Pipelineistan

* glenn:

"Already, a plurality support the Censure Resolution, and that's with just one person -- Russ Feingold -- advocating it, and Democrats running away from it. Think of what those numbers will be if Democrats stand united, with some Republicans, and forcefully explain why we cannot allow the President to break the law with impunity.

I have said more times than I can count that Americans have deeply instilled within them the value that nobody is above the law, including the President, and that it is hubristic, arrogant and intolerable for anyone to claim the right to break the law, no matter the intentions. Every poll has shown considerable opposition to this law-breaking despite very little leadership on this issue. What more do Democrats want than this poll? Go forth and censure."

* a number of people are pointing to this article by pepe escobar called Pipelineistan:

"In the corridors of the conference, most of the oil and gas executives and scholars agreed that the way the game is played today in Pipelineistan, everything is politicized.

"When Bush tells India, 'You don't need to import gas from Iran,' that's totally illogical," said a Georgian scholar based in Bologna. "The [alleged Iranian] bomb is a pretext," said an Iranian oil executive based in London. "The Americans don't want Iran to develop, and that's equally true of China and Venezuela. We need to talk about security through knowledge."

Pipelineistan actors are actively discussing the possibility of limited US strikes against, for instance, the Bushehr plant, as was implied by a recent belligerent statement of the US ambassador to the UN, John Bolton.

But the general consensus is that an agreement of sorts will be reached in the next few months - with no UN sanctions against Iran. Asia does not want an Iran battered by the West; Iran, after all, is part of West Asia.

Manochehr Mohammadi, Iran's deputy foreign minister, may have spoken for all of Asia when he said, "Any sanctions will badly reflect more on our immediate neighbors than on ourselves." "

read the rest to get a sense of the interdependencies in the geo-economic/geo-political games being played re Iran. My guess is there's something valuable in there beyond the iran=nukular=bad meme that is being drilled into our brains.
(thnx anon)