From the NYT's Ethan Bronner:

At Shifa, Gaza City’s main hospital, dozens of casualties seen being brought in over many hours all appeared to be civilians.

And further down:

Reliable reports on the fighting, death toll and civilian situation in Gaza were scarce, since Israel has barred foreign journalists from entering Gaza for most of the past two months and every day since the war began, despite an Israeli Supreme Court order that it permit a pool of foreign correspondents. [...] Numerous reporters have been driving along the Israeli-Gaza border straining to see events through binoculars and television camera lenses.

How did he observe that the casualties appeared to be civilians - through his binoculars?

Thomas Friedman made a very good point the other day (emphasis mine):

According to AAA, U.S. gasoline prices now average about $1.67 a gallon. Funny, that’s almost exactly what gas cost on the morning of Sept. 11, 2001. In the wake of 9/11, President Bush had the political space to impose a gasoline tax, a “Patriot Tax,” to weaken the very people who had funded 9/11 and to stimulate a U.S. renewable-energy industry. But Bush wimped out and would not impose a tax when prices were low or a floor price when they got high.

Today’s financial crisis is Obama’s 9/11. The public is ready to be mobilized. Obama is coming in with enormous popularity. This is his best window of opportunity to impose a gas tax. And he could make it painless: offset the gas tax by lowering payroll taxes, or phase it in over two years at 10 cents a month. But if Obama, like Bush, wills the ends and not the means — wills a green economy without the price signals needed to change consumer behavior and drive innovation — he will fail.

The phased-in gas tax seems like a no-brainer to me, and not just for gasoline at the pump, but carbon at every level of the supply chain (taxed at the beginning and passed along). Congress and the public won't accept a sudden return to $4 gasoline, not in a recession, not by decree - I understand that. But over 5 or 10 years, with sufficient tax incentives and/or subsidies to plausibly generate alternative fuels in that time? What's the downside?

The Dec 19th episode of the Bill Moyers Journal has two must-see interviews, with Sarah Chayes, an American doing amazing work in Afghanistan, and NY governor Bill Patterson. Video, transcript.

Chayes on Pakistan:

BILL MOYERS: But isn't the Pakistan military supporting the Taliban?

SARAH CHAYES: Yes. Yes. And that's why-

BILL MOYERS: Our ally in Pakistan, we expect to fight the terrorists, are supporting the terrorists in-

SARAH CHAYES: Precisely. So we need to get the knots out of our foreign policy here. It's very perplexing to Afghans to understand that we are providing $1 billion a year to the Pakistani military which is creating the Taliban. That's the other thing they don't understand. And they say, "Wait a second, are you with them or against them?" This is something I've been beating my head against for the last seven years. It has been obvious to me that the Pakistani military intelligence agency has been basically creating, orchestrating this so-called Taliban resurgence for the last - since the end of 2001. So why are we paying Pakistan a billion dollars a year?

And they've been fooling us, you know, with the well-timed delivery of an al-Qaeda operative. And that really had us fooled for a number of years until incontrovertible intelligence demonstrated that the ISI was behind the bombing of the Indian embassy in Kabul a few months ago. And then it was, uh-oh, they really are doing this. And this is after years of U.S. military officers watching. I know somebody who was mentoring the Afghan National Army and was looking for where he can, you know, set up some operating posts or outposts for the Afghan National Army along the border, and he chose a couple of pieces of high ground. He goes outside with his field glasses and he finds the Pakistani Army in those pieces of high ground inside Afghanistan with Taliban training camps at the foot of the hills. These are things that have been going on for several years. And I think that we're finally copping to them. So we need to realign our policy, I think.

(I would note here that the ISI's role in the recent Mumbai attacks adds another dimension, and possibly an opportunity, to this problem.)

And Patterson on foreseeing the financial crisis and the culture of denial:

When I looked at the skepticism of people who were evaluating the stock market, when the short sellers were saying we were headed for a downturn, when economists that I would watch on other networks talked about it in a kind of hint but not direct way. And one time I heard an economist say, "We could be headed for trouble." And the other one says, "Oh, are you, are you being an alarmist" "Oh, no, no, no, no. I mean temporarily we'll have trouble."

I realized that a lot of people knew that the economy was going in the tank but no one wanted to say it. Because we as a society have learned how not to tell the truth. I saw a woman who was saying she didn't know how to tell her children that their home was going to be foreclosed on. There's an answer. Tell the truth. Tell them we're going to have to move. And I think, governments, our government, New York State's government was guaranteeing the public that things were fine, that we had a budget that called for six percent growth after the negotiations. And I thought that the best way to buy credibility is to tell the truth.

You'll have to take a hit from it for it for a while. See, I think, Bill, a lot of people knew it was coming but weren't able to address it. And I thought I'll roll the dice. I'm unafraid of being unemployed. The truth has to be told sometimes. I'm willing to tell it because I think that the public is angry. And, and I'm honest. The criticisms, the CSEA quote, as you read before.

Update 12/30: News today that the Taliban are capturing territory from the Pakistani military suggests to me that the juxtaposition of the military with the ISI (Pakistan's equivalent of CIA) was too simplistic. The challenge may be not how to pressure the Pakistani government to rein in its military per se, but how to pressure the right factions within that government to rein in a semi-rogue intelligence agency. This is not my area of expertise, clearly.