There goes that debate: Global warming sinks disputed island

By GottaLaff

Have you ever been in the midst of a heated argument only to get cut off at the knees? Welcome to Climate Change Land:

Reporting from New Delhi - Global warming appears to have finally resolved a dispute that gunboats never could: An island midway between India and Bangladesh that became a catalyst for military threats in the 1980s is now submerged under the rising sea.The Bay of Bengal island, which India called New Moore Island and Bangladesh referred to as South Talpatti, has ceased to exist, the Jadavpur University's School of Oceanic Studies declared this week. [...]

As for the future, a United Nations panel predicted that 17% of Bangladesh will disappear by 2050, displacing 20 million people, if water levels rise by 3.3 feet, as some expect.

"There's a lesson here that the world should learn while negotiating over territory," Hazra said. "It's not whether some country makes a gain. It's whether we all collectively win or lose given the impact we're seeing on the global environment."

Existence v. extinction: That is the real bottom line.

Palin Editor's Double Life

By GottaLaff

First things first:

Penquin Books announced that it is moving up the publication date of The Persecution of Sarah Palin by Matthew Continetti from next February to November 12, 2009 to coincide with the publication of Palin's controversial memoir.

The book is subtitled: How the Elite Media Tried to Bring Down a Rising Star.

Aw, man, poor Barbie McLipschmutz! The elite media is apparently trying to do what she herself already succeeded at doing: Looking like a dumbed down version of a box of professionally highlighted hair. Good thing Penguin's rushing to defend her honor before it's too...

Never mind.

Now then. On to more exciting, heart-stopping Barbie news:

The Daily Beast has learned that a top HarperCollins editor who worked on Sarah Palin's new memoir helped write another book about her: sophomoric send-up Terminatrix.

Yes. Yes, it's true. Her own editor is making her look like a dumbed down version of a box of professionally highlighted hair... in skin-tight leather:

Last October, at the height of Palin’s memorable vice-presidential run, Bellow was the anonymous co-author of a quickie paperback satire of the then-governor of Alaska.

Terminatrix: The Sarah Palin Chronicles—which has a cover featuring a Photoshopped governor in skin-tight leather and brandishing an automatic weapon—is a sophomoric send-up of Palin and her family, featuring digitally altered images and derisive captions, and packaged in a 5-by-7-inch, 96-page trade paperback. A representative gag: Palin’s face superimposed on a painting of Joan of Arc, with the mocking commentary: “In between junior high and high school, Sarah heard God's call to save France.”

France? Did I just see that obscene 4-, er, 6-letter word "France" juxtaposed next to the name "Sarah"? Sacre bleu! Zut alors!

Twenty thousand copies of Terminatrix were shipped by the now-defunct Collins Books, a HarperCollins imprint for which Bellow worked as executive editor. The book carries the humorous credit line, “Compiled by the Editors of the Wasilla Iron Dog Gazette.”

Informed sources tell me that the mysterious Wasilla compilers are actually the fortysomething Bellow, son of the late Nobel Prize-winning novelist Saul Bellow, and his former HarperCollins colleague Bruce Nichols, who today is editor-in-chief of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

I bet Barbie's agent had a thing or two to say about these things or two:

Palin’s literary agent, high-powered Washington attorney Robert Barnett, offered a terse “no comment” and Lee Hough, the Colorado Springs-based agent who represents Palin’s collaborator on the biography, Lynn Vincent, emailed me : “Lynn is under a very strick [sic] confidentiality agreement and cannot engage on this. Sorry about that.”

And that's all they're going to say about that, thank you very much. They're professionals, after all... strickly speaking.

Summers, Volcker Already Feuding

By GottaLaff

The Daily Show With Jon StewartM - Th 11p / 10c

Big 'Bama's House

Daily Show Full Episodes
Funny Political Videos

Important Things With Demetri Martin
More Funny Videos

(relevant segment at about 3:20)

If I were a punditiot, I'd be frothing and drooling over this, insisting that it's the end of the Obama administration, using that already timeworn phrase, "the honeymoon is over". But I'm not, so I won't:

Paul Volcker "has grown increasingly frustrated over delays in setting up the economic advisory group President Barack Obama picked the former Federal Reserve chairman to lead," Bloomberg reports.

Volcker blames Obama's NEC Director Lawrence Summers "for slowing down the effort to organize the panel of outside advisers... Summers isn't regularly inviting Volcker to White House meetings and hasn't shown interest in collaborating on policy or sharing potential solutions to the economic crisis."

While Summers "oversees the official White House economic policy apparatus, Obama tapped Volcker for a new Economic Recovery Advisory Board charged with injecting fresh, outside ideas into policy debates."

David Kurtz: "I'm starting to get the sense that Larry Summers is to economic policy in the Obama Administration what Dick Cheney was to national security policy in the Bush Administration."

Okay, punditiots, knock yourselves out. Perpetuate that stellar reputation you've so rightly earned. Meanwhile, I prefer to wait a little longer, put things into perspective, and give them more than two weeks to sort things out.

BREAKING: Israeli ground forces move into Gaza

By GottaLaff

CNN is just reporting that leaflets were dropped to tell Gaza residents to leave immediately. This will be a "long and comprehensive operation", per the reporting.

They're going on to say that this will be urban warfare, advantage: Hamas, since it's on their turf.

The Israeli's want to occupy/control certain areas on the periphery of more highly popuated, denser areas like Gaza City, if I understood right, and the first stages will be limited in scope.

"This is just the beginning." And, per the reporting, this is what Hamas wanted to happen, to lure Israeli forces in, get them bogged down, leading to some sort of eruption of opinion in the Arab world. They want to inflame emotions against the Israelis.