Month: June 2010

"You can support Pamela Gorman here, just to drive them crazy," – conservative blogger William A. Jacobson, on the latest Palin clone.

Something possibly profound happened in the recently concluded case, Christian Legal Society vs Martinez. It's summed up by a letter from a lawyer for the anti-Prop 8 side to Judge Walker:

 

According to SCOTUS, gays and lesbians are now a class with respect to equal protection in the current court – hence the importance of this precedent with respect to the Prop 8 case.

My main fear with Elena Kagan, of course, is that she disagrees with this and will burnish her credentials among the judicial restraint chorus by siding with the right against gay people. How does Obama know she won't? How do we? Such questions are not to be asked or answered.

A reader writes:

I thought that the rise of social media and quick, easy access to information would render our politics more transparent, but it appears as though the opposite is true.  Social media has enabled politicians to bypass the traditional channels to create their own narratives and directly reach their audience. 

Sadly, it appears as though this arrangement suits most journalists.

They seem more than happy to summarize Facebook posts or write articles about incoherent tweets.  If they put an edgy headline and enable comments they can increase the number of hits on their website without having to invest any real time in holding politicians and candidates accountable.  As we have seen, even nationally televised "debates" don't require candidates to answer questions anymore. I fear that the "Palin model" – where candidates don't have to answer any difficult questions – will become much more common because people will feel proximity to politicians; every tweet shows up on their cell phone like a personal text.

We need journalism now more than ever but journalists now seem more worried about their access and celebrity than truth.  As you might say, we have entered the age of deference journalism.

Jim Burroway provides more background:

This case isn’t the first time we’ve seen researchers suggest that trying to prevent homosexuality is an ethically defensible position. In 2001, Aaron Greenberg and the controversial J. Michael Baily, both of Northwestern University, published a paper in the Archives of Sexual Behavior noting that “As we learn more about the causes of sexual orientation, the likelihood increases that parents will one day be able to select the orientation of their children.” They gave a number of reasons why parents might seek to prevent homosexuality in their children or even abort a fetus if a test were to determine that the fetus were homosexual. Interestingly, they deny that the reasons are based on heterosexism, yet go on to raise a number of heteronormative reasons why parents might want to abort or treat gay fetuses…Of course, many on the religious right would still condemn all abortions regardless of the reason. But for them, finding a medical “cure” for homosexuality would be perfectly acceptable.

Because he is at the center of her politics:

The federal medical care overhaul would limit contributions to health savings accounts and raise insurance costs for people including those with special needs, former Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin said at a fundraiser Tuesday for developmentally disabled children. She warned that new rules aiming to raise $13 billion by limiting contributions to flexible spending accounts amount to a "hefty tax hike" for families of special needs children struggling with health care costs.

They won't leave you stuck under a tree.

A reader writes:

Just to add to the chorus of mothers not believing the birth story: when I was pregnant, I remember my obstetrician telling me she might have to duck out of my scheduled appointment at any time because one of her patients who was pregnant with her third child was in labor, and that third babies “just sort of fall out.”  Labor with each child is progressively shorter, statistically.  Especially after the water breaks.  I can only imagine how fast the labor is for fifth babies and that Palin must have been warned of this.  In a high risk pregnancy, there’s simply no way a logical person would get on an airplane to fly cross-country under those circumstances.

Another writes:

When my amniotic fluid starting leaking prematurely in my first pregnancy, there was no ambiguity from my doctor – I was to get the hospital immediately if not sooner.

Another:

Let go of the Trig Palin issue; it makes you look like a loon. I have two children. When I was pregnant with my first, I gained almost no weight until the end of the 7th month. I went to a conference in Arizona at the end of my 6th month and people didn't know I was pregnant until I told them.

My doctor was unconcerned by my lack of weight gain, and attributed it to the fact that I was running 5 miles a day up. He told me to continue running. I was eating plenty of calories and the baby grew normally. Palin is a runner and that can account for her low weight gain. I gained a little more weight with the second one, but I quit running sooner — at the end of the 6th month, rather than at the end of the 7th.

I had a 14-15 year old friend in high school who hid a pregnancy by gaining only 14 pounds and wearing big sweatshirts.  Her mother was an RN and didn't know my friend was pregnant until she went into labor. (Boy, was her mom embarrassed!) The baby weighed almost 8 pounds and was full term. My friend managed this entirely through exercise.

I had very little pain with either delivery, and labored through both without medication or epidural.  My first labor took 28 hours. My second labor took 26 hours. At the beginning of both labors, I could feel contractions, which included mild discomfort.  I suppose you could describe them as "labor pains," even if they weren't very painful. At no point in either of my labors did I feel the need to scream or shout or cross my  legs. In fact, I sat quietly and played cards and read until I ws more than 12 hours in labor the first time and more than 20 hours into labor the second time. Again, I think I had a good handle on my pain and enduring it without a lot of fuss because I was a distance runner. If you can run, you labor without too much fuss. I think flying back to Alaska was reckless, but it wasn't impossible.

This issue is a non-issue. Her lack of weight gain isn't that abnormal. Her lack of pain isn't that abnormal. Her long labor isn't that abnormal. They're all within the scope of my personal experience with pregnancy.

But this was her fifth child and in previous pregnancies, she was huge. She is not a large woman, and her previous pregnancies showed. She had also had two previous miscarriages, which would, one imagines, make one a little sensitive to winging it with pregnancies and labor. Another:

I've enjoyed your Palin coverage from the beginning.  However, I feel I have to come forward and tell you that, if she's telling the truth, her birth experience is not that unusual.  I'm the mother of four grown children.  In two of those pregnancies the amniotic fluid began leaking well in advance of the start of active labor.  Before my first child was born, I leaked for over a month – the docs felt it was best to let the pregnancy continue, and put me on bed rest.  In the second case, the amniotic fluid leaked for a day and a half with no labor, until the doctor decided to induce labor.  So it's perfectly possible to leak amniotic fluid for quite a while without going into labor, and judging by what my doctors told me, it's not particularly unusual.

David Kravets highlights a new ACLU report (.pdf) that provides "an outline of, and links to, dozens of examples of Cold War-era snooping in the modern age":

At a California State University, Fresno lecture on veganism, six of the 60 in attendance were undercover officers from the local and campus police. The Oakland Police Department in California had infiltrated a police-brutality demonstration, and its undercover officers selected “the route of the march.” … A Kentucky minister was detained at Canadian border trying to enter the United States because he had purchased copies of the Koran on the internet following the 2001 terror attacks. A New York, Muslim-American student journalist was detained for taking pictures of Old Glory outside a Veterans Affairs building as part of a class project.

(Image by Will Varner)

McArdle pounces:

This is coming up over and over again–an "easy" fix for Social Security wherein "all" we have to do is get rid of the cap on Social Security payroll taxes, without increasing benefits.  Dylan Matthews has the charts that are currently making the rounds, which show that this [simple] solution not only eliminates the Social Security shortfall, but also generates a substantial surplus!

This is not actually surprising, since what this amounts to is hiking the marginal tax rates on high incomes by 15 percentage points–making the federal tax take on the highest incomes 55% in 2012, assuming that Obama and Congress follows through and allows the Bush tax cuts to expire in 2011. This is obviously a gigantic hike, and moreover, when Medicare, state, and local taxes are added in, would push the tax burden on the highest incomes to over 2/3 in the highest tax jurisdictions. Whatever you think of this plan, this is not an easy solution.

Well it is not pain-free, as I conceded. But it is easy and elegantly simple. And if you are going to raise taxes, as we must, there's no way for them not to target the wealthy. That's almost only where the money now is.