1. Gas stations

2. Fresh paint

3. Freshly baked bread

4. Coffee

5. The inside of my guitar

Wow. This means a lot to me, Bill. Thank you.

I just finished listening to two sort-of mysteries (well, one is much more of a straight mystery than the other, but neither is standard issue by any means) that just knocked my socks off. One is The Woodcutter by Reginald Hill and the other is Faithful Place by Tana French. Both books are virtuoso performances by writers at the top of their games. (The second is also likely to get you to fall on your knees and thank God not to have been raised in a tenement in Dublin.)

If you'd like to listen to a cracking good piece of fiction, by the way, I just finished hearing Jonathan Keeble's unabridged recording of Reginald Hill's novel The Woodcutter. It's a phenomenal performance and a terrific book. Highly recommended.

I've been listening to American on Purpose while eating breakfast every day for a week! 

I was under the impression that I was singlehandedly supporting Audible.com -- I have too many audiobooks on my iPod to count -- but am happy to see I have some fellow audio-hounds here at Ricochet.

I've listened to a whole slew of political autobiographies on audiobook, read by the authors -- George W. Bush's book, Bill Clinton's book, Donald Rumsfeld's book and more -- and enjoy them very much, even though they are often (not always) abridged. It's very interesting to hear people reading their own histories. Rumsfeld's book was particularly fascinating. But my go-to audiobooks -- the ones I listen to so often I could practically recite them -- are P.G. Wodehouse and assorted mysteries (Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers, Colin Dexter, Reginald Hill). Best reader of Wodehouse: Jeremy Sinden, although Jonathan Cecil is very good too. Jeremy Sinden also did an excellent reading of Ngaio Marsh's mystery Hand in Glove, if genteel mysteries happen to appeal.

Thank you, everybody! One of the benefits of the difference in our time zones is I can post in the evening, go to sleep, and wake up to a full conversation in the morning. 

There was definitely a pro-Obama contingent in the audience at AIPAC, but I think quite a few of them were students (one of the few times Obama broke into a full, genuine smile was when he greeted the students in the room). I had conversations with Democrats at the conference that showed them internally divided about Obama: they spouted fuzzy defenses of his boneheaded economic program (their arguments were based primarily on the bogeyman of reflexive Republican intransigence), but to a man, they were dubious about his support of Israel. Everyone I spoke to agreed that Obama's refusal to hold the Palestinians to account for their reconciliation with Hamas is a big problem. When I brought up his renewal of the full aid package to Egypt despite their taking US hostages, everybody I spoke to -- Democrat or Republican -- was equally troubled. 

Duane, you have a way with a segue. Thank you! And to you too, Mama Toad. Enjoy the book. 

Whoa, Rob! Big mazeltov!

Exactly right. It's not surprising that Israelis have become so expert at this. I'm generalizing here, but the national character exhibits a combination of cheerful, at times quite delusional optimism with turn-on-a-dime ruthless pragmatism that never fails to astonish me.

These are dark days, but don't count us out just yet. We don't know what's about to happen internally in Iran, and we don't know what tactics Israel has up her sleeve that she has no intention of discussing with journalists.

Or give the regime a pretext to force the people to rally together, or even simply to appear to do so, which is often enough for a credulous world. As M1919A4 said above, we are an extremely useful foil for our tyrannical enemies.

This is an extremely important point, and it has an instructive historical corollary: the nascent state of Israel, though outgunned, undersupported and understaffed in 1948, won the War of Independence in 1948 by employing just this kind of indirect approach. If you can't defeat your enemy with a full-on frontal assault, you cut his supply lines, cut his lines of communication, sabotage his systems, intimidate his brain trust, do everything possible to make the physical prosecution of the war difficult to impossible for the enemy. Above all, stay creative and hold onto the element of surprise; keep the enemy wrongfooted and on the defensive. If I can figure out how, I'll post some writing I did a while ago on Operation Horev (December 1948) in which the Israelis masterfully demonstrated these principles.

Nobody, my totally unscientific response to your question is a conjecture: that if you interviewed a cross section of Israelis, the majority would oppose a strike. The reasons are: 1) many Israelis (when pressed) are worried about the blowback from Iran (in the form not only of direct strikes from Iran itself but also in the form of a two-pronged assault at much closer quarters from Hezbollah in the north and Hamas in the west [notwithstanding the bad blood right now between Iran and Hamas]); 2) there is a thread of hope that after Assad's fall, Hezbollah et al will be cut off at the knees, and the last thing we want to do right now is get in the way of either of those results; 3) there is a queasiness here toward collective punishment that's so deep in the Israeli psyche that it's institutionalized in the ethos of the Israeli army; and 4) there is an apprehension that as we are invariably blamed simply for defending ourselves, we will be consigning ourselves to permanent pariah status for taking such drastic offensive preemptive action. That's my guess.

Viator, the Syrian and Iraqi programs consisted of one site each. I point this out not to minimize the Israeli accomplishment in destroying them but to note that as impressive as those successes were, the Iranian logistical situation is not remotely analagous to them, and it's foolhardy in the extreme to extrapolate the results of a strike on Iranian facilities based on the results of the Syrian and Iraqi strikes. 

I have no more desire to live near a nuclear armed Muslim Brotherhood, Salafist or Twelver regime than you do. That being said, I refuse either to be chased out of town or worked into a lather of anxiety over the intentions of our neighbors, our leaders, or the leaders of our purported allies. I firmly believe Israel will not countenance another mass destruction of a Jewish population but also believe Israel will think long and hard before visiting mass destruction on any other population, no matter how psychopathic their leadership may be. Every attempt must be made to evict the cataclysmically dangerous Iranian leadership before mass carnage is rained down on the heads of a hostage Iranian population.

Paris, I think it will take Obama a good deal less than wiping out the Iranian nuclear program to win the election, alas. 

Viator, the targets in Iran are scattered over an enormous territory and the most sensitive are 200 feet underground. Whopper bunker busters would certainly help, but they will not wipe out the program, and Iran's inevitable retaliation against us would have to be taken into account. I'm with Rafi Eitan on this -- as long as the mullahs are in place, nobody's stopping them from getting their bomb; all anyone can do is delay it. The only way to make Iran a relatively safe neighbor is to change the regime. 

Hi, Peter. I read this piece this morning and actually snorted aloud when I hit that bit about our collective panic. It's dismaying to read something so patently out of touch with the reality of life here nestled within a piece that appears on most all other counts to be based on fact (to the extent that any article on this subject can be based on fact). It made me doubt everything else in the piece, which was disconcerting (Bergman is an extremely highly regarded journalist). 

On reflection, it's quite alarming that Bergman is perceiving a general panic, because that perception probably reflects the attitudes of the people in his circle -- and as they're mostly well-connected intelligence people, that's hardly reassuring. Down here among the tennis moms and other suburbanites, there is no panic at all. No one is discussing Iran much, and no one is discussing this article. For all the speculation, no one knows the reality of Israel's planning or the reality of Iran's decision-making; nor does anyone know how much of anything we read about is pure theater. No, we're not panicking. There really isn't much point.

Ursula, this is extremely interesting and impressive. Please keep us posted.

Lovely photo, too. 

Severely, thank you! I see you're a Wodehouse fan, so you're clearly a person of great taste and discernment. I'm honored by your praise.

Now, I'll bend to no man in my attitude toward celery, but confess that I didn't realize when I wrote the piece that there is a relationship between whiskey and Southern Comfort. That stuff is luscious.