Inexplicable: I recently won in court to stop my book "America by Heart" from being leaked,but US Govt can't stop Wikileaks' treasonous act?
Er, some of it was leaked. I read parts of it online before it was published. She simply managed to get the websites to remove the leaks subsequently. But any desperate weapon to hand, right?
Ben Smith has the story:
Las Vegas gambling magnate Sheldon Adelson is a significant figure in Republican politics — the 13th richest man in America and one of the GOP's biggest donors. But he's an even bigger player in Israel, where he's a key backer of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Yet Adelson's sharpest transformation of the political landscape may be through his ownership of Israel Hayom ("Israel Today”), a three-year-old free daily newspaper that quietly became the most widely distributed daily in the country this summer. It stirs passions strong enough that legislators have sought to hobble it with laws banning foreign ownership and selling below cost.
Adelson's paper is an assault on the media status quo in the model of Fox News in a country where newspapers still litigate the political conversation. The echoes aren't subtle: One of the five principles printed on the tabloid's dense second page translates as "fair and balanced."
It was a debate on religion in Toronto. I remain in awe of Hitch’s energy. A BBC summary of the debate can be listened to here. The videos continue here: Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7, Part 8.
And here is Hitch again on the subject of the Washington novel. In chemotherapy at 61, he has the tenacity of most healthy people in their twenties.
Obama pre-empts the GOP on short-term debt. Now to embrace the gist of Bowles-Simpson to call their bluff altogether.
Calculated Risk's current assessment:
The data is still mixed and fits with my general view of a sluggish and choppy recovery (my view since the spring of 2009). Although I don't see a sharp increase in growth, I think the pace of recovery will probably pick up a little bit in 2011, and I'll take the over on the consensus view of 2.5% GDP growth in 2011. My guess is 3%+ GDP growth in 2011 – still not a strong recovery given the amount of slack in the economy, but an improvement over 2010.
Cape Town, South Africa, 3 pm
Courtesy of Gregg Easterbrook:
This year, the United States will spend at least $700 billion on defense and security. Adjusting for inflation, that's more than America has spent on defense in any year since World War II — more than during the Korean war, the Vietnam war, or the Reagan military buildup. Much of that enormous sum results from spending increases under presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama. Since 2001, military and security expenditures have soared by 119 percent.
Various pundits have accused the GOP of intentionally sabotaging the economy in order to diminish Obama's re-election chances. Brendan Nyhan sighs:
There's undeniably an element of partisanship in GOP opposition to Obama's economic policies, but that's how politics works. Democrats also reflexively opposed many of President Bush's proposals, including his initiatives for Iraq, but that doesn't mean they were sabotaging US foreign policy to ensure his defeat. Moreover, the increasingly routine nature of these accusations hinders open debate. In a democracy, it's crucial that political leaders can publicly oppose the executive branch without being accused of hurting the country. That principle is no less true today than it was during President Bush's time in office.
I don't doubt that the most hardcore Republican partisans long for this recession to continue indefinitely – or until the minute before they win back the presidency. But on one big issue, the GOP seems eager to prop up Keynesian demand by keeping the unaffordable Bush tax cuts in place for the remainder of Obama's first term. They have no serious plans for reducing spending either. This is, from my point of view, fiscally reckless in the medium and long-term – but it cannot be spun as trying to depress the economy next year.
Marc Lynch watches a fascinating process:
Thus far, most of the mainstream Arab media seems to be either ignoring the Wikileaks revelations or else reporting it in generalities, i.e. reporting that it's happening but not the details in the cables. I imagine there are some pretty tense scenes in Arab newsrooms right now, as they try to figure out how to cover the news within their political constraints.
Al-Jazeera may feel the heat the most, since not covering it (presumably to protect the Qatari royal family) could shatter its reputation for being independent and in tune with the "Arab street". So far, the only real story I've seen in the mainstream Arab media is in the populist Arab nationalist paper al-Quds al-Arabi, which covers the front page with a detailed expose focused on its bete noir Saudi Arabia. Meanwhile, the details are all over Arabic social media like Facebook and Twitter, blogs, forums, and online-only news sites like Jordan's Ammon News. This may be a critical test of the real impact of Arabic social media and the internet: can it break through a wall of silence and reach mass publics if the mass media doesn't pick up the story?
Another nuclear scientist in Iran is murdered in a terror attack:
Two separate explosions killed a nuclear scientist and injured another in the Iranian capital Monday morning, official news outlets reported. Both scholars' wives and a driver were also injured in the attacks, according to the news agencies. The slain scientist, Majid Shahriari, was a member of the nuclear engineering team at the Shahid Behesti university in Tehran, according to the official Islamic Republic News Agency, or IRNA… The assassins, riding motorcycles, tossed bombs at — or attached them to — vehicles of the two Shahid Behesti University professors as they drove with their spouses en route to work between 7 a.m. and 8 a.m."A Pulsar motorbike drove close to Dr. Shahriari's car and stuck a bomb on his car which after a few seconds exploded," Tehran police chief Hossein Sajednia was quoted as saying by the semi-official Fars news agency.
There is no indication of who is responsible, so caution is warranted. Another nuclear scientist was murdered by a terror attack last January. The first murdered scientist was a Green Movement supporter; but the more recent one was apparently a Basij. That's what makes an internal terrorist motive for both murders puzzling.
The Dish 