The Right Hand Bombeth, The Left Hand Bombeth Too

Everything you need to know about the Israel-Gaza conflict summed up right here.

Israel on Wednesday approved an even tougher war on Hamas, warning residents to flee southern Gaza ahead of planned bombardments of cross-border tunnels, as the Palestinian death toll passed 700.

After a brief lull to allow Gaza's beleaguered population to hunt for food and fuel, Defence Minister Ehud Barak was given the green light by the security cabinet to order a deeper offensive into Gaza towns as part of the campaign to halt Hamas cross-border rocket attacks.

But Barak has also decided to send an envoy to Cairo on Thursday to get details on an Egyptian ceasefire plan, which secured widespread international backing amid mounting concern about the scale of the civilian casualties.

Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said he hoped the talks would "lead to conditions which will allow" the end of the Israeli offensive which began on December 27 and has so far killed 702 Palestinians and wounded 3,100, Gaza medics say.

Olmert chaired the security cabinet meeting in Jerusalem which "approved continuing the ground offensive, including a third stage that would broaden it by pushing deeper into populated areas," a senior defence official said.

The final decision will be left with Barak, the official added.

Approving a bloodier, nastier third phase to the Gaza invasion while sending a peace delegation to Egypt with the expectation that the former will mean the latter is basically waiting to accept Hamas' unconditional surrender.

When of course that doesn't happen, more bombs and more deaths will occur. "Stupid Palestinians! Why won't you stop making us destroy you?"

A better question is why won't the US make Israel stop.

Another Milepost On The Road To Oblivion

How do you know if your economy is screwed? Guess who is issuing warnings about missing all fourth quarter profits and sales estimates?

You got it. Wal-Mart.

Wal-Mart warned its quarterly profit would miss analysts' expectations and reported comparable December sales below forecasts Thursday, signaling that even discount retailers are feeling the pinch of the economic slowdown.

The world's largest retailer said it expects to earn 91 to 94 cents a share for its fiscal fourth quarter, compared with previous guidance of $1.03 to $1.07 a share give in November. On average, analysts surveyed by Thomson Reuters predicted a profit of $1.06 a share.

Sales at stores open a least a year rose 1.7 percent to $46.509 billion last month, but were below expectations of a 2.8 percent rise. For January, the company expects same-store sales to be flat to up 2 percent.

Shares of Wal-Mart sank 6.75 percent in before-hours trading.

If Wallyworld is treading water, the American consumer is dead broke...and with it our entire economy.

You have no idea how bad 2009 is going to be. Truly.

Harrying Harry

My personal opinion of Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid is that he's pretty much the least effective Democrat to hold that position ever, and that the complete lack of respect for him as a player in Washington means it's long past time for him to be replaced. Not only has Harry folded on every major piece of legislation in the Senate over the last two years to Bush, the events of the last month have cemented the fact that he's viewed as a joke by his own party. Firedoglake's Jane Hamsher agrees.

Reid looks like a cat in a room full of rocking chairs on Meet the Press. Nobody knows how much Fitz has (not even Fitz, who is still trying to transcribe his tapes) or how much he'll need to reveal to prove his case, so Reid says he "doesn't remember" his conversation with Blago, but calls Blago a liar anyway. When asked if he supported Jesse Jackson Jr. for the Senate seat, he says he would support him. And admits that there's "room to negotiate" on Burris.

Burris appears at the Senate on Tuesday. Gets turned away. Could Reid look any worse?

Yes!

Obama stares down DiFi, appoints Panetta to the CIA, and the NYT breaks the story before she's told (but Ron Wyden already knows). DiFi's fuming.

Despite having been one of the 50 Senators who signed Reid's letter saying Burris would never be seated, she announces that as the outgoing head of the Rules Committee she thinks the Senate has no choice but to seat him.

(Good timing, because Charlie Rangel is already complaining about the Rules Committee dragging its feet.)

Reid can't hold his own caucus in line. Blames Rahm. Gives interview saying "I don't work for Barack Obama."

Smooth.

WaPo: "Burris Backs Reid Into a Corner."

A seventy-one year old dude who hasn't held office for 14 years, appointed by a crook, takes the Senate Majority Leader to the cleaners.

Reid is a red state senator, up for re-election in 2010 and under pressure from the right, who is already making noise about appeasing Republicans who aren't going to be appeased. He's a hazard to Obama's agenda, which is why leading Senate Democrats tried to ease him out as Majority Leader last year.

There's a reason why nobody's looking to Senate Democrats for leadership or even very much cooperation with Obama's planned legislation. That reason is Harry Reid. He has one job: get Obama's legislation through the Senate. If he cannot do that, and there's every reason to believe that he will fail miserably at this task, then he needs to be replaced. Period.

Honestly, can somebody explain to me how a Republican became the Dems' leader in the Senate? All he has to do is say "We're with the President on this" and then peel off like two GOP Senators to avoid a filibuster. If he can't even do that, he's done.

And so is the country.

StupidiNews!

• No group has yet taken credit for firing rockets at Israel from Lebanon's southern border.
• US companies are facing a $400 billion pension shortfall this year.
• The 2009 deficit, now forecast at $1.2 trillion, could stop Obama's stimulus plan before it starts.
• Mounting job losses are affecting the rental markets for apartments, vacancies are at a four year high.
• Microsoft Windows 7 beta goes into public release Friday.

Math For The Win

The FDIC's own numbers show that the Deposit Insurance Fund (DIF), the pile of money that's supposed to cover your bank account should your bank go under, is at $35 billion as of September 30, 2008.

Total number of deposits in US banks as of that date: Roughly $9 trillion.

There's not enough money in the fund to cover even one percent of the country's insured deposits should more banks fail...in fact there's barely enough to cover one-third of one percent of the country's deposits.

How much do you want to bet that more than one-third of one percent of US banks fail in 2009? During the Great Depression, bank failure percentage rates were in the double digits for several years.

But everything's fine, of course. The gubment says so.

Well Now This Makes A Certain Amount Of Sense

Josh Marshall:

There's been a lot of griping recently from the Right about how there are no web-native news outlets on the right, or that they aren't seen as having a lot of credibility or that the people who write for them get no respect. And then you read that Pajamas Media, the right-leaning blog outfit started a few years back with a crazy amount of VC money just hired Joe the Plumber to be their new war correspondent in Israel.

Awesome and win, now in paragraph form.

Much like Fox's Half Hour Comedy Hour, wingnuts are only actually funny when they believe they are serious.

Insert Caption Here

"No Jimmy, you can't play center. Look, we take on the Ex-British Prime Ministers in three weeks, so we gotta get our game on, guys."

Jobapalooza

As I alluded to in this morning's Stupidinews, job loss predictions for December were mostly in the "slightly less than November's disastrous numbers" category. Payroll company ADP just unzipped its fly and peed all over that.

Private employers shed 693,000 jobs in December, up sharply from the revised 476,000 jobs lost in November and far more than economists estimated, separate reports showed Wednesday.

ADP released its forecast using new methodology that the firm said would more closely reflect the nation's economic picture. The company's numbers had been consistently missing the mark, underestimating job losses as calculated by the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Another report, from outplacement company Challenger, Gray & Christmas, showed that planned layoffs at U.S. firms eased in December from the previous month's seven-year high but they were up an astounding 275 percent annually as the year-old recession cut a huge swathe of destruction through job market.

And given how bad the holiday retail sales season was in December and the new fiscal quarter/year upon us, I think that January prediction of one million jobs lost is going to be very accurate.

As bad as 2008 was, 2009 is going to be wall-to-wall disaster for the economy. If this level of job loss in America continues a full blown depression is certainly feasible. Could 2009 really see ten million jobs lost in 12 months? I honestly don't think that's out of the picture at all.

It may even be lowballing it. That's how worrying this is.

The Calm Before The Hurricane

Israel has called a 3-hour time out for humanitarian aid to get into Gaza.

The temporary cease-fire will take place in the "whole of the Gaza Strip" from 1 p.m. until 4 p.m. (6 a.m. to 9 a.m. ET) today, Israeli Defense Ministry spokesman Peter Lerner told CNN.

The three-hour truce is scheduled to take place each day.

"This is in order to enable replenishing of supplies and allow aid activities," he said.

Lerner noted that Israeli forces would respond to any aggression toward them during the pause.

Gosh, that's downright considerate of them to take a breather before expanding the incursion into phase three.

Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert convened a security cabinet meeting Wednesday to weigh expanding the army's offensive in the Gaza Strip and discuss an Egyptian ceasefire initiative, officials said.
"The cabinet is now meeting to discuss the operation in Gaza and to discuss the latest ceasefire initiative," a government official said.
According to a senior defense official, the cabinet will consider whether to expand the ground offensive, launched Saturday night, deeper into Palestinian towns.
"(Defense Minister Ehud) Barak has instructed the army to prepare for the third stage of the operation," the official told AFP.
"We can't see the operation stopping in the coming days. We still have to study the details of the Egyptian proposal," the official said.

The third stage of course would be the invasion and capture of Gaza City and other towns in Gaza in an effort to root out Hamas once and for all. I don't see how this can result in anything other than the occupation and outright destruction of what little infrastructure Gaza has left. Israel's not tipping its hand on this meeting to have the plan shot down. It's doing so for the express purpose of announcing to the Palestinian world that Gaza is about to become an abattoir and that there's nothing anyone can do about it as the people in Gaza are unable to flee. It's collective punishment of the first order and Israel knows that as long as the US backs them unconditionally, they can get away with it.

We may be looking at the beginning of what could even be the medium-term US style occupation of Gaza by the IDF. Surely Fatah is waiting in the wings for the chance to take over, and they figure when Israel then gracefully offers the choice between Israeli occupation and Fatah rule, the people of Gaza (well, the remaining ones) will choose Fatah. Israel will pack up and go home, Fatah will vow to rebuild, and everything will be all peachy. That's the plan, anyway.

Plans rarely survive first contact with the enemy. In the next few days, the casualties in Gaza are going to get brutal, ugly, and very graphic. There's a reason why Israel is keeping all reporters out of the combat zone (even US reporters) since this went to a ground operation: that's the one lesson they did learn from Lebanon in 2007. They know their ability to stay in Gaza past January 20 depends on the public relations war more than the military one.

StupidiNews!

• The Fed predicts a deteriorating economy and employment picture well into 2010.
• An Israeli airstrike on a UN school in Gaza kills 40 and enrages the world.
• National Guardsmen stationed in Afghanistan are extending their tours to avoid the economy at home.
• Europe is scrambling to avoid natural gas shortages after Russia has cut them off.
• Predictions for Friday's December job loss numbers range from 450,000 to 750,000 or more.

Sound, Fury, And A Lot Of Dead

Jeff Huber is certainly one of the folks you should be reading on US foreign policy, and his take on Israel's latest foray into Gaza is spot on.

Never tired of watching its own horror show, the Bush team is reprising the scenario it ran in Lebanon: Cheney goads Bush into giving tacit approval for Israel to launch a military offensive against a group of sand colored people who, in terms of relative firepower, amount to an ant colony. Kondi does her hair up like a fright wig and drags out the ceasefire process until Israel a) has killed all the sand colored people it wants to kill or b) starts getting its tohkes kicked by the sand colored people and wants mommy to make them stop it.

As usual, read the whole thing, then bookmark Pen and Sword, if only because he's one of the few Americans on earth willing to say:

It's too bad for the Palestinians they can't afford to set up a lobbying group like the American Israeli Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) and think tanks like the American Enterprise Institute and to buy all of our politicians and our media like the Israelis have done.

And if that doesn't perfectly sum up the major problem with Israel and America's "special relationship" over the last 16 years, I dunno what will.

Turning A Blind Eye

Over at MoJo, Kevin Drum lets Team Obama have it over Bill Richardson's resignation.

The wreck of Bill Richardson, who withdrew earlier today as President-elect Obama’s nominee for Commerce Secretary, surely should have been anticipated by the Obama vetters. As previously reported by Mother Jones, the New Mexico governor has, over the last decade, left behind a wide trail of questionable business dealings, many of them involving the energy industry.

Obama's transition team apparently chose to ignore these past whiffs of scandal. They also seem to have been unfazed by the current federal investigation into a possible pay-to-play scandal, which was already well underway when Richardson’s nomination was announced on December 3. Within two weeks of the nomination, the media was widely reportingthat Richardson was the subject of a grand jury probe in a “highly active stage.”

Richardson insists that he and his administration “have acted properly in all matters” and that he is withdrawing his name from consideration only because “the ongoing investigation also would have forced an untenable delay in the confirmation process.” But the accusations are pretty damning. The Washington Post reports:

The probe in New Mexico involves questions about a California firm, CDR Financial Products, and its president, David Rubin. The grand jury in Albuquerque is looking into whether the firm was given a contract with the New Mexico Finance Authority because of pressure from Richardson. CDR made $1.48 million advising the authority on interest-rate swaps and refinancing of funds related to $1.6 billion in transportation bonds issued by the agency, state officials confirmed.The firm and Rubin together gave $100,000 to two Richardson organizations shortly before winning those contracts.

Drum of course is absolutely correct, Richardson's legal troubles and pay-to-play whisperings have been swirling around him for some time now. But the fault lies primarily with Obama's staffers and ultimately with Obama himself. He's the guy in charge, he made the Richardson selection in the first place, and now he does look bad at a time where we need a real leader and the country is in deep, deep trouble.

It's almost as if for every really excellent decision Obama makes, he has to balance it out with a truly craptastic one. While that's an improvement over Bush for sure, the times demand nothing less than an exceptional President right now, or we're looking at a national catastrophe.

Fair or unfair, Obama absolutely must be better than this.

Slighting DiFi

This whole "We forgot to tell the incoming chair of the Senate Intelligence committee about Leon Panetta, oops" thing is crap. Diane Feinstein is pissed for a reason.

“I was not informed about the selection of Leon Panetta to be the CIA Director. I know nothing about this, other than what I’ve read,” Feinstein said in a statement. “My position has consistently been that I believe the Agency is best-served by having an intelligence professional in charge at this time.”

A Feinstein spokesman told CNN’s Dana Bash that the California senator found out about Obama’s pick after her staff showed her a New York Times report.

"The President-elect will now have a chance to make his arguments,” the spokesman said. “Her next move is to listen."

No, her next move is to sit the hell down and shut the hell up.

Look, I'm not a retired general or a 30-year intel community veteran, but even I can spot political chin music. Obama is dead serious about cleaning house at the CIA. This is a message fastball right at the helmet, and Feinstein and outgoing chair Jay Rockefeller were left out of the loop on this one for a specific reason. That reason is both of them bought into Bush's "Jack Bauer From 24" theory of torture as CIA operating procedure, and Obama is having none of that. He wants Gitmo gone, he wants torture stopped, he wants rendition ended, and he wants the people inside the CIA who pulled the trigger on this ripped out at the root. Moreover, he's sending a clear message that the folks who supported this kind of thing during the Bush years are totally on Barry's shit list going forward.

You don't "forget" to tell the chair of the Senate committee confirming your pick who your pick is ahead of time. You certainly don't forget to divulge critical information to the chair of the Intelligence committee. Folks, I all but guarantee you this was a caluculated insult, and the selection of Panetta combined with the selection of Dawn Johnsen at the Office of Legal Counsel is making a lot of people at Langley very uncomfortable right now. And let's not forget the reason why DiFi and Jello Jay Rockefeller are sweating Panetta. Both of them have a lot to answer for should the CIA torture regime stuff go public.

Barry's about to go collect some heads, yo. And I don't see DiFi standing in his way on this, having just gotten the chair. She can't protest too much, after all.

[UPDATE] And there you have it: DiFi is now on board with the idea of Panetta as CIA Director.

"I have been contacted by both President-elect Obama and Vice President-elect Biden, and they have explained to me the reasons why they believe Leon Panetta is the best candidate for CIA Director," a new statement from her office read. "I look forward to speaking with Mr. Panetta about the critical issues facing the intelligence community and his plans to address them."

That was almost record speed, making me think that while Obama is going to be cleaning up the CIA, he may be more discrete about the worst of it, sparing DiFi and Jello Jay.

We'll see.

The Low, Low Price Of $8 Trillion

CNN has calculated the current cost of the bailout from Bear Stearns to Obama's simulus package and come up with eight trillion dollars.

"Monetary stimulus alone is not enough - it must be combined with fiscal stimulus if you want more bang for your buck," he noted.

But the new program, which Obama aides have said could total $775 billion, will also weigh heavily on the ballooning federal deficit. The current fiscal year is barely a few months old and already the government is running a deficit exceeding $400 billion -- nearly the same amount as all of last year. Many economists believe it will top $1 trillion in the end.

Some say that the benefits of massive spending outweigh the cost of inaction.

"While it seems like quite a lot, we don't really need to focus on the cost due to the depth of the recession," said Mark Vitner, economist with Wachovia.

Others, while saying that government action is needed, question the vast sums that are being allocated and proposed.

"The government says it can spend the money better than you can, but that hasn't been the case in the past," said Bill Beach, director of the center for data analysis at the conservative-leaning Heritage Foundation. "That will really show up when they have to raise taxes in the future to make up for the increasing deficit."

If we've thrown that much money at the economy already and we're still very much expected to have an even worse 2009 and 2010, there's something fundamentally wrong with both Bush and Obama's assumptions on the economy. Obama's plan just isn't going to work. It will soften the blow somewhat, but the reality is the massive deficit we'll be carrying from this will only serve to slow down the economy even more in the future. As much as I hate to agree with anyone from the Heritage Foundation ever, Obama is going to have to raise taxes at some point, and raise them significantly.

We're looking at a very long process that may stretch a decade or more.

StupidiNews!

• Obama, Britney Spears, and a number of other high-profile Twitter accounts were hacked yesterday.
• Ex-eBay CEO Meg Whitman is running for Governor of California in 2010.
• Russia and Ukraine are blaming each other for Gazprom's shutdown of gas pipelines to Europe.
• Obama's choice of former Clinton chief of staff Leon Panetta to run the CIA suggests a major shakeup.
• 2008 was a record year for the movie business at the box office.