In our coverage of yesterday’s bloody attacks in which eight Israelis were murdered by Palestinian terrorists near Eilat, Contentions authors have attempted to go below the surface and understand what those who planned or colluded in the atrocity hoped to accomplish.

I pointed out it was possibly a provocation aimed at reminding the region Hamas has the power to unleash violence anytime it wants from its secure terror state on Israel’s doorstep, especially with the confrontation over statehood about to take place in the United Nations. David Hazony saw it as an effort on the part of Hamas to help distract the world from the atrocities its ally Syria is conducting against their own people as well as Palestinians. And Evelyn Gordon believes Egypt is turning a blind eye to its territory being used as a base for terror attacks in order to convince Israel to allow it to re-militarize the Sinai.

All of this may be true, but today, another angle to this story must be considered.

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It is tough to be a woman in Saudi Arabia: Women cannot go outside their home without a husband or a male family member to escort them and famously cannot drive. They have no vote although, again, pretty much no one in Saudi Arabia does. The State Department advises women traveling unescorted that restaurants may refuse them service. Because of the myriad restrictions, most Saudi women cannot work in public places. A 2005 law which would have allowed women to work in public shops remains unimplemented.

But if women cannot work, then pity the poor bra salesmen who must sell lingerie to women in the Islamist kingdom. According to an expose in Hurriyet:

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A lot of the media coverage of the Verizon union worker strike has overlooked the root cause of the dispute between management and labor: the increased cost of health care under the 2010 Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare.

Union workers called a strike after Verizon asked them to cover the price of their health care premiums. According to Verizon’s statement to employees, Obamacare tax hikes forced the company to pass on the extra cost to workers:

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In addition to this being the 20^th anniversary of the attempted coup to reinstate Communist rule in Russia today, this month also marks the 50^th anniversary of the building of the Berlin Wall whose fall heralded the collapse of the Soviet empire. While there have been many retrospectives published on these events, one of the most insightful comes from the daughter of the man who built the wall: Nina Khruscheva who now teaches international affairs at the New School in New York City who wrote about the double anniversary in The Scotsman. Unlike Mikhail Gorbachev, who refused to defend Communism or the Wall with force, her father Nikita Khrushchev was prepared to do whatever it took to hold Eastern Europe in thrall, even if she does portray him as the victim of pressure from Kremlin hardliners.

But the main point to be gleaned from this history is not trying to determine whether he was the villain of the story or that Mikhail Gorbachev was a hero.

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So does this definitively dash Big Labor’s last great hope to take out Gov. Scott Walker next year? Now that former Sen. Russ Feingold’s announced he won’t run for governor, the chances of Democrats finding an electable candidate to compete with Walker in a 2012 recall election are sure to be much slimmer.

Not only is public sentiment in the state moving against a recall, but Feingold was the only potential Democratic candidate who had a good shot at beating Walker, according to Public Policy Polling:

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As I wrote last week, the fact that about a fifth of Congress will have visited Israel during the August recess is a massive statement about the strength of the bipartisan coalition that supports the Jewish state. The buzz coming from these trips is that both Republicans and Democrats are making it clear to the Palestinian Authority that if they go ahead with their plan to ask the United Nations to recognize their independence without making peace with Israel, a U.S. aid cutoff will be inevitable. They are also telling the White House that the United States must veto this resolution in the Security Council.

Though some worry about the president’s resolve when it comes to vetoing the Palestinian ploy, a failure to do so isn’t likely. It is just as much the concern of the United States to prevent the chaos that allowing the UN to destroy the peace process in this matter as it is in Israel’s interests. But the real question on the minds of many of the Democrats is whether or not Obama will pick another fight with Israel before the next election.

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On August 19, 1991—twenty years ago today—the political scientist Dmitri Furman ran to tell his friend, Russian analyst Alexei Pankin, that an anti-Gorbachev coup had begun. Pankin remembers Furman’s next words as having “proven prophetic.”

“It doesn’t matter who comes out on top — the people who organized the putsch against Gorbachev or Boris Yeltsin,” Pankin vividly recalls Furman, who died less than a month ago, saying. “The winner will destroy the opposition and cling to power as long as possible on the pretext of overcoming the chaos or of defending democracy. Neither side will have any use for Gorbachev because of his penchant for reaching compromises and consensus among conflicting interests. This means that true democracy has already lost the battle.”

But not everyone sees it this way.

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To most Americans, democracy and elections mean the type of system Americans enjoy in which voters choose from a number of candidates to represent certain constituencies. Elections, however, come in all sorts of flavors, and minor variations can radically influence results.

Behind election design are a number of choices:

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Back in April, I wrote to take issue with a statement written by Kenneth Stern of the American Jewish Committee and Cary Nelson, the president of the American Association of University Professors. The duo contended that a number of recent troubling incidents involving Jewish students on American college campuses did not rise to the level of a “working definition” of anti-Semitism. Even worse, they sought to dismiss efforts to fight back against the vicious anti-Semitism that masquerades as criticism of Zionism as an unscrupulous attempt at censoring anti-Israel speech.  Their stand undermined the campaign to get the government and universities to take the issue of anti-Semitism seriously. My post prompted a subsequent exchange with Stern and Nelson who defended their stance on the issue.

But four months later the head of the AJC has weighed in on the issue to express his disagreement with Stern. According to the Forward, David Harris, the president of the American Jewish Committee has written to express his regret about Stern’s letter and concedes that it should never have been released.

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Now that Americans are becoming increasingly skeptical of the anthropogenic global warming theory, climate scientists have been forced to get even more creative with their climate change alarmism.

Here’s the latest fanatical claim, via a NASA/Penn State scientific study: A band of moralistic, environmental-loving aliens may attack and destroy humanity (for the greater good of the universe, of course!), unless we can get our carbon emissions under control.

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According to the latest Gallup survey, Americans’ satisfaction with the way things are going in the United States has fallen to 11 percent, the lowest level of the Obama presidency and just four percentage points above the all-time low recorded in October 2008. This figure is lower than it was during the low point of the Carter presidency (12 percent) and the George H.W. Bush presidency (14 percent).

For the record, both men ran for re-election. And both men were handily defeated.

The well-coordinated terrorist attacks against Israel yesterday made international headlines and also solicited a State Department condemnation. But the terror which Israelis endure is a near-daily occurrence.

While attacks against buses still make headlines, rocket fire from the Gaza Strip continues regularly. The same day as the bus attacks, for example, Israel’s Iron Dome system intercepted two rockets fired from Gaza and aimed at the Israeli city of Ashkelon. If only Obama was less interested in being Zoning Commissioner-in-Chief in Jerusalem and more interested in zero tolerance toward terror, his policies might not have turned out to be such miserable failures.

Yuval Levin and I have written an op-ed for the Wall Street Journal arguing that while the Tea Party movement has been a tremendously positive force in American political life, the next test, and the real test, is whether it can channel its energy into entitlement reform—and specifically the reform of Medicare.

The crushing and unprecedented coming debt crisis—which will see the national debt grow to more than twice the size of the economy, strangling our economic future—cannot be averted unless health-care costs are brought under control, and that cannot be done unless the basic structure of the Medicare program is reformed. If we ignore Medicare, we ignore the debt problem.

Our bottom line is this: If the Tea Party movement holds politicians’ feet to the fire on Medicare reform, it will take its place among the great, constructive political movements in U.S. history. If it doesn’t, it will be judged to have been fundamentally unserious when it came to rolling back the modern welfare state.

You can read the whole thing here.

The economic news of the past 48 hours, combined with polling data this week, has suddenly snapped into focus the actual question of the 2012 election: Can anything save Barack Obama? In the National Journal, Charlie Cook—both a serious political analyst and a conventional-wisdom weathervane—spends 1,000 words harrumphing about how the GOP is going too far t0 the right but also says, “To put it more simply, this election is the Republican Party’s to lose.”

I’m not so sure about that. Elections are referenda on the incumbent. Seven presidents since World War II found themselves in the same straits; five were no longer president after the next election day. This incumbent is in more trouble than any other in the past 30 years

I explain the reasons why in today’s New York Post.

Several years ago, Farid Ghadry—a Syrian exile activist—published a piece in the Middle East Quarterly looking at what political trends lay beneath the surface of Syria’s Baathist dictatorship.

While Ghadry himself does not have any following in Syria or among Syrians, his analysis is nonetheless apt: He identified the discussions groups that arose during the short-lived “Damascus Spring” and hypothesized that they represented the proto-political parties which might develop.

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David offered a persuasive analysis for why Hamas permitted yesterday’s multipronged terror attack across the Israeli-Egyptian border. But since Hamas rarely needs an excuse to attack Israel, the more interesting question is why Egypt permitted the attack. And “permit” seems to be the operative word: The attack took place in broad daylight right in front of an Egyptian army outpost (thus surprising Israel despite intelligence warnings, as it expected the attack to hit an unguarded part of the border), and even when the ensuing firefight moved into Egyptian territory, Israeli news reports offer no indication that Israeli forces ever saw any Egyptian troops in action; they merely note that Egypt later claimed its soldiers had killed two terrorists.

One possible answer, of course, is simple incompetence, which is worrying enough: If Egypt can’t maintain security in Sinai, Israel will have to vastly increase its own troop presence along the border. A more worrying possibility is that the new government, beset by growing domestic unrest, has decided to distract its citizens’ attention by permitting anti-Israel terror from Sinai – which would presumably be popular, given Egyptians’ widespread loathing for Israel (around 90% consistently view Israel as an “enemy” or a “threat”). But there’s a third, equally worrying possibility: This is a deliberate Egyptian tactic aimed at pressuring Israel to annul the Israeli-Egyptian peace treaty’s central provision — the demilitarization of Sinai.

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Yesterday’s Wall Street Journal contains these two priceless paragraphs:

President Barack Obama pitched himself onto the political scene as a man who could rise above partisan politics, and despite presiding over a bitterly divided government, he is starting the 2012 campaign still casting himself as that guy.

On a three-day midwestern bus trip, Mr. Obama tried to portray himself as an outsider. “The only thing that’s holding us back right now is our politics,” he said three times at a town-hall-style meeting here on Wednesday. “That’s the message we need to send to Washington,” he said, as if he wasn’t part of Washington.

The mind reels at the brazenness of this strategy.

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