The Blog Formerly Known As Vote '08

The President-elect, today:

“We have to make tough choices and smart investments today so that as the economy recovers, the deficit starts to come down.  We cannot have a solid recovery if our people and our businesses don’t have confidence that we’re getting our fiscal house in order.  That’s why our goal is not to create a slew of new government programs, but a foundation for long-term economic growth.

That also means an economic recovery plan that is free from earmarks and pet projects.  I understand that every member of Congress has ideas on how to spend money.  Many of these projects are worthy, and benefit local communities.  But this emergency legislation must not be the vehicle for those aspirations.  This must be a time when leaders in both parties put the urgent needs of our nation above our own narrow interests.”

Read the full transcript here.

Republicans soon after held a news conference with their take; House Minority Leader John Boehner said, “At the end of the day, how much debt are we going to pile on future generations?”

Nice of them to get religion. A little late, though.

(Photo: Stephen Crowley/the New York Times)

Two vastly different polls (1st one here, 2nd one here) present an emphatic (& thus enigmatic) ‘yes’ to the question in the headline.

But Nate Silver bursts the bubbles of both the pro- & anti- Palin camps:

“Alaska is perhaps the most difficult state in the country to poll. Its residents are in a strange time zone and keep strange schedules; it has very high rates of cellphone usage; it has highly unusual demographics.”

&

“Actually, I’m not sure that this one is too hard to adjudicate. The Alaska Standard is an attractive and engaging blog, but its lead author, talk show host Dan Fagan, is most definitely not a fan of Mrs. Palin. In fact, although Fagan is a staunch conservative, virtually all of his posts are anti-Palin in some way, most recently regarding some controversy surrounding Levi Johnston.

Fagan very much is a fan, however, of Lisa Murkowski. Not only that, but Murkowski has written an article for this website, and is listed as one of its contributors along the side panel. The pollster, David Dittman, is also listed as a contributor.

So you’ll excuse me if I don’t find it terribly shocking that when this website decided to conduct a poll, it contained GREAT NEWS!!! FOR LISA MURKOWSKI!!!”

So which poll should we believe?

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Marvin Hier in the Wall Street Journal (h/t my Dad):

“Red Cross officials are all over the Gaza crisis, describing it as a full-blown humanitarian nightmare. Where were they during the seven months when tens of thousands of Israeli families could not sleep for fear of a rocket attack? Where were their trauma experts to decry that humanitarian crisis?

There have been hundreds of articles and reports written from the Erez border crossing falsely accusing Israel of blocking humanitarian supplies from reaching beleaguered Palestinians in Gaza. (In fact, over 520 truck loads of humanitarian aid have been delivered through Israeli crossings since the beginning of the Israeli counterattack.) But how many news articles, NGO reports and special U.N. commissions have investigated Hamas’s policy of deliberately placing rocket launchers near schools, mosques and homes in order to use innocent Palestinians as human shields?”

Writing in the Washington Post, former President Jimmy Carter says the conflict could have been avoided, based on his experiences visiting the region last year:

“We knew that the 1.5 million inhabitants of Gaza were being starved, as the U.N. special rapporteur on the right to food had found that acute malnutrition in Gaza was on the same scale as in the poorest nations in the southern Sahara, with more than half of all Palestinian families eating only one meal a day.

Palestinian leaders from Gaza were noncommittal on all issues, claiming that rockets were the only way to respond to their imprisonment and to dramatize their humanitarian plight. The top Hamas leaders in Damascus, however, agreed to consider a cease-fire in Gaza only, provided Israel would not attack Gaza and would permit normal humanitarian supplies to be delivered to Palestinian citizens.

After extended discussions with those from Gaza, these Hamas leaders also agreed to accept any peace agreement that might be negotiated between the Israelis and Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, who also heads the PLO, provided it was approved by a majority vote of Palestinians in a referendum or by an elected unity government.

Since we were only observers, and not negotiators, we relayed this information to the Egyptians, and they pursued the cease-fire proposal. After about a month, the Egyptians and Hamas informed us that all military action by both sides and all rocket firing would stop on June 19, for a period of six months, and that humanitarian supplies would be restored to the normal level that had existed before Israel’s withdrawal in 2005 (about 700 trucks daily).

We were unable to confirm this in Jerusalem because of Israel’s unwillingness to admit to any negotiations with Hamas, but rocket firing was soon stopped and there was an increase in supplies of food, water, medicine and fuel. Yet the increase was to an average of about 20 percent of normal levels. And this fragile truce was partially broken on Nov. 4, when Israel launched an attack in Gaza to destroy a defensive tunnel being dug by Hamas inside the wall that encloses Gaza.”

In a piece in today’s New York Times, Rashid Khalidi (like Marvin Hier above) tries to point out inaccuracies in the media about Israel’s role:

This war on the people of Gaza isn’t really about rockets. Nor is it about “restoring Israel’s deterrence,” as the Israeli press might have you believe. Far more revealing are the words of Moshe Yaalon, then the Israeli Defense Forces chief of staff, in 2002: “The Palestinians must be made to understand in the deepest recesses of their consciousness that they are a defeated people.”

Ross Douthat’s thoughtful examination of the conflict nearly leads him to throw up his hands:

“The answer is simultaneously simple and impossible: In the midst of a hotly-contested domestic political scene, they need to balance their short-term security concerns (all those rockets flying out of Gaza, in this case) against a twofold long-term goal - the need to incentivize Palestinians to stay within hailing distance of the negotiating table (which is awfully hard to do when you’re smashing through their cities in pursuit of Hamas rocketeers), and the need to act unilaterally, in the absence of a plausible negotiating partner, to preserve their state’s long-term viability in the face of the looming demographic time bomb (which is awfully hard to do, as Israel has discovered in the wake of the Gaza pull-out, without compromising your short-term security). And it’s the Kobayashi Maru-style impossibility of all this that makes something like the Gaza incursion so hard to analyze: It seems like a bad idea, but within the constraints that Israeli leaders operate under it’s possible that it’s the worst option except for all the others.”

& finally, Matt Yglesias tries to put this conflict in the context of all conflicts:

“…something I’ve heard from fans of this attack is rhetorical questions along the lines of “what would the United States do if we were being attacked by rockets from Mexico or Canada?” Of course with such hypotheticals, it’s always hard to specify the issue correctly. I assume if someone shot a rocket across the Canadian border in the general direction of Seattle that the Canadian government would arrest the guy. But you actually don’t need to get very hypothetical to ask what the United States would do if people felt themselves threatened by foreign killers — we’d do exactly what we did in 2002-2003, namely engage in a panicky, counterproductive, and immoral overreaction driven more by emotion, ego, and politics than by sound thinking about the situation. So I don’t really find it surprising that Israel is reacting in this way.

By somewhat the same token, I do read in the comments section what I would regard as a disproportionate level of shock and appalledness from some quarters about Israeli activities as if this action is some kind of unprecedented outrage in human history. The real outrage is how common and banal, how unsurprising and thoroughly precedented it is.

Those are just some of a myriad of viewpoints out there on the web.

What are yours? Post a comment!

FURTHER READING: Check out (from Pew) how the Gaza story is sucking up the news hole, even though most reporters aren’t allowed in.

[above: Birds in a tree in northwest Missouri, January, 1971. photo by my father.]

“Each public officer who takes an oath to support the constitution swears that he will support it as he understands it, & not as it is understood by others.”

Who said it?

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