Month: December 2008

A reader writes:

Sorry, Andrew.  Having lived with a woman who gave birth to four children (one still born at eight months), Palin looks very pregnant to me, especially considering the fact that she’s wearing a loose overcoat.  The fact that she had what looks like excessive weight gain with an earlier child does not prove anything.  Weight gain with each pregnancy varies depending on the health of the mother, the health of the fetus, and the mother’s diet and exercise regimen.  I see nothing in that photograph that makes me think she’s faking a pregnancy.

Another adds:

Just a quick note to say that from my skeptical, untrained eye, you can’t say for certain that she’s clearly not pregnant from the picture. I only say this because my co-worker down the hall, who’s 6 weeks away from delivering her third, is an expert at hiding it. When I talk to her, I regularly forget that she is pregnant, and a picture of her wouldn’t convince anyone that she was.

Keep pushing and asking, though.

This fact pattern is surely bizarre, and we have to keep demanding real answers from these people in the age of "truthiness." You’re not in tin foil hat territory … yet. I am worried that this may turn into your "windshield wiper" moment.

Another adds:

From a journalist’s standpoint, I’ve been interested in your pursuit in this, which I think is certainly within the bounds of reasonable journalistic inquiry. There’s one thing that has bothered me about this whole episode: faced with the rumors that swirled that first weekend after she was announced as McCain’s VP pick, the simple and obvious path would have been to make a copy of the birth certificate available to the press. Instead, she chose to address the rumor by outing her teenage daughter as pregnant, just as the family was preparing to take the national stage at the RNC. How much more horrifying could that be for a young woman? As a parent, this seems unfathomable to me.

Another writes:

The photo was not photoshopped. I am the person who found the photo which I passed on to Audrey at Palin Deception. My partner and I also found that the photo had been taken at the Museum in Juneau and from there it was a simple thing to connect the dots. After the photo’s publication the photographer contacted my partner and confirmed her presence on the day in question and the fact that she took the photograph. There can be absolutely no doubt that this is an original photo.

 

The New York marriage equality bill won’t go to a vote. Joe sighs:

In 2010 there will be a redistricting in New York state, a process that the Democrats will at least now be able to control. Therein may lie our hope for marriage equality in 2011.

Relying on Democrats for anything seems to me to be quixotic at best.

As Dish readers know, there are only three public photographs that I could find of Sarah Palin pregnant with Trig (the McCain campaign insisted there were "loads" and then was forced to retract). But we now have another. The date of this photograph, which turned up on a Flickr account, has been clearly established as March 26, 2008:

Here’s a link from the Alaska state website discussing the event. Here’s a news video.

That’s barely three weeks before she gave birth to Trig, a full-term, 6 pound baby. It’s also around a week before video footage of Palin, captured here. Since Palin refused throughout the campaign to provide any medical records (although, in classic Palin style, says she has), we only have three photographs of her pregnant and one doctor’s letter, released hours before the polls opened November 3. If you’re interested in why any sane person would ever doubt a mother’s announcement of her own pregnancy, read this. Maybe this photo has been photo-shopped. Maybe Palin had an anomalous pregnancy that showed far, far less than her previous ones, one that went from close to nothing to a serious bump in two weeks. Maybe the angle in the photo is misleading, and leaning toward us her pregnancy is concealed. Maybe her fifth labor really did take 26 hours combined via a speaking engagement (as amniotic fluid was leaking) and an 11 hour airplane flight (when a birth could have begun at any moment at extreme risk to the child), and maybe the bizarre and, to my mind, incredible stories she has told about the pregnancy and labor are true (there is still a chance they are). But if all these things are true, the Palin camp has had months to provide what would be instantly available records to dismiss all and every "insane" blog speculation about this. And yet none came – on or off the record. I begged the McCain campaign by private email and in a private meeting to give me something – anything – to kill the story off. I promised to run any evidence that would blow this out of the water. That offer still stands. Please make me look like an idiot for asking these questions. But they didn’t offer a thing, asserting that even asking the question was an outrageous reputation-destroying offense. Maybe Michelle Malkin is right that this is truther, tin-foil hat territory. But Malkin’s only substantive point rebutting the photographic evidence is:

We’re all obstetricians now!

Actually, the Dish went out and interviewed eight of the leading obstetricians in the country and laid out all the facts of the case and asked the experts for their take. While none would say that this pregnancy could not have happened, and none would comment on a case they hadn’t examined personally, all of them said it was one of the strangest and unlikeliest series of events they had ever heard of and found Palin’s decision to forgo medical help for more than a day after her water broke and risk the life of her unborn child on a long airplane trip to be reckless beyond measure.

Malkin also equates the story with the Obama birth certificate affair. But we have documentary evidence of the certificate, and Palin has produced no hard evidence at all for her pregnancy. All that’s needed is some medical records of her pregnancy which, as a Down Syndrome pregnancy, would have a large pile of medical documentation easily released. There is no formal record of Trig’s birth at Mat-Su Regional Medical Center, although there is a record of two other babies born on the same day.

Maybe I am crazy to even wonder. Or maybe we have witnessed one of the biggest frauds in American political history and the biggest failures among the American media in a very, very long time.

All I know is: the media refuses to ask and doesn’t want to know and failed to demand medical records. All I know is that some journalists – like the Washington Post’s Howie Kurtz – even tried to discredit the integrity of bloggers for asking. And yet in the campaign, the pregnancy and baby were offered at every moment as a reason to vote for Palin. If the Bridge To Nowhere is worth checking out, why aren’t the pregnancy’s bizarre details? Without the Down Syndrome pregnancy, Palin would not have had the rock-star appeal to the pro-life base that contributed to her selection. She made it a political issue by holding up the baby at the convention.

I do not know the truth and have never claimed that Palin is lying. I have always stated that bringing a baby with Down Syndrome into the world is a noble and beautiful thing. I have simply asked, given the implausible, if possible, circumstances, that a person running for vice-president provide some basic evidence for a very strange and unclear story. For a photograph of Palin pregnant with one of her previous children, see below. Compare and contrast. Remember that, as a general rule, pregnant mothers show more with each successive pregnancy. Remember also, as a general rule, that successive labors come more quickly. I think it’s time Palin’s doctor, Catherine Baldwin-Johnson talked to the press, don’t you think? And that the McCain campaign tell us exactly what they knew and asked all along.

More evidence that the Wasilla whack-job was getting pretty Barbra by the end of the campaign. The McCain camp spent over $100,000 on make-up and styling for Palin in the last two months of the campaign, and there’s another $30,000 in clothing allowance has yet been spelled out. When you put it all together, we’re talking about a woman who, if this carried on, would have an annual budget of something close to a $1 million for clothes and make-up alone. Some hockey mom. No wonder this beauty pageant contestant who once claimed she smelled of fish and longed to meet Ivana Trump, doesn’t want to leave the stage (or go back to Alaska which she pretends to govern).

And it’s all perfectly fine if your goal is to provide a bimbo hood ornament for horny old white male voters. Just please don’t tell me any of this has anything to do with a serious political party.

Elizabeth Nolan Brown doesn’t understand why social conservatives are pissed that Indiana Planned Parenthood is giving away gift cards:

Unless all the folks wringing their keyboards about it are way stupider than I think they are, they’ve got to realize that Planned Parenthood offering gift certificates is going to do absolutely nothing to increase the rate of abortion (which they ostensibly care about lowering). As I mentioned in my post on Ladyblog Tuesday, only about 3-5 percent of PP services are abortion-related anyway; the majority are actually aimed at preventing abortion (by preventing unwanted pregnancies), with the rest devoted to basic women’s health services (mammograms, pap smears, etc.). If anyone is actually going to purchase and give out Planned Parenthood gift cards, it will probably be, say, women’s shelters and charitable organizations that want to help low-income women obtain contraception, STD testing, or basic gynecological care.

Although this point seems lost on the Pope, contraception helps prevent abortion.

Mark Warren profiles Jon Favreau, Obama’s precocious and gifted speechwriter:

He is too busy to read much. "I’m embarrassed to say that since college"–Favreau graduated from Holy Cross in 2003–"I’ve been so busy speechwriting for Kerry and then Barack that I haven’t been reading all the good literary stuff I used to read back in the day." As for speechcraft, while he says the speeches of Bobby Kennedy are his favorites, he also says Peggy Noonan is his all-time favorite speechwriter.

He cites Ronald Reagan’s Pointe du Hoc speech marking the fortieth anniversary of D-day as his favorite of hers, and in Noonan’s sugary epic, you can hear the faint echo of Barack Obama talking about his grandfather.

Favreau also says he has greatly admired the writing of Michael Gerson, who was President Bush’s main speechwriter for five years, especially his address to the joint session of Congress after the September 11 attacks. Gerson returns the admiration. One night in New Hampshire, he sought out Favreau at a campaign rally and introduced himself to talk shop.

Ezra Klein responds to my post the NHS:

About a quarter of Britons are satisfied with their health care system. Less than a fifth of Americans can say the same. Similarly, a mere 15 percent of Britons want to dynamite the awful beast and start over. More than a third — a third! — of Americans feel the same way. Indeed, none of the socialized systems have even half as many of their residents calling for a totally new direction. Germany, where a robust 26 percent want to start over, is the least nationalized of the lot, using semi-private insurance pools known as "sickness funds," and sure enough, they’re the system that’s closest to ours on total dissatisfaction. I guess you could say that private health care sounds like a great idea unless you live under it.

Satisfaction is a subjective function of subjective expectations. If you have the kind of expectations that many Brits have for their healthcare system, it is not hard to feel satisfied. The Brits are very happy with their dentists as well. And there is a cultural aspect here – Brits simply believe suffering is an important part of life, especially through ill health. Going to the doctor is often viewed as a moral failure, a sign of weakness. This is a cultural function of decades of conditioning that success is morally problematic and that translating that success into better health is morally inexcusable. But if most Americans with insurance had to live under the NHS for a day, there would be a revolution. It was one of my first epiphanies about most Americans: they believe in demanding and expecting the best from healthcare, not enduring and surviving the worst, because it is their collective obligation. Ah, I thought. This is how free people think and act. Which, for much of the left, is, of course, the problem.

Justin Fox writes about those out to kill the savings instrument:

Unlike pensions, 401(k)s are voluntary, and many workers either don’t participate or don’t set aside enough money to give them a shot at a comfortable retirement. Those who do save enough often bungle their investment choices. Those who choose well pay higher investment fees generally than pension funds do. Even participants in the best-run, lowest-cost retirement funds face the risk that the market will tank — as it has done this year — when they’re close to retirement. At retirement comes another issue: pensions insure against the risk that you’ll outlive your money, because they pay until you die; 401(k)s don’t. And finally, the tax breaks built into the 401(k) — about $80 billion a year — fall mostly in the laps of high earners.

The alternative, Ghilarducci’s  government-run pension plan, doesn’t sound very promising. State governments have vastly underfunded the public pensions they are already responsible for.

A reader writes:

I can think of many reasons one might want to live in the USA, but our health care system isn’t one of them. Do you seriously believe that a health care system that leaves millions without adequate care, that bankrupts sick individuals and families, that consistently ranks at or near the bottom of all industrialized nations by almost every metric used to evaluate such things, and does so at double or triple the costs of other nations with better overall health care, is a superior system?

Rather than "government collective" deciding, our health care choices are decided by HMO’s and insurance companies. My health care options are limited by my insurance company, and like most people, I can’t afford to dump the health care insurance subsidized by my employer for better coverage. And if I should get laid off in this currently failing free-market economy and lose my insurance, then I better hope I don’t ever get seriously ill, or else I’m pretty much done for.

But those fears are grounded in the "rationality" you mentioned, which apparently ranks below "freedom" and "markets" in your theology.

Another adds:

I take your point about the health care system in the UK and the downsides it has. But, having also lived in the UK, I don’t think your analysis is completely accurate. The "government collective" only makes health care decisions if you go to an NHS facility. There are plenty of private doctors around, and if someone chooses to go to a private doctor and either pay their own way, or purchase health insurance, they are free to do so (as I did during my stay). As it stands now in the US, most people have their health care decisions made for them as well, only instead of government employees, those decisions are made by HMOs and health insurers who make the decisions based on corporate profits. I fail to be convinced how it is worse to have those tough decisions made by government (which can be admittedly dreadful but is still — on some level — answerable to the people) rather than a corporate entity (whose fiduciary duty under the law is to maximize profits for its shareholders).