Month: December 2008

by Chris Bodenner
SNL’s Andy Samberg and Jorma Taccone perform an ode to premature ejaculation (with a cameo by Justin Timberlake).

By Patrick Appel
A group of scientists is lobbying the UN for an asteroid defense system. Appleyard is a fatalist:

The short-sighted dinosaurs never saw the need. I am tempted to see such impacts as forest fires – violent but necessary. After all, if the one that wiped out the dinosaurs hadn’t happened, the mammals could never have made their move. Come, friendly asteroids, and fall on earth.

Easterbrook would disagree.

By Patrick Appel
A reader writes:

The easiest way to disprove these "conspiracy" theories surrounding Trig’s birth is for Sarah Palin to release her medical records. The carefully worded statement from Dr. Cathy Baldwin-Johnson that was released the day before the election was not an adequate substitute. Don’t you find it curious at all that such a simple move could have smothered these rumors in the cradle, so to speak?

No. My guess: the McCain campaign didn’t release medical records because they didn’t see it as in their best interest. They used this story to cause a media backlash and to try to discredit Andrew – one of McCain-Palin’s most relentless critics. What would they have gained by releasing records?

By Patrick Appel
Saletan sees Johnson & Johnson going into the breast implant business as a warning:

…the increasing power of insurance gatekeepers and cost controls, driven by the recession, might drive some companies out of health-oriented medicine and into cosmetic procedures. The inability of middle-class people to pay for boob jobs doesn’t mean providers have to shift their focus to real medicine for the middle class. Maybe they’ll shift their focus instead to boob jobs for the rich.

True, the rich are a smaller market than the middle class. But if the cost controls in real medicine are too tight, providers can make up in profit margins what they lose in volume. So, as we’re revising our health-care system, let’s try not to drive too many doctors and health companies out of real medicine. They might have something less important to do.

by Chris Bodenner
Merrill Lynch chief John Thain tells the board of directors he deserves a $10-million bonus this year (over which the company lost more than $11 billion and was sold to Bank of America).

by Chris Bodenner
Flickrite Tony Bowden has amassed a gallery of signs from around the world.

Tallinn Zoo, Estonia

By Patrick Appel
Greenwald calls out journalists promoting Brennan’s claims of unfair persecution:

Concerns over torture and rendition — despite being widespread among countless military officials and intelligence professionals — are uniformly depicted as nothing more than ideological idiosyncrasies from the dreaded Left ("left-wing hit job on Brennan"; "largely on the left"; "left-leaning bloggers and columnists"; "Obama’s liberal base"; Obama’s "most ardent supporters on the left"; "liberal critics"; "liberal bloggers"; "confined to liberal blogs"; "the Democratic base").

Thus:  non-ideological, pragmatic, Serious centrists (which, as everyone knows, is what we need now) are free of this nattering fixation on all this "torture" talk.  Serious adults know that it’s time to move on and not hold grudges.  It’s only the shrill ideologues on the Left who care about such things and want to hold it against those who defended these programs.  Depicting one’s critics as confined to "the Left" is a time-honored Beltway method for rendering the criticisms unserious, and it’s in full force here (and, as Digby ironically notes, it is the Right, far more than the Left, that has waged war against the CIA in recent years; the Left has largely defended the CIA against manipulation and abuse by the Bush White House).

By Patrick Appel
A reader writes:

I agree with your take, but you didn’t address the larger point — if there really is nothing to the faked pregnancy idea, then by necessity the truly bizarre plane flight while in labor with the 5th and definitely most high-risk pregnancy must be true. That speaks volumes about both her judgment and the sincerity of her "pro-life" credentials, that she would risk a baby like that. This is relevant on a variety of levels, not the least of which being that her "pro-life" credentials had everything to do with why she was picked and her continued appeal to the conservative base.

I understand this point, but I’d still rather let the issue go. Palin’s unfitness for office has been demonstrated again and again. The tale of Palin’s pregnancy tells us nothing we didn’t know already.

by Chris Bodenner
David Sands profiles the next NSA:

Tall, square-shouldered and square-jawed, James L. Jones looks like central casting’s version of exactly what he is: a straight-talking, straight-shooting Marine. But the retired four-star general … has a few lines on his resume not normally associated with former Marine Corps commandants or former NATO supreme allied commanders.

For one thing, the 65-year-old Kansas City, Mo. native speaks fluent French, thanks to a childhood spent mainly in Paris where his father worked for International Harvester. For another, he’s one of the few Marines who holds a degree from Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service.

By Patrick Appel
A reader writes:

The military is an inherently conservative organization by its very nature. The GOP has tried to take advantage of this and has subtly encouraged an increased politicization of the military, believing that it served both national and GOP interests. For example, canning General Shinseki because he disagreed with Rusted and promoting Myer because he was more open to the entire GOP political agenda.What Obama may be trying to do is to move the military back into its more traditional, less political military role.  How this would be moving the military to the "left" isn’t clear to me.  The military should be above and outside of politics and the fact that Hilzoy can talk about it moving right or left suggests how degraded the relationship between civilian and military leadership has become under Bush.