Month: July 2009

What she is doing is either a) shrewdly lowering expectations for her future career; or b)  preparing herself for Total Victim Mode if and when the shoe drops. Your call.

She's finally found it. Check out the interview with ABC News. I loved this:

Well, yes. Would you take anything Sarah Palin told you at face value? Then this bald-faced lie:

"You know conditions have really changed in Alaska in the political arena since Aug. 29, since I was tapped to run for VP. When that opposition research — those researchers really bombarded Alaska — started digging for dirt and have not let up. They're not gonna find any dirt. We keep proving that every time we win an ethics violation lawsuit and we've won every one of them. But it has been costing our state millions of dollars. It's cost Todd and me. You know the adversaries would love to see us put on the path of personal bankruptcy so that we can't afford to run."

She has not won every ethics violation inquiry and the state has not run up millions of dollars in costs. But we do know that something prompted her sudden, panicked resignation. We just don't know yet what it was. Will the press start asking the questions they have refused to ask for the past ten months? It is their job to find out the truth behind deranged public officials. It is not their job to run interference for them.

Cass Sunstein thinks that hanging out with those you agree with can cause extremism:

(Hat tip: 3QD)

Richard Posner evaluates:

There are some indications of incipient recovery, including upticks in manufacturing and sales of durable products and housing starts. But as long as unemployment (and underemployment) is rising and housing prices (a major store of value) and personal consumption expenditures are depressed, the economic prospects are uncertain. There have been too many false dawns and overoptimistic predictions, including by government officials.

 An example is the emphasis on unemployment as a "lagging indicator" of depressed economic conditions. It is true that unemployment often continues increasing after an economic recovery begins. The standard explanation is that firms prefer not to incur the cost of hiring or rehiring workers until they are sure that demand for goods and services is increasing. An alternative explanation is tacit collusion: firms may hesitate to expand output as demand rises, hoping their competitors will follow suit, since the more slowly supply rises in response to rising demand, the faster prices and profits will increase. But it is only after a depression is over that one can recognize an increase in unemployment as a lagging indicator. It would have been ridiculous to observe the steep decline in employment in 1930 and be reassured that, since unemployment is a lagging indicator, the depression was over. It had just begun.

Chris Wilson studies the chances of getting a viral YouTube hit:

 Hendrik Hertzberg remembers Stonewall:

Even in the legendarily liberated nineteen-sixties, mainstream attitudes toward homosexuality were benighted to a degree that is difficult to exaggerate. “Sodomy” between consenting adults was against the law almost everywhere. “Perversion” was a firing offense throughout the federal government, not just in the military. The American Psychiatric Association classified homosexuality as a “sociopathic” mental disorder. In the Daily News, gays were “homos.” In 1966, three years before Stonewall, Time, then the voice of middlebrow, middle-class respectability, published a long essay on “The Homosexual in America.” The magazine, while acknowledging that “homosexuals are present in every walk of life,” concluded that homosexuality

is a pathetic little second-rate substitute for reality, a pitiable flight from life. As such it deserves fairness, compassion, understanding and, when possible, treatment. But it deserves no encouragement, no glamorization, no rationalization, no fake status as minority martyrdom, no sophistry about simple differences in taste—and, above all, no pretense that it is anything but a pernicious sickness.

Hilzoy reacts to the above excerpt from Time:

For some reason, the tone in which this is written bothers me almost as much as the content: it's somehow curdled. The condescension, the fake knowingness, the pervasive underlying "heh heh heh" — it sets my teeth on edge. As long as one gay man or lesbian is denied the right to marry, or legally discriminated against because of his or her sexual orientation, or asked to leave the military after honorable service, we haven't come far enough. But we have come a long, long way.

(Graph from John Sides)

At the NYT.

(Hat tip: Daniel Indiviglio)

Yglesias counters Douthat. So does Freddie DeBoer.

Some of you may have come across a neo-fascist blogger, Ace of Spades, who makes Glenn Beck seem like Jim Lehrer. All of this is to say: even he can't quite put up with the degenerate dorks who now constitute much of the Republican base. Here he is inveighing against the commenters he has spent the last few years whipping into an anti-elitist frenzy:

In the end, the tiger eats them all.

And still it grows:

In an interview with the Guardian last week, Ahmed, 33, from Rochdale, says he received a visit at Manchester prison last April from a man in his 40s who identified himself as an MI5 officer, accompanied by a man in his mid-30s who said he was a police officer. "They said they wanted my advice about tackling extremism and then said they could offer me protection if I helped them. Then they said, 'If you withdraw what you are saying about torture, we can make a deal with you to reduce your sentence, or if you want to take money we can give you money.' "