Month: November 2009

A reader writes:

Having grown up in Gilo, I have to chime in on all these people expressing the fact that expanding Gilo is not a problem. My mom, who lived there for a while, responded to the article by saying, "When we were growing up, those weren't settlements. Those were just cheap houses."

Does that mean that it's acceptable to expand Gilo? No,

it does not.

The problem is that each side has been so invested in its own perception of reality that they ignore the other side's feelings about the issue. In a normal run of events, it would be perfectly fine. But to ignore the context of what those settlements mean to Palestinians, the political reality behind the on-the-ground reality, is peevish. It's naive to pretend that it's fine.

There are other places to build cheap houses. Israel is a small country, but it's far from being fully developed. What is the necessity to build the houses there?

It appears so.

David Corn makes a cameo in the book. Palin distorts the story to make it fit better with her self-serving story. It's not that big a deal – more selective unfairness than a lie of any sort. Corn's explanation here.

A new poll finds that 51 percent of Americans think canceling the rest of the stimulus would create more jobs. Derek Thompson is slack-jawed:

The idea that canceling the stimulus would create more jobs implies that passing the stimulus has actually killed more jobs than it's created, which is bonkers. Let's say you don't want to consider infrastructure spending or green technology spending or a single job that might have been created in the private sector. If nothing else, the tens of billions we've sent to state budgets have, without question, saved hundreds of thousands of jobs, like teachers, that are supported by state taxes. It's just a very basic fact.

They're watching Fox. Facts don't matter.

“Former Vice President Dick Cheney and his wife, Lynne Cheney, welcomed their seventh grandchild, Sarah Lynne Cheney, Wednesday, November 18, 2009.  She weighed 6 lbs., 14 oz and was born at 8:17 A.M. at Sibley Hospital in Washington,  D.C.  Her parents are the Cheney’s daughter Mary and her partner, Heather Poe.”

Many congratulations to the Cheney family. And congratulations on the word “parents.”

“It is pure fiction. No such discussion took place,” – Nicolle Wallace, disputing yet another passage in Palin's book.

“That is the most cockamamie bullshit. She didn’t have a damn thing to do with it, and she didn’t know what it was about," – Dave Oesting of Anchorage, lead plaintiff attorney in the private litigants’ civil case against Exxon and its successor, Exxon Mobil Corp.

He was referring to governor Palin's boast in her book that she played a role in "achieving victory" for the victims of the Exxon-Valdez disaster, even when she is on record at the time of the final court decision saying she was "very, very disappointed" and heart-broken with the decision to reduce damages for the victims that she called "not right".

In "Going Rogue," she calls it a "victory".

Another pot-smoker, another loser:

Giants pitcher Tim Lincecum has won the 2009 National League Cy Young Award in a historic and close vote of the Baseball Writers Association of America. Lincecum becomes the first pitcher since the writers created the award in 1956 to win it in each of his first two full seasons in the majors and the first starting pitcher to win with as few as 15 wins in a nonstrike year.

 

Drezner flags a Carnegie Endowment for International Peace study:

China will become the world’s largest economy in 2032, and grow to be 20 percent larger than the United States by 2050. Over the next forty years, nearly 60 percent of G20 economic growth will come from Brazil, China, India, Russia, and Mexico alone. However, these emerging markets will not rise among the world’s richest countries in per capita terms: their average income in 2050 will still be 40 percent below that of the G7 states today. The end of the decades-old correlation between economic size and per capita income will have profound effects on global economic governance.

Silver does some Senate handicapping:

I suspect the net gain for either party will not exceed two seats. There are some primaries yet to determine nominees, so it's too early to say either way which party should come out ahead.