie would usually be waiting, empty.

She tore the house apart looking for the cat, who had been spayed just days before. She and her dad took out bathroom tiles and part of a cabinet to check a crawl space and papered the neighborhood with “lost cat” signs.

Then she got a phone call.

“Hi, you’re not going to believe this, but I am calling from Fort Worth, Texas, and I accidentally picked up your husband’s luggage. And when I opened the luggage, a cat jumped out,” Kelly Levy quoted the caller saying.

Rob Carter said he made it home with the suitcase before realizing it wasn’t his - and there was a big surprise inside.

“I went to unpack and saw some of the clothes and saw it wasn’t my suitcase,” he said. “I was going to close it, and a kitten jumped out and ran under the bed. I screamed like a little girl.”

Carter said that he eventually was able to get the cat to come out from under the bed.

“In the morning, I got close enough to see its collar and the phone number on it,” he said. “So I called the number and got a hold of the crying wife of the traveler.”

I figure we can use a happy kitty story.

Israeli journalists covering the death of an Ecuadoran worker by Palestinian sniper fire were attacked—by Palestinian snipers. It’s all on video, and it’s on YouTube. Thanks to Giyus for the heads-up.

I eagerly await the complaint from Reporters Without Borders.

Hundreds of thousands of Gazans are passing back and forth freely into Egypt. Hamas and Egypt are both managing to slam Israel for keeping Gazans in Gaza, although Egypt has never wanted Gaza back, even when offered the Strip after the Six-Day War. They’ve blamed Israeli “oppression” over the past several years as the reason Gazans are “imprisoned” in the territory. But here, I think, is the real reason, the one that the AP editors let slip past:

In Egyptian Rafah, a market stall selling pistols and ammunition clips for Kalashnikov assault rifles had no customers Wednesday. Weapons are generally brought into Gaza through smuggling tunnels under the Gaza-Egypt border.

An off-duty Hamas policeman, who only gave his first name, Abdel Rahman, said there was no need to buy weapons from Egypt.

“You can buy weapons in Gaza, guns and RPGs,” he said, adding that they were easier to find than cancer medicine or Coca-Cola.

Weapons are easier to find than Coca-Cola. And the UN is still talking about criticizing Israel over shutting down the Gaza Strip.

The Jerusalem Post reports on the support that PM Olmert has:

Prime Minister Ehud Olmert received a boost from the far left of the political map Tuesday when former Knesset speaker Avraham Burg, former Meretz leader Shulamit Aloni and Peace Now director-general Yariv Oppenheimer said he should be allowed to remain in power after the Winograd Report’s publication.Burg retired from politics in 2004 and has since made headlines by adopting increasingly extremist positions. He most recently made news six months ago when he obtained a French passport and wrote a book comparing Israel to Nazi Germany and suggesting that Israel should no longer be a Jewish state.
…
Aloni endorsed Olmert in an interview with Yediot Aharonot. She blamed the problems of the war on the IDF and said that due to his lack of military experience, Olmert could not have been expected to contradict the generals.

“Under the current conditions, I would prefer that Olmert remain,” Aloni said. “I have no trust in [Labor chairman Ehud] Barak. It could be that [Barak] is a wonderful pianist and he knows how to take apart and put back together watches, but I stopped liking him long ago. I would vote for Olmert.”

Oppenheimer sent a letter to members of Labor’s executive committee and the party’s branch heads calling upon Barak to keep Labor in the government in order to advance the peace process. Oppenheimer will host a rally with the same message on Sunday at Labor headquarters.

Perhaps PM Olmert’s support is broader based, but these three are saying that his failings, evidenced by his mistakes during the Lebanon war of 2006, ought to be overlooked.

Ari Shavit writes that there is another group that dissents, The company commanders’ outcry:

The dozens of company commanders who sent a warning letter yesterday to the prime minister are not all cut from the same cloth. Among them are residents of Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, Haifa and Modi’in, Kiryat Ono, Gedera and Eli. Among them are high-tech people and real-estate dealers, students and educators, engineers, programmers and tour guides. Among them are religious and secular people, leftists and rightists, urbanites, moshav members and kibbutz members. All of them are company commanders in the reserves. Combat companies in the infantry, the armored corps, paratroops and the artillery corps. And they are telling Prime Minister Ehud Olmert: Take responsibility. Acknowledge the value of responsibility.
…
The company commanders who signed the letter sent yesterday evening to Olmert are a significant part of the IDF assault command, and this group has said in its letter that it is no longer possible to continue in this way. That the way the prime minister is behaving has damaged the value basis of national security. That a supreme commander who does not know how to take responsibility for his actions loses the moral authority to send soldiers into battle.

According to Shavit, these commanders didn’t use their position to threaten to disobey orders - unlike more publicized similar letters - but simply asked that the political leader of their country accept responsibility.

The Jerusalem Post reports on another, more personal blow against the Prime Minister:

FORMER JUSTICE and finance minister Dan Meridor and Prime Minister Ehud Olmert go back a long way together. They were both second generation MKs raised in the Revisionist ideology of their fathers, and elected on a Likud ticket. When Meridor’s sons were bar mitzva, Olmert not only came to the party, but also to the synagogue service, indicative of a close friendship. It must therefore have been difficult for Meridor to speak out against Olmert at the opening day, in the Knesset, of the annual Herzliya Conference.Meridor was one of the panelists in the session on the Winograd Committee and National Security Decision-Making, and had to leave early, so he was spared the embarrassment of being asked at question time to elaborate on his remarks, which didn’t mention Olmert by name. What he said was that, “There are people who are capable of being elected but not of making decisions. The public should elect people who not only reflect their ideology, but who have the capacity to lead. The person elected should not devote time to getting re-elected, but to learning, so that he would never get to the stage of saying: ‘They told me, but what do I understand?’”

I won’t pretend that this will make a difference. It won’t. Unless enough coalition members decide that it’s worth jeopardizing their political futures, Olmert will remain in power. Unfortunately Israel’s political system is so configured that vanity is more important than integrity. A political leader who lost the public’s trust need not regain that trust to stay in power; he needs only to convince 61 people that he is indispensable to their ambitions and interests.

Still it’s telling that those who most publicly support the PM unconditionally are at the political margins. Maybe when he was elected, PM Olmert represented a centrist coalition; now he is the candidate of the Left.
Crossposted on Soccer Dad.

The Arab League is currently trying to get the UN Security Council to pass a resolution forcing Israel to reopen the Gaza Crossings. I wonder, I thought, whether the UN Security Council ever passed a resolution insisting that the terrorists in Gaza stop firing rockets into Israel. So I looked through the 2007 resolutions. Couldn’t find one. Checked in 2006. Couldn’t find one. Maybe back in 2005, after Israel left Gaza? Nope.

So it seems that the United Nations is silent, always, about rockets being fired into a member state from the territories that are ministered by UNRWA. But the UNSC is going to issue a statement condemning Israel for daring to close the crossings after terrorists fired hundreds of rockets at Israeli homes, farms, and schools.

NEW YORK - The UN Security Council is expected to issue a presidential statement Wednesday denouncing Israel’s conduct in the Gaza Strip.

The council held an emergency session yesterday on the humanitarian situation in Gaza, at the Arab states’ request, and the debate was expected to continue far into the night.

The initial draft circulated Tuesday demanded an immediate halt to Israel’s “illegal” actions against Gaza’s civilian population, expressed “grave concern” over the deteriorating humanitarian situation there and demanded that Israel honor its obligations under international law. However, Israel has been lobbying Security Council members to soften the language, arguing that the draft is utterly one-sided, and UN sources said that both the United States and Britain back Israel’s objections, while other council members are also uncomfortable with the current language.

Even more strange, Israel has modified the blockade to make sure that Gazans receive fuel from now on. But they’re not going to get luxuries. In fact, the fuel has already been sent. And Gaza’s thank-you note came with explosives attached. Hell, even the AP noticed the rockets and put them in its main Gaza story lede.

Israel sent fuel to Gaza’s power plant on Tuesday, easing its five-day blockade of the Palestinian territory amid growing international concern about a humanitarian crisis.

The U.S. warned Israel not to add to the hardship for ordinary Palestinians but blamed the problem on Gaza’s Islamic Hamas rulers. Israel imposed the siege in response to increasing rocket attacks on its border communities by Gaza militants.

Despite the easing of the closure, Palestinian militants fired 19 rockets toward Israel on Tuesday, the military said, up from just two on Monday.

When even the AP puts the rocket attacks in its lede, you have to wonder why the UNSC won’t put them in its statement. And then, of course, you remember that Libya has been elected to the rotating position on the Security Council. Libya is, in fact, the president of the UNSC. Imagine that. A terrorist state, pushing for a resolution condemning Israel’s actions defending herself from terrorism, and backed, of course, by the Arab League and the OIC. The Muslim bloc is pushing for an anti-Israel statement.

In New York, the UN Security Council adjourned until Wednesday talks on a statement that would urge an end to the Israeli lockdown while also slamming militants firing rockets into the Jewish state.

But a council diplomat, speaking on condition of anonymity after a heated emergency session, voiced skepticism that the United States, a staunch ally of Israel, would accept a compromise text sought by the 14 other council members.

“Fourteen members indicated (during Tuesday’s debate) they wanted a (compromise) text. One, the United States, expressed reluctance,” the diplomat said. “Therefore, it will be difficult to agree an acceptable compromise.”

Adoption of the non-binding text requires approval by all members.

Libya, the council chair this month, submitted a draft that would call on Israel to end its blockade of Gaza and ensure “unhindered access for humanitarian assistance to the Palestinian people,” according to a copy of the text obtained by AFP.

The text would also urge Israel “to abide by its obligation under international law, including humanitarian and human rights law, and immediately to cease all its illegal measures and practices against the Palestinian civilian population in the Gaza Strip.”

However, US Ambassador to the United Nations Zalmay Khalilzad told reporters the draft in its current form was “unacceptable” because “it does not talk about the rocket attacks on innocent Israelis.”

At the White House, spokeswoman Dana Perino expressed understanding for Israel’s dilemma.

“One of the reasons that Israel has taken the action it has is because it was sustaining upwards of 150 rockets falling on its territory a day. And so Israel is defending itself,” she said.

So the big question for tomorrow is: U.S. veto, or U.S. cave? And secondary question: How long before the General Assembly issues its own anti-Israel resolution?