Noted...

Jobless: New unemployment claims rose to 626,000 -- much worse than expected.

Some suggest that the time has come to combat the outsourcing of American jobs by taxing outsourcing. Specifically, we should raise tarrifs on goods and services now produced in foreign countries after an American corporation outsourced those jobs.

What stimulus plan? There's been a lot of overheated talk on Obama's ill-considered attempts to reach out to the GOP. I think Krugman is right:

You see, this isn’t a brainstorming session — it’s a collision of fundamentally incompatible world views. If one thing is clear from the stimulus debate, it’s that the two parties have utterly different economic doctrines. Democrats believe in something more or less like standard textbook macroeconomics; Republicans believe in a doctrine under which tax cuts are the universal elixir, and government spending is almost always bad.

Obama may be able to get a few Republican Senators to go along with his plan; or he can get a lot of Republican votes by, in effect, becoming a Republican. There is no middle ground.

But he's trying for the middle ground anyways, by framing his stimulus as a tax cut, even though "tax rebates" are going to people who don't pay taxes. And much of the money is going to bail out bad banks without taking the logical step of outright nationalization. The execs who got us into this mess should all be fired by a new boss named Uncle Sam. Instead, Sam is helping the fat cats stay fat. (Update: There is now a $500,000 limit on fatness. That's a start, I suppose, but hardly sufficient to those of us who want to see the incompetent bastards get pink slips.)

A "rebate" or a giveaway of $500 or $1000 will do little to help those who have lost jobs. That kind of money will buy a family, what, maybe a week or two or three. Then what? We need government-run jobs programs. The time has come to resort to the employer of last resort.

Israel: Polls show that support for Israel remains strong, but is slowly eroding. According to the Jerusalem Post:

57 percent of Americans polled defined themselves as Israel supporters, compared to 8 percent who called themselves Palestinian supporters, and 34% who said that they were neither or were undecided, according to the survey carried out for the Washington DC-based 'The Israel Project.'

Last year, 69% supported Israel, and 6% supported the Palestinians.

Here's an interesting comparison: Back in 2001, the ADL found that 17% of Americans hold "hard core" anti-Jewish beliefs. Of course, many of the people who support the Palestinians (and I count myself among the 8%) are not anti-Semites -- they simply feel, as I do, that the Palestinians are getting a raw deal. I also feel that the Ethiopians got a raw deal from Italy -- yet I don't hate Italians.

The grim bottom line: The Palestinians are despised even by the vast majority of the America's anti-Jewish bigots.

Spinning the unspinnable: lambert made a great catch when he drew our attention to this screencap from Google News:

As lambert puts it:

Escort, attack, seize — same difference!

Remember David Ignatius? We were just talking about him. He's the WP reporter -- and son of a former Navy Secretary -- who behaved in such an irritating fashion at Davos. Now he has this telling advice for Barack Obama:

Whom should President Obama appoint as his emissary to Iran, to take on what may be the most important diplomatic mission in decades?...

My nominees are Zbigniew Brzezinski and Brent Scowcroft, former national security advisers for Presidents Jimmy Carter and George H.W. Bush, respectively. They would elevate the Iran mission, connecting it to the tradition of bipartisan strategic thinking that shaped America's role in the modern world. And, like our youthful new president, these two octogenarians understand the need for America to "turn a page" in its foreign policy and to connect with what Brzezinski has called a "global political awakening."

I know Brzezinski's and Scowcroft's views about dialogue with Iran because I spent many days with them last spring, moderating a discussion that yielded a book, "America and the World: Conversations on the Future of American Foreign Policy."

Scowcroft is, of course, a figure from the Bush era -- the Poppy Bush era. Is that change?

As we've noted earlier, Zbig is -- in essence -- a neocon who supported Pol Pot.

Remember, neoconservatism began on the Democratic side of the aisle, with a cabal surrounding Scoop Jackson. Of course, Brzenzinski now claims to despise the neocons, and he did denounce the Iraq war, as did Scowcroft. But Daniel Pipes and Paul Wolfowitz both emerged from the Brzenzinski orbit.

He also supported the slaughter of 200,000 people on East Timor by the Indonesians. He supported the creation of the Iranian theocracy as a buffer against the Soviets. He supported the Afghan Mujahadin -- which is to say, he supported Osama Bin Laden. When asked about this record (the result of a blinkered anti-USSR strategy), he gave this classic response:

"What's a few riled-up Muslims?"

There was a time (1980) when the mere mention of of Zbig's name at the Democratic National Conventional was enough to raise a rafter-shaking mass boo. But now, too many people have forgotten why he was once hated. Youngsters seem to be of the impression that anyone who voiced opposition to Bush's Iraq war policy must be cool. That's a simplistic attitude: The enemy of your enemy is not necessarily your friend.

At least I know how to draw, Shep: Artist Shepard Fairey modified an AP photo of Obama when he created his ubiquitous red, white and blue image. Now AP wants compensation.

All ribbing aside, I think AP should let the matter slide. One can argue that Fairey has created an essentially new work of art. I mean, Warhol used a well-known studio photo of Marilyn Monroe, yet he never credited the original photographer.