We have expressed our skepticism of the interminable Chicken Little routine about a supposedly imminent attack on Iran. Mixed signals emerge from the headlines this week. First this, from Politico.com, Feb. 2:

Leon Panetta story sparks Israel-Iran speculation
The prospect of war in the Middle East stoked media attention Thursday after a Washington Post editorial writer claimed Defense Secretary Leon Panetta believes that Israel may attack Iran this spring.

From Huffington Post, Feb. 1:

Mind-Reading Advance Lets Brain Scientists 'Eavesdrop' On Thoughts
Scientists already know how to see into your mind's eye, and now they can hear the voices in your head. In a new paper published in PLoS [Public Library of Science] Biology, researchers present evidence showing that they can track the brain activity of a person listening to spoken words and use it to reconstruct the words.

Us old-school lefties have been wondering for a quite some time, which is more annoying—the legions of "Anonymous" hacktivists who think that faceless adventurism is the cutting-edge of revolution, or Ron Paul supporters who think that this ultra-reactionary Republican crank stands for progressive change? Well now, much to our amusement, they appear to be at each other's throats! And we have to give an editorial tip o' the hat to Anonymous for uncovering more dirt on Paul's ties to real live neo-Nazis. In their latest cyber-attack, they apparently hacked the website of some nimrods calling themselves American Third Position, or A3P—a Southern California-based outfit that is seeking to mainstream white supremacism by running candidates, in the style of David Duke back in the '90s. The hackers evidently splashed a bunch of the A3P crew's internal e-mails on the group's homepage—and, lo and behold, it turns out they are a well integrated into Paul's political machine! This account from the UK's International Business Times, Jan. 31:

In a Jan. 30 Google-sponsored "video chat," President Barack Obama gave the first public acknowledgment of what has been a very open secret—the use of US drones against militant forces in Pakistan's tribal areas. Obama responded to a question from a young man in Brooklyn, who noted that the president had ordered more drone attacks in his first year in office than his predecessor George Bush. Saying the attacks cause "a lot of civilian casualties," he asked if they were worth it. Obama responded (rather disingenuously, in light of some recent horrific news accounts): "I want to make sure that people understand that actually, drones have not caused a huge number of civilian casualties. For the most part, they have been very precise precision strikes against al-Qaeda and their affiliates. And we are very careful in terms of how it has been applied." Asked by another participant in a follow-up question whether drone strikes "send a message" that the US is interfering in other countries' affairs, Obama responded with the kind of downright Orwellian logic that he has already proved himself capable of:

Could everybody just stop and think, please? Rand Paul won applause from basically freedom-loving folks when he was blocked from boarding a flight by the Transportation Security Administration last week in Nashville, after refusing to submit to a full body pat-down. Carl Gibson on Huffington Post points out a salient little irony to the situation: Paul was headed for Washington DC to participate in an anti-choice event, the "March for Life"! So much for personal freedom! This cuts to the heart of the bogus pseudo-libertarianism of Rand and his old man Ron Paul. Gibson astutely writes:

From AP, Jan. 29:

Florida highway pileup kills at least 10 people
GAINESVILLE, Fla. — A long line of cars and trucks collided one after another early Sunday on a dark Florida highway so shrouded in haze and smoke that drivers were instantly blinded. At least 10 people were killed.

The New York Police Department, under fire from New York City Muslims, has announced that it is ending its program of NYPD-CIA collaboration launched after 9-11. Commissioner Raymond Kelly says the CIA officer working as a special assistant to the department's intelligence program will leave his post in April after nine months. The program has been under scrutiny since it was revealed in a series of stories by the Associated Press, prompting the CIA's own Inspector General to conduct an investigation. The Inspector General's probe found there was insufficient oversight of the program, which included sending plainclothes "rakers" into mosques and Muslim communities. Muslims not suspected of any wrongdoing were put in intelligence databases.

President Obama in his State of the Union address Jan. 24 said: "We have a supply of natural gas that can last America nearly 100 years, and my administration will take every possible action to safely develop this energy." On Jan. 27, he effused before a crowd in Las Vegas: "We have a supply of natural gas that can last America nearly a hundred years, Developing it could power our cars, our homes and our factories in a cleaner and cheaper way. And experts believe it could support more than 600,000 jobs by the end of the decade... We, it turns out, are the Saudi Arabia of natural gas. We've got a lot of it.... We only have about 2% of the world's oil reserves. So we've got to have an all-out, all-in, all-of-the-above strategy that develops every source of American energy." While Obama did not explicitly invoke hydraulic fracturing, this amounts to an endorsement of the controversial practice. The Bureau of Land Management estimates 90% of natural gas drilling on public lands involves "fracking," in which a mixture of chemicals, sand and water is injected into shale formations to open fissures and allow gas to come to the surface. (Bloomberg, LAT, Gannett, Jan. 26)