The Dish

Sarah Palin has now made two very clear public statements in the last day about the legitimacy of questions about the maternity of her son Trig. Here's the first, transcribed from the interview above:

Would you make [Obama's long form] birth certificate an issue if you ran?

I think the public, rightfully, is still making it an issue. I don’t have a problem with that. I don’t know if I would have to bother to make it an issue ’cause I think there are enough members of the electorate who still want answers.

Do you think it’s a fair question to be looking at?

I think it’s a fair question, just like I think past associations and past voting record — all of that is fair game. You know, I’ve got to tell you, too: I think our campaign, the McCain/Palin campaign didn’t do a good enough job in that area. We didn’t call out Obama and some of his associates on their records and what their beliefs were and perhaps what their future plans were. And I don’t think that that was fair to voters to not have done our jobs as candidates and as a campaign to bring to light a lot of the things that now we’re seeing made manifest in the administration.

I mean, truly, if your past is fair game and your kids are fair game, certainly Obama’s past should be. I mean, we want to treat men and women equally, right?

Hey, you know, that’s a great point, in that weird conspiracy-theory freaky thing that people talk about that Trig isn’t my real son. And a lot of people say, “Well you need to produce his birth certificate! You need to prove that he’s your kid!” Which we have done. But yeah, so maybe we could reverse that and use the same [unintelligible]-type thinking on them.

And here's the second, a later Facebook attempt to walk back some of this:

Voters have every right to ask candidates for information if they so choose. I’ve pointed out that it was seemingly fair game during the 2008 election for many on the left to badger my doctor and lawyer for proof that Trig is in fact my child. Conspiracy-minded reporters and voters had a right to ask… which they have repeatedly. But at no point – not during the campaign, and not during recent interviews – have I asked the president to produce his birth certificate or suggested that he was not born in the United States.

Most bloggers and readers have jumped onto the story line – understandably – that Palin has joined or at least mainstreamed the Birther movement. But this does not strike me as the news here. Palin has always been a brutal campaigner and in her first campaign for mayor, she demanded that her opponent produce his own marriage license to prove that he was in fact married to his wife. Of course, her first opponent did produce his license. And her current target, Barack Obama, has also produced his birth certificate a long time ago, and yet she is still demanding that he produce it.

The news here is that, to her credit, Palin says that all inquiries into a candidate's veracity, record, associations, and medical history are legitimate forms of inquiry. She therefore backs this blog's near-solitary attempt to get her to provide evidence – after very serious questions of fact emerged – that she was indeed the biological mother of Trig. To all those Palinites and McCainiacs and right and left bloggers who decried this question as lunatic, Palin has now said she differs. They were more Palinite than Palin.

But here's the critical sentence:

In that weird conspiracy-theory freaky thing that people talk about that Trig isn’t my real son. And a lot of people say, “Well you need to produce his birth certificate! You need to prove that he’s your kid!” Which we have done.

My italics. Palin has never produced Trig's birth certificate or a single piece of objective medical evidence that proves he is indeed her biological son. A child with Down Syndrome must have a pile of such records,  tests, assessments and ultrasounds that conclusively prove that he is Sarah's biological son. It seems bizarre to me that neither the public nor the campaign (so far as I can glean) has ever been given one of them.

Her doctor, Catherine Baldwin Johnson, offered a two-page summary of Palin's health just hours before polls opened on November 3, a bizarre approach to transparency. The summary omits certain details from Palin's medical history (two miscarriages, one serious), and does not provide any actual documentary evidence of the pregnancy and birth. It was authored by a doctor who has refused to return any phone calls, even from the New York Times, since the moment Palin's candidacy was announced. The hospital has three recorded births on the day Trig was born: the governor's son, by wishes of the parents, was not included on the list. There were only a handful of photographs over eight months that showed Palin pregnant, none showed her as visibly pregnant as with her previous children, and at seven months, her entire staff and all of Alaska's political class disbelieved her:

People just couldn't believe the news. "Really? No!" said Bethel state Rep. Mary Nelson, who is close to giving birth herself … "It's wonderful. She's very well-disguised," said Senate President Lyda Green, a mother of three who has sometimes sparred with Palin politically. "When I was five months pregnant, there was absolutely no question that I was with child."

On the return flight from Dallas to Alaska, which she says she boarded despite having contractions at eight months – a "strange sensation" she had never felt before, according to "Going Rogue," – the flight attendants on the plane at the time, according to a contemporaneous account in the ADN, had no idea she was even pregnant, let alone in labor of some kind. The questions about this astonishing story are not a function of conspiracy theories and never were. They require no elaborate theory of whose child Trig may actually be. They are simply basic questions anyone would ask of a person who had recounted such an amazing tale. And yet not a single journalist has done so.

This blog has attempted to give Palin the benefit of the doubt on this from the get-go. The Dish was one of the first blogs to post a photograph – of only four – showing Palin somewhat pregnant. At the time, on August 31, 2008, I asked:

Please give us these answers – and provide medical records for Sarah Palin's pregnancy – and put this to rest.

A short time later, I asked simply:

What harm would it do to release the medical records showing that Sarah Palin delivered Trig on April 18 in Wasilla? This is not hard: there must be an obstetrician, medical records, and data that can easily refute this rumor. It is not out of the ordinary either: candidates routinely issue medical records. So let's have them. And then we can move on.

 On September 3, Palin was cut off from the press for the following reasons:

In an extraordinary and emotional interview, Steve Schmidt said his campaign feels "under siege" by wave after wave of news inquiries that have questioned whether Palin is really the mother of a 4-month-old baby, whether her amniotic fluid had been tested and whether she would submit to a DNA test to establish the child's parentage.

On September 5, Ben Smith reported that the medical records would be released "very soon". We kept being told that in the campaign and they never were – until the brief doctor's note was issued a few hours before midnight before Election day.

I also politely asked the campaign to simply confirm that they knew that Trig was Sarah's biological son, and they responded not by providing the data but by leaking my email to the press. I asked the campaign personally and off the record in the last phase of the campaign to tell me that they knew these rumors were absurd. The senior official I spoke with simply didn't know.

So here are the simple questions the Dish has been trying to get an answer for much more than a year. They are easily answered and could have been at any moment since August 31 2008 when I first asked them. Here they are:

Can you please provide independent medical documents/slides/reports that prove that Trig is Palin's biological child? If this is deemed too private, then please provide them off the record to a reporter who can vouch for them to the rest of us?

Can you please provide Trig Palin's birth certificate listing his biological mother and father?

Can you please ask Catherine Baldwin-Johnson to discuss these questions with medical reporters so this whole thing can be put to rest for good and all?

If you refuse to do these things, why?

Please, governor Palin, let's put this behind us. Only you can. I pledge to post any and all material you can provide debunking these stories soon as I receive any. I'd like this line of inquiry to end as soon as possible – for the sake of all of us, but especially the innocent child caught up in something he doesn't deserve.

Behold, the beatboxing flautist:

(Hat tip: VideoSift)

Drum counters Salmon:

[T]he federal government doesn't have much of an incentive to maintain lots of income inequality.  Not much fiscal incentive anyway.  For the most part, the political incentives swamp the fiscal ones, and unfortunately they aren't very closely balanced.  Pursue policies that raise middle class wages, and the effect is so diffuse and so slow that hardly anyone notices.  Pursue policies that benefit the rich and you get immediately showered with oceans of campaign contributions.  That's mostly what motivates our political economy, I think, not tiny changes in the total tax take based on changes in income inequality.

Free Exchange has further thoughts.

Looking at recent numbers, Bruce Bartlett makes the case:

The CBO also looked at the stimulative effect of various parts of the stimulus package. It found that purchases of goods and services by the federal government–such as for public works–had the largest bang for the buck, raising GDP by $2.50 for each $1 spent. Transfer payments had a lesser impact, but were still significantly more stimulative than tax cuts. Moreover, tax cuts of the sort favored by Republicans have the least impact. According to the CBO, tax cuts for low-income individuals raise GDP by as much as $1.70 for every $1 of revenue loss, while those for the rich and for corporations raised GDP by at most 50 cents for every $1 of revenue loss.

Lest one suspect the CBO of bias, private economists have also found that tax cuts are far less stimulative than spending under current economic conditions. Mark Zandi of Moody's ( MCO – news – people ) Economy.com, an advisor to John McCain last year, recently testified before the Joint Economic Committee of Congress that the Republicans' favorite tax proposals–making all the Bush tax cuts permanent and cutting the corporate tax rate–would raise GDP by at most 37 cents for each $1 of revenue loss. By contrast, increased outlays for infrastructure, aid to state and local governments and extended unemployment benefits increase GDP by between $1.41 and $1.57 for every $1 spent.

A reader writes:

I'm not a climatologist, but I am interested in climate change. Fortunately, I attend a college with a climatologist. I asked her about the data massaging trick and this is how she explained it.

The data in question is actually two sets of data. One being the data from 1BCE to now using tree rings and coral. Tree rings are larger when it is wet or hot and smaller when it is cold and dry. Because wet/hot and cold/dry aren't correlated, there are uncertainties with the data. But, the data from tree rings from 1BCE to now does show temperatures similar with other temperature markers. That is, until the middle of this century.

The other set of data comes from real thermometers, from the mid-19th century to now. The data becomes more reliable as data gathering methods become more precise. What the scientists at CRU did was splice and combine the two data sets. The tree rings data shows cooling that is in opposition to actual measured temperatures. So the CRU scientists combined the two data sets to make it look like one data set that shows more continuous warming.

The professor I spoke with was very clear that what the CRU scientists did may not have been ethically pure, but warming is happening. They probably should have made clear the "trick" they used was actually two different data sets, she said. The information that has become known through this "scandal" may call into question historical climate data, but not current climate data. The world is still warming now, and "climategate" doesn't change the need for significant carbon cuts in Copenhagen.

The RNC refuses to see the upside of today's job report.

Ben Smith notices how Palin keeps Trig in the spotlight:

[T]he most striking evidence of her son’s impact has been Palin’s book tour promoting her memoir “Going Rogue.” As she descends from her tour bus or private jet to meet her fans, 19-month-old Trig has been a conspicuous presence — and generated a huge response. “There’s a lot of people who come through the line to see Trig instead of to see her,” says Jason Recher, a campaign aide who remained close to Palin and is now accompanying her on her book tour…if Palin had any ambivalence about exposing her older children to the spotlight, there’s none for Trig. He enjoys the crowds, said Recher, and at every stop, there are admirers who have come specifically to meet him.

Reihan reacts to Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-UT) making the case for withdrawal in Afghanistan:

Remember that the bitterest opponents of the Clinton-era U.S. interventions in Kosovo and Haiti were conservatives like Tom DeLay, who condemned the Clinton administration for treating “foreign policy as social work,” in Michael Mandelbaum’s evocative phrase. The post-9/11 moment represented a departure from this conservative suspicion of nation-building, as Jacksonian sentiments were yoked to the ambitious project of building democracies in the Muslim world. But now that Obama, a man most conservatives dislike and distrust, is the steward of that effort, those conservative instincts are making a comeback. Jason Chaffetz represents the beginning of a wave—and it’s not obvious that Obama can do anything to stop it.