Author: Andrew Sullivan

A reader writes:

Regarding your comment that the tournament is about nationalism not football: absolutely. Cup games (and some qualifying matches) are the only times I wave the flag, curse out other countries, and go along with all the other jingoist nationalism. It feels great, but I reckon it's a good thing that it's only on a four-year cycle.

Maybe this is why American conservatives hate it – it's patriotism they can't politicize.

Richard Florida makes the connection:

Most experts expect housing prices to decline further as federal supports are withdrawn. Recall it took the better part of two and half decades for housing prices to rebound after the Great Depression. My own hunch is that there is still quite a ways to go, especially in over-built regions like Las Vegas, Phoenix, and Miami. But even in these places, more central locations are likely to hold up better. Price declines in the walkable areas of South Beach for example, while considerable, have been significantly less than in downtown Miami or less central and walkable areas. In particular, walkability and neighborhood quality seem to be emerging as the best hedge against massive housing price declines. All of that said, I'd still advocate renting, or at least a wait-and-see approach to buying, while the market remains in such flux.

The story is getting slightly more legs here and here. I like this reader comment:

Why every mother in America didn't burst into spontaneous, incredulous laughter when she first trotted out her BS tale is beyond me.

And this:

I have given birth 3 times, all home deliveries with no anesthesia and only a midwife for the 3rd since I figured my good luck might run out.  When you are within hours of giving birth, you do not — you CANNOT — sit with legs crossed in an airport reading a book, or board a flight and buckle up, or sit in an airplane seat for 10 hours followed by a drive in the middle of the night. 

The wild ride has been total BS from the beginning and with each of Sarah's retelling, it just becomes more ridiculous that anyone would believe it. 

Did Oprah actually read Palin's account in Going Rogue? Seriously? I mean: it's surreal.

Alex Pareene outs an LA Times political blogger as a former member of the Bush communications team – a fact not disclosed by the paper:

nearly everything Malcolm and Orr write is critical of the Obama administration, disdainful of Democrats, and supportive of Republicans. They print poll results that are good for Republicans, but not ones that look like good news for Democrats.

There's nothing wrong with the Times hiring conservatives to blog for them. If the Times wants a conservative blog, they can go ahead and launch a conservative blog. The point is to actually identify it as such. Right now the Times seems to be catering their online product specifically for Drudge and the right-wing blogosphere while pretending it's still objective in the traditional old newspaper sense of the word. … (Of course, if it was ever revealed that either Malcolm or Orr had ever said anything mean about Matt Drudge in private, I'm sure they'd both be looking for work by the end of the week.)

Free Exchange compares gay and straight parenting:

Currently, most gay or lesbian parents had their child in a prior heterosexual relationship. As society becomes more tolerant and gay marriage more popular, children born to or adopted by gay couples will become more common. This suggests the typical gay and lesbian couple might be better parents then the average hetero couple. The typical hetero couple may or may not have planned for a child, while a gay couple probably did.

What makes a good parent is tough to quantify. but the evidence does suggest that being financially and emotionally stable probably matters more than gender.

A reader writes:

You asked, "Are any emails safe?"

No. Is this even still a question? Seriously?

My mama taught me when I was very young not to put anything in writing that I wouldn't want the whole world to see, and I think it holds me in good stead, *especially* with email.  Even if you're sending something to someone you trust, email is insecure.  It's too easy to accidentally send something to someone that you don't intend, to type a shortcut into the "to" field and not notice that it didn't resolve the way you expected it to, to hit return and have something go out before you were ready for it.

My best friend in the whole world would never out me about something on purpose, but bless her heart, she's computer-clueless and has a long history of screwing up email, and I just simply won't say anything I wouldn't want to have accidentally forwarded to everyone in her address book.  I save it for a phone call, instead.

Anyone who thinks that a listserv of 400 journalists and bloggers is a safe place to vent in private just hasn't been paying attention.

'Americans are not addicted to oil, Americans are addicted to freedom – the freedom to move freely and independently where and when we want," – former Virginia governor, George Allen.

At some point, we'll get a more honest GOP: they'll declare that national default is a good thing and that carbon-based energy needs to be even more central to the US economy.  After all, anything else is "librul" isn't it?

Friedersdorf wants the issue left alone:

I assume Trig Palin is Sarah Palin’s son, and that I don’t think we should go down the road of demanding hard evidence on these sorts of questions (even if it meant never finding out the truth in an individual case) — it sets a precedent that would mire future elections in ever more absurd accusations and counter-accusations, all of them focusing attention on the personal history of candidates rather than their professional qualifications and policy positions, a road we’ve gone too far down already, and that benefits the least qualified seekers of office (and that is unnecessary in the case of a candidate like Sarah Palin, who wouldn’t even make it past summary judgment in a trial to gauge her qualifications for the presidency).

I think this assumes that this is indeed a case of legitimate privacy; whereas I regard it as something much more sinister. His response to my call for pushback:

One explanation for the disparity in evidence: the persistence of questions about Trig helps Sarah Palin.

All along, she has savvily used the notion that the media is treating her unfairly to enhance her popularity. An amoral political strategist would advise her to keep hard evidence of Trig’s maternity hidden at all costs in the hope that critics would continue questioning it — if Professor Bernstein and I, both of us huge Sarah Palin critics, doubt the merits of this line of inquiry, imagine how the average American reacts to it, and how the Sarah Palin base reacts. For better or worse, we live in a country where the politics of umbrage are very effective, and Ms. Palin is expert at them. Indeed I fear that speculation about Trig’s maternity increases the chance that she’ll win the 2012 GOP nomination. If a savvy political analyst can be found who disagrees with that assessment, I’d be surprised.

Later in his post, Andrew writes, “if Palin has lied about this, it’s the most staggering, appalling deception in the history of American politics.” I think that on reflection he’d reconsider. How staggering a lie is must relate to consequences. Consider Dick Cheney and the Iraq War, or the treatment of detainees at black sites around the world, just to name two political lies that resulted in loss of life and incalculable damage to our country. Compared to these issues, which The Daily Dish has covered so well, the saga of Sarah Palin and her son are of little consequence. I appreciate wariness about Sarah Palin as 2012 approaches, and since he conducts even inquiries to which I object with a commitment to regularly airing dissent, I can respect Andrew even when his obsessions and mine part — the Dish is a success in large part due to his obsessions and passions, and as his many longtime readers know, no one agrees with him on everything. As the Obama Administration continues to ignore Bush-era lawbreaking, assemble an assassinations list, and normalize other excesses of the War on Terrorism, however, I’d love to convince Andrew that whatever energy he spends on the Trig story is more profitably invested elsewhere.

Well, I certainly hope I won’t abandon vigilance on other issues for this farce. But two responses: first, it is not my concern whether this helps or hinders Palin. I want to know what’s true, that’s all. And while I’m perfectly aware of the rope-a-dope potential, and have been from the beginning, everything I know about Palin suggests that this is a secondary strategy. And when someone with that much power brazenly dares the media, the media needs to dare back. Otherwise, they win. And they have won, hence all the copy-cats.

Secondly, this lie, while certainly not as offensive or grave as “we do not torture”, could amount to a woman stuffing her dress to fake pregnancy. There’s a clarity about that kind of lie that strikes me as truly gob-smacking. Before I knew much about Palin, it struck me as extremely unlikely. But would you put anything past her, now you’ve watched her for a couple of years?

By the way, the only reputation I care about is between me and my conscience and my readers. Apart from that, I couldn’t give a toss what others say. But if they have an argument or some evidence, I’d love to clear this up and move on.

CJR's Greg Marx actually adds something to the post-Weigel debate. What he notes is that Ezra Klein, Dave Weigel and Dan Froomkin were and are all bloggers, whose work inevitably involves more of their raw humanity, warts and all, than that of traditional reporters. They develop an intimacy with readers and an increasing degree of candor and personal transparency in their writing. And once a writer has set those parameters, his private life will soon follow – and he or she will become part of the story.

In ten years of doing this, I have certainly learned the amazing professional advantages and personal costs of this model. For the readers, though, I think it's almost all positive. The truth is: reporters are human beings, and I think that being more candid about who we are and where we come from allows readers more lee-way to judge our work. They can see for themselves if they think we're off-base. They can note that Dave's personality and biases obviously affect his writing – and make allowances. In a blog, this helps give the blogger ore credibility and durability and interest. But squeezed into a corporate journalist model without the kind of cool, hands-off stewardship of, say, James Bennet, this can clash with previous models. Wapo's failure was in not sticking with this and in not being prepared to allow the new model to work alongside the old – through the inevitable bumps and skids on the journey. Marx:

Institutions like the Post have both an opportunity and an obligation to take advantage of what this new model offers—to find a way to, as Tkacik writes, “combine the best of both.” Instead, at the first sign of trouble, they cut Weigel loose. And rather than thinking about how it might have made this experiment work—for example, by making clear to readers this was an experiment in a new form, or by providing support from an editor who could help Weigel navigate the shifting terrain—the Post seems determined to draw the wrong conclusions.

Amen. CJR's cover-story by former Jezebel blogger, Moe Tkacik, whom Marx cites, is a brilliant overview of the new forms of journalism we are experimenting with. Her description of being a professional phone-sex worker – and its strange parallels with being a journalist – is pay-off enough (and great grist for the illustration above).