Month: July 2010

Many readers have pointed out that the citation Dave used from the two page fax issued hours before polls opened on election day 2008 was inaccurate. Dave cited this:

From the letter: "Routine prenatal testing early in the second trimester  [of Palin's pregnancy] determined that the fetus had the chromosomal condition known as Down Syndrome. [The Alaska governor and her husband, Todd, decided to go ahead with the pregnancy.]"

Dave added the words in bold. They do not exist in the original (PDF). I'm sorry I didn't catch it. If Dave were merely trying to explain the context, he should have put his own words in parentheses. I apologize for this. Another reader suggests that Palin was in "prodromal labor" and the contractions were of no great consequence:

There are several phases of labor. Not all labor is active labor, and not even all active labor is particularly painful. The cervix can be dilating and effacing and there can be no pain, just pressure or no feeling at all. It's called prodormal labor. It involves contractions and can last for days.

I was in prodormal labor for 22 hrs after my water broke. It is not rare. Would I have gotten on a plane during those 22hrs? No way. I would not have even gone to places with many people for fear of infection. I stayed home. Was she stupid and irresponsible to get on a plane after she had a leak of amniotic fluid, sure. Does this prove she was lying? No.

But prodormal labor occurs before the water breaks. And Palin described the contractions she felt at 4 am in Going Rogue as something new that were not the same as her previous Braxton Hicks contractions. For the record, the Dish consulted several of the top obstetricians in the country while researching this almost two years ago. While none would specifically comment on an individual case without examining the record and all said Palin's account was conceivably true, they uniformly found the story as something extraordinary and profoundly implausible as stated.

Surely that alone is worth exploring. But no reporter in the national media has ever asked Palin to account for the whole story and explain it. The story was in her book, and no interviewer, including Oprah, went near it. Why?

Doha, Qatar, 8.03 am

Ambers studies her press strategy:

Here's where Palin is getting quite savvy as a politician: when she makes a mistake, or appears to do something dumb, she is quick to exploit her own misfortune … not in a way that excuses her original mistake, but that alludes to the improbable fact that there is some in-joke, some secret code that the rest of us aren't getting. As much as the verb "humanize" is overused, Palin knows how to humanize herself. That's a rare talent for a politician to cultivate, and one that she's getting better at every day. What's more, she humanizes herself by somehow ascribing her misfortune to the establishment that's trying to tear her down. Her audience loves it.

Ackerman finds one.

Frum deciphers Palin's endorsement of establishment candidate Kelly Ayotte, the New Hampshire attorney general running for US Senate:

1) The “early states” theory. Palin wants to earn favors in early primary states: Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina. In those states she is nominating likely winners even when (as with Iowa’s Terry Brandstad) that likely winner tilts more to the middle than Palin’s current political identity.

2) The “go with the winner” theory. Palin is seeking to make herself look more powerful within the party by claiming credit for other people’s successes.

3) The “woo women” theory. Palin has endorsed women candidates against men she might have been expected to prefer: eg Carly Fiorina over Chuck DeVore in California. These endorsements enabled and justified Palin’s recent “Mama Grizzlies” ad. By positioning herself as a champion of women in politics, Palin distracts attention from one important weakness of any Palin candidacy: her unpopularity among women voters. It’s working too.

Cillizza reminds us:

New Hampshire will hold the first primary of the Republican presidential race and Ayotte, if she gets to the Senate, will be a highly sought after endorsement. Palin also has endorsed candidates for governor in Iowa (Terry Branstad) and South Carolina (Nikki Haley) — two other states that will play a critical role in deciding the identity of the party's nominee.

Shawn Millerick at Now! Hampshire looks local:

[The endorsement] set off an earthquake that shook the political landscape in New Hampshire.

This most certainly is a boost to Ayotte’s campaign and a blow to her GOP opponents. Lamontage has been trying to get traction as the real conservative in the race, but the twin blows of Palin’s endorsement of Ayotte and Lamontagne’s recent fundraising release of barely $100,000 for the quarter spell the end of his campaign. And with Palin’s support Ayotte’s conservative credentials are solidified, setting up a primary showdown with her liberal primary opponent, country club owner Bill Binnie.

Binnie is pro-choice, pro-gay marriage, pro-amnesty for illegal immigrants, against the AZ immigration law, pro-TARRP bailout, pro-VAT tax and has a history of campaign contributions to Democrats. With Lamontagne and other candidates unable to get traction, the GOP senate nomination is shaping up to be a two person race between conservative Kelly Ayotte and liberal Bill Binnie.

(The YouTube ad was made a year ago.)

The latest revelations from Journo-list are deeply depressing to me. What's depressing is the way in which liberal journalists are not responding to events in order to find out the truth, but playing strategic games to cover or not cover events and controversies in order to win a media/political war.

The far right is right on this: this collusion is corruption. It is no less corrupt than the comically propagandistic Fox News and the lock-step orthodoxy on the partisan right in journalism – but it is nonetheless corrupt. Having a private journalistic list-serv to debate, bring issues to general attention, notice new facts seems pretty innocuous to me. But this was an attempt to corral press coverage and skew it to a particular outcome. To wit:

What is necessary is to raise the cost on the right of going after the left. In other words, find a rightwinger’s [sic] and smash it through a plate-glass window. Take a snapshot of the bleeding mess and send it out in a Christmas card to let the right know that it needs to live in a state of constant fear. Obviously I mean this rhetorically.

And I think this threads the needle. If the right forces us all to either defend Wright or tear him down, no matter what we choose, we lose the game they’ve put upon us. Instead, take one of them — Fred Barnes, Karl Rove, who cares — and call them racists. Ask: why do they have such a deep-seated problem with a black politician who unites the country? What lurks behind those problems? This makes them sputter with rage, which in turn leads to overreaction and self-destruction.

I understand this is Spencer getting excited in a private context in the face of a baldly racist propaganda campaign by the FNC-RNC machine to use Wright to tar Obama. And I know that Spencer is a good person, dedicated to real investigative journalism and with more balls and capacity for hard work than most of his peers. But the attitude in this email is still not, to my mind, the attitude of a journalist. It is the attitude of a political activist.

I was never on Journo-list, of course, and would have declined if invited. I understand why the coordinated talking points of the rightwing media can infuriate. But I remain of the view that the journalist needs to be as independent as possible and as hostile to all power as possible, regardless of its partisanship, while trying to see why the powerful make the difficult decisions they often feel obliged to. One reason I would never be on such a list, of course, is my record of non-liberalism: my loathing of the Clintons, my anti-p.c. instincts, my disdain for taboos on race and gender and sexuality on the left, my early support for what I stupidly thought would be moderate conservatism under Bush and even dumber tub-thumping for war in Iraq after the trauma of 9/11. I was also shocked by George Stephanopoulos' FNC-style questioning in the primary debate, and said so in no uncertain terms. But those errors and good judgments were mine and mine alone. Unless readers understand that that is the ethic, they have every reason to suspect they are being manipulated. We are all influenced by friends and colleagues. But this list was a step way too far.

I'm glad Journo-list is over. It should never have been begun. I know many of its members are good and decent and fair-minded writers. But socialized groupthink is not the answer to what's wrong with the media. It's what's already wrong with the media.

Since Murdoch imposed a pay-wall on the Times and Sunday Times of London, online readership has plunged by around 90 percent.

His vote for Kagan means a primary challenge.

Maybe Josh was right:

[W]here Lowden trailed Reid only 51-41 with moderate voters, Angle is facing a 64-28 deficit. The price of nominating Angle for Nevada Republicans appears to be 26 points with moderate voters.

Bagehot updates us on the search for common ground in British politics:

Unsurprisingly, lots of figures in the magic circle of the Coalition are getting good at coming up with solutions for problems, or at least analyses of problems, that bridge (or at least paper over) that divide. They offer pragmatic, often rather modest sounding proposals, with a bit of a market tinge (lots of talk about consumer choice and people power). These modest proposals have the great virtue of not exposing philosophical rifts between the right and left fringes of the Coalition. My problem is this: I have the strange hunch that the people advancing these proposals do not believe they will do the job.

Massie studies approval numbers. Another gauge of the coalition's health:

Liberal Democrat membership in England is up 14% this year while existing members are renewing their subscriptions at an increased rate too. As I say, this ought not to be considered too great a surprise but it's worth bearing in mind next time someone tries to persuade you that being in government with the Tories will and must ruin Nick Clegg's party.