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08 Dec 09

Which Countries Are Missing From Copenhagen Talks? - The Gaggle Blog - Newsweek.com

  • Taiwan: Much of the world considers Taiwan an independent country, even though some bigger powers (including the U.S.) don’t, mainly for political reasons. Since it’s not a U.N. member state, Taiwan’s interest will be represented by China, which will have prime placement at the conference. But Taiwan remains more willing to make cuts to its emissions than more-industrial China, so the interests of both aren’t perfectly aligned. Taiwanese leaders will still attend the conference, although they’ll be limited in how they can participate. They’re also hoping that face time with other leaders might help boost Taiwan’s standing.

How Americans See The World - The Daily Dish | By Andrew Sullivan

  • Only 16% of the public has a favorable
    view of Pakistan, our essential partner in the new AfPak strategy --
    barely more than have a favorable view of Iran (11%) -- and unfavorable
    views of Pakistan have gone from 39% to 68% since last year.  Yikes. 
    And the partisan gap on Israel is interesting, if not new:  in the
    general public, 68% of Republicans and 43% of Democrats say that they
    sympathize with Israel more than with the Palestinians. Among [Council on Foreign Relations]
    experts, a solid 41% plurality say that they sympathize with both
    Israel and the Palestinians equally.

Glenn Greenwald - Salon.com

  • military officials proclaimed "suicide by hanging"
  • On the night of June 10, 2006, three Guantanamo detainees were found dead in their individual cells.
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They could study this in journalism schools: NYT v WaPo on climate emails - James Fallows

  • I am trying to avoid gratuitous NYT/WaPo comparisons, because like all publications they are trying their best in difficult conditions
  • In Face of Skeptics, Experts Affirm Climate Peril
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Flight 297 Passenger: Tedd Petruna Is 'Living In A Fantasy World' | TPMMuckraker

  • A security consultant who was a passenger on AirTran Flight 297 says the man who claims he thwarted porn-watching Muslim hijackers clearly fabricated the story, but Brent Brown adds that the airline's version of events underplays the seriousness of what happened.
  • But Brown, whose firm is based in Atlanta, also said that AirTran's explanation of what happened doesn't tell the whole story. He said a group of passengers -- "of obvious Middle Eastern descent, which doesn't concern me" -- were refusing to cooperate with flight attendants and using cell phones while the plane was on the runway. The atmosphere was "extremely tense," and the crew was upset, according to Brown.
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The View from Taiwan: Bubbling Taipei: the world's most expensive cabbages

  • sprays insecticide on what, at an estimated $1.2 million (£725,000) each, are probably the most expensive cabbages on Earth. Even when the Taipei 101 tower was built 200 metres away from his garlic beds, the cabbage man and his wife — who do not live on the plot — held on to their patch, whose value has steadily risen. Consensus opinion holds that the 50m x 25m allotment may be worth about $150 million today, although some put it as high as $300 million and everyone expects it to gain about 25 per cent in value over the next 18 months.
  • While the value of that plot has been rising, Taipei has been doing little in the way of building work. Just 2 per cent of GDP has been spent on construction in each of the past five years — far below even the dismal levels in deflationary Japan.
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The Celebrity-Political Complex - The Daily Dish | By Andrew Sullivan

  • now it’s the politicians themselves — Joe Scarborough, Mike Huckabee — who find themselves ensconced as hosts on a cable-TV set. The door between politics and television news now isn’t merely revolving; it spins so fast and so continuously that a fair number of people no longer seem to belong neatly on one side or the other.
05 Dec 09

Matthew Yglesias » The Persistence of Poverty

  • Now picture you are in a room with 10 people screaming.
  • Would you pay a $1 to get the first person to stop screaming, and a penny for the 10th person to stop screaming?
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Georgia to the rescue... again | FP Passport

  • A big chunk of them will also come from Georgia,  a non-NATO member with an ulterior motive:




    But the rest of the troops mentioned are
    either already deployed, or coming from a country whose desperate,
    loose cannon leader is pretty much discredited internationally. From a
    military perspective, Georgia's contribution is welcome news. But from
    a
    political perspective, it represents more that country's desperation to
    join NATO than a grand victory for Obama's new strategy.




    According to the Washington Post, NATO officials are counting on at least 900 troops from Georgia. Grunstein thinks it might be as high as 3,300.

Iran Is No Existential Threat | Foreign Policy

  • But the sanctions did not prove
    "crippling," as Bush had hoped: Iran
    continued to expand its nuclear infrastructure, and the risks of a military
    confrontation between the United States
    and Iran
    climbed.
  • Unfortunately, Barack Obama's administration has decided
    to repeat this sorry history.
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Matthew Yglesias » Transparency Squandered

  • In principle, journalists could use the information to write better-informed stories about congress.
  • Instead, you get things like a Politico article that leads with Pelosi’s spending on flowers and James Clyburn’s spending on donuts that had to be corrected because it “incorrectly reported the amounts Nancy Pelosi’s office spent on flowers and James Clyburn’s office spent on donuts.”
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