The Dish

AIPAC prepares a resolution. It reads like Michael Goldfarb in a bad mood. This passage is interesting:

Whereas the concept of `universal jurisdiction’ has frequently been used in attempts to detain, charge, and prosecute Israeli and United States officials and former officials in connection with unfounded allegations of war crimes and has often unfairly impeded the travel of those individuals;

A reader writes:

As a former Catholic seminarian and professed Cistercian Monk…

I could never understand how I could be so doctrinally conservative and equally delighted when balls were in my face. Now I get it. I was never a doctrinal conservative. That’s why I was able to renounce the Deposit of Faith without so much as a thought. It was a liturgical ceremonial traditional fetish (which also manifests whenever something Royal happens on the BBC) that is by definition: Gay!

Thank you. I can enjoy the rest of my day now. Life is Grand. I think you’re Grand.

And irony is really gay as well.

Ken Silverstein interviews "Desmond Travers was one of the four members of the United Nations Fact Finding Mission on the Gaza Conflict, which produced the controversial Goldstone Report":

We found no evidence that Hamas used civilians as hostages. I had expected to find such evidence but did not. We also found no evidence that mosques were used to store munitions. Those charges reflect Western perceptions in some quarters that Islam is a violent religion. Gaza is densely populated and has a labyrinth of makeshift shanties and a system of tunnels and bunkers. If I were a Hamas operative the last place I’d store munitions would be in a mosque. It’s not secure, is very visible, and would probably be pre-targeted by Israeli surveillance. There are a many better places to store munitions. We investigated two destroyed mosques—one where worshippers were killed—and we found no evidence that either was used as anything but a place of worship.

A reader writes:

Hey—I know the vote in Maine is important but there is another repeal effort we are fighting here in Washington State that I am at a loss to understand why you don’t highlight as well. It is not marriage, per se, we are fighting for but an extension of domestic partner benefits that mandates total equality between straight and queer couples. From a local paper:

 

The yearly Washington Poll shows the statewide Referendum 71 for gay couples’ rights passing one week before the Nov. 3 election. The poll was conducted by a social research school at the University of Washington that has a track record of correctly forecasting election results. Its poll shows R-71 is winning by a 56 percent to 39 percent margin among registered voters. The edge was 57-38 among likely voters; likely voters were those who have sent in ballots already or said they voted in November 2007.
 
Referendum 71 asks voters to endorse or reject Senate Bill 5688, which state lawmakers approved and Gov. Chris Gregoire signed into law as the third installment of expanded rights for registered domestic partners. It would provide all remaining state-level rights of marriage to registered partners, including same-sex couples and heterosexual couples in which one partner is 62 or older.

This is huge.

I sure hope it passes, and helps cement a floor for equality in terms of benefits. I certainly don't intend to signal any ambivalence about the vote. But domestic partnership, even with equal rights and benefits, remains something other than marriage and the polls are not as close as they are in Maine. Hence my emphasis. 

Justin Fox puts today's GDP numbers in perspective:

We're probably out of the recession, but it's still impossible to tell if we're in much of a recovery. This is partly because of a litany of cautionary notes that need to be sounded every time a GDP number, especially an "advance estimate" like today's, comes out.

Some economic releases—like the weekly jobless claims number released today—are raw data. Many others involve some extrapolation from a survey sample, but are still effectively data releases. GDP, by contrast, is an estimate, put together by perhaps the most understaffed of government statistical agencies, the Commerce Department's Bureau of Economic Analysis, with data from a plethora of sources and a bunch of guesswork. It will be revised in a month, revised again a month after that, then revised again a couple years down the road. The final number could end up pretty much anywhere between 1% and 6% (or even beyond: the initial GDP growth estimate for the first quarter of 2000 was 5.4%; it has since been revised all the way down to 1.1%). And even that final number will involve estimates and assumptions (especially those involving the inflation rate) that some might take issue with. Beyond all that, there are the usual questions about whether high unemployment, continuing financial troubles or other factors might drag the economy back down in the coming months.

Elizabeth Pisani sorts through the conflicting press reports:

I finally got around to combing through the full report of the trial in the New England Journal of Medicine. Both the optimists and the pessimists are right. It really depends on what your hopes and expectations were. If you are a basic scientist (as most of the people involved in the study were) you’d be pretty thrilled by the results, because they show that vaccines might one day work. If you are a public health boffin such as myself, you’d be pretty disappointed, because the study suggests that that this vaccine doesn’t work for the people who really need it — a point much underplayed in the official reports.

As I’ve said too often, the Iraq surge was explicitly proposed as a means to get Iraq’s various factions to come together and build a common government and army and police force. From today’s NYT:

Both the military and the police remain heavily politicized. The police and border officials, for example, are largely answerable to the Interior Ministry, which has been seen (often correctly) as a pawn of Shiite political movements. Members of the security forces are often loyal not to the state but to the person or political party that gave them their jobs.

The same is true of many parts of the Iraqi Army.

For example, the Fifth Iraqi Army Division, in Diyala Province northeast of Baghdad, has been under the sway of the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq, the Shiite party that has the largest bloc in Parliament; the Eighth Division, in Diwaniya and Kut to the southeast of the capital, has answered largely to Dawa, the Shiite party of Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki; the Fourth Division, in Salahuddin Province in northern Iraq, has been allied with one of the two major Kurdish parties, the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan.

More recently, the Iraqi Awakening Conference, a tribal-centric political party based in Anbar Province (where Sunni tribesmen, the so-called Sons of Iraq, turned against the insurgency during the surge) has gained influence over the Seventh Iraq Army Division, which was heavily involved in recruiting Sunnis to maintain security in 2006.

What if the real impact of the surge will be that it helped train and arm the various camps for an even more brutal civil war once the US has left? I guess that would be a nifty exit strategy and a way to save face. But it wasn’t a success in the terms laid out by its own advocates. I hope it doesn’t happen; but see few reassurances that it won’t.

Pivoting off one my posts, Ezra offers his take on the public option opt out, should it pass. He thinks almost no states will reject it:

States wouldn't be able to opt out till 2014…The controversy around the public option is an expression of the controversy around Barack Obama's presidency in general, and health-care reform in particular. Once those issues are essentially settled, the underlying policy isn't going to hold people's attention.

A reader writes:

I understand that you are convinced that Oprah won't ask Palin any of the questions you are dying to have answered.  I agree with you that Oprah probably won't ask her questions about whether or not her fifth child is really hers.  However, that is not Oprah's responsibility.  She isn't a reporter.  She interviews celebrities so they can sell their shit.  That is her job.  Her job is not to do what an investigative journalist should be doing.  The fact that those people have not been doing their jobs in regards to Palin's past is not Oprah's problem.

Another writes:

You should stop harping on Oprah. I certainly don't watch her show for cutting edge, investigative journalism, but why malign her already for an interview that has yet to tape and air?  After publicly supporting candidate Obama, one can presume that O has questions about Palin that she would like to have answered.  I don't think she'll go on the attack (the way I believe someone needs to do to Palin) but she did ask some difficult, painful questions earlier this year during her interview with the Edwardses.  I think it's a bit unfair to pre-judge Oprah before the event.

Ok, I'll post-judge her. Better still: the Dish will live-blog the interview.