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Yes, they do, as was probably the case in the Jundallah bombing on Sunday:

This brings us to Saudi Arabia, whose relations with Iran are passing through a period of mutual antipathy bordering on hostility. Tehran has alleged that Iranian hajj pilgrims are being maltreated by Saudi authorities and that Saudi intelligence is accountable for the mysterious disappearance of an Iranian nuclear scientist who was on pilgrimage to Mecca recently.

Saudi newspapers with links to the establishment have carried in recent months extremely vituperative attacks against the regime in Tehran, often at a personal level directed against the Iranian leadership. They have almost gone into mourning now that the turmoil on Tehran’s streets following the disputed presidential election has receded. Ahmadinejad has alleged that his opposition kept up links with Riyadh in trying to bring about “regime change” in Tehran.

Saudi Arabia has two great worries over Iran. First, that Obama is pressing ahead with the normalization process with Tehran – a “thaw” was visible at the Geneva talks on October 1- and Tehran has begun responding to US overtures. The worst Saudi nightmare is coming true.

I’ve been watching this for a long time, but most Americans are oblivious to this.

Middle Eastern politics are never simple.  Anyone who reads the Old Testament carefully will know this.  But Americans on both sides of the political spectrum all too easily fall into simplistic moralising on the subject.  The Obama Administration’s semi-orchestrated retreat from being a world power will bring conflicts like this to the surface.  But we’ve always been trapped in a “fight or flee” mentality, and the bill for that is going to come due in a hurry.

As always, it’s time to pray…

Well, that’s what he did in the Huffington Post:

But if Obama doesn’t weigh in forcefully and say “no” to the hush money for Big Pharma, big insurance, and the AMA, America’s middle class will get walloped. And if the walloping starts before 2012, Sarah Palin or some other right wing-nut populist will wallop Obama. And after she or he wallops Obama, America will get walloped even worse.

And it’s on this account:

Last January, as I understand it, the White House promised Big Pharma, big insurance, and the American Medical Association the moral equivalent of what Joel Halderman allegedly demanded of David Letterman: hush money. The groups agreed to stay silent or even be supportive of healthcare reform, as long as they were paid off.

But now that it’s time to collect, the bill is larger than the White House expected, and it’s going to fall like an avalanche on middle class Americans in coming years. That could mean an ugly 2012 election (read Sarah Palin).

So the President has to do what Letterman did: Refuse to pay.

I actually agree with Reich on one thing: in putting this health care thing together, this administration and its co-conspirators in Congress have worked too hard to pay off too many moneyed interests.  He’s also right that giving these interests free rein in a controlled market will prove expensive, and will lead to a backlash.

Where I disagree is the solution.  We need to have more competition and choice by individuals, which is the essence of John Mackey’s plan (which the left trashed, to its shame.)  Make ’em work in a more competitive environment.

Perhaps invoking Sarah Palin will get the left off of its duff on this.  Perhaps not.

The flap over Rush Limbaugh’s exclusion from a share of the St. Louis Rams is absurd.

American football has to be the worst place in our culture for liberals to make a stand like this.  It is:

1. Competitive, in a culture where cooperation has been deemed to be the norm.
2. It has winners and losers, in a culture where no one is supposed to lose.
3. It is violent; the left is supposed to be anti-war and anti-violence.
4. It accelerates brain damage when intellectual genius has been deemed to be the ne plus ultra of life (but see this.)
5. It’s a distinctively Southern emphasis kind of sport; liberals hate the South.
6. It takes away people from soccer, which we imported and which is, by virtue of it being an import, superior.

Rush Limbaugh and American football are made for each other.  By their own principles, liberals need to be trying to abolish football rather than keeping Rush Limbaugh out of it.  But such slips of principle are one reason why I don’t embrace liberalism.

That’s what American Prospect’s Mark Schmitt is thinking about in his article “Left Without Labour:”

The new progressive coalition follows the lines of the “emerging Democratic majority” that Ruy Teixeira and John Judis predicted in their 2002 book of that name: minority, professional, and younger voters, with help from a large gender gap. This is a coalition that can win without a majority of white working-class voters, whether union members or not. (Those who were union members were always solid Democrats.) In many ways, that’s good because it helps to bring an end to the culture wars that limited the party’s ability to speak clearly about matters of fundamental rights and justice.

But it’s also dangerous. A political coalition that doesn’t need Joe the — fake — Plumber (John McCain’s mascot of the white working class) can also afford to ignore the real Joes, Josés, and Josephines of the working middle class, the ones who earn $16 an hour, not $250,000 a year. It can afford to be unconcerned about the collapse of manufacturing jobs, casually reassuring us that more education is the answer to all economic woes. A party of professionals and young voters risks becoming a party that overlooks the core economic crisis–not the recession but the 40-year crisis–that is wiping out the American dream for millions of workers and communities that are never going to become meccas for foodies and Web designers.

It is dangerous, and it illustrates the basic problem with American liberalism: it’s elitist, and as a consequence out of touch with the reality that people face.

An American left which decouples its message from economic inequity–or the class struggle, as those of a Marxist bent refer to it as–has a serious legitimacy problem.  And, as this country’s ability to “defy gravity” with its prosperity gets lost with receding dollar hegemony, contracting credit and an expanding government, those inequities will work their way up people’s consciousness.

Part of the problem is with the trade unions themselves.  They sell themselves as the authentic representatives of America’s working class, but in reality they’re focused on their own people with many years of service.  And they can be racist when they take the notion to be that way.

When–not if–the left finds it convenient to completely divorce itself from its proletarian support base, whoever has the wit to mobilise it–with or without the trade unions–will be a powerful force in American life.  But that’s going to take a political realignment beyond what the current players can envision.

Schmitt shows he too can be myopic about working people.  He speaks of those who earn US$16/hour as being the “the real Joes, Josés, and Josephines of the working middle class.”  He ought to start with those who can’t even get out of the single digits on an hourly basis.