Debating Trig Trutherism
— Slublog

At the Journolist. The Daily Caller has the raw emails.

A sample, from Ryan Donmoyer, "objective" journalist:

Again, statistically speaking, I believe it is highly more likely that a teen mother would have a child with Downs than it is for a 44-year-old woman to conceive without fertility help.

As far as I can tell, the following is the circumstantial evidence, and not all of it is vetted:

1) Sarah Palin doesnÂ’t look even remotely pregnant in photographs that are supposed to be her third trimester.

2) The state of Alaska yesterday removed official photographs of her the months that coincide with her third trimester.

3) Her staff was surprised to find out she was pregnant when she announced at 7 months.

4) Her teenage daughter disappeared from school for months, claiming mono during the time that coincided with her third trimester.

5) She opted to take a long flight after her water broke which probably isnÂ’t consistent with anything any doctor would recommend. (But her daughter might have needed her).

6) She returned to work 3 days after the baby was born.

7) In undated photos, the daughter looks like she definitely could be pregnant. People who saw the daughter yesterday tell me that she def looks like she could be post-partum.

8 ) ItÂ’s far more likely for a teenager to have a child with Downs Syndrome than it is for a 43-year-old woman to conceive naturally.

9) Supposedly, the babyÂ’s grandparents refused to issue any kind of statement when the baby was born, for whatever little thatÂ’s worth.

There was some pushback, but overall many of those participating in the conversation seemed to think the idea that Palin was covering up her daughter's pregnancy was, as the Mythbusters might say...plausible.

The thread also contains some important parenting advice from Dylan Matthews, whose name matches that of a researcher for the Washington Post.

I understand the impulse to dismiss this as non-news. But assuming the baby is Sarah PalinÂ’s, her conduct was the equivalent of punching herself in the stomach. ItÂ’s gross, gross negligence. I still remember when a family friend delivered her baby, knowing from the amnio that it had DownÂ’s, and the surgeries went on for days. The baby was declared dead, revived, etc., etc. ItÂ’s a horrendous process. It was hard enough for her at Dartmouth-Hitchcock, the best hospital in NE north of Boston, but doing that in Wasilla? Doing it in Wasilla when she very well could have stayed in Dallas? That offends me. That sort of thing warrants a social services call.

So IÂ’m inclined to believe that the girlÂ’s the daughterÂ’s, because Palin is an absolutely wretched parent otherwise. Believing itÂ’s the daughter is probably the most flattering possible angle here.

Remember, though, Journolist is just boring shop talk. Nothing to see here.

If nothing else, this thread exposes the total contempt many in the media had for Sarah Palin. They were perfectly willing to believe the worst of a woman they had only known of for a short time. The only reason for their hatred was that Palin threatened the political fortunes of the guy they hoped would be elected president.

I've always wondered why Andrew Sullivan kept on the Trig story, even after the election. Now we know - it seems Trig Trutherism was kind of the norm among his peers. Sullivan was just more open with his conspiracy theory-mongering.

Posted by: Slublog at 07:09 AM | Comments (181)
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Charles Sherrod on Video: "We Must Stop The White Man And His Uncle Toms From Stealing Our Elections"
— Ace

Does this sound to you like a guy with a heart open to racial healing?

Or a man whose heart is poisoned by hate who, by virtue of his exalted position in the black community, continues transmitting to young black minds the vile idea that true black authenticity is only to be found in an unquenchable hatred of the white man?

And, of course, his "Uncle Toms" -- blacks who don't believe in the same creed of extreme separatism (Sherrod is black economic separatist) and unreasoning hatred of all things white.

Posted by: Ace at 06:43 AM | Comments (176)
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Overnight Open Thread
— Maetenloch

A Modest Proposal: Should The Blog Buy a Satellite?

The $8,000 DIY Satellite Kit and Morons in Spaaaace

So Interorbital Systems (IOS) says it can deploy 32 tiny satellites simultaneously from a rocket launched from the Pacific island of Tonga and each satellite will only cost a measly 8 grand. For that you get a TubeSat kit with microcomputer, a transceiver, and batteries and a free launch into space. The satellites will be released into orbit at 192 miles above the Earth and will eventually re-enter the atmosphere and burn up after a few months.

You know - $8,000 is nothing in the big scheme of things. So I'm thinking that if we all took up a collection and Ace was willing to subsist on lower quality ramen, we could become the first very blog with its own satellite. Imagine that - morons with a space program. Oh the humanity! If nothing else, I figure MoronSat could just repeat the Anka rant over and over. And maybe throw in a few moron-fave songs.

We'll be going where no blog has ever gone before and doing it with moronitude! All we need now is 80 generous morons to pony up $100 and we're there. Best of all - the FCC has no jurisdiction in space. This could be just the first step in stupidity but one giant leap for morons.

more...

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Grim Days for Global Warmenists
— Dave in Texas

The whitewash of the CRU emails has been laid on, but the goddang planet is not cooperating.

In America, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has been trumpeting that, according to its much-quoted worldwide temperature data, the first six months of this year were the hottest ever recorded. But expert analysis on Watts Up With That, the US science blog, shows that NOAA's claimed warming appears to be strangely concentrated in those parts of the world where it has fewest weather stations. In Greenland, for instance, two of the hottest spots, showing a startling five-degree rise in temperatures, have no weather stations at all.

A second technique the warmists have used lately to keep their spirits up has been to repeat incessantly that the official inquiries into the "Climategate" scandal have cleared the top IPCC scientists involved of any wrongdoing, and that their science has been "vindicated". But, as has been pointed out by critics like Steve McIntyre of Climate Audit, this is hardly surprising, since the inquiries were careful not to interview any experts, such as himself, who could have explained just why the emails leaked from the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) were so horribly damaging.

Meanwhile, in South America, it's kinda cold.

Al Gore herdin Chakra Angus steaks

Via the H2.

Posted by: Dave in Texas at 02:08 PM | Comments (422)
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Hey, I Thought Ill-Considered Charges of Racism Were Wrong Or Something
— Ace

Apparently I'm missing some nuance.

Most members of the media, both liberal and conservative, expressed outrage over Sherrod’s sacking and the unfair media coverage that followed. Keith Olbermann denounced the “political guillotine” of Fox News and Breitbart, and the conservative desire to “convict the benevolent as racist.” It was important, Olbermann maintained, to remember that facts matter and that hyperbolic bloggers who end up treating their quarry like Danton should be humiliated...

Even Sherrod, having just observed the consequences of sloppily charging people with racism, told CNN that Breitbart “knew what effect [the video] would have on the conservative, racist people he's dealing with.” And as the scripted media introspection and the rehearsed “conversations” about race were inaugurated by those who already knew the answers, blogger and former Journolist member Matt Yglesias was falsely accusing libertarian economist Arnold Kling of racism—the second time Kling has had to endure the toxic charge. But Kling, unlike Sherrod, is an enemy.

If all this counted as a teachable moment, it is unclear who the students were.

Posted by: Ace at 11:26 AM | Comments (345)
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Oh Boy: White House Recommended Release of Lockerbie Bomber Over Jailtime In Libya
— Ace

The choices offered to the White House were "compassionate leave" for that terminal, last-stages cancer that hasn't taken the spring out his step yet, or continued jailing in Libya.

Why the White House didn't reject both and demand continued jail in Scotland I don't know.

But given the choice -- jail or freedom -- the White House chose... freeeeedommm!

It's nice they can support freedom once in a while, but this isn't the right time for that.

THE US government secretly advised Scottish ministers it would be "far preferable" to free the Lockerbie bomber than jail him in Libya.

Correspondence obtained by The Sunday Times reveals the Obama administration considered compassionate release more palatable than locking up Abdel Baset al-Megrahi in a Libyan prison.

The intervention, which has angered US relatives of those who died in the attack, was made by Richard LeBaron, deputy head of the US embassy in London, a week before Megrahi was freed in August last year on grounds that he had terminal cancer.

The document, acquired by a well-placed US source, threatens to undermine US President Barack Obama's claim last week that all Americans were "surprised, disappointed and angry" to learn of Megrahi's release.

Scottish ministers viewed the level of US resistance to compassionate release as "half-hearted" and a sign it would be accepted.

The US has tried to keep the letter secret, refusing to give permission to the Scottish authorities to publish it on the grounds it would prevent future "frank and open communications" with other governments.

But of course they did.

Posted by: Ace at 11:08 AM | Comments (228)
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Sunday Book Thread
— Monty

Military history is one of my favorite pastimes, and two conflicts get most of my attention: the American Civil War, and World War II.

World War II has generated a massive amount of literature -- probably millions of books have been written about it, from every possible angle and perspective. This flood of printed matter makes it hard for a reader to choose the good from the bad. World War II historians, like most other academics, have been lured by the fashions of the times; we've seen revisionist histories that cast the Allies as the aggressors (it was France's fault for demanding reparations from Germany, don't you know) and Adolf Hitler as a misunderstood genius, and we've seen histories that overinflate the contributions of one group or another (homosexual Gypsy partisans or female leaders of the French Resistance).

I prefer battle histories to any other kind of historical account mainly because battle-historians are less liable to revisionism, though hagiography is always a danger. But even here there is an avalanche of books to choose from. Where to start?

If you want a single-volume overview of the war (a tremendously difficult task, given the scope), you could do a lot worse than John Keegan's The Second World War. In particular, Keegan reminds American readers that the British had been fighting the Germans for three years before the Americans even entered the war -- Americans tend to forget that the war started in 1938, not in the winter of 1941. The Chinese and Koreans had been suffering under the Japanese boot since 1933 or before. The outcome of the war was never certain; had things broken only slightly differently, the Axis powers might have emerged triumphant. It was never inevitable that the Allies won -- in fact, there was a lot of luck involved, and the advantage that Adolf Hitler was mentally unbalanced. (I shudder to think at what the Wehrmacht might have done had a competent military man been the leader: Albert Kesselring, who gave the Allies such grief in Italy, say; or Von Manstein.)

Once you've got that under your belt, you can move on to books about specific battles and campaigns.

For the naval part of the war, you cannot do better than Samuel Eliot Morison's The Two Ocean War. (It's a big book, but still just an abridgment of Morison's 15-volume full history.) This book is an eye-opener in many ways. For one, it shows just how close-run a thing Germany's U-boat blockade of England was. Had the US entered the war only a few months later -- or not at all -- England might very well have been starved into submission.

For the Pacific campaign, I can recommand John Costello's The Pacific War: 1941-1945. It's about the best theaterwide overview of the conflict that I've come across.

And finally, for all the ink spilled on the European campaigns of 1944-1945, there has been a real dearth of good stuff on the North African/Italian campaign from 1942 - 1945. Luckily, Rick Atkinson has stepped into the breach with a three-volume "Liberation Trilogy" history: An Army at Dawn, about America's first major land campaign in North Africa; The Day of Battle, about the American Army's campaigns in Sicily and Italy; and a forthcoming book about the 1944 campaign in Europe. These are the best popular battle-histories I have come across in many years, and I recommend them highly even to people who aren't normally interested in this kind of stuff.

Posted by: Monty at 04:44 AM | Comments (401)
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Overnight Open Thread
— Maetenloch

Hello, hello all M&Ms. Welcome to your regularly scheduled CatSaturday night ONT.

The Best Places in the World To Die

So here's a survey by the Economist's Intelligence Unit on what it's like to die in each country. The UK comes in first and the US only halfway down. It's easy to snark that of course Britain does death well since their NHS can't afford to give good health care. And there's some truth to that but it appears that they really do give good end of life care:

For all the health-care systemÂ’s faults, British doctors tend to be honest about prognoses. The mortally ill get plentiful pain killers. A well-established hospice movement cares for people near death, although only 4% of deaths occur in them. For similar reasons, Australia and New Zealand rank highly too.

Here in the US we're willing to spend a lot of money and take extraordinary measures to keep someone alive but thanks to drug war paranoia we're also incredibly stingy with painkillers so a lot of people suffer and die in pain needlessly. And there's no dignity in that.

But having watched two family members die in the last two years I can tell you that hospices do admirable work in making someone's last days as comfortable as possible and preparing the family for the inevitable. If only the rest of the medical system was as concerned with comfort and dignity as they are.

more...

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Oh What A Difference 22 Months Make
— DrewM

Remember this little gem from Kos?

Break their back, crush their spirits

See, here's the deal -- we're going to win the White House, we're going to win big in the Senate, and we're going to rack up big gains in the House. Republicans know this and are preparing for the worst. Now think of 2004 -- we really thought Kerry was going to pull it off. Remember that? And remember how utterly devastated we were when Bush pulled it off? The pain was so much worse because we expected to win.

So with conservatives bracing for the worse, they won't experience the kind of pain we did. Not unless we deliver a defeat even worse than their worst nightmares. And I'll be honest with you -- I want them to hurt as much as we did. I want their spirits crushed, their backs broken.

So the way we do that is we deliver a defeat worse than they ever imagined. We do that by winning states that have no business turning Blue -- like North Carolina, Georgia, Indiana, and so on -- states that were easy Bush victories in 2004. We do that by electing a 60-seat supermajority in the Senate. We do that by defeating their leadership, like Mitch McConnell in the Senate. We do that by defeating their heroes, like wingnut go-to hero John Shadegg. We do that by making sure a record number of Americans reject conservative ideology, leaving it utterly discredited.

The day after the election, I want to see an electoral battlefield littered with defeated Republicans, their ranks demoralized, their treasury in heavy debt, and no real leadership to take the helm. I want a vacuum so complete, that a bloody leadership battle between the neocons, theocons, and corporate cons shakes the GOP to its core, and leaves it fractured and ill-equipped to stymie the progressive agenda, much less ramp up for an even bleaker (for them) 2010.

There's more but I like freezing on the idea 2010 will be "even bleaker" for the GOP than 2008.

Let's check in with NutRoots 2010 to see, shall we?

Signs that all is not well showed up in other places. Many of those in attendance openly expressed concern that President Obama is losing momentum in pushing their causes. "I've definitely never heard more cursing by speakers at a political conference than at Netroots Nation," Philip Klein of the American Spectator told me. Markos Moulitsas, the founder of the liberal website DailyKos, railed against "bullshit Democrats" at last night's kickoff event. He urged Montana Governor Brian Schweitzer to run in the Democratic primary for U.S. Senate in 2012, when moderate Democratic Senator Max Baucus will presumably be seeking re-election. Mr. Baucus is blamed by liberals for sinking the chances of a "public option" in this year's health care bill.

Mr. Moulitsas was preceded by Ed Schultz, the liberal host who appears daily on MSNBC. He divided his speech between appeals to liberals to "stick it" to "ruthless, callous, rotten-to-the core Republicans" and raging about his disappointment with the Obama administration. "The White House has a war room. I think they have a sissy room too," he told attendees. At times he sounded like a spurned suitor. "I busted my ass for Obama," he said. "He don't come to Ed, he goes [and gives an interview] to Bret Baier on Fox News in my time slot."

As the man says, Heh.

I think the left does protest too much. I mean they got health care, blown up baseline domestic spending (and deficits) as far as the eye can see thanks to a useless 'stimulus' plan and grabbed a boat load of power through "Wall Street Reform". They are also making inroads on Don't Ask, Don't Tell, ending our involvement in Iraq and while they didn't get Cap and Trade, they can now move on to EPA regulations which will likely be worse than what Congress would have passed. Oh and don't forget two unimpressive but reliably liberal Supreme Court Justices.

Sure they didn't get total control of the health care syste but unless the monstrosity that did pass is repealed, it will just be a matter of time until they do. They also haven't gotten immigration amnesty or across the board tax increases but the latter is likely coming down the pike soon enough.

And yes, We're still in Afghanistan but that's as much their fault as anyone's. They are the ones who spent 5 years bitching about The Good and Necessary War (Afghanistan) vs. Bad Imperialism for Oil (Iraq). Gys, don't get pissed because people took you seriously. Beside, no matter what he says, Obama is pulling the plug on that next year in order to run on some sort of "victory" in '12.

It's natural that the base always wants more, especially given the margin of their victories, but it's not too shabby.

(See the update for a fuller list of so-called Obama "accomplishments")

Even with all of that, it's obvious that the reports of the Republican party's demise were premature. The question is, what will they do when if they get all the levers back in 2012?

Right now, Republicans aren't saying much and that's ok. The Democrats are unpopular and we should ride that wave this year since even if we win both houses this year, the impact will be limited while Obama is in office. Remember how often Bush rolled the Reid/Pelosi gang for two years? Presidents matter.

Still, at some point, the Republicans are going to have to layout a more positive agenda of what they will do if given another chance.

Until then, enjoy the tears of Kos and his friends. They are tasty. And good for you.

Update: Via Allah, Obama addresses Nutroots via video. Note the "greatest hits" clip package in the middle courtesy of MSNBC.

But FNC is a propaganda arm of the GOP. more...

Posted by: DrewM at 04:11 PM | Comments (185)
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Excitable Andi: My Work Here is Done
— Dave in Texas

Ok, I got a paycheck, dangling it here in front of anybody who wants this action, that says "Andrew Sullivan of the Extreme Vaginal Heartache" is sooo not done with the Trig Conspiracy.

Takers? Line up over there. By the water fountain.. no pushing.

This one is couched in the beautiful terms of "a reader writes". (This link goes to the Atlantic, if anybooger wants to send me an alternative, the lines are open).

The reader:

While it is certain that her tale is not credible, it is not just the wild ride aspect of the story that raises eyebrows; this has to be taken in the context of all the other things that don't add up about her story. The lack of a pregnant physique, and then the impossibly-morphing body shapes. The fact that no one knew. The timing of the announcement. The odd story of the too-early amniocentesis. The disappearance of Bristol, her pregnant appearance and substantiated claims that she was pregnant in 2007. The lack of any documentation whatsoever of the birth. The changing details...

St. Andrew responds, "I think this series of facts is telling. It's what has dragged me back into this again and again. But without any hard evidence, I do think we have reached an impasse here".

Really? Are we here now?

NOW?

I can't steal it all.. here, I'll add some Dave adjustments (mine completely):

the.. the absence of people moving around the streets.. the tunnels.. my God, what did those mean? Miles of tracks laid under these vast cities.. and the incredible weight of the stones. Who could have moved these to their peaks in the desert? How did they get there? And what about the faces on Easter Island? Those vaginas are not indiginous to the westward shores. Makemake does not roll that way. How did these pyramids come to be? Who's got a spare drink ticket?

The kind hearted-reader wonders, "why would you pick on a lunatic so?" (or keep boring me with this crap?).

The answer is directed toward The Atlantic, who apparently needs the hits.

tip via DrewRinoM

Posted by: Dave in Texas at 01:21 PM | Comments (335)
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