Month: August 2008

From Alaska: worth checking out.

San Mateo, California, 8.02 am.

Caitlin Flanagan revisits the story of Parry Hearst:

Patty Hearst caught our attention because she was an innocent and largely naive young woman who was being fought over, in public, by two powerful forces: her parents and “the culture” in its most extreme and violent manifestation. At one particularly heartrending moment, her father defended her against charges that she had joined the SLA: “We’ve had her 20 years; they’ve only had her 60 days,” he said. Then Catherine Hearst broke her usual silence: “I know my girl.” That’s why we couldn’t let the story go, not because Patty herself fascinated us, but because we were desperate to know, in the epic battle for her affections, whom she would choose: Catherine or Cinque? It was the kind of question many of us were grappling with in our own lives, and Patty Hearst gave us the perfect excuse to talk about our own situations without really talking about them, not directly. We needed someone like her just then. As the U.S. attorney said in his closing arguments, by way of reminding the jurors how Patty had ended up on trial: “She didn’t call us. We called her.”

Philip Gourevitch, writing for the New Yorker, just put up a short piece on Palin. Money quote:

“the Democrats also preach individual freedoms and individual rights, capitalism, free market, let-it-do-its-thing-best, let people keep as much of their money that they earn as possible.”

Rush Limbaugh approves of this message?

Hilzoy makes an obvious point:

When this campaign started, one of my biggest questions about Barack Obama was whether he would be any good at managing things. The President is, after all, the head of a very large organization, and he had better either have good management skills or hire a chief of staff who does. The fact that I didn’t know whether Obama had them didn’t prevent me from voting for him — none of the other candidates I might have supported had a track record in management either — but I would have been happier had I known whether Obama was any good at running things.

I don’t have that problem any more.

Obama has spent the past year and a half running a large organization — as of last December, it had "about 500 employees and a budget of $100 million" — and running it very well. It’s not just that he and his team beat the Clinton campaign, which started out with enormous advantages. It’s not even that he often did so by building effective political machines from scratch in states in which Clinton had locked down the political establishment. It’s that every account of the Obama campaign that I’ve read makes it clear that he has done an outstanding job of constructing and running a political organization.

Even Jonah Goldberg realizes the commander-in-chief of Alaska’s National Guard line is "really lame" for the party of Eisenhower. But the "Alaska-Is-Close-To-Russia" argument by Cindy McCain. This is what the GOP’s national security analysis now is! I mean: seriously, guys. Is this an episode of South Park? Enjoy:

"I should not talk so much about myself if there were anybody else whom I knew as well. Unfortunately, I am confined to this theme by the narrowness of my experience. Moreover, I, on my side, require of every writer, first or last, a simple and sincere account of his own life, and not merely what he has heard of other men’s lives; some such account as he would send to his kindred from a distant land; for if he has lived sincerely, it must have been in a distant land to me," – Henry David Thoreau, Walden.

Check out the fourth picture in the Daily Mail. The beauty queen pic is pretty cool too.

Ambers thinks it’s legit:

She’s just had a baby. Can she be a full-time campaigner?

Tough question. The McCain campaign would say "Would you ask that question if she were a man?" And I’d say,  "you answer my question first, and then I’ll answer yours." And the McCain campaign would say: "It’s a sexist question." And I’d say: "You’re answering the argument, not the question. " And they’d say: "You’re just against her because she an evangelical Christian and you secular media types can’t stand a feminist who isn’t a liberal." And I’d say: "What were we talking about again?"

From Josh:

The investigator appointed by the state legislature began trying to arrange a time to depose Gov. Palin last week — in other words, in the final days before her selection.

I ask again: who vetted her? Josh has a sober and clear overview of Troopergate and why it matters here. Money quote:

We rely on elected officials not to use the power of their office to pursue personal agendas or vendettas. It’s called an abuse of power. There is ample evidence that Palin used her power as governor to get her ex-brother-in-law fired. When his boss refused to fire him, she fired him. She first denied Monegan’s claims of pressure to fire Wooten and then had to amend her story when evidence proved otherwise.

The available evidence now suggests that she 1) tried to have an ex-relative fired from his job for personal reasons, something that was clearly inappropriate, and perhaps illegal, though possibly understandable in human terms, 2) fired a state official for not himself acting inappropriately by firing the relative, 3) lied to the public about what happened and 4) continues to lie about what happened.

These are, to put it mildly, not the traits or temperament you want in someone who could hold the executive power of the federal government.