The Dish

A commenter at Immoral Minority, an Alaskan blog, digs up a newspaper clipping online:

So I visit the link that LoveAndKnishesFromBrooklyn provided, which comes from the "Neighbors" section of the ADN on July 7, 1984, and I read the following: Awards for the various competitions will be provided by the new Miss Wasilla, Katrina Mueller, at 6 p.m. at the Mat-su Resort Pavilion.

We already know that Palin did not win the Miss Congeniality in that contest either, as her Wiki profile claimed. In the fictional Going Rogue, Palin says she did win the Miss Wasilla contest – but doesn't specify what year, although every other source says 1984.

I'm not adding this to the "odd lies" roster until all the facts are totally clear. It's beyond trivial. But it's important to keep track of the insane amount of times Palin has just made stuff up. It helps establish a pattern of deceit that helps us assess her other fantastic claims.

Update: IM has now established that Sarah Palin was Miss Wasilla 1983, and a third runner up for Miss Alaska in 1984.

Bonus pick of Palin wearing some sort of beauty pageant crown after the jump:

Kerry Howley reviews Barbara Ehrenreich’s book attacking positive thinking:

It’s no surprise that I was first told to smile while sitting in a church pew. The world of positivity is one of preachers, sacred books, incantations, revival meetings, and mystical teachings, all emanating from the idea that happy thoughts have the power to transform the physical world. For some people, sometimes, this fulfills a real need. But in the absence of critics like Ehrenreich, we run the risk of passively absorbing this dogma as it seeps into our lives, gently diminishing the sense that some circumstances really are beyond our control. Positivity is a secular religion. Sometimes it takes a village atheist to remind us that we can choose not to believe.

I don’t share Ehrenreich’s lefty politics, but I agree about the hideous cult of self-esteem:

Self-esteem isn’t all that it’s cracked up to be.

In fact, as a brief recounting of Bob Torricelli’s career would usefully illustrate, it can be a huge part of the problem. New research has found that self-esteem can be just as high among D students, drunk drivers and former Presidents from Arkansas as it is among Nobel laureates, nuns and New York City fire fighters. In fact, according to research performed by Brad Bushman of Iowa State University and Roy Baumeister of Case Western Reserve University, people with high self-esteem can engage in far more antisocial behavior than those with low self-worth. “I think we had a great deal of optimism that high self-esteem would cause all sorts of positive consequences and that if we raised self-esteem, people would do better in life,” Baumeister told the Times. “Mostly, the data have not borne that out.”

Racists, street thugs and school bullies all polled high on the self-esteem charts. And you can see why. If you think you’re God’s gift, you’re particularly offended if other people don’t treat you that way. So you lash out or commit crimes or cut ethical corners to reassert your pre-eminence. After all, who are your moral inferiors to suggest that you could be doing something, er, wrong? What do they know?

Ambers, who appears to have curled up in bed for the frigid weekend with a copy of "Game Change", reveals a few more choice nuggets:

Clinton senior strategist Mark Penn boasted to his staff how many times he managed to say "cocaine" on that famous Hardball segment (page 163).

Hillary Clinton was initially pleased when her New Hampshire campaign chairman, Billy Shaheen, mentioned Obama's previous use of drugs (page 161): 

"Hillary's reaction to Shaheen's remarks was, 'Good for him!' Followed by 'Let's push it out.'  Her aides violently disagreed, seeing what Shaheen had said as a PR disaster. Grudgingly, Clinton acquiesced to disowning Shaheen's comments. But she wasn't going to cut him loose. Why should Billy have to fall on his sword for invoking something that had been fair game in every recent election?"

Those of us who were super-vigilant about the Clintons' capacity for dirty politics were … totally right.

Paul Varnell finds silver-linings in aging:

The intensity of your sexual desire somewhat diminishes. Cephalus in Plato's Republic remarks that he is finally free of "the tyranny of Venus." I understand what he means. This does not mean that sexual desire completely vanishes but that its claims seem less urgent and more under control. Most older men will understand this intuitively. Younger people who may evaluate themselves by the strength of their libido will just have to learn it—and they will come to realize it is a blessing.

Chait's "basic view is that the Islamic world today is not unlike the Christian world before the enlightenment":

It is a culture where notions of liberalism and religious tolerance are largely foreign — where even the most liberal mass movement that can be found, the Green movement in Iran, has to make its case in religious terms in order to have any chance at legitimacy. I would not blame the mass of Muslims for al Qaeda's terrorism any more than I'd blame the average medieval Christian for the Crusades. Still, an illiberal, non-secular culture like this is far more capable of producing, or even merely accepting, violence against non-believers qua non-believers.

A lot of liberals have an unfortunate tendency to brand as racist any analysis that holds one culture above another. But there's nothing inherently racial in believing that the illiberal culture that dominates the Muslim world is a key source of the problem, just as it wouldn't be racial make a sweeping indictment of pre-Enlightenment European culture.

A reader writes:

When FDR was elected in 1933, he moved to the White House and Eleanor moved to 20 East 9th Street in Manhattan.  A plaque on the building says she lived there until 1942.  She then moved to an apartment house on Washington Square West (I forget the number, but I can walk over and find it if you would like me to do so).  A plaque on that building says she lived there until something like 1949.  Eleanor had her girlfriend in New York and Franklin had his girlfriend in Washington and on his vacations.  Nobody reported any of this, not even when FDR died in his girlfriend's presence.  People were cool in the 1940s.

Now, Tiger Woods, Clinton, the Edwardses, etc. are big stories.  Why should anyone care?

The Daily Galaxy labels this their top post of 2009:

[Stephen Hawking said that] "At first, evolution proceeded by natural selection, from random mutations. This Darwinian phase, lasted about three and a half billion years, and produced us, beings who developed language, to exchange information."

But what distinguishes us from our cave man ancestors is the knowledge that we have accumulated over the last ten thousand years, and particularly, Hawking points out, over the last three hundred.

"I think it is legitimate to take a broader view, and include externally transmitted information, as well as DNA, in the evolution of the human race," Hawking said.

I noted Katie Roiphe's contrast of the carnality of the 20th century's Great Male Novelists (eg Philip Roth) and their contemporary counterparts (eg Jonathan Safran Foer) last week. Ross offers some historical context to her argument:

This strikes me as very perceptive, even if I’m a bit disappointed that the phrase “emo boy” didn’t find it’s way into Roiphe’s putdown of the modern young male novelist.

I wonder, though, if what she describes as the “puritanical” streak in contemporary fiction — an artifact of what Roiphe describes, elsewhere in the essay, as our “more conservative time” — has more to do with the exhaustion of the transgressive impulse than with any real return to the kind of moral-aesthetic strictures that a Roth or an Updike helped to overthrow. A jaded and self-conscious caution about the transformative possibilities of sex, after all, isn’t really the same thing as a revived puritanism — and what’s more, I think, it doesn’t provide anything like the same opportunities for would-be literary adventurers looking for something to push off against. Updike wouldn’t have been Updike, for instance, if he had started out as a novelist in the age of Lady Gaga and streaming online pornography.

At some point, even in my darker moments, I always believed that the odd lies of this farcical candidate would get to be addressed by the GOP itself. The Dish kept a record. Perhaps now the full story will finally come out.

Read Mudflats' latest.

A reader writes:

While I agree with you that this is one of the most interesting (and consequential) policy discussions I've observed in a long while, I think pretty much all of the participants are missing a critical point: it's not clear to me that Europe's growth rate since 1980 is a particularly useful statistic.  "Europe" is so diverse, and its members starting from such different baselines in 1980, that it would be very difficult to account for all of the relevant variables.

In 1980, East Germany was a communist wasteland; it no doubt experienced a period of rapid growth after reunification.  But this was the result of economic liberalization — going from communism to social democracy is a move towards freer markets.  Ireland in 1980 was much poorer than just about any region of the United States.  But it experienced an astonishing boom when it cut its corporate tax rate to 12.5%.  Spain was likewise very poor and experienced rapid growth (again, from a low baseline) when it modernized its economy after Franco's death and its accession to the EU.  In fact, many poorer EU countries benefited from a one-off increase in output as they joined the EU over the last 25 years and gained the benefits of the common market.

My point is not so much that Europe's respectable growth is the result of economic liberalization, although that's entirely plausible.  My point is that there are so many variables and so many unique historical circumstances that I don't think it's appropriate for Chait to glibly conclude that large welfare states and strong economic growth are compatible.  Europe's story since 1980 is so much more complicated than that.

Another reader:

In your emphasis of the last lines of the latest in this series, there are quite a few assumptions and implications that I think you need to develop/unpack/talk about.

Over the long-term a civilization needs aggregate power to protect itself in an inherently hostile world. In this respect (though certainly not in all ways) Europe is free-riding on the US, and following a non-sustainable strategy in a world that (IMHO) will always turn violent.

First, I think you seem to emphasize the idea that US military spending, which you have criticized as excessive in the past, is giving Europe a free-ride to develop more egalitarian/social democracy programs, while depriving the US of the money to do the same.  This is pretty significant because it cuts to the heart of a lot of deficit concerns for legitimate budget-hawks and the budget chicken-hawks.  Rather than pointing out that our system of capitalism is superior to Europe's system of capitalism, isn't this free-riding showing that the US is acting irrationally and that Europe, by free-riding, is acting rationally in response?  After all, from "Europe's perspective" (I'm not comfortable assuming one perspective on an entire continent of people), if you could get away with lower defense spending and more welfare, why wouldn't you?
 
Second, I think the assumption that this free-riding is non-sustainable needs to be explained.  Why is it non-sustainable?  I understand that strategies based on free-riding the actions of others is inherently unstable if you can't sufficiently control the actions of the party which you are free-riding, but I think Manzi, or you, need to explain what the first break-down will be, how it will occur, and what's to stop Europe from responding.
 

Finally, "long-term", "aggregate power" and "protect" have a lot of wiggle room.  "Long-term" means what exactly, 10 years, 50 years, 100 years?

"Aggregate power" is just as ambiguous a term here because it might be simply military power but it might also include financial, diplomatic, and cultural powers.  Europe is not exactly lacking in those departments, I might add.

"Protect" really, more than the others, deserves defining better because in the way its used, I'm not sure if Manzi is talking about "protect from existential threats" or "protect the current world order/status quo position of Europe".  While I don't think that global economic progress is a zero-sum game, the rapid industrialization of Africa, Asia, and South America does mean that Europe, in order to maintain its same relative status in the world, would have to either suppress economic growth in developing nations or find some way to grow in gigantic leaps and bounds. If there's one thing that this discussion has created, it's a consensus that American-style capitalism isn't leaps-and-bounds better than European-style capitalism, i.e. that our way isn't so much better than Europe's that we are crushing them.

Another reader:

As I read the discussions between those 2 (and many of Chait's questions occurred to me as I read Manzi's article), there's one thing Manzi doesn't really address.  It's foreign aid.  And I don't mean 'hand outs' that so enrage conservatives.  I mean, what Manzi has accurately characterized as Europe's free riding on the US for defense.

This is a form of foreign aid. American taxpayers pay for aircraft carriers, soldiers, etc., to defend Europe.  And Europe is rich. So we're actually providing ALOT of foreign aid to the richest countries on earth.  Japan pays the way for our soldiers; they reimburse us for the cost of stationing them in Japan. Europe does not.

The USSR collapsed in 1991, but our military hasn't really changed. We don't face tanks, or millions of soldiers across our allies' borders, yet the military structure we have still reflects those long dead threats.  It's true that much of the military is multi-capable; tanks can be use for destroying other tanks, or for chasing insurgents across open fields.  But do we need $600B of them to do this?

And I recognize having stable trading partners is essential to our economy.  But it's obvious we simply can't afford it anymore.  It's time to end foreign aid to the richest countries in the world.  We should maintain a worldclass military that can defend the US.  Let the allies evaluate their own situations and start paying their own way.