Month: February 2010

An important thing to note from the weekend:

While Rick Scarborough was scheduled to host a Friday session titled, "Why Christians Must Engage," at Thursday evening's Tea Party kick-off he conducted the "Organized Prayer Session for the convention & our nation." As Time described it:

By the end of the night, much of the room knelt in prayer – one of the pastors, Rick Scarborough, went after homosexuals several times to choruses of amens — before watching a Tea Party video.

Then there's Republican candidate for governor and former chief justice of the Alabama Supreme Court Judge Roy Moore.

More on Moore here. If you're a fiscal conservative rightly outraged at the sending and borrowing binge in DC, know who these people are, and that they have no plans to seriously tackle the debt at all.

The XXfactor women debating Grindr, the gay GPS-equipped hook-up app, is oddly fascinating:

If the virtual world has been good for anything besides the spread of grammatically disabled cat photos, it's been forging a new utilitarianism for sexual relations. There are already Web sites for casual hookups and forums for finding someone to play out your sexual fantasies. You don't have to take off your wedding ring at a hotel bar Don Draper-style to have an affair—you can just log on to AshleyMadison.com and find another, no-strings-attached, willing adulterer. When I was 16, a girl in my math class asked me what "blue balls" were. I thought it was an ice-cream brand. (I was thinking of Blue Bell, obvs.) Now teenagers outfitted with iPhones are hardly misinformed about anything anymore. This isn't wholly good, but it's definitely not wholly bad, either. There's going to be a Grindr-esque app for everyone sooner or later, and it's going to rock boatfuls of social-moral milieus. It's just inevitable.

Follow up here.

Andrew Sprung praises the health care summit:

The Feb. 26 date creates a deadline  for Democrats to get their negotiation for a "reconciliation sidecar" the Senate bill finished, while the summit itself sets the stage for them to pass that fix after Obama demonstrates Republican bad faith to the country one more time. It's been increasingly plain that Democrats are not going to pass HCR legislation before then. With the meeting between Obama and House Republicans as template, Obama has structured this "exchange of ideas" as a debate he can't lose. He's going to show that nation that that "plan" Republicans have been waving around is an empty book.

Brendan Nyhan is less sure:

Obama is raising expectations for genuine bipartisanship, but it's not going to happen — the odds of important policy changes coming out of the meeting are virtually nil. If House Democrats then go ahead and pass the Senate bill plus a reconciliation package on a party-line vote, the press will again surely note the contrast between Obama's rhetoric and the realities of legislating in a highly partisan Congress. Is this stunt really worth a delay of more than two weeks?

Continetti doesn't think the meeting will change anything.

The barrage against "his" debt has gotten through. For a long time I've been arguing that Obama desperately needs to to take on both his own party and the Republicans and propose a serious plan to cut the long-term debt. I think he needs to go on and on and on about this – and mean it – if the Independents are going to come around.

You may recall that MSNBC managed to get the state of Alaska to release them and they showed a deep enmeshment by Todd Palin in the affairs of state. Dish coverage here. MSNBC story here. And Christian Science Monitor story here. Andrew Halcro gave his interpretation of the role Todd Palin played in state politics here. In the best traditions of the Internet, I invite you to peruse them at will and send me anything interesting you find. I'll post any of salience.

Some, of course, give a glimpse into the Palins' lives around the birth of Trig – about which we have almost no independent confirmation or records. Here's an email that gives an independent glimpse into those hair-raising hours before her trans-continental flight half a day after her water broke. It's from an eye-witness in the waiting lounge for Alaska Airlines as Palin was ready to go back to Alaska because giving birth at world-renowned Dallas Childrens Hospital (with Down Syndrome experts on hand) would have violated her husband's insistence that the child be born in Alaska. You may recall that when the Anchorage Daily News asked Alaska Airlines how they allowed a woman eight months pregnant with a child with special needs get on a trans-continental flight, they got the following response:

Alaska Airlines … leaves the decision to the woman and her doctor, said spokeswoman Caroline Boren. Palin was very pleasant to the gate agents and flight attendants, as always, Boren said. "The stage of her pregnancy was not apparent by observation. She did not show any signs of distress," Boren said.

My italics. In Going Rogue, she tells us her state of mind as she realized she was in labor earlier that day:

Desperation for this baby overwhelmed me.

Please don't let anything happen to this baby.

It occurred to me, once and for all. I'm so in love with this child, please God protect him! After all my doubts and fears, I had fallen in love with this precious child. The worst thing in the world was that I would lose him.

Her italics. Half a day later, preparing for a long two-plane flight trip all the way back not just to Anchorage but to Wasilla, she was sitting in the Seattle airport lounge in a lay-over when recognized by a fellow passenger. All her earlier anxieties appeared to have disappeared, as she delivered her fate – and Trig's – into God's hands. What an incredibly cool and collected woman – someone with amazing reserves of steel. A day later, the stranger emailed to congratulate her on her birth and amazing composure. This seems to confirm Palin's version of the flight:

It was a calm, relatively restful flight home.

Since I long ago committed to publishing any evidence I could find related to Palin's remarkable pregnancy stories (she steadfastly refuses to provide any), I post it below:

One of our Iranian sources writes:

So much is happening in these last days before Feb 11th. The internet is almost not working in much of Tehran or it is so slow that most people cant even open their Gmail or Yahoo. The Greens have announced alternative routs to Azadi sq. if the Gov. blocks all the entrances to the main street. But the Gov. has installed 100s of massive speakers alongside the street of the march so people's chanting cannot be heard. They also have called on Basijis from other cities to come to Tehran and have assigned a major intersection to each group to prevent the Greens from entering the official protest. This video shows city workers taking away the garbage cans to prevent people from blocking the roads with them in case of clashes. The Green girl is explaining how funny it is that the Gov. has started a garbage bin campaign out of fear.  She and her friend laugh at them.

Evgeny Morozov looks closer at the online obstructionism. The LA Times offers a comprehensive view of the run-up to Thursday.

The test of a journalist is his work. I haven't detected a shred of bias in Bronner's pieces from the NYT on Israel and the Middle East, even though his son is now in the IDF. I agree with Goldblog on this for the most part. I do believe, however, that it should have been clearly disclosed without pressure from the outside forcing the NYT into a disclosure that clearly would not have happened without a public editor. Keeping such a potential conflict of interest under wraps – even as questions of war crimes are being debated in a military in which Bronner's son is now fighting – was a clear lapse of ethical judgment on Bill Keller's part, not Bronner's, who rightly informed his editors. 

Hoyt also makes a fair point:

Stepping back, this is what I see: The Times sent a reporter overseas to provide disinterested coverage of one of the world’s most intense and potentially explosive conflicts, and now his son has taken up arms for one side. Even the most sympathetic reader could reasonably wonder how that would affect the father, especially if shooting broke out.

Of course it would – but with this disclosure, it seems to me that Bronner will be even more careful to be as even-handed as he can be.

But I confess some ignorance here as well. Or is Israel once again an exception?

Michael Wolff has an insightful piece on Palin's opening campaign speech for 2012 on Saturday night, but seems to misinterpret my analysis. I think it was quite brilliant as a political speech, just as her convention speech was extraordinarily effective.

It was and is pure sophistry – a string of crowd-pleasing slogans with no content whatever, except for an endorsement of a global war on Islam, tax-cuts, populist attacks on Wall Street, a subtle but scary attempt to politicize the military as belonging to one party, cooptation of one religion in America, and, with the exception of nuclear power (I'm with her on that) a desire for more carbon energy, not less (as long as it's developed in the US). She has literally no serious plans commensurate with the health care crisis and no plans to cut spending in any serious way at all.

But she sure can make a speech. It was the most electrifying speech I have heard from a leader of the GOP since Reagan.

She can electrify a crowd. She has the kind of charisma that appeals to the sub-rational. and she has crafted a Peronist identity – utterly fraudulent, of course – that is political dynamite in a recession with populism roiling everyone and everything. She is Coughlin with boobs – except with a foreign policy agenda to expand Israel and unite with it in a war against Islam.

Do not under-estimate the appeal of a beautiful, big breasted, divinely chosen warrior-mother as a military leader in a global religious war. Bush at least had some inkling that we need a strategy to depolarize the Muslim world and bring moderates along with us to defeat the Islamists; in my view, he genuinely believed that what happened at Abu Ghraib was wrong but couldn't break down his denial that he had authorized almost all of it (she wants more of it); his Washington Cathedral speech reflected statesmanship (Palin wants brazen projection of hard power everywhere and her election as president would represent a true crisis in any alliances that Obama has been able to rebuild).