The AP looks pretty Anti-Sarah Palin in this story

Why the heck would you assign 11 of your reporters to fact check Sarah Palin's autobiography when there's oh say... the biggest piece of healthcare legislation floating through Congress? Any idea?

The AP claims Palin misstated her record with regard to travel expenses and taxpayer-funded bailouts, using statements widely reported elsewhere. But it also speculated into Palin's motives for writing "Going Rogue: An American Life," stating as fact that the book "has all the characteristics of a pre-campaign manifesto."

Palin quickly hit back on a Facebook post titled "Really? Still Making Things Up?"

"Imagine that," the post read. "11 AP reporters dedicating time and resources to tearing up the book, instead of using the time and resources to 'fact check' what's going on with Sheik Mohammed's trial, Pelosi's health care takeover costs, Hasan's associations, etc. Amazing."

AP spokesman Paul Colford said the organization, with more than 4,000 employees, and 49 Pulitzer Prizes earned for asking the hard questions, has the luxury of putting multiple reporters on major stories. He confirmed 11 people worked on the story, but not all full-time. He refused to say, however, if similar number of journalists were assigned to review other political books, or if Palin has been treated differently.

Yes, what about Obama's autobiography? Did they fact check that? In an industry that is suppose to be unbiased, that sort of "research" looks fishy and they should understand that. Conservative talk radio is going to have a field day with this one.

Rocky road for employment

I know that technically we're bouncing back from the Great Recession, but New York Daily News Writer Nouriel Roubini thinks the worst is still to come for the American worker. The job market is always the last to improve when coming out of a recession and there's a good chance a lot of these jobs that were lost may never come back.

The last recession ended in November 2001, but job losses continued for more than a year and half until June of 2003; ditto for the 1990-91 recession.

So we can expect that job losses will continue until the end of 2010 at the earliest. In other words, if you are unemployed and looking for work and just waiting for the economy to turn the corner, you had better hunker down. All the economic numbers suggest this will take a while. The jobs just are not coming back.

There's really just one hope for our leaders to turn things around: a bold prescription that increases the fiscal stimulus with another round of labor-intensive, shovel-ready infrastructure projects, helps fiscally strapped state and local governments and provides a temporary tax credit to the private sector to hire more workers. Helping the unemployed just by extending unemployment benefits is necessary not sufficient; it leads to persistent unemployment rather than job creation.

The long-term picture for workers and families is even worse than current job loss numbers alone would suggest. Now as a way of sharing the pain, many firms are telling their workers to cut hours, take furloughs and accept lower wages. Specifically, that fall in hours worked is equivalent to another 3 million full time jobs lost on top of the 7.5 million jobs formally lost.

This is very bad news but we must face facts. Many of the lost jobs are gone forever, including construction jobs, finance jobs and manufacturing jobs. Recent studies suggest that a quarter of U.S. jobs are fully out-sourceable over time to other countries.

Well that's just swell news. The main thing is that there seems to be change from "be whatever you want" in this country to "get whatever the heck you can and survive." Not exactly the American dream that everyone has grown to love.

Stimulus creating jobs in districts that don't exist

I'm sure this is an honest mistake, but damn, this is embarassing.

Here's a stimulus success story: In Arizona's 15th congressional district, 30 jobs have been saved or created with just $761,420 in federal stimulus spending. At least that's what the Web site set up by the Obama administration to track the $787 billion stimulus says.

There's one problem, though: There is no 15th congressional district in Arizona; the state has only eight districts.

And ABC News has found many more entries for projects like this in places that are incorrectly identified.

Late Monday, officials with the Recovery Board created to track the stimulus spending, said the mistakes in crediting nonexistent congressional districts were caused by human error.

Just a lesson to all you out there that believe the government is the answer to everything. The government screws up just as much as big business, so giving them complete control of certain sectors in life doesn't mean things will be flowers and babies.

Obama bows and freaks out America

Apparently by bowing to the Japanese emperor, Obama is apparently signifying some sort of disrespect towards capitalism and the free world. Nevermind being emperor is more symbolic than anything and Obama is following a Japanese custom. Apparently in order to be a true American he should have came in spouting John Wayne lines and offending Japanese people left and right. Either way, the media has blown this waaaay out of proportion.

This photo will get Democrat President Obama a lot of approving nods in Japan this weekend, especially among the older generation of Japanese who still pay attention to the royal family living in iRepublican vice president Dick Cheney is received by Emperor Akihito in 2007ts downtown castle. Very low bows like this are a sign of great respect and deference to a superior.

To some in the United States, however, an upright handshake might have looked better. (See Cheney-Akihito photo, right).

Remember Michelle Obama casually patting Britain's Queen Elizabeth on the back during their Buckingham Palace visit? America's royalty tends to make movies and get bad reviews and lots of money as a sign of respect.

Obama could receive some frowns back home as he did for his not-quite-this-low-or-maybe-about-the-same-bow to the Saudi king not so long ago. (See photo here)

How times change under Democratic presidents.

Back in 1994 when President Bill Clinton appeared to maybe perhaps almost start to bow to Akihito at a White House encounter, U.S. officials rushed to deny it was any such a thing.

God forbid we're liked in other countries, that would just be preposterous!

Weak dollar wont help the economy right now

The weak US dollar isn't helping the economy anytime soon, while it is allowing our exports to increase, the amount of imports in this country is growing faster. So it's going to take a couple years.

WASHINGTON – A weaker dollar may boost the nation's economy by increasing exports and narrowing the trade gap — but that won't happen anytime soon.

Instead, the nation's trade deficit rose in September by the largest percentage in a decade as U.S. exports grew for the fifth straight month, but imports rose faster, a government report showed Friday. That trend is likely to continue until the middle of next year, economists said.

Rising oil prices and higher purchases of foreign goods by U.S. companies drove imports higher. So did more purchases of foreign parts by U.S. manufacturers, which are ramping up production in the fledgling economic recovery.

Higher exports, spurred by a lower dollar, probably won't reduce the trade gap and boost the U.S. economy until 2011, economists said.

Meanwhile the job market is still in shambles. It will be interesting to see how the US economy starts to recover if it is actually recovering.

US can't win in Afghanistan, says Gorbachev

And he would certainly know a thing or two about that since the Soviet Union invaded and was in a murky war in Afghanistan for much of the 1980s... something that has been long considered that country's version of Vietnam. His diagnosis was basically that Afghanistan is too scattered and too much of a clan culture to be controlled militarily.

Nov. 10 (Bloomberg) -- Former Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev, drawing on his experience of military failure in Afghanistan in the 1980s, said the U.S. can’t win the conflict there and should begin pulling out its soldiers.

Afghanistan, where U.S. and NATO forces are battling a Taliban-led insurgency, is too fragmented between clans to be controlled militarily, Gorbachev, 78, said in an interview today in Berlin. While he said President Barack Obama would be unlikely to take his advice, Gorbachev said he saw no chance of success even with more U.S. troops.

“I believe that there is no prospect of a military solution,” Gorbachev said in Russian through a translator. “What we need is the reconciliation of Afghan society -- and they should be preparing the ground for withdrawal rather than additional troops.” 

Considering how much the Afghan war hurt the Soviet Union, the United States might want to take a look at these statements and the similarities between the invasion by the USSR and the current occupation by the US. 

Uh-oh, Iran is up to no good

Apparently Iran is working on nuclear warheads, which is not something America would like to be happening, in case you're keeping score. Luckily the UN has taken their normal course of action... doing nothing.

The UN's nuclear watchdog has asked Iran to explain evidence suggesting that Iranian scientists have experimented with an advanced nuclear warhead design, the Guardian has learned.

The very existence of the technology, known as a "two-point implosion" device, is officially secret in both the US and Britain, but according to previously unpublished documentation in a dossier compiled by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), Iranian scientists may have tested high-explosive components of the design. The development was today described by nuclear experts as "breathtaking" and has added urgency to the effort to find a diplomatic solution to the Iranian nuclear crisis.

The sophisticated technology, once mastered, allows for the production of smaller and simpler warheads than older models. It reduces the diameter of a warhead and makes it easier to put a nuclear warhead on a missile.

Um... crap. That's kind of a bad sign for us when Iran constantly talks about doing us in. Is anyone going to do anything?