Month: December 2010

Pareene notes that Time's Palin cover story relies on an e-mail interview with Palin:

[E-mail] is generally how you get a quick statement, not how you put together a cover story. … An e-mail interview easily allows the subject to avoid getting tripped up by tough questions and completely ignore unwelcome follow-ups. Palin's media strategy is all about limiting exposure and making sure every appearance is on her own terms and in her comfort zone. That strategy requires a press so desperate for the attention Palin content generates that they bend over backward for her — and it looks like it's all working perfectly, so far.

Weasel Zippers protests:

The problem with this, the “stylist” is in fact Sarah Palin’s daughter, Bristol.

Not really. The point is the conflict between simple charity and charity with extensions. Who actually does the hair does not seem to me to be salient in this awkward confluence. Still, I guess as we face huge choices on taxes, spending, the war, civil rights, the debt and immigration, it's good to know that Ms Palin can still leap to the top of Memeorandum.

P.M. Carpenter on Paul Krugman:

In this space I daily resist polemics. I really do. Or, well, I try anyway. But when I read liberal polemics (the right-wing species is both hopeless and overmonitored) masquerading as in-the-game intellectualism — What we need is direct and massive stimulus, urges Krugman repeatedly, when there's a more realistic chance that I'll win the Nobel Peace Prize next year — I find myself, as noted, growing intolerant, and thus equally polemical.

For that I apologize, to myself. I'll try to do better, for you the reader. Mr. Krugman, will you?

A reader writes:

Surely it has been pointed out to you that for Obama to reap any of the political benefit of this move to the center on taxes — in the political spirit of Clinton era 'triangulation'— it is incumbent on us liberals and progressive to scream to the high heavens, to make our genuine, strong, anger and displeasure over capitulating to the wealthy and super-wealthy known throughout the land (or at least the media); only then will the middle-grounders, Independents and even the right feel that Obama has moved in their direction, not ours. We are doing our part.

Verena von Pfetten reports on this season's stupidest shoe, the $330 Teva stiletto:

And while the shoes are still ugly, the advertising images are at least entertaining. Teva heels: the perfect shoe for when you want to wear stilettos while rock climbing/gardening/sitting in a tree.

Clive Crook scratches his head.

… looking hot. It's sometimes tough to keep both personae in tandem. Ah, yes, the British press. She wouldn't survive them for very long.

Apparently its open season in Minnesota:

In a dramatic display of the new Republican order, Minnesota’s state GOP banished 18 prominent party members — including two former governors and a retired U.S. senator — as punishment for supporting a third-party candidate for governor.

The stunning purge, narrowly passed by the state Republican central committee last weekend, suggests more than just a fit of pique: by banning some of the state’s leading moderates, the Minnesota GOP moved toward extinguishing a dying species of Republican in one of its last habitats.

It ought to be obvious that in order to win a gubernatorial race or a senate seat as a Republican, a politician had to have a lot of supporters inside the party, as well as appeal among centrists. Do the hardliners think that by expelling center right politicians, they’ll somehow eliminate the people who once voted for them?

Those exiled warned that the measure, which bans the 18 former members from participating in party activities for two years and bars them from attending the 2012 Republican National Convention, may provoke a backlash that undercuts the party’s competitiveness in a state that’s voted for the GOP presidential nominee just once in the past half century.

Ya think? 

Reihan joins the debate:

[I]t is possible that two people who are financially independent and capable of keeping their finances separate might have less “need” for marriage. But it is worth noting that these are precisely the people who marry in contemporary U.S. society. My suspicion — call me crazy — is that mass incarceration is a fairly important driver of the turn away from marriage among non-college-educated Americans, not a decision that marriage confers no “real protections.”

After praising a Rich Lowry column on the plight of working Americans, David Frum practically begs his former colleague to have the courage of his convictions:

Rich, if you take these concerns seriously as a writer and thinker – then take them seriously as an editor. Challenge your readers. Fix their attention. Urge them to see what you see. Emancipate them from pretend information and false ideas. Use your platform. Don’t ratify a pre-existing conservative consensus that fails to address the issues you identify as supremely important – change it. National Review could be hugely relevant to the debate over the future of conservatism if it would only speak clearly and consistently in favor of what you regard as true – and against the current orthodoxy that you tacitly concede is false. Lead!-because if you don’t, you leave the field to a reactionary conservatism that offers little or nothing to the hard-pressed people whose cause you took up today.

It would be fun to see National Review commit as a magazine to challenging its audience. Surveying the outlets that are making money on the right, however, is to understand how difficult it would be for Lowry to go that route. Once again, the financial incentives and intellectual health of movement conservatism are in tension.