Month: May 2011

Sao Paulo, Brazil, 6.57 pm.

"The creepy colour is natural and had been preceded by a thunderstorm."

Kate Pickert argues that the new law "isn't a game-changer":

Vermont is not like the rest of the country. First, the state is home to only about 600,000 people. It’s not clear that the scale is large enough to test out a single-payer system and see if it could be instituted in larger states or nationwide. Vermont’s existing private insurance market is also unlike most other places. The state has very strict insurance regulation that has whittled down the number of private insurers selling policies on the individual market. Turning Vermont’s existing system into single-payer would be a huge change, but it’s not the same as a big state like California making the jump or a far less regulated state like Alabama.

The trip to Europe? But one should not read too much into this, of course. Things can change rapidly. But the attempt to use Netanyahu's visit to portray Obama as anti-American hasn't worked.

"Now that President Obama has released his full birth certificate–providing the proof that the right has always demanded to rebut one of their own conspiracy theories–we think it is reasonable to ask Palin to provide the (simple) proof to back up her own story.

It's true that, right now, Palin is just a private citizen, but she allegedly gave birth to Trig while governor of Alaska and then advanced the Trig story during her campaign for Vice President of the United States. And the possibility that a Governor and Vice Presidential candidate defrauded the nation is certainly worth investigating, even if only to put it to rest.

If Palin decides to actually run for President in 2012, we think she will be forced to provide proof of her story, as the media is not likely to be so easily cowed this time around," – Henry Blodget.

I wish I could be so sure.

But remember the key precedents. Palin's allies demanded in her first race that her opponent, John Stein, produce his marriage license to prove he was married, because his wife retained her maiden name. They then claimed, once he produced it, that he could have forged it. Palin called on Trump to keep on digging to get more details of Obama's birth certificate. She has already said in public that she has produced the medical records proving Trig's maternity, and so obviously has no principled reason to withhold them. In Frank Bailey's book, she is revealed as being willing to talk to the press to kill off the persistent rumors of a hoax pregnancy, so, again, she has shown she is willing to do so in principle, as anyone with nothing to hide and with a mountain of medical records would do.

I can't see how she can run without disposing of this story for good and all, as any sane person would have three years ago, as her former close aide, Frank Bailey concedes. But be assured: the mainstream media will be her dogged allies in protecting her from setting the record straight. And the more liberal the source, the more emphatic they will be about not going there. Why? Because they now see this – correctly – as a game of chicken, in which the journalists have as much to lose as the candidate. And if there is anything to this story, it will be framed as another skirmish between the MSM and a good, Christian mother. She has set up that narrative already, because, if she does have something to hide, it is her only chance.

Part of me had hoped this would all go away, because, as literally everyone in DC assured me, she was never going to run for president. But it won't. Because she won't. And they seem as clueless as ever about her potential.

Disturbing helmet-cam video from the raid:

Balko asks pertinent questions:

[I]magine you’re asleep—behind a couple walls, after working a graveyard shift—for what you see in the video. Would you have woken up and known that these were cops breaking into your home? Might it have been in the back of your mind that you had relatives murdered by armed intruders just a year ago?

The episode looks like a scene from a dystopian movie where America has become a police state. This is where the drug war has taken us. It must end.

We have been told she wasn't running; and we have been told she couldn't run because she hadn't done the core homework necessary, and didn't have the proper machinery on the ground. Now we learn from none other than Karl Rove:

"I think it's the emergence of a potential race. Look, I don't think she thinks the rules apply to her. She doesn't need to have the traditional trappings of a presidential campaign, no finance committee, she can raise the money, she doesn't need to go shake a lot of hands in Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina. She gets to decide what the rules are that govern her campaign and go accordingly and politics is changing. Some people have done things that have been outside the norm of custom and have won."

It sure ain't Wasilla:

Despite its rustic flair, there is nothing ordinary about Ms. Palin’s new neighborhood, one of the most elite in the Phoenix area and a place that some refer to derisively as “Snobsdale.” “Scottsdale is a unique combination of cowboy country, open spaces, sophistication, snobbery, resorts, arts, golf, spring training and plastic surgery,” said Jason Rose, a public relations executive who works here. Its downtown is lined with art galleries and fashionable restaurants, and Scottsdale hosts an Arabian horse show and antique car auction every year.

But it is in the state with the greatest racial discrepancy between current, almost entirely white seniors and current, increasingly Latino babies. I.e.: a great base for what the Palin campaign is calling "The Fundamental Restoration of America." If your appeal is cultural panic, why not base yourself in its heartland? From then on: divide and conquer.

(Photo by Alan English, who captions: "Frank Lloyd Wright Spire & Coyote Fountain. The Scottsdale Promenade is an Upscale Mall & Office complex at the SW Corner of Scottsdale Road and Frank Lloyd Wright Blvd.")

From the annals of Republican hathos.

Eugene Volokh rejects the notion that circumcision bans are "motivated by hostility to Jews":

[I]t’s true that circumcision bans are likely to affect Jews more deeply than others, because Jewish parents are more likely to feel strongly about circumcising their children. But it would still be the odd anti-Semite who so wants to hurt Jews that he’s willing to try to in the process forcibly change the practices of over 50% of the population — overwhelmingly non-Jews — and thus to incur the political opposition of that big chunk of the population.

Also: Muslims. My position on this is based on a very simple principle that people's bodies should not be permanently altered without their consent. But I would still include a religious exception to this law, that would protect the rights of Muslims and Jews to retain this barbaric act because they sincerely believe it is integral to their faith, and is not as drastic or as hideous as female genital mutilation, where sexual feeling is removed, rather than merely blunted by scar tissue.

More TMI. I think many readers assume that being British, I was never put under the knife.

But I was, because, as my parents later explained, my foreskin was apparently too abundant and/or tight according to the doctor. With so few circumcisers in Britain, they actually took me to a mohel for the process, during which I am told I screamed like bloody murder. No doubt Goldblog will infer from this my profound desire to lop off the West Bank from Israel as some sort of repressed psychological revenge. And I'm not going to plumb my own subconscious on this. But, to be honest, the Jewish angle never really occurred to me, growing up as a roundhead rather than a cavalier. I only found out in my early twenties when I asked my folks what had happened. (At one point in early high school, since no one ever explained to me why my willy looked different from my peers', I even wondered if the relative oddness of my member was the outward sign of my inward homosexuality. I had no idea it had just been mutilated at all.)

But actually, my simple impulse on this is the same I have in many areas: a very dogged defense of my own liberty. If others can permanently alter your own body without your consent, you really have no freedom at all.

Noah Millman imagines a parallel universe:

[H]ad John McCain lost with Tim Pawlenty as his running mate in 2008 (and he would have), Pawlenty would have had at least as good a shot as Mitt Romney of taking the nomination this time around, his uninspiring persona notwithstanding.

As things stand, Larison wonders why Pawlenty is getting the Serious Candidate treatment. And this, of course, reflects something most don't recognize. Sarah Palin is the incumbent vice-presidential candidate. That she is not considered the next-one-in-line is only because of what she revealed about herself almost as soon as she was picked, which spooked the GOP establishment. But that establishment has already anointed her, however much they now want to scram.

Hence the dog-whistle of the propaganda movie title, "The Undefeated." Those who live in the reality-based world will note that the last time Palin ran for anything she was brutally defeated in an historic wipe-out. If she had stayed on as Alaska governor, the current polls suggest she'd be thrown out on her elegant heels. No: "The Undefeated" is designed to indicate that she remains undefeated by the Republican establishment and the media that actually asks questions of politicians.

This is a populist once anointed by the establishment, now running against it. In these times, none of the other candidates has such a pedigree. Or her kind of will to power.

(Photo: Grace Bollert, 7, waits for former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin to sign her new book 'America By Heart: Reflections on Family, Faith and Flag' November 23, 2010 in Phoenix, Arizona. By Eric Thayer/Getty Images.)