Month: December 2009

Well, he can say it but he has to withdraw it. Here's an odd sentence from the NYT's op-edder today:

Management wants me to make it clear that in my last column I wasn’t endorsing inappropriate threats against Mr. Lieberman.

Here's presumably what he's referring to:

A message to progressives: By all means, hang Senator Joe Lieberman in effigy.

There is no "inappropriate threat" to Lieberman the person here. Just an endorsement, self-consciously hyperbolic, of attacking his public image. Did Lieberman complain?

An interesting sign of how overt the politicization of Montazeri's death has become:

Karrroubi and Mousavi have been photographed with the casket as well. Here they are in Qom, via

And in a week, the mourning will reach a climax.

It is indeed hard to fact-check a work of fiction, but since the McCain campaign never vetted her and Harper Collins never edited her, someone's gotta do it:

Former Gov. Sarah Palin, who has had a rocky relationship with the state's capital city, says in her book there were some ugly threats made against her daughters while they were attending Juneau schools. Those threats reportedly caused daughter Willow Palin to be removed from the Juneau School District…

So let's check in with reality, shall we?

Former Juneau School District Superintendent Peggy Cowan was superintendent during the period in question and said she never heard of such concerns.

"That was never reported to my office," she said. "I am completely confident that I never heard that."

Cowan was contacted in Barrow, where she is now the superintendent at the North Slope Borough School District.

Had a report been made to Juneau schools, Cowan said she would have worked with the principals at the schools to determine how seriously the threats should be taken and how to ensure the safety of the children.

Juneau Police Chief Greg Browning similarly said his department has no record of ever being alerted to such threats.

His department's school resource officers are in Juneau schools daily, and would likely have been alerted to such threats, had they been made, he said.

The Alaska State Troopers provide a security detail for Palin, but trooper spokeswoman Megan Peters said the first they heard about the allegation was from Palin's book.

A reader writes:

Okay, for sheer yule pathos it’s hard to deny this little chestnut a place on your mantle of Christmas depression. Judy Garland singing “After the Holidays” on the Tonight Show with Johnny Carson. Watching this force of nature near her booze-soaked end pleading to an imaginary lover who’s about to bolt is a bummer on so many levels. The weepy piano tinkling at 1:58 with Judy mock reflecting on Christmases past make this the perfect viewing companion to your fourth straight-up glass of Christmas cheer in an empty room poorly illuminated by a dehydrated tree covered in lights you got at WalMart.

Supergay too. Sometimes I suspect Christmas is really a plot to advance the supergay. The kitsch, the artifice, the collective lie of good will, the power of superficiality, the naked materialism: it’s all some super-ironic super-gay joke on all of us, right? Just don’t tell Bill O’Reilly.

Laredo, Texas, becomes the largest US city where residents must turn to the Internet to buy books.

An interesting point from Krugman:

Take the CBO estimate of the cost of subsidies and Medicaid expansion in the Senate bill — that is, ignoring all possible cost savings. It’s $179 billion in 2018. Take the CMS projection of total health care spending in 2018: it’s more than $4.5 trillion. So the direct cost of expanding coverage — the initial bump in the blue curve above — is less than 4 percent of total health care spending. That’s the amount by which, on the current trajectory, health spending rises every 7 months.

And it's budgeted. Any Republican who voted for the unfunded Medicare Prescription Drug Entitlement has no logical standing to oppose this bill on fiscal grounds.

"With Gareth coming out publicly and our divorce being finalized in the New Year, I feel a chapter is closing and, although I feel sad and wish it could be different, it's for the best. This is who Gareth is and it is something which cannot be changed, but it has been so hard coming to terms with that…  He will always love me, but he cannot turn himself into a heterosexual. If he could, I would still be married to him. We will always be the best of friends and I couldn't feel prouder of him than I do now," – Jenna Thomas, former wife of Gareth Thomas, the Welsh rugby player who came out last week.

In 2005, Thomas captained Wales to their first Grand Slam victory since 1978 and was capped 100 times for his nation – more than any other Welshman in a country where rugby is a civil religion.

It's a revealing divide in a way: which conservatives loved the 1990s and which ones found them faintly bathetic? Here's Charles Krauthammer in a semi-nostalgic column:

Throughout the decade, and most especially as it began to wane, I returned to this theme of the wondrous oddity, the sheer impossibility of an age of such post-historical tranquility.

And inevitable ennui. So profound was that tranquility, so trivial the history of that time, that my colleague George Will and I would muse that if this kept up — an era whose dominant issue was a president's zipper problem — he might as well go back to the academy and I to psychiatry.

And that would be a bad thing because … ? There's always a paradox in professional conservatives lamenting happy times, because it both encourages less government and increases their irrelevance as public commentators. But there's a strain in some neoconservatism that can sometimes appear actually hostile to tranquillity because it is seen as a cause of what Krauthammer calls ennui, of boredom, of decadence. "Trivial history" is another term, in some ways, for peace and prosperity, in which our private lives take center stage and the tedium of politics, folly of war, and grinding millstone of poverty are kept at bay.

For my part, the 1990s were a wonderful and largely conservative achievement. I too had a political magazine to fill, but found the changing culture as fascinating as the somewhat restrained politics. This was the era, after all, of OJ Simpson and Afro-centrism, of the explosion of the gay rights movement and the evolution of feminism, of the assault on p.c. and the innovation of the Internet, of the pharmaceutical revolution and Russian …. democracy! Clinton, while a dreadful human being, was a perfectly fine, moderately conservative president. The sex and the lying were just humanly fascinating – as was the socially conservative over-reaction.

A society able to devote itself to the core question of perjury in a civil suit and to enjoy Seinfeld and the Simpsons: isn't that kind of era what conservatives really want?

Not all of them, I found out. For those conservatives deeply troubled by modernity and its pleasures, for those who see war and conflict as key motivators for civic virtue, a society pretty happy with itself, and a government actually running a surplus with no wars, is a problem. It saps "national greatness". Bush openly called for a great theme for a great moment. The tragedy of history was that he was granted his wish.

There are conservatives who are always girded for war or suspect all peace as some kind of hidden war; and those who are happy at peace, grateful for its blessings and hopeful that it will last. There are those who always see Hobbes and those who see Hobbes but are grateful for Locke. There are those who see human conduct at its height as being engaged in virtuous battle for a righteous republic. And there are those who like snow-boarding. These two groups of conservatives have very different pedigrees and philosophical mentors. In the 1990s, the distinction between the two was masked.

It is masked no more.

Yes, that's where the comma should go. I just wasn't so merry when I first rested.