Month: October 2007

"Who, of all the powerful women in American politics right now, has inspired the unease, dismay and frank dislike that she has? Condi Rice, Nancy Pelosi, Dianne Feinstein? These are serious women who are making crucial decisions about our national life every day. They inspire agreement and disagreement; they fight and are fought with. But they do not inspire repugnance. Nobody hates Barbara Mikulski, Elizabeth Dole or Kay Bailey Hutchison; everyone respects Ms. Rice and Ms. Feinstein.

Hillary’s problem is not that she’s a woman; it’s that unlike these women–all of whom have come under intense scrutiny, each of whom has real partisan foes–she has a history that lends itself to the kind of doubts that end in fearfulness. It is an unease and dismay based not on gender stereotypes but on personal history," – Peggy Noonan on She Who Is Inevitable.

They despise him more than the left because he represents a different kind of conservatism. And so Michael Goldfarb argues that I mislabeled the data on military support for Ron Paul in this post, where I touted military donations to Obama and Paul. It’s all donors connected to the military, not active service military members. He’s right. I mislabeled. But as Goldfarb also notes, the data from active service members is basically the same with a twist: Ron Paul comes first among Republicans, but Obama beats him over all. The point stands. It’s staggering to me that military donors are supporting the two clearly anti-war candidates in the race. I know that’s a message The Weekly Standard doesn’t want to hear. For them, war is as much an end as a means. Soldiers don’t always feel that way. Maybe because they see what it actually is.

Are you sitting down? Because if we have a Clinton Restoration, this kind of explanation is going to be coming at us quite often:

I was looking recently at Republican women voters (core Republicans and Republican leaners), and their support for Hillary has doubled in the last few months to 13 percent, from less than 6 percent. Also quite interestingly, "Don’t Knows" surged to 11 percent, so a total of 24 percent would either vote for her or consider voting for her.

How it takes me back …

Another Cheney moment?

Allegations that a Syrian envoy admitted during a United Nations meeting Oct. 17 that an Israeli air strike hit a nuclear facility in September are inaccurate and have raised the ire of some in the US intelligence community, who see the Vice President’s hand as allegedly being behind the disinformation.

A United Nations press release discussing the General Assembly’s Disarmament Committee meeting mistranslated comments ascribed to an unnamed Syrian diplomat as saying that Israel had on various occasions “taken action against nuclear facilities, including the 6 July attack in Syria.”

The UN has since gone through the tape recordings of the meeting and found that there was no mention of the word “nuclear” at all. According to the UN, the error was one of translation, involving several interpreters translating the same meeting.

Eye-tracking technology can reveal some interesting things about what men and women are really looking at at a baseball game. (Update: my husband, who is never wrong, reminds me I already posted about this sans graphic.)

A reader writes:

One thing Watson and others forget is that the brain is highly malleable based on environment. Although he is the father of DNA he knows very little about neuroplasticity and neurogenesis. Previously it was thought that the human brain was ‘hardwired’ after a certain age. This is not true. Not only is not true, but the human mind is capable of adaptation but actual neuron growth even late in life. Ten years ago this was thought impossible.

Neurogenesis and neuroplasticity proves that a nurturing social and family setting shifts IQ, perspective, and emotional IQ. The so-called bell curve isn’t genetic. Oppressed Tibetans and Chinese ethnic minorities -whose test scores soar in the United States and Canada- are 20-30 points lower in their homeland. That 20-30 points deficit is in the same range of a lot of groups that are attacked or threatened (Muslims in France, Christians in Nigeria, Blacks in America). Conversely when oppressed groups are removed from their environment their IQ, emotional health returns to a normal rate, thus proving that is NOT genetic.

It is plastic, shifting and based upon the environment.

That is why people under prolonged stress experience memory loss, emotional outbursts and many other symptoms of a mind that is under duress. When the stress ends, normal memory levels return. A Black male living in the inner city in a single parent household facing an assortment of threats is obviously going to test differently than a white child growing up in the suburbs in a nurturing environment.

What is concerning about this growing myth in the end-all-be-all power of genes is that it leaves people helpless. There is apparently a fat gene, an Alzheimers gene, and what next? A stupid gene? This is genetic determinism and it’s not only a false scientific creation but down-right scary. It leaves people waiting around for ‘the magic pill,’ helpless and perpetual victims. It makes doctors and scientists as God and turns the average human into a lab rat.

A. J. Jacobs writes:

By the end of the year, I had moved from my old agnosticism to what a minister friend of mine calls "reverent agnosticism": Whether or not there is a God, I think there’s something to the idea of sacredness. The Sabbath can be sacred, rituals can be sacred, and there’s an importance to that. Do you think there’s anything to the idea of being a "reverent agnostic"? Or is it just oxymoronic?

Matt Labash and Stephen Colbert think it is. And if you think faith is a one-off, moment-of-total-revelation from which everything else follows, then I can see their point. But this, of course, does not exhaust the varieties of religious experience, to echo James. And there are times when intelligent believers, in periods of doubt or just spiritual drought, pray without assurance the God is truly there; or attend Mass or other services and feel and see nothing. But they still show up; and they still pray: unsure but still aware that what is beyond us will not always be clear to us, and the the struggle to believe is as important as the achievement. If this is "reverent agosticism," then it is another phrase for thinking faith. J.K. Rowling speaks to it in the Harry Potter books. Here’s a recent quote of hers, debunking the notion that somehow her work is anti-Christian. It isn’t. It’s just not fundamentalist. Money quote:

"The truth is that, like Graham Greene, my faith is sometimes that my faith will return. It’s something I struggle with a lot. On any given moment if you asked me [if] I believe in life after death, I think if you polled me regularly through the week, I think I would come down on the side of yes — that I do believe in life after death. [But] it’s something that I wrestle with a lot. It preoccupies me a lot, and I think that’s very obvious within the books."

Or as Montaigne put it:

"Some impose upon the world beliefs they do not hold; others, more in number, impose beliefs upon themselves, not being able to penetrate into what it really is to believe."

(Photo: Peter McDiarmid/Getty.)

A reader writes:

I don’t know if you saw this in the NYT yesterday:

"Katon Dawson, the chairman of the state Republican Party, … was far more dismissive of Mr. Colbert’s apparent intentions than his Democratic counterparts. "My advice," he said in an interview, “is that he could probably have more fun buying a sports car and getting a girlfriend."

Since Mr. Colbert is married, I think what Mr. Dawson is trying to say is, in order to fit into the Republican Presidential field properly; he needs to spend beyond his means and engage in an adulterous relationship.  We have all seen that is what’s required to fit in with the modern Republican Party, but I am at a loss as to why he needed to spell it out so plainly.

What is Mark Penn smoking, apart from complacency? He claims a quarter of Republican women will vote for Clinton. Drudge blared it in his new role as Clinton’s publicity arm. WaPo points out that if this were to happen, Clinton

would significantly outperform any Democratic candidate since 1972 among this group of voters. In exit polls from 1972 to 2004, an average of 9 percent of GOP women voted for Democratic candidates…

In the latest Post-ABC poll, 80 percent of Republican women said they definitely would not support Clinton if she were the Democratic nominee. Fewer said so of Obama or Edwards. Only 11 percent said they would vote for her in a general election match-up against Rudy Giuliani.

11 percent? 24 percent? Who’s counting? Obama adviser Joel Benenson adds:

In a recent Cook/RT Strategies Poll, in a head-to-head match-up against Rudy Giuliani, Clinton won only 7% of Republican women voters. Indeed, more Democratic women crossover to the Republican side to vote against Clinton—9% – than Republican women crossover to vote for her.

The Clinton lies are already under way.

"This is like a lighthouse going on, the light shining its beam on Mitt Romney," – Albert Mohler on Hugh Hewitt’s radio show. Yes, an institution that untilo very recently banned inter-racial dating and engaged in brutal anti-Catholic bigotry is now a light shining on Mitt Romney, a man who belonged to a church which, in his lifetime, barred African-Americans from the priesthood and temple ceremonies. Ah, the GOP. They don’t even pretend any more, do they?