Month: September 2011

Bruce Bartlett joins the discussion, comes out roughly where I am, but thinks Obama's pivot to healthcare in a recession much worse than we knew at the time was a real, if understandable, mistake.

A reader quotes Paul Burka:

"I think Palin is playing her cards very smartly. She has the biggest following of any Republican, by far. She has 100% name identification. She is a free agent. I think she’s intent upon running, and I think Rick Perry had better watch out."

Look at Laura Ingraham and Ann Coulter in that recent Fox interview, dumping all over her. They are getting bolder, venturing that she might be "stupid" despite liberal criticism. Joe's book and its details are looming. People can sense the mess that's coming.

She's done. She. Is. Done.

Another agrees:

I've had fun, these last few months, sending the same "Sarah Palin isn't running" email to you every few weeks. I write them largely to entertain myself – and I find myself very entertaining. But I think you need a serious talking-down.

And it starts with a question: after what is now a couple of years of exposing (very humorously, I think) the sociopathology of the Palin clan, and watching as high-school-quality machinations of Todd'n'Sarah unwind and are eventually exposed, do you really think Palin is capable of the kind of nine-dimensional chess game you seem to be implying in "If Perry Falters…"?

Palin has a devoted following that's just below the support of people who are actually campaigning – and just slightly above the number of people who believe the pyramids were built by aliens. You seem to believe her popularity will grow when she hits the campaign trail. I think there's no candidate as popular as an undeclared candidate.

In this Republican season, it's especially true. Every Golden Child candidate who looked good standing in the wings withers in the spotlight, and off the media go looking for their next crush. Mitch Daniels begets Haley Barbour begets Michele Bachman begets Chris Christie begets Rick Perry. Perry, now actually running, is dropping in popularity, and your roving eye turns back to Sarah, with her bloc of consistent support that will surely, surely propel her to power. In this case, I think, Ron Paul's experience is instructive: Sarah, like Paul, has a popularity that will not wither, but also will not grow.

Palin's an idiot. You, of all people, realize that. She's not executing a grand strategy. She's doing what makes her the center of attention, which is what she has done her whole life. Give her credit: she's a savant at pushing certain media buttons, and she uses the segment of conservatism that wants nothing from their politicians but an ability to annoy liberals and the ATM of wingnut welfare to keep the cameras grinding away. 

But she isn't going to run for President, because that would be the end of her. She'd be miserable and have to answer questions and take responsibility for things, and that's not what she's about. 

She reminds me, in a way, of Marion Berry's assessment of Jesse Jackson. Berry, disgraced but nonetheless a real politician, said of the constantly kibbitzing Jackson, "Jesse don't want to run nothing but his mouth."

That's Sarah. She's not running. She's never going to run.

The cranky but lovable Greater Israel fanatic is 86 – and sure knows how to corral the over-70 Jewish set. But dig deeper and you see the view he really holds:

Over lunch he denounced the so-called Arab Spring as “a fraud,” and Mr. Obama’s call for Hosni Mubarak’s resignation as president of Egypt “an outrage.”

That's the message he wants to bring to the wider world.

The Dish posted about Rod Dreher's sister's struggle with cancer. She succumbed yesterday. Rod's post on it is as moving as his first. Money quote:

I talked to her the other day, and knew from what my folks had been telling me that she was in steep decline. Losing weight, on oxygen again, in lots of pain. But if it hadn’t been for Mama and Daddy, who live next door to her, telling me these things, I would never have known. She never, ever complains. She mentioned to me that she had been dreaming lately of family members who had died. Our grandfather Dede. Our grandmother Mullay. Our Aunt Julia. She said they appeared to her in different dreams.

“Did they say anything to you?” I asked her.

“No, they just smiled,” she said.

“Do you think they were preparing you for something?”

“No, I didn’t get that sense.”

Of course she didn’t. Ruthie has so much hope for survival.

But she was wrong.

(Photo: Ruthie Leming and her daughter, Claire. The eyes on that child.)

Yes:

Mitt’s prospects here may be more fragile here than they appear from afar. Despite his advantages, Romney is drawing roughly one-third of the vote here–or just about the 31.6 percent he finished with in 2008. Romney’s rivals like to describe him as an “incumbent” for the purposes of the New Hampshire contest, and that seems fair. Last time around Mitt was still introducing himself to voters; now his name recognition is about 100 percent. But any incumbent running just over 30 percent and not increasing his numbers is hardly in a commanding position.

Which means that Huntsman needs to focus very tightly on the Granite state. His tax reform proposals should be front and center.

A major coup for the former Utah governor. He's so easily the most electable and most qualified of all the candidates it's almost painful to see how his party has moved beyond him into the twilight zone.

Keith Humphreys finds that the Internet is making it harder to avoid disturbing images and videos:

The textbook therapeutic use of exposure under controlled conditions is the treatment of phobias. The patient is trained to relax with a series of muscular and mental exercises and then the feared stimulus (say, a spider) is gradually introduced over a series of sessions.

At first the spider would be introduced just by talking about spiders and webs and the like, then by having a still photo of a spider, followed perhaps by a video of spiders, and then finally an actual spider. The patient retrains him or herself to maintain the relaxed state despite the exposure until the feared object is no longer scary. The patient knows when the sessions are going to happen and that the exposure will be graduated, which fosters the sense of control they need to master their emotional distress.

However, as we interact with the Internet and other media, feared or traumatic images can come at us unpredictably when we are not relaxed and when we feel no sense of control.

Alec MacGillis reports:

[Strip clubs] are caught in an endless legal battle with the state that points to the downside of the Texas approach to revenue collection. By singling-out easy targets, Perry hasn't cultivated a pro-business atmosphere, but rather a mixture of distrust, resentment, and non-compliance among those who are supposed to be ponying up. The $5-per-customer tax on strip clubs that Perry signed in 2007—which goes by a number of nicknames, the most clever of which is the “pole tax”—was to fund an array of programs relating to sexual assault prevention and counseling, as well as subsidies for a sliver of the six million Texans without insurance. In a state with no income tax, helping those without health coverage fell to, well, those looking for women who aren’t covered. “That’s where we’ve come to,”  Garnet Coleman, a Democratic state representative from Houston, told me.

(Photo: Adult entertainers protest outside of San Francisco's city hall on August 18, 2006. Dozens of adult entertainment workers protested proposed regulations of adult entertainment establishments during an entertainment commission hearing at San Francisco City Hall. By Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)

P.Z. Myers picks apart Zietsch and Santtila's study, which he says "fails pretty badly." The most conveyable portion:

All of 1.9% of the male subjects reported never achieving orgasm through intercourse; 12% of the female subjects reported "rarely or never" having an orgasm in the last 4 weeks. This is actually a surprisingly good number; worldwide frequency of anorgasmia in women is typically around 20%, but the sample the authors are taking their data from is fairly homogeneous, consisting of Finns between 18 and 49. Again, though, the results highlight the cultural variability: the female response seems to be much more sensitive to environmental conditions, while the male response is strongly canalized. You can't assess orgasm in women without taking a whole battery of social issues into account, while men are easy. The orgasmic response in men is locked in as a response to testosterone levels, which are reliably high in most men, while the same response in women relies on other, probably diverse, developmental cues to be switched on.

Greg Laden and Scicurious also scrutinize the study.

Marc Thiessen defends Perry's Liberty University speech against Jennifer Rubin. Rubin doubles down on the anti-intellectualism charge:

Conservatives can and should be anti-elitist to their heart’s content in attacking supercilious liberals who don’t trust average Americans to run their own lives and perpetuate silly and dangerous ideas (e.g. poverty causes crime, the U.S. is the source of much of the world’s ills). But they win the important debates — and elections — by convincing Americans that their ideas are better and their candidates understand how the world works.