Month: March 2011

Palin And Trig: There She Goes Again

Trigsarah

And you thought I was the one with the unhealthy obsession. From an interview with Sarah Palin by the BBC on her relationship with the US media:

"SP: Let's take a couple of examples – and I don't really want to have to talk politics on one of the best days of our life here in Alaska – but I'll give you one more answer. Things like, that are misconstrued regarding rumours out there that are still in the media because reporters don't do their homework, too often, and they don't set the record straight – though I think it's their job to set the record straight – rumors like I didn't know that Africa was a continent, that's still out there, that's a lie.

Things like I censored books when I was a mayor up here in Alaska, that's a lie… [Governor Palin begins to walk away] … So again if I decide to run we know that we have to put up with a lot of the BS that comes from the media but …

It's not all of you guys but some of you still claim that Trig isn't my kid. I think that's an indication of screwed-up media.

JL: You were saying, your favourite from the media? Which one is that?

SP: Is that Trig is not my child, which is still out there in the media.

JL: How offensive is that? How do you deal with that?

SP: Would you be offended if someone said your child wasn't your child? It's offensive. OK, you know what, I'm really really trying to enjoy one of the best days of our lives." 

But this, of course, is untrue. On the censorship question, the MSM never claimed she had banned books as Wasilla mayor, even though she complained about some. It didn't help that her response was about Harry Potter, claiming, erroneously, that the books had not yet been published when she was mayor. They had been published and she did not ban them. But notice the defensive, irrelevant untruth. And here's USA Today clearly debunking the rumor in October 2008, with the following headline:

Palin did not ban books in Wasilla as mayor

So "reporters don't do their homework" and have not debunked this yet? As for the Africa issue, the MSM reporter who relayed this was Fox News's Carl Cameron. Talk about liberal media bias. Besides, the notion of her confusion about Africa came directly from first-hand witnesses.

Now to the other charge.

I know of no one in the MSM who has claimed that Trig is not biologically Palin's child. I certainly haven't. The NYT ran a front-page story based on the premise that the rumors were nuts. Other MSM reporters made a decision to slime other journalists for even asking the question. To the best of my knowledge, no reporter (outside the ADN) has ever directly asked her to provide easily available evidence, which is odd given the many bizarre parts of the story. This the Dish has – of the McCain campaign. It is my quixotic belief that it is the duty of elected officials to clear up genuine, empirically resolvable questions about their past. Obama rightly produced his birth certificate – however offensive the insinuation that he was ineligible to be be president. Palin refuses to produce any medical records – however offensive the question understandably is.

Frank Bailey, an estranged former close aide who totally believes Palin's account(s) of her fifth pregnancy, makes this point in his manuscript about the rumors that swirled in Alaska in March and April 2008, long before anyone outside asked the obvious questions:

We did our best to bombard both friendly and non-friendly media outlets with our outrage, blasting critics by suggesting their evil had no limit. In doing so, we stupidly ensured that everyone in the state now knew of the rumor, no matter how remote their village.

Now Palin has informed the BBC. That'll help, won't it? Bailey asks the obvious question:

Why didn‘t we just ignore the asinine rumor, thereby giving it the non-respect it was due? For the same reason we never ignored anything: we came to share Sarah‘s translucent skin.

And still she brings it up. And still she refuses to provide what Bailey called "a more simple solution," the easily available medical records. Maybe she is so offended she refuses to concede the premise that she even has to address the issue. But Bailey's manuscript also reveals her early attempts to engage the Alaska media to rebut the rumor. So she once tried to get past this, and then relapsed if it required doing anything more than show stretch marks. Now she brings it up unprovoked to attack the media again – without ever engaging in what we might call empiricism.

Surprise! She wants it both ways. Both victim and aggressor; an "open book" with several pages redacted. Yes, it's tough running for national office. You have to address stuff regular folks never have to. But she was the one who demanded physical evidence of a marriage license from her first political opponent, because his wife kept her maiden name. And that was a race for Wasilla mayor, not president of the US.

And the beat goes on.

The Realism Of Tom Coburn

In an interview with Hugh Hewitt, the Republican Senator who backed Bowles-Simpson hinted that a bipartisan deal to cut the buget deficit might include a reduction in the tax deduction for interest on home mortgages "What there’ll be is there’ll be a limitation on it for one home," Coburn said, "and a limitation on the size of the home, probably, $500,000 dollars." Now check out the response:

Hugh Hewitt: Oh, my gosh. Won’t you kill the real estate market?

Tom Coburn: I don’t think so.

Hugh Hewitt: Oh, boy, that’s going to be tough to swallow. So you’ve got Republicans who agree with that?

Tom Coburn: Well, you know, the point is that that’s what the Deficit Commission had, so that’s what we’re starting from. We’re not talking about any of the things that we’re actually doing right now.

A bit later on the two argue about the proposal:

HH: Yeah, but I’m wondering, how would you propose to take away, for example, the mortgage interest deduction if the government hasn’t even done something like get rid of 80 teacher quality programs?

TC: Well, here’s the goal. The goal is to eliminate tax credits where we quit sending capital in the wrong direction, because the government says to send it that way. And so what you do is you take any money that’s savings from that, and lower everybody’s rates. So the whole deal is to get a renewal of our economic endeavor by lowering everybody’s income tax rates. So it’s a net net.

HH: Oh, I understand that, but I do not understand how you expect to sell something that would dramatically devalue people’s homes. That’s what I…

TC: There’s nothing that dramatically devalues people’s home. What we’re saying is the interest rate deduction on a $500,000 dollar home is deductible. If you have a million dollar home, and this is forward, it’s not what people have now, it’s moving forward. So if you already have it…

HH: No, no, I’m just saying that if you do that, though, you’ll lower the value of every new home bought, because the value of the interest deduction’s priced into that. Isn’t housing dying right now?

TC: Well, let me tell you something, Hugh, the average price of a home in America is not $500,000 dollars. It’s right around $210,000 dollars right now. That’s the average price.

HH: But the latter…well, we’ll have to come back and talk about this…

TC: And so you’re going to cover, we’re going to cover 95% of the people in their homes today.

HH: I’ll come back and talk with you about it next time, because that’s a disaster from the home building industry’s perspective. But I’ll talk to you about it next time.

The shorter version: Senator Coburn is trying to address the budget deficit and lessen a huge distortion of the market that's built into the tax code. And Hewitt panics. Yes, it's going to be a tough call to get the fiscal changes we desperately need.

A Rocky Pedestal

"President Obama recently warned Libyan President Muammar Gaddafithat the brutality inflicted on his own citizens was "outrageous and it is unacceptable", saying it violates "international norms and every standard of common decency". He said those responsible "must be held accountable". President Obama ended his remarks by saying "the United States will continue to stand up for freedom, stand up for justice, and stand up for the dignity of all people."

The United States cannot stand up for justice and the rule of law when it sits idly on its own record of torture. It diminishes the weight of its moral authority to influence others around the world when it treats its binding legal obligations as options it can choose to exercise or ignore. If President Obama is sincere about standing up for fundamental values, then America's actions must live up to its rhetoric," – Morris Davis, former chief prosecutor at Guantánamo.

I wonder why this did not appear in the US press.

The Palin And Fox Factors

How else to interpret this:

Since 1952, the Republicans have had 10 competitive races for the presidential nomination. Across these 10 elections, 2008 is the only year in which the eventual nominee, John McCain, achieved front-runner status relatively late in the campaign cycle. In the other nine, the nominee rose to the top of the pack in the year prior to the election, and in eight of those elections, the nominee was the front-runner by March.

My two cents: there is no Republican party left as such.

There is the RNC; but also other independent groups financing campaigns with as much influence. There is the Tea Party, whose clout in the near and medium term is unpredictable but real. There is talk radio, which has done its best to delegitimize obvious establishment choices (such as Daniels). There is Fox, whose pay-for-propaganda-platforms have raised the incentives not to run for office, by paying those who don't, until they do. There is the lucrative conservative-industrial complex, where book sales and speaking fees make you a fortune without having to grapple with the difficult choices required from actually governing. And then there's the obvious front-runner for the base – Sarah Palin – who is also the de facto incumbent (as the last election's veep nominee), but who understandably induces panic and fear in equal measure by the GOP's sane leadership – who see how she fares against Obama and gulps.

Then there's the first time any GOP candidate has to run actively against Palin. It's one sure-fire way to alienate the FNC-Talk-Radio base – the last thing you want to do when running for a primary electorate. So we have a game of chicken between a former half-term governor …. and the rest.

A Defense Of John Edwards

It comes from Mickey Kaus!

Here is the problem I have with indicting John Edwards:  Apparently the prosecutors’ idea is that if Edwards used money from “Bunny” Mellon and others to keep his mistress stashed away and quiet, this was really a campaign expense and should have been paid for out of campaign funds. But suppose Edwards had paid for it with campaign funds. Don’t you think prosecutors would now be thinking of indicting him for an improper use of campaign funds?  (You can’t pay for most meals using campaign funds. You can’t buy mittens with campaign funds. Are mistresses going to OK?)

If you’re going to enact a criminal law which requires such squirrelly distinctions–including an absurd attempt to figure out what part of a politician’s life isn’t related to getting him or her elected–the only way to save it, it seems to me, is to cut people a lot of slack when it comes to applying it.  That’s especially true when it comes to laws regulating the core democratic practice of running for office. Otherwise you wind up with what lawyers like to call a “chilling effect”–chilling in that it will prevent candidates from doing lots of things that should be legal, chilling in that it will deter non-insiders from running.