Month: September 2008

Just trying to explain what makes Sarah Palin unable to tell the truth.

Oliver Willis can tell the future.

The Republican former mayor of Los Angeles defects from his party to support the Democrat:

"When I was mayor I had dealings with McCain where I didn’t respect him," Riordan said.

Doctors are demanding McCain’s full medical records. I would like to repeat my call for Biden to release his. He had an aneurysm and the public has a right to know the health risks of their potential presidents. Of course, Palin should release hers as well – as I asked more than two weeks ago. But the McCain campaign’s strategy is clearly to deny us the critical, basic information required to evaluate the person who could technically be president next January. They just don’t believe in transparency or accountability.

That’s Clive Crook’s take on the Damien Hirst auction.

A reader notes:

What’s extraordinary, yet unsurprising, about Gellman’s revelation is the degree to which it reveals Cheney’s complete  contempt for Bush. A contempt shared, apparently, by Andrew Card and Scooter Libby. Knowing that the chief law enforcement officer of the United States regarded portions of the warrantless wiretapping program illegal, they let the president sign an order continuing it in effect.

If this had happened in a democracy governed by the rule of law, it could have landed Bush in jail.

Now imagine if they could do this with Bush as a cipher, what they could do with Palin.

McCain sees Spain’s prime minister as another deadly foe. The list is growing by the day.

Jonah Lehrer responds to geneticist David Goldstein’s article:

The end result is that even diseases that look largely genetic in twin studies are caused by an insanely complex confluence of factors, with hundreds of genes contributing to the disorder. (I was talking to a scientist a few weeks ago who said he wouldn’t be surprised if a thousand different genes were involved in triggering the range of behaviors typically categorized as "schizophrenia.") But wait: it gets worse. The brain is a plastic machine, constantly altering its patterns of gene expression in response to environmental changes. As a result, the static texts of Nature are constantly being modified by Nurture.

Razib has more.

A reader responds to the two campaign ads on the economy:

Let me get this straight … Obama’s ad is two minutes in which he outlines, in broad strokes, his economic plan and points us to a site where we can read the plan in full. McCain’s ad is 30 seconds of tough rhetoric without a word that says what he would do except "reform Wall Street" because he’s "taken on tougher guys than this before".

And it’s Obama’s plan that’s all talk?

Deference, please.

The trouble with having no access to a vice-presidential candidate is that you have to parse edited statements like Kremlinologists. The record is very clear that the decision to accept the veep nomination was kept from the Palin children until they arrived in Ohio on what they were told was a surprise trip for their parents’ wedding anniversary. Here’s a Fox-approved Kremlin interview with Todd Palin that re-confirms the official tick-tock provided by the McCain campaign. It’s clear from this that the girls did not vote after McCain had offered Palin the job. But they may have been asked long before that about the possibility. The only trouble with that explanation is the way Palin put it in her Hannity interview. She said:

"It was a time of asking the girls to vote on it, anyway.  And they voted unanimously, yes.  Didn’t bother asking my son because, you know, he’s going to be off doing his thing anyway, so he wouldn’t be so impacted by, at least, the campaign period here.  So ask the girls what they thought and they’re like, absolutely.  Let’s do this, mom."

This strongly implies that Palin had already been asked and was offering the girls a vote on the question. "Let’s do this, mom," is not a response to a hypothetical. It certainly reads like an enthusiastic response to a choice on the table. Without the context of what "it was a time" is referring to, we can’t know. I guess we’ll find out eventually, although we haven’t about almost anything else.