Month: September 2011

A statement from Joe McGinniss worth reprinting:

Bottom line: not only my editor, but Random House attorneys verified every source, in some cases speaking directly to the sources themselves. I have dozens of hours of recorded conversations. Random House attorneys listened to them all, then made an independent judgment about the trustworthiness of the sources. No material from an unverified source is included in the book.

Many details were omitted for that reason. Obviously, any writer would like to be able to name every source. In this case, the climate of fear the Palins created in and around Wasilla made that impossible. After seeing how Sarah reacted to my moving next door, many people became afraid for their own safety and said they’d talk to me only if I guaranteed confidentiality. When I felt I had to, I did. Anonymous sources have a long and honorable tradition in U.S. journalism. Look at Woodward and Bernstein and “Deep Throat.” Just last week, the NY Times had a story about the Mets third baseman and quoted an anonymous source. In twelve books written over 42 years, I’ve never been through a legal vetting like this one. It lasted for months.

"If the Obama administration had wanted to do what is right, and not what would spare it the slings and arrows of its domestic critics, it should not have rebuffed the Palestinians for appealing to the UN. The U.S. did the right thing in 1947. Why not have done it in 2011?" – John Judis, TNR. Ackerman applauds. It is, I presume, a rhetorical question.

More classic Palin from the Greta infomercial:

"Is a title worth it? Does a title shackle a person? Are they someone like me who's maverick? I do go rogue and I call it like I see it and I don’t mind stirring it up in order to get people to think and debate aggressively. … Is a title and a campaign too shackle-y?"

"Shackle-y" now joins "refudiate". But notice how she really doesn't see the difference between a title and an office. You see: when you hold an office, you have to do things. When you hold a title, you just go places, people cheer and everyone loves you. If you read the books that show her uninterest in doing things most clearly – Dunn's, Bailey's, McGinniss's – you begin to realize this verbal tic really means something.

Maybe she won't run. God I hope so. The minute she says she's not, we can begin to put her in the rear-view mirror and our three year nightmare will finally end.

“Newt Gingrich wrote a novel, and he’s a short story. Bill Clinton wrote a biography, and he’s a novel," – James McBride.

An amusing profile in neocon media overreach. 

In her latest "interview" with her public relations aide, Greta Van Susteren, Palin accuses the media of not vetting the 2008 candidates properly and of turning politics into a reality show. I kid you not.

Readers push back against this one:

Cul-de-sacs are not safer:

"They turn what should be a 100-yard walk into a two-mile drive, and they put more people in cars for more reasons than they should," [University of Virginia's William] Lucy said. And because they get lulled into a sense of security, he said, parents don’t teach their kids about street safety and the "difference between street and sidewalk and driveway and yard." But the greatest danger to a young child, he said, is being backed over by a motor vehicle– usually driven by their own parents in their own driveway. Indeed, "backovers" account for 34 percent of "non-traffic" vehicular fatalities among children under 15 years old. ("Frontovers" account for another 30 percent, meaning that 64 percent of "non-traffic" vehicular fatalities still involve children being run over, according to KidsAndCars.org.)"

Another writes:

Regarding your reader's point that suburban cul-de-sacs become de facto playgrounds: so do city streets and parks for urban kids.

I was raised in the grid of Chicago’s far north side, and all the front yards (usually without fences or shrubs) created de facto football fields and baseball diamonds.  The alleys and gangways were mazes for hide-and-seek and discovering what happens when a squirrel gets run over.  A few blocks away were parks and playgrounds and beaches we could walk to.  Yeah, you had to watch for traffic, but so do kids in cul-de-sacs.

But more importantly: what happens when kids are adolescents? While the relative safety of suburban cul-de-sacs might be a good thing for younger children to run around in, living in an urban grid, as James Howard Kunstler brilliantly argues in The Geography of Nowhere, helps those children grow into adults who are part of a community.  When children have independent relationships with adults – storekeepers, bakers, butchers, crossing guards at the busy streets, the mailman, the blind vet who runs the newsstand on the corner, neighbors who aren’t parents of their friends, the cop on the beat, and so on (all examples from my own childhood) – the kids mature into people who feel a part of a community.  And in an urban grid, adolescents can go places and do things without being dependent on driving adults or getting their own drivers’ licenses.  The museums, the ballparks, the cinemas, the libraries, the many wonders of a city are accessible to young people making the transition to adulthood in cities in ways they simply are not in the ‘burbs.

And are these suburban cul-de-sacs really so safe?  A recent incident in a Chicago suburb, where a homeless man who was living unbeknownst to most nearby residents in a field attacked an elderly woman, suggests otherwise.  Money quote:

By many accounts, the cluster of houses and apartments in a leafy area behind The Home Depot in Orland Park is a safe and family-friendly place. It’s a quiet community where people feel free to walk their dogs and let their children play outside without fear. Thus it came as a shock to many residents that a homeless man pushed down and allegedly sexually assaulted an 83-year-old woman Friday morning in a nearby field.

Suburban safety is a myth suburbanites like to tell themselves. 

The reader's brother concurs:

Growing up in the city was the best thing for us, as kids. I hate the idea that urbanism is anti-child. It's a meme with no truth in it, and one that is responsible, in part, for so many parents abandoning the city once they have kids. They don't want to be Bad Parents, so they Must Leave The City For The Kids.

Another:

The ability to play in the street in a surburban cul-de-sac environment only works if you live at the end of the cul-de-sac. I know people who live on the feeder streets, and you better believe cars are flying down these streets to get to the main road.

One more:

When I was growing up in Brooklyn, there was plenty of playtime on the streets – you just, you know, got out of the way of the cars when they came.  Not all streets in the city are thoroughfares.  Stickball, punchball, skellsies (or "skelly"), "pitching in", street football, "Johnny on the pony", "Ringolaria" – all these games and more were played out on Hart Street where I grew up in Bushwick (Bill Cosby has many stories of street games when he grew up in Philadelphia).

When my family moved to the Florida suburbs, no one played any street games.  But that was thirty years ago.  Maybe it's a sign of the times, where the few parents who let their kids have a little bit of unsupervised activity (like riding their bike to school for chrissake) get harassed by the police.

Jan-Werner Mueller hazards a theory:

So is a populist simply a successful politician one doesn’t like? Can the charge of “populism” itself be populist? I would argue that populism is not about a particular social base (such as the lower-middle class or what the French call les classes populaires), but is rather a form of political imaginary. It’s a way of seeing the political world that opposes a fully unified—but essentially fictional—people against small minorities who are put outside the authentic people. It is a hallmark of populism—and a structural one, independent of any particular national context or policy issue—that it construes an “unhealthy coalition” between an elite that doesn’t really belong and marginal groups that don’t really belong either.

He's "running" for president again. Georgi Derluguian eyes Russia's fragile economy:

A major unknown … is how would Putin’s notoriously inefficient and venal ‘vertical of power’ fare in the face of world economic turmoil? Retrench and pray for high oil prices, collapse in the face of protests and elite defections, or turn into a developmental dictatorship of savings? Still more unknown is what could be the ideologies and mobilization resources of the opposition in the eventuality of catastrophic crisis with such daily-life occurrences as electrical shutdowns and industrial accidents.

Matt Stopera captions the above photo, by Getty's Alexey Druzhinina, "Vladimir Putin autographing a huge portait of himself for a little girl. Like a boss."

Douthat takes stock:

I strongly agree with death penalty critics like Will Wilkinson that the general decline of capital punishment in the United States over the last three centuries is a sign of moral progress. (It’s a very good thing that we aren’t hanging people for property crimes any more.) But it seems to me that there’s a real moral difference between reducing the application of the death penalty because we’ve decided that certain uses are inherently unjust (which is what drove the decline of executions for most of American history) and eliminating its use entirely because we’ve decided that our legal system isn’t competent to implement it (which is part of what’s driving the decline of the death penalty at the moment).