Here she is on Blitzer today:
Well, I still am concerned about that association with Bill Ayers. And if anybody still wants to talk about it, I will, because this is an unrepentant domestic terrorist who had campaigned to blow up, to destroy our Pentagon and our U.S. Capitol. That’s an association that still bothers me. And I think it’s still fair to talk about it.
The LDS leadership is busted for targeting gay couples as far back as 1997. There’s a new memo that has come to light from late Mormon president Gordon Hinckley, carefully planning the assault on gay families, hoping to use the Catholic hierarchy as a p.r. front:
I moved this below the fold because it kept launching automatically.
Thomas P.M. Barnett responds to Friedman:
I am wary of the uni-causal explanation for the Soviet Union’s fall (oil up and then down), because it takes a complex thing and turns it into an all-encompassing, single-point failure answer. So I am equally wary of thinking that lower oil prices afford us that much leverage with Iran. High oil prices alone don’t explain all of Soviet behavior in the 1970s and lower prices don’t explain all of it in the 1980s. It is simply a simplistic 20/20 hindsight that’s been layered on in recent years, in part to give Reagan undue credit for the USSR’s demise.
James Surowiecki makes the case for bailing out GM:
…one of the big reasons why bailing out the automakers feels necessary is precisely because we let Lehman Brothers fail. Had the financial system stayed reasonably stable, rather than plunging into the chaos we’ve seen in the past six weeks, then one might have been able to make the case that General Motors, with its three-billion-dollar market cap, was not all that important, in either literal or psychological terms, and that the market could easily weather its failure. Today, I think that sounds incredibly implausible to anyone who’s paying attention to the credit and equity markets.
But that’s what they always say.
Amazingly, Palin has now offered a third version – contradicting her first two, which contradicted each other – of how she accepted John McCain’s insane offer to be his vice-presidential nominee. To recap: the first version was to Charlie Gibson, saying she accepted on the spot, unblinkingly. The second version was that she asked permission of the girls, a chronological impossibility. Now we have both the first version and now a new third version in the same propaganda piece broadcast on Fox last night:
PALIN: Just looking right in my eyes and saying, Are you ready for this? Would you like to do this? And I said, I would be honored to run with you. Absolutely. And I thanked him for taking the chance on me also.
I mean, just talk about — that was the epitome of being the maverick, somebody bold, somebody thinking outside of the box, not going with, no doubt, what a lot of the — more of the conventional wisdom would have dictated, you know, go get somebody who’s already on the national scene and perhaps it would be a safer type of pick.
No. He was going to do what he believed was the right thing to do with his pick. And you know, I saw that in his eyes and I respected that. And I said, Absolutely. You are the perfect running mate. I would love to run with you. It was great…
VAN SUSTEREN: Todd wasn’t with you. Did you call Todd then?
PALIN: Well, before I said yes. That was Senator McCain’s recommendation. He says, Why don’t you call your husband and find out, you know, if he’s good with this also. I called Todd, and Todd, too, was no hesitation. He was like, Absolutely. This will be good. Yes, do this. And just good confirmation that, of course, we were to say yes.
Notice how he story changes within the same interview. She says that she said yes immediately and then says, when prompted, that she called her husband first. The second version of the story – ""It was a time of asking the girls to vote on it, anyway. And they voted unanimously, yes," – is now down the black hole of magical realism that sustains her mind. What you realize is that the actual truth matters not a whit. She has no real memory; she has what she invents from minute to minute in her head for instant effect. She’s pathological.
Rauch sees it too:
The civil-rights model tried to separate marriage from the political process, because we didn’t have nearly enough straight support to win. That left our opponents with the political field to themselves while we busied ourselves in the courts. Not any more. We now have enough straight allies to win, long-term, in the political arena.
To judge from the protests, that’s where we’ll be going. Goodbye Thurgood Marshall, hello Martin Luther King. Goodbye Lambda Legal, hello ACT-UP. Sure, more love, less anger than in the AIDS days. But the protests, provided they are peaceful and don’t turn hateful or anti-religious, point the way forward.
A reader writes:
God, you’re totally crushing on Nate Silver too. I’m glad to see I’m not alone.
It’s a little bit of geek chic, I guess. I particularly love him for how awkward he can be in interviews–the nervous peal of laughter when he can’t match the emotional beats of the host, and then the borderline asbergian intensity when he starts wonking away. Man, I could watch Nate wonk it all night long.
There is much to praise in this piece by PJ O’Rouke. A taste:
The left has no idea what’s going on in the financial crisis. And I honor their confusion. Jim Jerk down the road from me, with all the cars up on blocks in his front yard, falls behind in his mortgage payments, and the economy of Iceland implodes. I’m missing a few pieces of this puzzle myself.
Josh is right.
"Next Wednesday is a new dawn for the bendy cucumber and the amusingly shaped carrot," – European Commission agriculture spokesman Michael Mann on a new relaxation of EU produce regulations.
(Hat tip: FP)
The Dish 