by Chris Bodenner
Jesse Griffin adds a wrinkle to the melodrama:
Do you the really tacky thing about this US Weekly photo? Last Friday, after ignoring Sadie and his mom for days, Levi suddenly called up and asked Sherry to cut his hair. When he arrived they asked what it was for, but he refused to say anything other than that had a photoshoot on Saturday. So Levi woke his mother up, demanded that she cut his hair, but said NOTHING about his engagement to Bristol.
Stay classy Levi.
by Chris Bodenner
A Slog commenter accuses Dan of pushing open relationships on people. He protests:
There's a column, pretty recent one, not gonna look up, where I encouraged a guy who was into monogamy to dump a girl who wasn't. And told him he was fine. Go and find it! Gotta run.
I do advocate, however, being realistic about the odds that one or the other or both partners in a truly long long-term relationship will cheat at some point. The stats on infidelity? Shocking, considering that monogamy is so favored, culturally. We fail at it, though, pretty predictably, and so I think we should be realistic—the monogamous wannabes should—because I think a good, strong relationship should be able to survive, and be expected to survive, a routine, non-nuclear-level infidelity.
Because, you see, I'm a conservative, and I don't like to see marriages fall apart over trivial bullshit.
by Dave Weigel
Rick Barber — the man who cut three of the most dizzingly amusing YouTube ads of the cycle — will not be heading to Congress. He badly lost last night's runoff in his Alabama district, falling by 22 points to Montgomery City Councilwoman Martha Roby, who pitted the support of the Republican establishment against Barber's aggressive courting of tea parties.
There is a lesson here, as well as an excuse to post Barber's best video. It's easy to look at a loss like this and conclude that the hype for tea party candidates like Barber or like failed Agriculture Commissioner Dale Peterson — both of whom ran ads directed by the wily Ladd Ehlinger, Jr. — outpaces their support from voters. That's not wrong — Barber, not Roby, was the subject of cable news profiles, and Peterson will be the only Alabama AC candidate profiled by the Washington Post. But in a normal year, could Barber have forced a runoff or gotten to even 39% of the vote? More likely, he would have been the latest "fringe" candidate to see his exposure limited to some helpful paragraphs in a newspaper voter guide and be trampled into single digits.
But the tea party's success in boosting some serious candidates, like Scott Brown, has got the nonpartisan and liberal media chasing after any candidate who ostentatiously proclaims himself a tea partier. The "wackier" his appeal, the better. The easier it is to "nail" him on his views in an interview, the better. It's a bit like when a new craze hits (let's say alt rock) and all of a sudden every going-nowhere band can get a record deal (let's say The Verve Pipe, Days of the New, Marcy Playground) simply for acting up.
by Dave Weigel
Who could have expected this? Criticizing my blog-host's indulgence of the "Trig isn't the son of Sarah Palin" theory inspired a bunch of e-mail, some of it critical of me for doubting. Or of not doubting enough. I've lost track.
Your argument comparing the Birthers and those questioning Trig Palin’s birth misses the largest most salient fact of all. Obama has answered his questioners with a legal document that clearly proves those stating he was not born in the US are choosing to disbelieve what has legally been shown to be fact. Sarah Palin has answered her questioners by producing a statement: "I already answered those questions". I am foreigner who does not even live in the US, I have no horse in this race. But these arguments are not of the same ilk. While both arguments can be be settled with supporting documentation, only the Birthers have been shown to be WRONG. As Andrew has stated before, just prove him wrong…
It's true that Palin has not published a certificate of birth the way Obama's campaign did when confronted with the early spasms of the birthers. A medical report that describes her pregnancy is all the media has. Remember, though — birtherism didn't really take off until the campaign did so, and conspiracy theorists began to argue that the document was flawed and lacking. Palin has reacted to more information requests with anger. I think that anger's understandable.
I'm utterly astounded that you take it upon yourself to claim that evidence against Palin as Trig's mother a) is vapor, and b) doesn't make any difference even if it's not vapor. If you are finding people in AK who "followed" Palin during her brief pregnancy, would you please give their names and their comments? And may I ask, why haven't they themselves come forward to offer eyewitness accounts of the pregnancy? And why haven't those who were present at the birth (other than Levi, who's a confessed liar, and Palin's father, who is a creep of the first order and clearly biased) ever come forward to confirm the details of the birth story? And by the way, not even the doctor who wrote Palin's "medical letter" before the 2008 election said in the letter that she was present at the birth.
The last point is not true. 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." That's pretty clear, isn't it? And among the people who told me that Alaskans were well aware of Palin's pregnancy were Shannyn Moore, an award-winning and left-leaning political radio host who has been roundly attacked by Palin fans.
Ok, so, she gave birth to Trig. But that does not mean that her story doesn't smell. I look at this not so much as a political story, but a medical one. Here are the questions that remain unanswered for me:
1) Why did she have amniocentesis at 13 weeks gestation (as she stated in People Magazine in August 2008). Amnio is normally performed at 16-20 weeks. It is considered too risky at 13 weeks.
2) Why didn't she seek medical attention when she discovered she was leaking amniotic fluid (she confirmed this in an interview in the ADN shortly after Trig was born)? This is a huge red flag because once your water is broken, the risk of infection increases. If she was leaking amniotic fluid, wasn't she at all concerned that she would get amniotic fluid all over her plane seat? (Sorry, but delivering a baby is messy business).
3) Why was Trig delivered by a family physician, and not an obstetrician, or a perinatologist? Over-40 women are almost always considered "high risk" because of the increased chance of pre-eclampsia, a potentially fatal condition.
4) Why did she give birth to Trig at a small community hospital that does not offer high-risk obstetrics and does not have a neo-natal intensive care unit? She was 44, in labor prematurely, and carrying a Downs' Syndrome baby (who sometimes face complications at birth). Any of those three things qualifies her as "high-risk". This is the part that just sounds so implausible to me. The Providence Alaska Medical Center is close to the airport in Anchorage, is a state-of-the-art facility, and Palin's physician had privileges there. So why did they drive an hour past that facility back to the Mat-su hospital?
Here's what you and so many others are missing, Mr. Weigel: It is simply not normal behavior to "go into labor" in Texas and then take a very long trip, involving two planes and a car ride, to get home. Labor hurts like hell, and can turn on a dime. You may have heard the story of the birth of Gov. Bobby Jindal's third child, but here's a recap. Mrs. Jindal had typically long, drawn-out labors with her first two children, and she assumed her third child would arrive in a similar fashion. He did not. Mrs. Jindal's labor progressed so quickly that there was no time to get to the hospital, and Mr. Jindal ended up delivering his son himself, while on the phone with a 911 operator who coached him through it.
In "Going Rogue" she describes how she woke up in Texas feeling contractions and prayed that her baby would be okay even though he would be premature. That is very understandable, but if she really cared about her baby's well being, why didn't she also visit a hospital in Texas to have a physician reassure her?
Andrew has never stated that he thinks Palin faked the pregnancy. He has stated clearly that he thinks there are three options here: 1) she behaved recklessly by flying while in labor 2) she lied about the details of Trig's birth to make herself sound more tough or 3) she faked the whole thing.
Not to be too flippant about this, but who cares? This is a woman who named her other children Track, Bristol, Willow, and Piper, and gets made fun of all the time for that, and whose husband participates in multi-week snowmobile races. So, yes, count me in as a believer of theory #1 who hasn't been too interested in it since then. (I have read "Going Rogue" with her account of this, via ghostwriter Lynne Vincent.) Why interpret her odd decisions as part of a cover-up?
by Patrick Appel
Thoreau is saddened by them:
Regarding the marijuana ballot measure, it appears that support is strong among whites and opposition is strong among minorities. At first this surprised me, given that minority communities are the ones most impacted by the insanity of drug enforcement. On the other hand, that sort of thing cuts both ways. If prohibition exacerbates the pathologies associated with drug abuse, then the least advantaged communities that are impacted the most by prohibition will understandably have the most negative view of drugs.
A guide to dueling polls on the proposition here.
by Chris Bodenner
A reader writes:
For the first time I really believe she will run. If this isn't "getting your house in order," I don't know what is. And contrary to Bristol's claims, I don't think anyone takes a breath in that family without clearing it with Sarah first.
The announcement was clearly meant to ruin Andrew's vacation.
by Patrick Appel
Jonah Lehrer's two cents:
Unless we engage with those uncomfortable data points, those stats which suggest that George W. Bush wasn't all bad, or that Obama isn't such a leftist radical, then our beliefs will never improve. (It doesn't help, of course, that our news sources are increasingly segregated along ideological lines.) So here's my theorem: The value of a political pundit is directly correlated with his or her willingness to admit past error.
by David Frum
I suggest some ideas in the Financial Times today.
A vote to repeal healthcare would be symbolic only: even if repeal passed, which it would not, the president would veto it. Extending the Bush tax cuts would be helpful to long-term economic growth – but hardly constitutes an effective anti-recession measure. The Bush tax cuts have been in force since 2001 and 2003. The crash of October 2008 and the ensuing recession happened anyway. The medicine that did not prevent the disease is hardly likely to cure it.
Yet there are policy improvements that Republicans could deliver – and which would help lift the country out of the worst recession since 1945. The first is a payroll tax holiday. Mr Obama added $787bn to the national debt with a poorly designed “fiscal stimulus” that did little to create jobs. Now is the time for a Republican alternative. The US collects about $40bn a month from the payroll tax that funds Social Security and Medicare. A one-year holiday from such payments would put money in workers’ pockets and encourage employers to hire, at only a little more than half the cost of the Obama stimulus. The holiday would have been a great idea in January 2009. It still is now.
by Patrick Appel
Well, this explains Levi's recent apology. Ben Smith has new piece on whether Palin will run for president. His reaction to the engagement:
It's evidence that she is running to the degree that she's cleaning up a messy family situation. It's evidence that she's not because, yet again, her efforts to emerge as a serious person are drowned out her daughter's exclusive dish to USWeekly.
by Patrick Appel
One of Christopher Ryan's readers asks:
My question is, could there be a natural selective pressure in post-agricultural societies to favor monogamy, such as if offspring raised by monogamous parents would be more likely to "succeed" (have higher fitness, or reproductive success) than those raised by single parents?
Ryan's answer:
What's the genetic correlate to "monogamy?" In other words, assuming there are no genes specifically devoted to making one more or less prone to long-term sexual monogamy, how would the very significant selective pressures you describe affect the genome?
I have to say up front that neither I nor my co-author are experts in genetics, so I may well be missing something, but while I see how monogamy could have been promoted by very strong familial, cultural, and economic pressures (see centuries of arranged marriage among the wealthy and powerful of Europe, for example), I don't see how that would be replicated at a genetic level…There may be some association with genes that affect novelty-seeking behavior perhaps, or overall libido, but I can't imagine it getting more specific than that.
In addition to the selective pressures Ryan's reader notes, what about disease?
In her book on HIV, Elizabeth Pisani argues that Western nations haven't seen the same sort of heterosexual HIV epidemics as some African nations partially because of differing sexual practices. Citizens of nations such as America are more likely to practice serial monogamy, i.e. one sex partner after another. HIV is most infectious in the early stages, so monogamy limits its spread and makes it more likely that those with HIV will become aware of their condition before passing the disease to multiple partners. According to Pisani, in several African nations individuals are much more likely to have several sexual partners at the same time and they are therefore more likely to both contract and spread HIV through these networks. It seems possible that as population density increased, which caused tremendous death and poverty, sexually transmitted diseases made monogamy evolutionarily advantageous, in some communities at least. The Sex At Dawn authors get half-way there on page 208:
While there were no doubt occasional outbreaks of infectious disease in prehistory, it's unlikely they spread far, even with high levels of sexual promiscuity. It would have been nearly impossible for pathogens to take hold in widely dispersed groups of foragers with infrequent contact between groups. The conditions necessary for devastating epidemics or pandemics didn't exist until the agricultural revolution.
Any other theories? Or problems with this one?
The Dish 