Watching Republican partisans squirm or downplay today's Palin birtherism has been entertaining. Allahpundit sighs:
Well, the best way not to get tagged as a Birther is to refrain from saying that people are “rightfully making it an issue” and that the only reason that she would avoid doing that herself is because “there are enough members of the electorate who still want answers.” It’s the same thing as Truthers saying that all they’re doing is “asking questions.” The answers have already been provided; they just reject them because they’re married to their conspiracies.
It gave me a chuckle more than anything. It does say a lot about Sarah Palin and why people like her so much. She's candid, honest and unafraid. Those are extremely rare qualities in politicians these days. She's really just making a few simple points that are undeniably true.
[M]y personal opinion is that while President Obama may likely have been born in Hawaii, there is obviously something else on his birth certificate that he doesn't want us to see, and he's devoted considerable time, money and energy towards that end. I will leave it to the imagination of my readers as to what that might be.
You want to make the point that according to conventional political wisdom she shouldn't have answered RH's questions, fine, make that point. You clearly don't understand what sort of politician Gov. Palin is, but you're free to make it. What you're not free to do, though, is use faulty logic to compare her position to that of the Trig Truthers – or any kind of Truthers. That's way off base.
One might wonder whether a national Dem of prominence comparable to hers is making noise about Trig, but she has a modest point about the size of the fever swamps.
Jim Burroway passes along speculation that the Ugandan bill, which would sentence gays to death, is likely to pass:
Reuters now suggests that passage of the bill is almost assured due to two factors. The first, we’ve already mentioned, is the fact that 2011 is an election year, and no Member of Parliament can be seen as being supportive of LGBT causes and hope to survive the election. The second factor — the one that contributes directly to a decline in donor influence — is oil. Foreign aid currently makes up about a third of Uganda’s budget, but with the 2006 discovery of large oil deposits along Uganda’s western border, Uganda is quickly moving to become a major oil producer.
"Get a sex change, or at least start wearing Red outfits and high heels around the house playing Sarah dress-up for yourself and whatever gutter trash you can round up at the local adult book store. You look like an aging queen on her knees at some gloryhole waiting for a miraculous birth certificate to be slipped in from the next stall so you can engage your latest perversion until you climax all over yourself," – Dan Riehl, on my request for actual, easily available proof of Palin's maternity of Trig.
Because Question 1 was the first gay marriage ballot initiative not to impact its state's constitution, there is no good comparable at the state level. But some national numbers suggest that it the wording of the initiative might have mattered.
Maria Anne Pilgrim, originally from Canada, cries as she takes the Oath of Allegiance from Department of Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano to become an American citizen December 4, 2009 at Ellis Island in New York. Pilgrim served in the US Army as both enlisted and an officer as an occupational therapist, serving part of her time at Walter Reed Medical Center. Napolitano presided over the naturalization of 110 new citizens during a visit to New York By Maria Anne PilgrimChris Hondros/Getty Images.
[T]he insurer doesn't really care to negotiate lower prices. They tried that in the late ’90s, and everyone hated them for it. It turns out that workers don't feel the cost of their health care because they think employers pay it, and employers don't care that much about cost increases because they take it out of wages. Neither group likes premium increases, but they don't really care. But everyone screams if you tighten networks and review care. As such, providers have pretty free rein. That's part of why we pay so much more than any other country per unit of care.
Sarah Palin has now made two very clear public statements in the last day about the legitimacy of questions about the maternity of her son Trig. Here's the first, transcribed from the interview above:
Would you make [Obama's long form] birth certificate an issue if you ran?
I think the public, rightfully, is still making it an issue. I don’t have a problem with that. I don’t know if I would have to bother to make it an issue ’cause I think there are enough members of the electorate who still want answers.
Do you think it’s a fair question to be looking at?
I think it’s a fair question, just like I think past associations and past voting record — all of that is fair game. You know, I’ve got to tell you, too: I think our campaign, the McCain/Palin campaign didn’t do a good enough job in that area. We didn’t call out Obama and some of his associates on their records and what their beliefs were and perhaps what their future plans were. And I don’t think that that was fair to voters to not have done our jobs as candidates and as a campaign to bring to light a lot of the things that now we’re seeing made manifest in the administration.
I mean, truly, if your past is fair game and your kids are fair game, certainly Obama’s past should be. I mean, we want to treat men and women equally, right?
Hey, you know, that’s a great point, in that weird conspiracy-theory freaky thing that people talk about that Trig isn’t my real son. And a lot of people say, “Well you need to produce his birth certificate! You need to prove that he’s your kid!” Which we have done. But yeah, so maybe we could reverse that and use the same [unintelligible]-type thinking on them.
And here's the second, a later Facebook attempt to walk back some of this:
Voters have every right to ask candidates for information if they so choose. I’ve pointed out that it was seemingly fair game during the 2008 election for many on the left to badger my doctor and lawyer for proof that Trig is in fact my child. Conspiracy-minded reporters and voters had a right to ask… which they have repeatedly. But at no point – not during the campaign, and not during recent interviews – have I asked the president to produce his birth certificate or suggested that he was not born in the United States.
Most bloggers and readers have jumped onto the story line – understandably – that Palin has joined or at least mainstreamed the Birther movement. But this does not strike me as the news here. Palin has always been a brutal campaigner and in her first campaign for mayor, she demanded that her opponent produce his own marriage license to prove that he was in fact married to his wife. Of course, her first opponent did produce his license. And her current target, Barack Obama, has also produced his birth certificate a long time ago, and yet she is still demanding that he produce it.
The news here is that, to her credit, Palin says that all inquiries into a candidate's veracity, record, associations, and medical history are legitimate forms of inquiry. She therefore backs this blog's near-solitary attempt to get her to provide evidence – after very serious questions of fact emerged – that she was indeed the biological mother of Trig. To all those Palinites and McCainiacs and right and left bloggers who decried this question as lunatic, Palin has now said she differs. They were more Palinite than Palin.
But here's the critical sentence:
In that weird conspiracy-theory freaky thing that people talk about that Trig isn’t my real son. And a lot of people say, “Well you need to produce his birth certificate! You need to prove that he’s your kid!” Which we have done.
My italics. Palin has never produced Trig's birth certificate or a single piece of objective medical evidence that proves he is indeed her biological son. A child with Down Syndrome must have a pile of such records, tests, assessments and ultrasounds that conclusively prove that he is Sarah's biological son. It seems bizarre to me that neither the public nor the campaign (so far as I can glean) has ever been given one of them.
Her doctor, Catherine Baldwin Johnson, offered a two-page summary of Palin's health just hours before polls opened on November 3, a bizarre approach to transparency. The summary omits certain details from Palin's medical history (two miscarriages, one serious), and does not provide any actual documentary evidence of the pregnancy and birth. It was authored by a doctor who has refused to return any phone calls, even from the New York Times, since the moment Palin's candidacy was announced. The hospital has three recorded births on the day Trig was born: the governor's son, by wishes of the parents, was not included on the list. There were only a handful of photographs over eight months that showed Palin pregnant, none showed her as visibly pregnant as with her previous children, and at seven months, her entire staff and all of Alaska's political class disbelieved her:
People just couldn't believe the news. "Really? No!" said Bethel state Rep. Mary Nelson, who is close to giving birth herself … "It's wonderful. She's very well-disguised," said Senate President Lyda Green, a mother of three who has sometimes sparred with Palin politically. "When I was five months pregnant, there was absolutely no question that I was with child."
On the return flight from Dallas to Alaska, which she says she boarded despite having contractions at eight months – a "strange sensation" she had never felt before, according to "Going Rogue," – the flight attendants on the plane at the time, according to a contemporaneous account in the ADN, had no idea she was even pregnant, let alone in labor of some kind. The questions about this astonishing story are not a function of conspiracy theories and never were. They require no elaborate theory of whose child Trig may actually be. They are simply basic questions anyone would ask of a person who had recounted such an amazing tale. And yet not a single journalist has done so.
This blog has attempted to give Palin the benefit of the doubt on this from the get-go. The Dish was one of the first blogs to post a photograph – of only four – showing Palin somewhat pregnant. At the time, on August 31, 2008, I asked:
Please give us these answers – and provide medical records for Sarah Palin's pregnancy – and put this to rest.
What harm would it do to release the medical records showing that Sarah Palin delivered Trig on April 18 in Wasilla? This is not hard: there must be an obstetrician, medical records, and data that can easily refute this rumor. It is not out of the ordinary either: candidates routinely issue medical records. So let's have them. And then we can move on.
On September 3, Palin was cut off from the press for the following reasons:
In an extraordinary and emotional interview, Steve Schmidt said his campaign feels "under siege" by wave after wave of news inquiries that have questioned whether Palin is really the mother of a 4-month-old baby, whether her amniotic fluid had been tested and whether she would submit to a DNA test to establish the child's parentage.
On September 5, Ben Smith reported that the medical records would be released "very soon". We kept being told that in the campaign and they never were – until the brief doctor's note was issued a few hours before midnight before Election day.
I also politely asked the campaign to simply confirm that they knew that Trig was Sarah's biological son, and they responded not by providing the data but by leaking my email to the press. I asked the campaign personally and off the record in the last phase of the campaign to tell me that they knew these rumors were absurd. The senior official I spoke with simply didn't know.
So here are the simple questions the Dish has been trying to get an answer for much more than a year. They are easily answered and could have been at any moment since August 31 2008 when I first asked them. Here they are:
Can you please provide independent medical documents/slides/reports that prove that Trig is Palin's biological child? If this is deemed too private, then please provide them off the record to a reporter who can vouch for them to the rest of us?
Can you please provide Trig Palin's birth certificate listing his biological mother and father?
Can you please ask Catherine Baldwin-Johnson to discuss these questions with medical reporters so this whole thing can be put to rest for good and all?
If you refuse to do these things, why?
Please, governor Palin, let's put this behind us. Only you can. I pledge to post any and all material you can provide debunking these stories soon as I receive any. I'd like this line of inquiry to end as soon as possible – for the sake of all of us, but especially the innocent child caught up in something he doesn't deserve.
[T]he federal government doesn't have much of an incentive to maintain lots of income inequality. Not much fiscal incentive anyway. For the most part, the political incentives swamp the fiscal ones, and unfortunately they aren't very closely balanced. Pursue policies that raise middle class wages, and the effect is so diffuse and so slow that hardly anyone notices. Pursue policies that benefit the rich and you get immediately showered with oceans of campaign contributions. That's mostly what motivates our political economy, I think, not tiny changes in the total tax take based on changes in income inequality.
"The basic problem with my love relationships with women is that my standards are so high — and they apply equally to both of us. I seek full-blast mutual intensity, fully fledged mutual acceptance, full-blown mutual flourishing, and fully felt peace and joy with each other. This requires a level of physical attraction, personal adoration, and moral admiration that is hard to find. And it shares a depth of trust and openness for a genuine soul-sharing with a mutual respect for a calling to each other and to others. Does such a woman exist for me? Only God knows and I eagerly await this divine unfolding. Like Heathcliff and Catherine’s relationship in Emily Bronte’s remarkable novel Wuthering Heights or Franz Schubert’s tempestuous piano Sonata No. 21 in B flat (D.960) I will not let life or death stand in the way of this sublime and funky love that I crave!" – Cornel West, in his new memoir.
The Dish 