Author: Andrew Sullivan

They won't leave you stuck under a tree.

A reader writes:

Just to add to the chorus of mothers not believing the birth story: when I was pregnant, I remember my obstetrician telling me she might have to duck out of my scheduled appointment at any time because one of her patients who was pregnant with her third child was in labor, and that third babies “just sort of fall out.”  Labor with each child is progressively shorter, statistically.  Especially after the water breaks.  I can only imagine how fast the labor is for fifth babies and that Palin must have been warned of this.  In a high risk pregnancy, there’s simply no way a logical person would get on an airplane to fly cross-country under those circumstances.

Another writes:

When my amniotic fluid starting leaking prematurely in my first pregnancy, there was no ambiguity from my doctor – I was to get the hospital immediately if not sooner.

Another:

Let go of the Trig Palin issue; it makes you look like a loon. I have two children. When I was pregnant with my first, I gained almost no weight until the end of the 7th month. I went to a conference in Arizona at the end of my 6th month and people didn't know I was pregnant until I told them.

My doctor was unconcerned by my lack of weight gain, and attributed it to the fact that I was running 5 miles a day up. He told me to continue running. I was eating plenty of calories and the baby grew normally. Palin is a runner and that can account for her low weight gain. I gained a little more weight with the second one, but I quit running sooner — at the end of the 6th month, rather than at the end of the 7th.

I had a 14-15 year old friend in high school who hid a pregnancy by gaining only 14 pounds and wearing big sweatshirts.  Her mother was an RN and didn't know my friend was pregnant until she went into labor. (Boy, was her mom embarrassed!) The baby weighed almost 8 pounds and was full term. My friend managed this entirely through exercise.

I had very little pain with either delivery, and labored through both without medication or epidural.  My first labor took 28 hours. My second labor took 26 hours. At the beginning of both labors, I could feel contractions, which included mild discomfort.  I suppose you could describe them as "labor pains," even if they weren't very painful. At no point in either of my labors did I feel the need to scream or shout or cross my  legs. In fact, I sat quietly and played cards and read until I ws more than 12 hours in labor the first time and more than 20 hours into labor the second time. Again, I think I had a good handle on my pain and enduring it without a lot of fuss because I was a distance runner. If you can run, you labor without too much fuss. I think flying back to Alaska was reckless, but it wasn't impossible.

This issue is a non-issue. Her lack of weight gain isn't that abnormal. Her lack of pain isn't that abnormal. Her long labor isn't that abnormal. They're all within the scope of my personal experience with pregnancy.

But this was her fifth child and in previous pregnancies, she was huge. She is not a large woman, and her previous pregnancies showed. She had also had two previous miscarriages, which would, one imagines, make one a little sensitive to winging it with pregnancies and labor. Another:

I've enjoyed your Palin coverage from the beginning.  However, I feel I have to come forward and tell you that, if she's telling the truth, her birth experience is not that unusual.  I'm the mother of four grown children.  In two of those pregnancies the amniotic fluid began leaking well in advance of the start of active labor.  Before my first child was born, I leaked for over a month – the docs felt it was best to let the pregnancy continue, and put me on bed rest.  In the second case, the amniotic fluid leaked for a day and a half with no labor, until the doctor decided to induce labor.  So it's perfectly possible to leak amniotic fluid for quite a while without going into labor, and judging by what my doctors told me, it's not particularly unusual.

David Kravets highlights a new ACLU report (.pdf) that provides "an outline of, and links to, dozens of examples of Cold War-era snooping in the modern age":

At a California State University, Fresno lecture on veganism, six of the 60 in attendance were undercover officers from the local and campus police. The Oakland Police Department in California had infiltrated a police-brutality demonstration, and its undercover officers selected “the route of the march.” … A Kentucky minister was detained at Canadian border trying to enter the United States because he had purchased copies of the Koran on the internet following the 2001 terror attacks. A New York, Muslim-American student journalist was detained for taking pictures of Old Glory outside a Veterans Affairs building as part of a class project.

(Image by Will Varner)

McArdle pounces:

This is coming up over and over again–an "easy" fix for Social Security wherein "all" we have to do is get rid of the cap on Social Security payroll taxes, without increasing benefits.  Dylan Matthews has the charts that are currently making the rounds, which show that this [simple] solution not only eliminates the Social Security shortfall, but also generates a substantial surplus!

This is not actually surprising, since what this amounts to is hiking the marginal tax rates on high incomes by 15 percentage points–making the federal tax take on the highest incomes 55% in 2012, assuming that Obama and Congress follows through and allows the Bush tax cuts to expire in 2011. This is obviously a gigantic hike, and moreover, when Medicare, state, and local taxes are added in, would push the tax burden on the highest incomes to over 2/3 in the highest tax jurisdictions. Whatever you think of this plan, this is not an easy solution.

Well it is not pain-free, as I conceded. But it is easy and elegantly simple. And if you are going to raise taxes, as we must, there's no way for them not to target the wealthy. That's almost only where the money now is.

Jonah Goldberg has a strange defense of Glenn Beck against Matt Continetti (because Beck liked his book, one imagines). Friedersdorf interjects:

What Mr. Continetti "seems" to be doing, Mr. Goldberg writes (italics indicate weasel words), isn't "incorrect" or "poorly argued" or "confused" — it would be perfectly fair, if wrongheaded, if Mr. Goldberg used those words — what he seems to be doing is "an odd thing for a conservative writer, particularly one at the Standard, to do." It is never a good sign when an argument moves from "you're wrong for these reasons" to "I will now use an intellectual shortcut, demonstrating that your argument is wrong by insinuating that it is not conservative."

Continetti defends himself:

While Beck is introducing many excellent authors to his radio and television audiences, he is also introducing crank conspiracy theorists such as Carroll Quigley and Cleon Skousen.

Goldberg concedes that Beck has a “conspiratorial streak,” but then says that I “might overstate my case.” I’m sorry, I don’t. Take, for example, Beck’s June 22 television show. His guest was Harvard historian Niall Ferguson, who has written a new book on the Weimar banker Sigmund Warburg. "His family is conspiracy central, right?" Beck asked Ferguson, and then referred, once again, to Quigley’s 1966 Tragedy and Hope.

Tragedy and Hope, as I write in my piece, is the bible of conspiracy theorists. Why? Because in it Quigley, a Georgetown professor for many years and a man of the left, “admitted” that most of world history since the early twentieth century has been the design of secret societies.

"When my son Hunter asked me why it was okay for Bristol Palin to have a baby before she was married, I told him that God has special rules for special people.  God knew that Bristol could become very rich from having a baby, so He granted her a pregnancy.  Since she is the daughter of Sarah Palin, and the name Bristol Palin can be rearranged to spell “Orbit Plans” she is pretty much an angel, at least by the official bible definition.  And that pretty much makes her son like a Jesus, technically speaking.  This is just more proof that the blessed Palin family has wonderful and holy plans for true Americans.  After explaining this to my son, he told me that he wanted to be sex-educated at a public school so that he could have a Jesus baby too.  I smacked him in the mouth and told him that sex education is only for liberals and atheists. As good Christians, we should be ashamed of sexuality and our bodies, unless you are chosen by God, like Bristol Palin," – tinfoiler.

After backing Sodano and protesting the Belgian attempts to get data on child-rape cases, the Pope now installs as his number three a cardinal who opposes abortion in cases of rape.

Yglesias has a staggering little chart today on our looming fiscal crisis. Money quote:

See that line where the debt:GDP ratio is stable? That’s what happens under current law. If congress changes nothing, or the president vetoes everything, then this is what happens. No apocalypse. But nobody believes that’s going to happen. Nobody believes the Bush tax cuts will fully expire. Nobody expects the AMT phase-in to happen. Nobody expects physicians’ Medicare reimbursement rates to be held in check. And though I think he’s mistaken about this, Doug Elmendorf is skeptical that some cost-saving elements of the Affordable Care Act will ever be implemented. That’s the “alternative fiscal scenario” in which the debt level skyrockets.

Ezra adds his two cents here.

Hanoi, Vietnam, 8.15 am

Many of us have long been worried about the attempt by scientists to prevent homosexuality – or any variation in gender behavior – in utero. Well: the future is now:

Pediatric endocrinologist Maria New—of the Mount Sinai School of Medicine and Florida International University—isn't just trying to prevent lesbianism by treating pregnant women with an experimental hormone. She's also trying to prevent the births of girls who display an "abnormal" disinterest in babies, don't want to play with girls' toys or become mothers, and whose "career preferences" are deemed to "masculine."

Preventing women from choosing careers over babies is also part of the attempt to affect Congenital Adrenal Hyperplasia in utero:

And it isn’t just that many women with CAH have a lower interest, compared to other women, in having sex with men. In another paper entitled “What Causes Low Rates of Child-Bearing in Congenital Adrenal Hyperplasia?” Meyer-Bahlburg writes that “CAH women as a group have a lower interest than controls in getting married and performing the traditional child-care/housewife role. As children, they show an unusually low interest in engaging in maternal play with baby dolls, and their interest in caring for infants, the frequency of daydreams or fantasies of pregnancy and motherhood, or the expressed wish of experiencing pregnancy and having children of their own appear to be relatively low in all age groups.”