Month: November 2009

Here's an interesting new data point in the debate about what constitutes support for Israel. The neoconservative position, it has always seemed to me, is that support for anything Israel does is the litmus test. There is no weighing of issues here; there is just a demand that whatever is the most "pro-Israel" position be embraced, even if many sincerely believe such a policy would hurt – and has hurt – the Jewish state.

In recent years, that means supporting the annexation of the West Bank in perpetuity for the Jewish state. Almost all neocons deny this, and almost all are being disingenuous. They are always anti-anti-settlements. And that's why Seth Lipsky's pro-settlement candor is so refreshing. My colleague Jeffrey Goldberg opposes those settlements. And he dared to worry about Sarah Palin's desire for more and more settlements as a way to win the forever religious war she favors against Islam. Lipsky is having none of this whining. Palin's statement to Barbara Walters was as follows:

“I believe that the Jewish settlements should be allowed to be expanded upon, because that population of Israel is, is going to grow. More and more Jewish people will be flocking to Israel in the days and weeks and months ahead. And I don’t think that the Obama administration has any right to tell Israel that the Jewish settlements cannot expand.”

Lipsky's response:

When I read her reply, I thought that it was wonderful.

In the two generations in which I’ve been covering the Middle East debate, it was one of the few times a public figure gave in response to a question about the settlements an answer that I would call ideal. It seemed to me courageous, in that Palin was going against not only the administration but many in her own party and the gods of political correctness. There was no shilly-shallying about the Oslo process and the Quartet and the United Nations. Palin didn’t seem particularly worried one way or another about how she might be perceived. She is just on Israel’s side.

So you see how, in fact, the neocons are at perfect peace with an alliance with Christianists to foment religious war and Greater Israel as a prelude to Armageddon. They don't buy the Armageddon stuff (many are atheists), but what matters to them is simply being "on Israel's side", as long as that side never contemplates any sort of negotiation or peace agreement with the enemy. Lipsky reads "Going Rogue" and is therefore thrilled:

I couldn’t find anything in the book that made me worry about the fact that even on the difficult issues she supports Israel.

Again: "supports Israel". That's the only criterion there is. There is a reason Bill Kristol selected Palin as his future Quayle/W. And it has a lot to do with the Middle East.

Jonah Lehrer yawns at some recent supercomputer news:

In the coming years, there will be many grand announcements about supercomputers that attempt to imitate the machinery inside the skull. One way to distinguish between such claims is to look at their cellular realism: Are these microchips really behaving like neurons? Or has the simulation taken a shortcut, and turned our neurons into dumb little microchips? Because we sometimes forget that the "mind is like a computer" metaphor is only a metaphor. The mind is really just a piece of meat.

The future of Scotland is actually fascinating right now. A terrific piece of analysis can be found here by Jackie Ashley. One looming alternative to complete independence is the Scottish Nationalist Party's proposal of "devo-max" which would ask Scottish voters to approve everything-but-independence from Britain:

It basically means the Edinburgh parliament and government getting control over everything except defense, foreign policy and macroeconomics. It would keep the pound, the British army and the Queen.

This may be particularly interesting if the next government is a Tory one dedicated to tough spending cuts (the kind the US Republicans are too dishonest to propose). Scotland gets a disproportionate amount of public spending – it's a red state in an American sense. Real cuts would therefore further inflame Scottish independence, even though David Cameron is a staunch unionist. But he is also a Tory.

And if Scotland's seats were removed from the Westminster parliament, the Conservative Party's structural advantage in England could tip the political balance decisively to the center-right. 

For my part, I increasingly find the union with Scotland an anachronism. Britain is a largely false construct of relatively recent origins, forged on empire and now without much of a purpose. For England to shrug off the fiscal burden of Scotland and Northern Ireland would be a huge gain for the over-taxed English. And Saint Andrew wouldn't be too miffed either.

(Painting: The Calling of Saints Peter and Andrew – Caravaggio.)

Pago Pago, American Samoa, 11.39 am

Here's one small impact of ending the ban on HIV-positive tourists, visitors and immigrants: the International AIDS Society (IAS) will now hold the XIX International AIDS Conference (AIDS 2012) in Washington, DC, in July 2012. Finally, the US can take center-stage in the battle against this disease rather than remain the discriminatory pariah country it remained under Clinton and Bush.

In an extensive must-read Alaskan fact-check of Palin's book, Craig Medred finds:

"Going Rogue," Page 35: "Together Al and Lena (Todd Palin's grandparents) helped start the Bristol Bay fishery in the 1930s, drifting for salmon from sailboats…"

FLAT-OUT WRONG. According to a history compiled by a Bristol Bay author for the conservation group Trout Unlimited, "The fishery began in 1884 when San Francisco businessman Carl Rohlffs organized the Arctic Packing Company and built the first cannery on the Bay at the Native village of Kanulik across the Nushagak River from present day Dillingham. The first commercial pack of canned salmon was only about 400 cases or 6,000 fish." According to a history of the fishery done by Ray Hillborn of the University of Washington, "by 1912, 19 canneries and 1,083 sail-powered gillnet boats harvested and canned over 20 million salmon annually." That's about two decades before Palin claims Todd's grandparents pioneered the fishery.

My email to Adam Bellow about whether "Going Rogue" was fact-checked remains unanswered. (What's he gonna say?) But what's fascinating about Medred's Alaskan fact-checking is the broader picture it paints: of a woman always prepared to make stuff up on the spot and even in print on matters that can easily be independently checked. This is the strange pattern I noticed very early on and catalogued in the "Odd Lies Of Sarah Palin" series. Medred concludes:

It is tempting to go on picking apart the other 270-or-so pages of

"Going Rogue" in this manner, but I couldn't do it. It felt like piling on. It was clear by this point the reporting in the book was, at best, horribly sloppy, or, at worst, that Palin needs to heed her own demand: "Stop making things up."

The most incredible stories are those about her own family. Her completely ludicrous stories of her fifth pregnancy and labor are not alone in being beyond anything but religious belief. Medred notes this doozy:

"I was alerted to threats against Willow by students at her Juneau

school, one particularly disturbing," Palin writes. "Someone posted a note on an Internet set site threatening to gang-rape her at school. I never felt safe for her after that. Later the same thing happened to Bristol."

Is this true? (Are we supposed even to ask such an empirical question of "Going Rogue"?) If it was, why did Palin not call the cops?

Is she not a pit-bull in defending her children? She is more outraged in the book by her lie that some reporters asked Piper some questions than that Willow and Bristol were threatened with gang-rape! Then this from Medred:

There are a couple things I really would like to have asked Palin or Stapleton after reading the governor's claim that the "first official event (at the governor's mansion) was a dinner for friends and family that was interrupted by a leak dripping water through the ceiling onto the grand piano. We had buckets under ceilings for two years until Todd helped track down leaks and repairs were finally finished."

Did they really have a bucket on the grand piano in the governor's mansion for two years? Did it really take Todd Palin, a guy who can fix a snowmachine outside at 40 degrees below zero, two years to track down a leak? Did anyone think about calling a plumber?

It's like asking why a woman whose water has broken and who is experiencing contractions at eight months with a special needs child wouldn't go to an emergency room. She's either lying or embellishing through her teeth or is bent on risking the safety of her child or is a total lunatic. Those are your options. Believing her story as she tells it simply isn't an option.

You can live in a rational world and ask rational questions, but you soon realize you're dealing with a disturbed individual who shouldn't be allowed custody of a child let alone a nation. I've tried to make sense of this book. It cannot be done. It's a tissue of lies, truths, half-truths, fantasies, grievances, and hilarious references to Plato and Aristotle. It's a joke, as she is. And yet this joke is, to my mind, the likeliest Republican nominee for president in 2012. And one of the most common reasons people cite for supporting her is her honesty. 

Think of what that says about America in 2010.

This angle hasn't been much explored in the MSM but politically, it seems pretty salient to me. Everyone agrees that Latinos are becoming a critical voting bloc without whom no political party will easily form a majority in the near future. The collapse of Latino support for the GOP in the last few years – another triumph, Mr Rove! – was critical to Obama's landslide. And a new poll suggests that the GOP's total opposition to any health insurance reform that might actually insure significantly more people could be another blow to Republican-Latino outreach. Among the details of the new poll:

86% report that it is important for Congress to pass a bill on health reform before the 2010 election.

Hispanics now place health insurance reform before immigration reform as their top political priority:

32% reported health care, 30% identified the economy—including jobs and mortgage issues, 17% picked immigration as the biggest issue, while another 9% identified the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan… When asked which of the two was the more important, two?thirds (67%) of respondents picked health reform, compared to just 20% for immigration reform, and 10% thought they were of equal importance.

All the gaming of the political fallout of health reform seems to be focused on white independents. They're important. But the GOP's opposition to any meaningful health insurance reform may be winning them some short-term tactical gains in their base, while further isolating them in permanent minority status in a multi-cultural and multi-racial nation.

Joe McGinniss exposes Palin's true travel means:

It seems now that Palin hasn’t been on the bus, except for short hops between local airports and hotels and book-signing sites. Instead, as first reported by the Alaskan blog Palingates, she’s apparently been aboard UJT750, the Gulfstream American twin-jet that she first boarded at Westchester County airport shortly after noon on November 18, bound for Grand Rapids, Michigan, and the first stop on her tour. The full activity log for UJT750 can be found here. The bottom line is that the plane’s goings and comings track Palin’s tour perfectly: from Grand Rapids to Washington, Pa. and then to Rochester, N.Y., Roanoke, Va., Fayetteville, N.C., Birmingham, Al., and Jacksonville and Orlando, Florida.

There is, of course, nothing the least bit inappropriate about flying from place to place on a book tour. […] What’s wrong in this instance is the apparent fakery created and sustained for the sake of building pseudo-populist appeal—and selling books. Sarah Palin and Harper Collins have consciously tried to give the impression that she is doing her book tour by bus when the evidence suggests she is not. At every stop, she’s been filmed getting off Big Blue looking rested and radiant. She dazzles onlookers and interviewers with her seemingly bottomless reserves of energy. And no one suspects she may secretly be hopping on and off her main means of transport, UJT750, and resting up in hotels.

The jet apparently costs $4,000 an hour.

Ambers previews it:

His speech, as described in broad terms by advisers last week, will be short and serious. His challenge is to persuade Americans that the war in Afghanistan is winnable, as Americans tend to give their presidents significant leeway so long as they believe that the president is confident in his strategy.  Officials said last week that while he would outline a clear exit strategy, he would not tie troop withdrawals to any specific political developments in Afghanistan, which might run into opposition from Democrats in Congress, who are demanding benchmarks. Nor is the President likely to impose direct conditions on Afghanistan President Hamid Karzai.

I’m going to give the speech a chance. It’s a very difficult situation, and, after Bush’s grotesque mismanagement, no options are anything but varieties of awful. But everything I hear sounds like conventional drift to me – Bush’s policy with a much more interesting and intelligent discussion beforehand. So instead of staying in neo-colonial occupation against an insurgency that now feeds off US intervention with no real strategy, we will stay in neo-colonial occupation against an insurgency that now feeds off US intervention with lots of super-smart defenses of the indefensible. Great. Marc Lynch isn’t so thrilled either:

I’m impressed that [Obama’s] team seems to have given serious thought to the relationship between al-Qaeda and the Taliban, the legitimacy of the Karzai government, the lessons of the Soviet experience, how to pre-empt future demands for more troops, how to maximize leverage, and how to craft an exit strategy.  It doesn’t mean that they’ll get the policy right — or even that there’s a right policy to find.  I predicted weeks ago that the result of the strategy review would be a decision to add 30,000 or so troops, it wouldn’t work, hawkish critics would give Obama no credit for the decision, and next year we could have the whole argument over again.  Here’s to hoping that Obama’s speech…proves me wrong.

Canadian edition.