Month: September 2008

Coming soon to a planet near you:

Like any other rational person concerned about the state of the world and the enormous dangers ahead, Fareed Zakaria has one word to describe Sarah Palin’s attempts to say anything coherent about the country and world she is asking to be president of (if McCain were to expire). Bottom line:

Can we now admit the obvious? Sarah Palin is utterly unqualified to be vice president. She is a feisty, charismatic politician who has done some good things in Alaska. But she has never spent a day thinking about any important national or international issue, and this is a hell of a time to start…

In these times, for John McCain to have chosen this person to be his running mate is fundamentally irresponsible. McCain says that he always puts country first. In this important case, it is simply not true.

Until he drops Palin from the ticket, McCain is simply not a serious candidate for president.

This is wonderful news:

While there are many objections to [Proposition 8] — further government encroachment on personal lives, ambiguously written text — it is the chilling and discriminatory effect of the proposition on many of our employees that brings Google to publicly oppose Proposition 8. While we respect the strongly-held beliefs that people have on both sides of this argument, we see this fundamentally as an issue of equality. We hope that California voters will vote no on Proposition 8 — we should not eliminate anyone’s fundamental rights, whatever their sexuality, to marry the person they love.

Not too surprising either. Which company wants to condemn a whole minority of their employees to discrimination by the government? You can donate to the effort to prevent countless married gay couples in Caifornia from having their marriages rendered void here.

Auditions have begun.

Helen Joyce on the promise of IVF:

In many ways, older women make better mothers–better educated, better paid, more likely to be in a lasting relationship. But biologically, it is a different story. Every day she has lived has been another insult to her eggs, which are as old as she is and will show it even if her face doesn’t. It may one day become standard for women barely out of their teens to freeze 20 or 30 young, fresh eggs from a couple of cycles of IVF, to be thawed when child-bearing finally seems like a good idea.

And the risk:

I am afraid…that a technology intended to help make babies will end up achieving the opposite.

When will women have children if the clock has stopped ticking? If you have a small daughter, you may be happy to think of her calmly waiting for the right man and the right moment before using the youthful eggs she has wisely stored to make healthy children. But for so many women–and men–there never really is a right time; there is always another promotion to chase, a bigger house to buy, another hurdle to clear. So there’s a question for today’s youngish parents: will your grandchildren ever be born, and if they are, will you still be alive to see them?

Safe by Linda Bierds

Safe, we thought.
The floodwaters nestled
the arc of their udders, but no higher —
dewlaps, flanks, even the tips of the briskets,
dry. All day they stood
in the seascape meadow,
their square heads turned from the wind.

By evening they were dead.
Chill, we learned, not drowning,
killed them — the milk vein
thick on the floor of the chest
filling with cold, stunning the heart.
We had entered the house, where silt water
sketched on the walls and doorways
a single age ring. When we looked back,
they had fallen, only the crests of their bodies
breaking the waterline. I remember
the wind and a passive light.
Then the jabber of black grackles
riding each shoulder’s upturned blade.

Photo by Flickr user Michel Filion.

Fallows:

There has been no greater contrast between the Obama and McCain campaigns than the tactical-vs-strategic difference, with McCain demonstrating the primacy of short-term tactics and Obama sticking to a more coherent long-term strategy. And McCain’s dismissive comment suggests that he still does not realize this.

Hillary Clinton had the same problem.

On the Pakistan issue.

RCP’s poll of polls makes McCain’s last week look like a free-fall. Gallup now gives Obama an 8 point lead. Pollster looks less dramatic:

The Washington Independent fact checks an LA Times article on a study about biology and politics:

The study, released yesterday, tested the physiological responses of 46 participants to various threatening images, like bloody faces. It found that people who self-identified as “in favor of socially protective policies” responded much more strongly to the stimuli than people who held more liberal views on such issues as welfare, abortion, immigration, gay rights and school prayer.

The researchers concluded that people of different ideological persuasions have divergent physiological reactions, and that people with socially conservative views tend to be more shocked by potentially threatening stimuli.

“Some people have said that we’re calling conservatives ‘frightened’ or something along those lines,” Oxley said. “And we’re not. All we’re suggesting is that there’s a physiological difference between people who hold one set of political beliefs and people who hold another set of political beliefs.”