Mitzna has quit as Labor party leader (Jpost, Haaretz). The party will probably continue to flounder aimlessly.

There's a few reasons for the light blogging of late: one is my endeavours to find employment. The woman who I check in with once a week to get my unemployment benefits has been acting quite grumpy ever since the gov't worker strikes have begun - possibly because she fears losing her job. Bituah Leumi keeps finding excuses to reduce my benefits.

Another reason is that the local papers seem to be have been running fewer notable articles since the beginning of the Iraq war. Haaretz is increasingly useless: the feature article on Abu Mazen was a sympathetic suck-up that whitewashed his Holocaust denial; their recent pieces on the post-Corrie ISM incidents and IDF Gaza operations just repeat the ISM or Palestinian "eyewitnesses" and don't attempt to get to the bottom of anything.

A third reason is that, unlike Charles Johnson, I'm not interested in reiterating points that I've made before. By this I mean that by now I think most sane people should be skeptical of any claims made by "human shield" organizations, and I'm not inclined to debunk them each time they come up.

Finallly, despite the economic mess, life in this country is actually more sane than it was when I started this blog 13 months ago. Where would we be if Barak or Peres had been in power?

Yediot Ahronot had a couple of interesting articles this weekend: an interview with Condoleeza Rice, and some background on the Bush's upcoming June 24 Mideast speech. I'll try to get to these later.

This article says that members of the "human shield" group ISM are refusing to talk about the two British Musliims who apparently spent some time with them in Gaza before bombing a pub in Tel Aviv.

The "Mike's Place" website has a memorial to the victims of the bombing.