CASTRO IS STEPPING DOWN TEMPORARILY due to illness, and handing the reins of power over to his brother. From what I know about Castro, I’d guess he must be really damn sick. Not that I wish anyone (even Castro) dead, but it will be interesting to see what follows his demise. I doubt the communist regime will long survive its founder.

FIDEL CASTRO (temporarily) handed power over to his brother Raul.

PROTEST LITE: 1/3 less hunger in your hunger strikes:

Was a time when fasting at the very least meant eating less. But while our soldiers are sacrificing their lives for freedom, their detractors don’t seem to be to keen on sacrificing anything at all. Thus we have the Cindy Sheehan “hunger strike,” which allows smoothies, coffee with vanilla ice cream, and Jamba Juice. . .

Now the peacenik group CodePink, according to the Washington Post, “has issued a nationwide call for people to go on at least a partial hunger strike, if only for a few hours, to show their opposition to the war in Iraq.” Partial? For a few hours? Does that mean if you were planning on having two Twinkies and a bag of chips between lunch and dinner you should cut out one of the Twinkies? The life of a war protestor is a harsh one indeed!

I have a friend who is both a peacenik, and an observant Jew; she has made fun of me more than once in the past about the wimpy Catholic notion of what a fast entails. But this makes the official RC “one meal and one snack” look positively spartan. I’ll finally be able to hold my head high again . . .

LEBANON’S FOREIGN MINISTER Tareq Mitri proposes the deployment of the Lebanese army in the south and the disarmament of all non-state militias. No word yet on whether or not Hezbollah finds this acceptable.

MICHAEL YOUNG interviews Lebanese Druze leader Walid Jumblatt, who is now being threatened by Hezbollah as well as Syria.

HOW TO AVOID A BLOGOSPHERE SCANDAL: The title of a helpful series from LaShawn Barber. [Is she trying to tell you something?–Ed.] Don’t be snarky just because Glenn didn’t take you on his trip!

HEZBOLLAH’S NEXT MOVE? “Ali” from Hezbollah says Lebanese politicians are “next” after Israel withdraws:

And even when the battle with the Israelis is over, he adds menacingly, Hizbullah will have other battles to fight. “The real battle is after the end of this war. We will have to settle score with the Lebanese politicians. We also have the best security and intelligence apparatus in this country, and we can reach any of those people who are speaking against us now. Let’s finish with the Israelis and then we will settle scores later.”

REAL SIMPLE: George Jonas explains what ought to be obvious:

I’ve stumbled upon the secret of the countries Israel has never bombed or invaded. Different as they may be from one another, they have one thing in common. These countries have never bombed or invaded Israel…No matter how much you detest Israelites in particular, or Jews in general, as long as you can content yourself with calling on God’s wrath to rain down on the Jewish State, and refrain from reinforcing your prayer by supplying missiles to Hezbollah, you can exercise your religious freedom of loathing with no other consequence than perhaps being loathed in return.

HEZBOLLAH lauds Mel Gibson. (This is a joke, by the way. Sort of…)

VOICE OF REASON: Former Lebanese Prime Minister Michel Aoun, a murky figure who entangles himself in sometimes bizarre and counterproductive internal Lebanese alliances, emerges as a voice of reason and offers a way out.

JONATHAN TAYLOR AT PUBLIUS PUNDIT wonders if George W. Bush is serious about democracy promotion after recent events in Lebanon and Ukraine.

IT LOOKS GRUESOME IN LEBANON, but Iran is nervous too. (Thanks to Tony Badran for the heads up.)

LISA GOLDMAN has the story of the (now strained) friendship between the editor of Time Out Tel Aviv and Time Out Beirut. They recently met in Cyprus and hit it off instantly. Then the war came.

THANKS TO GLENN for inviting me to be one fourth of Instapundit again. I’ll be covering the Middle East, for the most part, as I usually do on my own blog. There is no shortage of material this week…

IF DOGS COULD TALK: I suspect that a lot of them would say something like this.

FRINGE CONSTITUTIONAL THEORY GOES HOLLYWOOD: The producer of movies like Trading Places has released a “documentary” that parrots the usual claims from tax protestors about how taxes are “voluntary” and that the federal government has perpetrated a massive fraud to collect incomes taxes. David Cay Johnston describes the movie and its, um, casual use of facts here. My favorite: “Not mentioned in the film is that Mr. Russo has more than $2 million of tax liens filed against him by the Internal Revenue Service, California and New York for unpaid federal and state taxes. Mr. Russo declined to discuss the liens, saying they were not relevant to his film.” Oh, okay. No reason to doubt his objectivity, then.

WHATEVER YOUR VIEWS on the relative justness of the Israeli and Palestinian/Arab causes, I think it’s becoming clear that for Israel, the Lebanese campaign has been a disaster.

Hizbullah is now unequivocally calling the shots in Lebanese domestic politics. Nasrallah is king. And after an attack like this, on a place like Qana that has such symbolism to the Lebanese people, it could hardly be otherwise. . . .

The attack has, in effect, blasted away Hizbullah’s domestic political constraints while tightening both the domestic and international ones on Israel. That may not be fair, but these are the conditions Israel has to fight under. It knew those rules going in, and ignored them at its peril.

Though Americans tend to lump them all into “Islamoterrorists”, Hizbullah, Hamas and Al Qaeda are in fact three very different organisations. My perception is that Israel was slowly gaining some traction in Europe (as well as a lot in America), by the perception that it was fighting Islamic terrorists who target civilians.

Unfortunately, in this conflict, Israel responded to a Hizbollah attack on a military target by killing huge numbers of Lebanese civilians. They may be collateral damage, rather than targets, but in the eyes of the world proportionality matters–you don’t nuke a neighbourhood to catch a shoplifter.

The massive response gave Hizbollah, which has restricted its attacks mostly (not entirely) to military targets in recent years, the cover to launch attacks on civilian neighbourhoods as “tit-for-tat”. I am not in any way justifying deliberately targeting civilians, but Israel’s stated aim of using violence to pressure the Lebanese people to reject Hizbollah has eroded the moral edge it normally enjoys over Hamas.

And whether or not Israel has a right to invade Lebanon (a question on which I doubt anyone is open to persuasion), it is hard to imagine a single goal that Israel has achieved by it. Stopping rockets from landing on Haifa? The rockets started after the invasion. Eroding Hizbollah’s power? Open confrontation has made Hizbollah a hero in the Arab world, and driven even Lebanese factions historically opposed to Hizbollah to supporting them. And the tragedy at Qana is being laid, rightly or wrongly, at Israel’s door, making it harder and harder for the US to maintain its support. Diminishing Syrian influence in Lebanon? Syrian power in the area is growing by the day as the fragile Lebanese government struggles to keep order.

This has led many of the journalists I know into elaborate conspiracy theories about what Israel “really” wanted to achieve. This strikes me as a sort of perverse variant of the Elders of Zion wingnuttery, as if the Israelis are so omnipowerful that any apparent difficulties are merely another chess move in their unstoppable plan to dominate the Middle East. Israel is ruled by a government, which is to say, an entity nearly perfectly engineered for generating mistakes. The parsimonious explanation for the quagmire situation in Lebanon is that the Israeli government was expecting very different results from the ones they got.

Update Michael Young thinks Hizbollah has overreached.

PERSPECTIVE, PLEASE: Mitt Romney apologized for using the term “tar baby” to describe the Big Dig debacle. Can we save the public shaming for public officials who actually intend their comments to be offensive? Like, say, Mel Gibson?

ABOUT THE ONLY nice thing that one can say about Mel Gibson right now is that the statement he released hits the nail right on the head:

I acted like a person completely out of control when I was arrested and said things that I do not believe to be true and which are despicable.

At least he didn’t take the usual famous-person tack of pretending he meant to say something entirely different from “I hate Jews”, or that it was all a giant misunderstanding due to his insufficient sensitivity to religious issues. Of course, that’s really very small comfort.

ISLAMIC BLOGGERS Ali Eteraz posts a letter from an American in Ramallah. And Aziz Poonwalla mourns that “Hizbollah has won. Again.”

Update Why would I post a link to that letter from Ramallah? demand correspondants. Well, because the “warbloggers” tend to get a lot more information from people on the ground in Israel than those on the ground in Ramallah or Beirut. One of the unfortunate aspects of the Israel/Palestinian conflict is that the information blogs are best at generating–informal, personal descriptions and analysis of events–are only available from people who are pretty heavily biased on one side or the other of the conflict. Palestinian activists don’t vacation in Haifa, and people with strongly pro-Israel views are rarely found in Ramallah, at least without tanks and air support. Thus, the only way to get eyewitness accounts is to take them from people with a huge axe to grind.

FINALLY, someone is offering a workable, low-cost solution to the problems in the Middle East:

During the several days that it was 112 degrees and I had no AC, all I wanted to do was build an IED and kill the AC guy who kept driving right past my office and helping other people. In fact, I wanted to kill everyone who didn’t agree with me on just about any point whatsoever.

And I realized that the problem with the Middle East is insufficient AC. If you think about it, virtually all of the organized violence in the world is originating from places where they have poor air conditioning. And in the desert, 112 degrees is considered a pleasant day. Imagine how grumpy you would be at 125 degrees. And guess what I never see on TV when they show footage of the Middle East?

Shade.

Every frickin’ person they interview in the Middle East is standing directly in the sun. Some shade would be a good step toward world peace.

PERSONAL NOTES: I’m American, but I tend to drop British spellings all over the place, because I work for a British magazine, and do most of my typing in Limey. I apologize to those who are even now composing sharp notes about the horrors of extra u’s, but I’m afraid I can’t help it. If it is true that women have smaller brains, the chunk that is missing from mine is the bit that would hold an extra set of spellings for daily use. Having painfully converted myself to automatically supply “travelled” and “centre” in the place of the good, old-fashioned American forms, I cannot easily switch back. If it bothers you, try to think of it as taking a little spelling vacation.

Also, if anyone wants to email me, rather than the Instapundit mailbox, you can do so at janegalt -at sign- janegalt.net.

OH HAPPY DAY: Aaron Haspel’s literary blog, God of the Machine, is back, with a snazzy new design. Despite his appalling habit of betting on a weak Texas Hold’em hand just to make everyone else at the table pay to see the flop, he’s well worth reading.

THERE’S GENERAL AGREEMENT among economists (and most economic journalists) that the American labour market isn’t nearly as strong as we would expect it to be at this point in the business cycle. Unemployment figures are, to be sure, quite low, but in part that is because a number of people have dropped out of the labour force; both the labour force participation rate and the employment-to-population ratio are at least a full percentage point below what they were in the late 1990’s. Median wages have stagnated since that time, indicating that labour demand is weaker than you would think if you just looked at the “headline” unemployment figure of 4.6%. One of my colleagues argues that this is because of competition from improving technology and (yes) outsourcing; anyone who has a job that can be routinized is in trouble. This includes a whole lot of white collar workers who used to have relatively secure and lucrative jobs; globalization seems to be making the poor better off at the expense of the middle class. The loss of those jobs isn’t a tragedy for the economy, of course; eventually, they will be replaced by better jobs, just as jobs weaving cotton cloth and braiding buggy whips were. But in the short term, it can be awfully hard on people who thought they had a safe living.

Andrew Samwick talks about one of the reasons that this dislocation is hitting the participation figures so hard: men are living off savings or spouses or going on disability rather than accept lower-paying, lower-status jobs. It seems to me that we used to have a society in which going on disability was more stigmatized than taking a job pumping gas. Has that changed?

For those of you who don’t know me, my name is Megan McArdle, and I’ll be your resident econblogger for the week (as well as a hefty dose of everything else–I’m a dilettante.)

I’m an economics journalist by profession, so as you might imagine, I spend rather a lot of time reading economics blogs. One of the best out there is Econlog, written by Bryan Caplan and Arnold Kling. You never imagined economics could be applied to so many questions, such as: why happiness researchers want you to commit suicide, and an inquiry into why LA has so many liquor stores, when big box retailers are allowed to sell liquor there (unlike Virginia, his current state of residence, and my own beloved New York State).

If I didn’t know anything else about these states, I would predict that California’s grocery stores would dominate the liquor market. Why make a special trip to a seedy liquor store when you can buy tequila at CostCo during your weekly shopping?

But this prediction is way off. The blatant fact is that there are seedy liquor stores on virtually every commercial street corner in Los Angeles. People are free to buy their liquor in regular grocery stores, but for reasons I can’t grasp, grocery stores only seem to have a modest slice of the market.

Another way to think about this Los Angeles Liquor Puzzle: It seems like the Wal-Mart model should be working, but it’s not. The mom-and-pop liquor stores are thriving in the face of big(ger) box competition.

The comments are also fun; in the post on finding yourself that very special mail-order bride to share your life, commenter Kedar weighs in with some . . . er . . . economic analysis:

Arranged marriage lasts longer. Success rate is also higher. It is a good idea to ask relatives find someone you will see only at the wedding. Love starts at the wedding and it takes time to reach the peak of love and also time to fall. So it takes time for the marginal cost to outweigh marginal benefit of marriage.

I’m imagining a proposal along these lines: “Hey, I calculated that it would take 37 years for the marginal cost of living together to exceed the marginal benefit! What do you think?”

But the image isn’t nearly as compelling as picturing the look on my relatives’ faces if I asked them to “find me someone I will see only at the wedding”.

Not to mention the look on my face when I got my first glimpse of what they’d picked out.