Several years ago we started a community garden where I live. We worked at it quite energetically. We got more and more people involved. Much of the hardest work involved digging irrigation ditches to bring water to the soil.

We made progress slowly. We brought water to little corners of the garden. But the work was exhausting, and some people burned out and needed to take a break. Usually they'd be back within a year and working shoulder-to-shoulder with the rest of us again.

The work was hard but extremely enjoyable. The camaraderie of it was a benefit whether or not the garden was yet prospering. It was very properly called a community garden.

Then the rain dancers arrived. And most of the people who had been toiling joined the rain dancers. We were to have rain aplenty for four years if we rain danced just right, rain we could rely on and believe in. And the digging could finally cease.

Well, most of our energy went into the rain dance, and it produced the most stupendous rain dance any of us had ever seen. And it rained. It rained no more than normal, but people squinted to see signs of hope

This is a thought provoking if not fully developed work on the ongoing situation in Palestine/Israel. Avi Shlaim has compiled a set of his writings from previous publications that in a broad way cover the events of the region, with a brief look at the Balfour Declaration before jumping forward to look at the UN Partition Plan of 1947 and its resulting sequence of events.

Avi Shlaim self professes to be of the school of revisionist historians and his writing fully supports that claim. Throughout the writing one of the themes is the Israeli use of military power to solve its problems, a solution much preferred to negotiations and compromise. A corollary of this is that when negotiations were used, they were mainly as a mask to delay a solution while the ongoing status quo built more settlements and evicted more Palestinians from their homes and farms, especially after the 1967 war.

In 2008, the ACLU estimated the US 'No Fly List' to have grown to over 1,000,000 names -- heck, even Cat Stevens and the late Senator Ted Kennedy were on it -- and it continues to expand. But, suspected terrorist Abdul Farouk Abdulmutallab, who was curiously able to obtain military-grade high explosives --80 grams of PETN (Gee, where'd he get that?) -- managed to escape airport security and detonate his underwear bomb!

In April 2009, American authorities reportedly refused an Air France flight from Paris to Mexico entry into US airspace because a left-wing journalist writing a book on the CIA was on board. Hernando Calvo Ospina, who works for Le Monde Diplomatique and has written on revolutionary movements in Cuba and Colombia, figured on the US authorities' 'no-fly list.' Air France said the April 18 flight was forced to divert to the French Caribbean island of Martinique before continuing its journey (telegraph.co.uk).

Sen. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska is launching a potentially devastating attack on the Clean Air Act. Majority Leader Harry Reid has granted her a vote for January 20 that would block the EPA from regulating greenhouse gas emissions from coal plants and other polluters in 2010.

The vote -- on an amendment to a must-pass bill to lift the debt ceiling -- will remove the EPA's enforcement funding and power so big polluters like the coal industry can ignore the Clean Air Act.

You think this would be easy to stop, but the vote is predicted to be close with many Democrats considering voting for the bill. This attack is a rerun of the successful efforts by Newt Gingrich to hamstring the Clinton EPA in the 90s.

"Congress must not block the Clean Air Act's limits on global warming pollution."

Republican and Democratic senators alike need to hear from you. The coal industry has been working furiously to close deals with senators across the political spectrum, including those who say they want to protect the environment. We cannot underestimate the Senate's vulnerability to cynical attempts to handcuff the EPA.