Stone Court

Surname Is Destiny

2009-06-11T21:49:00.002-04:00

Chastity Bono is undergoing a sex change operation.

But what's really interesting is the name of his publicist.

It's Howard Bragman.

If I ever need a publicist, I sure hope I can get a Bragman (or Bragwoman).

Separated at Birth?

2009-04-27T11:56:00.004-04:00

The same worried look, perhaps because both were concerned they were over-matched by the job at hand?

Plenty of Time to Catch Up on Thinking When You're Dead

2009-01-06T09:52:00.002-05:00

Roland Burris today:

Some of Burris' supporters have bemoaned the fact that Democrats would stand in the way of the Senate gaining its only black member. Burris himself downplayed the issue of race, telling reporters: "I cannot control my supporters. I have never in my life, in all my years of being elected to office, thought anything about race." (Emphasis added.)

Roland Burris's future tomb:

Burris already has a granite mausoleum erected under the heading "TRAIL BLAZER," followed by his achievement as "First African-American in Illinois to Become", the Chicago Tribune reports.

To be clear, while (like many) I think Burris has come off as a self-satisfied blowhard, that is not to say I think Burris should not be seated. To the contrary, my tentative view is that, while Akhil Amar has put forth a fairly persuasive (though hardly certain) argument that the Senate has the unreviewable power to refuse to seat Burris, for the Senate to exercise that power here, where there is no evidence of a corrupt bargain between Blagojevich and Burris, would be an abuse of that power and set a bad precedent for the future. Better to let Burris be seated and schedule a special election to replace him posthaste, which the Illinois Legislature retains the power to do under the Seventeenth Amendment.

You Gotta Lotta Bawls, Metaphor Imploding Edition

2008-11-20T13:55:00.003-05:00

Logic said this might happen, and via Melissa McEwan, it has:

The knuckleball — the fluttering, hard-to-hit pitch that's rare in the major leagues — is propelling a 16-year-old girl to the pros in Japan.

Eri Yoshida was inspired to learn how to throw the knuckler after seeing a video of Boston Red Sox pitcher Tim Wakefield. On Monday, she broke the gender barrier by being drafted for an independent league team as Japan's first female professional baseball player.

And a classy response from the Red Sox' Tim Wakefield:

"It's funny that I've reached that point in my career that people want to emulate me," Wakefield said. "I'm glad I had people like the Niekros, Charlie Hough and Tom Candiotti that I could look up to. I am deeply humbled that it is me this time."

…"Hope I can see her pitch one day," Wakefield said in a message he texted to the Red Sox that was relayed to The Associated Press. "I'm honored that someone wants to become me. I wish her the best of luck. Maybe I can learn something from her."

This blog will now return to its usual practice of not praising members of the Red Sox under any circumstances.

Getting Under Joe's Skin?

2008-11-11T11:25:00.002-05:00

When I first saw this news on TPM:

Lieberman Off the Hook?
The Obama transition team signals to TPM Election Central that Joe Lieberman is safe.
"We don't hold any grudges," Obama transition spokesperson Stephanie Cutter
tells us.

... I was cranky, because I've been just dying to see Traitor Joe ridden out of town on a rail, frog-marched out of the caucus, tarred and feathered, etc.

But then I got thinking some more... and I think this may be another absolutely brilliant move on Obama's part.

Why brilliant, you ask?

Well, because it makes Obama a bigger guy than Lieberman. Lieberman, clearly, DOES hold grudges--which is a big part of what's gotten him where he is today. At the same time, Lieberman is, as we've said a thousand times, a sanctimonious son of a bitch who likes to think he's better than everyone else. But this clearly indicates that he's NOT better than Barack Obama.

Seriously, this is like some of those other really sly ways that Obama has managed to drive certain people (like Bill Clinton) absolutely batshit crazy without ever saying anything that anyone else would interpret as a bad thing to have said.

Maybe I'm reading too much into it. But I think Joe was angling to be deprived of his committee chairmanship and kicked out of the caucus so he could once again blame the Democrats, talk about how the party has left him, and play the martyr. This deprives him of that opportunity. How does he keep his head from exploding if Barack Obama is a better man than he?

You Gotta Lotta Bawls, Gold-Plated Ones Edition

2008-10-16T10:20:00.002-04:00

For a cool million, the Obama campaign convinces Fox to ask Major League Baseball to move back the start time of Game 6 of the World Series. And the very Republican MLB agrees.

Money talks.

Related Post: You Gotta Lotta Bawls, Breathtaking Hypocrisy Edition

Stacking the Deck?

2008-09-29T11:57:00.003-04:00

Via Josh Marshall, the McCain campaign is complaining that debate moderator will have stacked the deck against Sarah Palin if it asks more, or even an equal number of, questions concerning foreign policy, as that area is perceived as Joe Biden's strength and (one of) Sarah Palin's weaknesses.

Frankly, I would be shocked if -- in the current environment, when a third of the first Presidential debate was converted from foreign to domestic policy -- Ifill asks more than half of her questions about foreign policy. She will probably ask less. But if she does ask half, McCain has no reason to complain. Both campaigns agreed to Ifill, knowing full well that when she moderated the last (Cheney-Edwards) VP debate she split her questions almost exactly equally between foreign and domestic issues. Based on word count, excluding Ifill's opening remarks and the candidates' closing statements, the debate was 51.2% on domestic matters and 48.8% on foreign policy.

That said, if the McCain campaign is hoping for a focus on domestic issues, you have to assume they are not looking forward to Thursday night.

I'm Fred Vincy and I Approved This Message

2008-09-11T14:48:00.002-04:00

Much attention to James Carville's completely unwarranted defense of John McCain as not knowing about the dishonest ads his campaign is running and he is on record as approving:

But I refuse to believe that John McCain agreed to airing this spot. I know he says I'm John McCain, I paid for it but they have that in the can and they do it. It I don't think he knew about it. I really don't.

Less attention to why John McCain appears in the ads saying he approves them. It's because of a provision in his signature legislative accomplishment, the McCain-Feingold campaign finance reform act (although I believe Ron Wyden was the author of this particular provision). In other words, no one is less entitled to the benefit of the doubt accorded by Carville than is John McCain.

Obama's Earmarks

2008-09-09T09:04:00.002-04:00

With the McCain campaign trying to make a big deal out of Obama's earmarks -- and to pretend that Palin hasn't been an even bigger advocate of earmarks -- it's worth taking a look at what Obama was requesting those earmarks for. He has a list on his Senate website for the most recent year (requested in 2007). I'm sure reasonable people could differ on the worthiness of these various projects, but for the most part they seem to be directed at entirely reasonable needs of Obama's state -- upgrading and maintaining dams, roads, hospitals, and museums, education, AIDS, national security/emergency preparedness, etc.

For a sample, here's the biggest one:

Army Corps of Engineers in Illinois, to support project UMR-IWW System Navigation Study, IL, IA, MN, MO, & WI, $24,000,000
Pre-Construction Engineering & Design (PED) of seven new 1,200-foot lock chambers and ecosystem restoration. Timely PED work for navigation is consistent with a recent study indicating that without new 1,200-foot lock chambers at the identified seven locations, American farmers stand to lose over $562 million annually in lost exports and domestic demand by 2020. Manufacturers and consumers also stand to lose from deteriorating infrastructure on our " Third Coast" in addition to the 400,000 jobs sustained by this transportation corridor. Construction of these new lock chambers will create at least 48 million man-hours, or up to 6,000 construction jobs each year, providing immediate economic benefits through high-skilled labor, and spurring much-needed economic growth that has historically occurred through investing in our lock and dam infrastructure.

O.K.

2008-09-08T06:29:00.002-04:00

Gallup says we're ten points down.

The media is giving up on having a serious interview of Sarah Palin.

The Obama Campaign has to stop acting like it's ahead and hit McCain hard. This is the moment, as when the Swift Boat ads came out in 2004, when the tone and structure of the campaign are likely to be set.

The ads that McCain represents the same policies as Bush are fine, but they are not enough. McCain says it's not true. To win that fight, you have to attack his character, his integrity. There's plenty to work with, from the Keating Five to his serial flip-flops over the last eight years.

But it has to be hard, and it has to be memorable.

Rather Redux

2008-09-05T13:46:00.002-04:00

What is Alaska State Senator Hollis French thinking?

ABC News has exclusively learned that Alaska Senator Hollis French will announce today that he is moving up the release date of his investigation into whether Gov. Sarah Palin abused her office to get the Alaska public safety commissioner, Walt Monegan, fired. The results of the investigation were originally scheduled for release Oct. 31 but will now come almost three weeks earlier, according to sources....

The Alaska state senator running an investigation of Gov. Palin had accused the McCain campaign of using stall tactics to prevent him from releasing his final report by Oct. 31, four days before the November election.

"It's likely to be damaging to the Governor's administration," said Senator Hollis French, a Democrat, appointed the project manager for a bi-partisan State Senate Legislative Counsel Committee investigation.

Maybe it's legitimate to move up the date -- Palin's now refusing to testify, so there will be less evidence to weigh -- but the change comes across as an effort to embarrass Palin before the election (rather than simply to finish a legislatively-approved investigation). (Of course, it may actually help McCain-Palin to get damaging information out there in early October, rather than days before the election, but that's besides the point.)

And why did French feel compelled to opine on what the investigation would show before it's completed. Of course, in the real world, good investigators know where an investigation is leading, but publicly stating those views is at best unprofessional and at worst evidence of bias.

Remember how, in 2004, real questions about George Bush's National Guard service were quickly dropped when Dan Rather relied on a forged document? I have a strong feeling that we may see a replay of that with Troopergate.

Republican Women Who Are Qualified to Be President, Part II

2008-08-30T09:51:00.002-04:00

Mary correctly points out that I omitted Jodi Rell from my list in the previous post.

Notably, that means that six of the seven most accomplished women in the Republican party are pro-choice (only Dole is not), thus rejecting one of their party's central principles.

I wonder why that might be....

Republican Women Who Are Qualified to Be President*

2008-08-29T13:59:00.004-04:00

Condoleezza Rice
Elizabeth Dole
Christine Todd Whitman
Kay Bailey Hutchison
Olympia Snowe
Susan Collins

*Political views aside.

Not Born Yesterday

2008-08-29T12:37:00.003-04:00

McCain, that is.

I'm nitpicking, I realize, but as a demographer, I think I do get to correct errors like this when I see them.

In an otherwise on-target post about McCain's pathetic and desperate choice of the woefully inexperienced Palin as v.p., Trapper John over at Daily Kos writes,

And he's presented Americans with the prospect of electing a dangerous neophyte
to be a heartbeat away from the presidency, behind a man whose life expectancy
is less than two presidential terms.

If John McCain had been born yesterday, this statement would be true. The life expectancy at birth of a white man in the United States as of the 2000 lifetables is 74.8, or far less than 8 years from McCain's present age (as of today) of 72.

But McCain, instead of being born yesterday, was born 72 years ago today. The life expectancy at age 70 of a white man in the United States is 13 more years, for an age of 83. So actually, McCain would be expected to survive 2 terms based on the mortality of people who've made it as far as he has.

Mind you, that's not taking into account his history of cancer or the ways in which the deprivation he experienced as a POW may have prematurely aged him and affected his health.

As I said, it's nitpicking, because obviously McCain's chances of dying in office, were he elected, are far greater than Obama's, and besides, we hold should all presidential candidates to the standard that their vice presidential picks should be ready to assume the Presidency if necessary...

I just hate to see life expectancy misrepresented.

Palin

2008-08-29T11:30:00.001-04:00

A very weak pick.

My first thought was Geraldine Ferraro, who was disaster for Mondale because of her obvious lack of qualification for office and family scandals.

But it's worse than that, because this is 2008, not 1984, and there are a number of women with the gravitas for the job. (And Palin's resume is thinner even than Ferraro's was in 1984.)

People have been comparing this election to 1980, but I suddenly feel like we may be partying like it's 1984....

Vote for Barack Obama or I Will Kill Myself!

2008-08-27T10:29:00.004-04:00

Amazingly, Bill Kristol finds Clinton's endorsement of Barack Obama "shockingly minimal".

It got we wondering .... If that's minimal, what would a maximal endorsement look like?

The only thing I could come up with is from Blazing Saddles.

Were They Watching the Same Speech I Was?

2008-08-27T10:05:00.002-04:00

The main headline from the New York Times this morning:

Clinton Delivers Emphatic Plea for Unity
Betrays No Anger in Backing Obama

What made that a "plea" for unity? There was nothing pathetic about it. How about a "call" for unity? Or even a "clarion call"? Or a "resounding call"?

And what's with the subtitle? Did they really expect her to "betray" anger? That assumes she's feeling it and was just doing a good job of hiding her "true" feelings. But everything we know about Hillary Clinton and what she has worked for all her life suggests that indeed, she meant every word she said last night.

These people are so enamored of their Democrats-infighting story, they can't see what's right in front of them.

Catharsis

2008-08-27T08:05:00.002-04:00

A great, great political speech by Hillary Clinton last night.

The defining passage, of course, was this challenge to her own supporters, which spoke to both their hearts and their heads:

I want you to ask yourselves: Were you in this campaign just for me? Or were you in it for that young Marine and others like him? Were you in it for that mom struggling with cancer while raising her kids? Were you in it for that boy and his mom surviving on the minimum wage? Were you in it for all the people in this country who feel invisible?

The speech gave Hillary's supporters a chance to show their love for Hillary twice -- by cheering her at the convention, and by working for her ideals by supporting Barack Obama.

But an underreported aspect of Hillary's speech was that it spoke just as much to Obama's supporters. It gave those of us who did not support Hillary the chance to love her again. It was a poignant reminder to those of us who voted against her because of Iraq -- and I do believe she would have won the presidency had it not been for her vote for the AUMF -- of her decades of fighting for justice and equality, and especially for healthcare and the lives of women and children, and of all the terrible, terrible calumny she has had to had to endure for being a liberal and for being a woman.

The healing has to be both ways. Hillary's supporters need to get in line. But Obama's supporters need to greet them with open arms. I've always thought those things would happen, but they will happen with a lot more enthusiasm now.

Lieberman?

2008-08-25T13:50:00.002-04:00

OK. This time it took two years, not two hours, to go from Stone Court to conventional wisdom. Ezra Klein and Amanda Marcotte now both argue that John McCain is likely to pick Joe Lieberman as his running mate.

From Stone Court, November 29, 2006:

McCain-Lieberman '08
I considered including this possibility in my pre-election post arguing that Lieberman was unlikely to become a Republican when reelected. Joe's raison d'être is to be President, or at least Vice President (preferably for someone who'd be 72 at inauguration and has a history of cancer). There is no way that that will ever happen as a Democrat (even Joementum himself finally realizes that) and there is no way it would ever happen as a Republican. If he becomes a Republican, he's just another pro-choice (well, mostly) Northeasterner without Giuliani's mythology or Pataki's record of being, well, a Republican. Only as a Democrat does he bring anything to a ticket.

The Republicans know their best (only?) chance of winning is by hiding what they stand for, since the post-Gingrich Republican agenda has never been widely popular (and is clearly less so post-2006 elections). That was the whole point of "compassionate conservatism" and "uniter not a divider". It was a deliberate lie to conceal what Bush intended to do. But Americans have seen that movie, and I can't see the same game plan working again. The 2006 elections sent the clear message that just saying "we're different from Bush" is not going to work.

McCain is the perfect person to lead such a strategy of deception. He's a conservative Republican who has convinced the media he's a principled "maverick" who's not part of the Republican machine. What better way to reinforce and amplify this very helpful media dynamic than picking a Democrat (and Gore's VP no less)? I suppose Lieberman could help in the same way with someone else at the top, but it really only works with McCain, because without him the maverick angle doesn't fly with the media and it looks a bit like choosing Zell Miller....

As Ezra and Amanda argue, that logic still holds.

And Lieberman's hand was clearly strengthened by the Biden pick. The two front-runners -- Romney and Pawlenty, who together control 85% of the Intrade market -- both lack the experience to go up against Biden persuasively in debate. (The same could be said of Obama vis-a-vis McCain, but Obama levels the playing field with greater intellectual and rhetorical ability and the trump card of having been right about invading Iraq, neither of which are available to Romney or Pawlenty (though Pawlenty does come across as likable).)

But still.

It's an awfully risky strategy with the base, which is finally coming around to McCain. If McCain's first appointment is someone who was endorsed by NARAL as recently as 2006 and voted against religious right darlings Clarence Thomas and Sam Alito, how can the religious right have any confidence that he won't pick the next David Souter when there's an opening on the Supreme Court? And McCain will be 72 this week and is a cancer survivor. And did I mention Lieberman is Jewish?

Mary rightly points out that Lieberman is tight with religious right figures such as John Hagee, but that still strikes me as a marriage of convenience over their shared love of war in the Middle East. That's a long way from wanting Lieberman to be a heartbeat away.

Yes, it will help McCain among "low information" independents and some Jews (though the latter are only 1.3% of the population in critical Ohio), but those gains are likely to be erased by reduced turnout among evangelicals, many of whom have already voiced the get-worse-before-it-gets-better mentality that, via Ralph Nader, brought us George Bush.

So, yeah, I can still see it. But McCain has to believe that he has no other way to win to take such a gamble.

You Can't Say That During an Election!

2008-08-22T13:35:00.002-04:00

Ezra Klein may be right that picking Chuck Hagel to be Secretary of Defense would be a bad idea, but I am not convinced that it would be illegal to announce that pick in advance. Klein cites 18 USC 599, which provides:

Whoever, being a candidate, directly or indirectly promises or pledges the appointment, or the use of his influence or support for the appointment of any person to any public or private position or employment, for the purpose of procuring support in his candidacy shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than one year, or both; and if the violation was willful, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than two years, or both.

I agree that Klein's reading of the statute -- that it prohibits Obama from pledging to name Hagel his SoD -- is consistent with the statute's language but, if that is the meaning, the statute would seem to raise serious First Amendment concerns. Indeed, I can hardly imagine political speech more central to the First Amendment than a Presidential candidate's promises concerning how the candidate will govern, including whom he or she will appoint. Playing Scalia for a moment and focusing on the late 18th Century, consider if during the 1796 election John Adams had promised to reappoint the highly controversial, and uniquely talented, Alexander Hamilton as Secretary of the Treasury. Could there have been a clearer statement to voters of the economic policies he intended to pursue? Would the Founders really have agreed that the First Amendment was satisfied if Adams had had to make the far weaker assertion that he would merely follow the policies of Hamilton?

Despite this constitutional infirmity, the statute may have force in a different situation. Consider for example if Obama promised Hillary Clinton that she would be the Secretary of Defense in order to induce her to push her supporters to vote for him. That smacks of corruption, not of free speech, and in my view is better understood as the conduct the statute should be read as targeting.

No Veep Announcement Today

2008-08-21T12:08:00.003-04:00

No way the Obama campaign steps on the firestorm over how many homes John McCain owns until it's had a chance to get some oxygen.

UPDATE: From Stone Court to conventional wisdom in two hours....

Lost in Translation?

2008-08-20T15:44:00.002-04:00

From our trip to Estonia:

Biden

2008-08-19T10:57:00.002-04:00

Yglesias excuses Biden's vote on the bankruptcy bill as merely the norm for a Senator supporting a major home state business, but I have to say that at the time it seemed worst than that.

I don't have time for a full Biden review, but here's a Stone Court blast from the past regarding the current front-runner:

Senator Pig
Atrios links to a list of 14 "Democrats Who Will Never Be President" due to their shameful votes to let the bankruptcy bill come to the Senate floor.

Joe Biden deserves a special place on that list for his disrespectful, condescending, and generally piggish cross examination of Harvard Law Professor Elizabeth Warren:
WARREN: A woman who borrowed $2,200, the credit she paid back, $2,100 over the two years preceding bankruptcy, and at the end of that period of time she was told she still owed $2,600. With fees and interest, I submit, Senator, that there are many in the credit industry right now who are getting their bankruptcies prepaid. That is, they have squeezed enough out of these families in interest and fees and payments that never pay down the principal.

BIDEN: Maybe we should talk about usury rates then. Maybe that's what we should talk about, not bankruptcy.

WARREN: Senator, I'll be the first. Invite me.

BIDEN: No, I know you will, but let's call a spade a spade. Your problem with the credit card companies is usury rates from your position. It's not about the bankruptcy bill.

WARREN: But, Senator, if you're not going to fix that problem, you can't take away the last shred of protection for these families.

BIDEN: I got it. OK. You're very good, Professor.
Transcript via Lexis($), but it sounded even more sarcastic and offensive as delivered -- you can listen here.

Better than Bayh and Kaine gets you a C.

Emily's List

2008-08-06T16:44:00.001-04:00

should really stop endorsing candidates running against pro-choice Democratic incumbents.

No on Tim Kaine

2008-07-30T07:36:00.004-04:00

This is important.

All the buzz is now that Virginia Governor Tim Kaine is at the top of Barack Obama's short list for Vice President.

Tim Kaine is pro-life. Or pretty close. Kathy G documents that Kaine says he is "personally pro-life" because of his Catholic faith. However, unlike other Catholic Dems (like Kerry or Sebelius) who couple that with statements (and actions) that abortion should be legally protected, Kaine has offered only the most tepid statement that he'd enforce the law on abortion. (As Kathy asks, “but what if the Supreme Court overturns Roe and leaves abortion up to the states?”) Kathy also lists a number of other clues to his position, such as his inexplicable opposition to government funding of embryonic stem cell research, as well as a number of other reasons he’d be “a piss-poor choice”.

Once again, this is a trial balloon. The Obama campaign wants to know if the liberal blogosphere will freak out about Kaine. And so far it has not. So far, it has been deafening silence on his pro-life position, and generally Kaine has received favorable reviews.

I really think the Obama campaign would think twice about Kaine if the liberal blogosphere drew a line in the sand. If you have a liberal blog, please post on your opposition to Tim Kaine, and encourage others to do so.

Choice Chooses Choosing?

2008-07-22T14:31:00.002-04:00

Earlier today, Mary forwarded an email reporting that "Women" as a category only recently appeared in the "Issues" section of the Obama campaign website. That does conform to my (vague) memory of the site a few months ago, and is also confirmed by the fact that "Women" is listed only in the pull-down menu, not in the list of issues in the main text.

What's even more odd is that the category "Women" lists 28 sub-issues, covering a wide range of topics (some more specific to women than others). Of those, 27 have titles introduced by the present participle (-ing): "Fixing the Nation’s Health Care System", "Empowering Women to Prevent HIV/AIDS", "Supporting Research into Women’s Health", etc. In contrast, one has a title introduced by a present tense verb used adjectivally: "Supports a Woman’s Right to Choose".

I hate to get all grammarian about this, but that is very odd and suggests that the choice section (which, by the way, is pretty blah*) was edited after the fact by someone other than the page's main author. Straying from grammarian to paranoid, the present participle suggests action -- doing something -- while the present tense verb used adjectivally suggests merely a state of being -- Obama feels pro-choice.

Not great.

*It's entire text: "Barack Obama understands that abortion is a divisive issue, and respects those who disagree with him. However, he has been a consistent champion of reproductive choice and will make preserving women’s rights under Roe v. Wade a priority as President. He opposes any constitutional amendment to overturn the Supreme Court's decision in that case."

Should It Worry Me?

2008-07-22T12:18:00.003-04:00

That my fourteen-month-old daughter says "Blackberry" (blah-bear)?

Straight Only Talk

2008-07-15T15:01:00.003-04:00

Ann at Feministing caught this gem from John McCain:

I think that we've proven that both parents are important in the success of a family so, no I don't believe in gay adoption.

Both parents? As Mary pointed out to me a few days ago, McCain himself was not a particularly involved father:

Eventually, [Cindy McCain] gave birth to daughter Meagan, followed by Jack and Jim. Once she began raising her family, the political wife made a radical decision not to raise her children in Washington, D.C., but rather in her home state of Arizona.

She left her husband on Capitol Hill to pursue his political career as she served as a single mother during the week. (Emphasis added.)

Rank hypocrisy.

Why the Legacy Airlines Should Go Out of Business

2008-07-10T11:18:00.002-04:00

I received this email today from Northwest Airlines:

An Open letter to All Airline Customers:

Our country is facing a possible sharp economic downturn because of skyrocketing oil and fuel prices, but by pulling together, we can all do something to help now. Visit www.StopOilSpeculationNow.com.

For airlines, ultra-expensive fuel means thousands of lost jobs and severe reductions in air service to both large and small communities. To the broader economy, oil prices mean slower activity and widespread economic pain. This pain can be alleviated, and that is why we are taking the extraordinary step of writing this joint letter to our customers.

Since high oil prices are partly a response to normal market forces, the nation needs to focus on increased energy supplies and conservation. However, there is another side to this story because normal market forces are being dangerously amplified by poorly regulated market speculation.

Twenty years ago, 21 percent of oil contracts were purchased by speculators who trade oil on paper with no intention of ever taking delivery. Today, oil speculators purchase 66 percent of all oil futures contracts, and that reflects just the transactions that are known. Speculators buy up large amounts of oil and then sell it to each other again and again. A barrel of oil may trade 20-plus times before it is delivered and used; the price goes up with each trade and consumers pick up the final tab. Some market experts estimate that current prices reflect as much as $30 to $60 per barrel in unnecessary speculative costs.

Over seventy years ago, Congress established regulations to control excessive, largely unchecked market speculation and manipulation. However, over the past two decades, these regulatory limits have been weakened or removed. We believe that restoring and enforcing these limits, along with several other modest measures, will provide more disclosure, transparency and sound market oversight. Together, these reforms will help cool the over-heated oil market and permit the economy to prosper.

The nation needs to pull together to reform the oil markets and solve this growing problem. We need your help. Get more information and contact Congress by visiting www.StopOilSpeculationNow.com.

Except, that as Krugman points out, the evidence doesn't support the theory that speculation is the cause of high oil prices.

More to the point, though, what Northwest dismisses as "speculation" is actually, in large measure, "hedging", a well-established financial mechanism that allows businesses that are highly dependent on the price of commodities to insure against the risk that the price will change. Oil producers can hedge against falling oil prices. And oil consumers -- say, airlines -- can hedge against rising prices. This is exactly what Southwest Airlines does -- and why it is continuing to make money.

Honestly, anyone with a passing interest in finance, politics, or the world in general is aware that oil prices are volatile. Anyone with a modicum of financial training is aware that there is a way to insure against that. It's bad enough that Northwest and the other legacy carriers have ignored these basic facts for decades when they had billions riding on their decisions, but to now criticize the very mechanism that could have saved them is the height of chutzpah.

Guess It Won't Be Wes

2008-06-30T16:26:00.003-04:00

It seems to me that the key point about the whole Wes Clark debacle is that the McCain campaign and their media enablers have now neutralized Clark as a spokesman for the Obama campaign and assured that he won't be Obama's choice for V.P.

Surely this was part of the purpose to the bleating on the right (repeated so readily by the talking heads) about Clark's supposedly mean, nasty, vicious attack on McCain?

The Republicans knew Clark could be effective in neutralizing McCain's so-called advantage based on military experience (how many stars did Clark have? kinda trumps whatever McCain did... even if Daddy was an admiral), so they had to take him down quickly as soon after he endorsed Obama as possible. Clark had been saying these things about McCain for a while, so doesn't it seem interesting that it's only now that the very same statements suddenly become so very objectionable?

Now maybe Clark as V.P. was never in the stars, and therefore it doesn't matter... And maybe the fact that Obama's gang threw Clark overboard so fast, rather than defending him (and pointing out how absurd and untrue the complaints from the Republicans have been), is a sign that they were never all that interested in him for V.P. in the first place. But I read this as a very well-carried-out maneuver by the bad guys, and not a very savvy response by our guy.

But feel free to tell me why I'm wrong.

The View From the Top

2008-06-23T05:55:00.002-04:00

Obama's acceptance of the FISA "compromise" is deeply disappointing.

I've long had a nagging worry that Clinton took a much more tolerant view of Bush's aggressive expansion of executive power than the other Democratic candidates because they only hoped to be President, while she expected to. I am afraid that distinction may now explain Obama's sudden embrace of this terrible bill.

Vacation, or Don't Do Anything Stupid While We're Gone

2008-06-12T01:24:00.002-04:00

Mary and I will be on vacation in Sweden and environs through June 21, so the VP series and other posting will have to wait until then.

In the meantime, don't go picking any Republicans, generals who may be Republicans, Senators whose "strength" is foreign policy but somehow voted against the first Gulf War and for the second, or against the first and against lifting the ban on gays in the military while we're away. And please, no losers, losers, or losers.

Skål.

Warner

2008-06-09T21:38:00.002-04:00

The third most likely VP pick, according to Intrade (8.9%), doesn't want the job. Former Virginia Governor Mark Warner tried to shoot down this rumor in March:

In terms of the VP, you know, I think I effectively took myself out of that one when I decided to run for the Senate.

Not exactly Sherman's "If drafted, I will not run; if nominated, I will not accept; if elected, I will not serve", but given that he declined to run for President, even though he would have had a realistic shot at winning, I am inclined to believe him. And I'm fine with leaving it at that.

Warner has plenty of pluses. He's clearly a very smart, very savvy politician. After Harvard Law, he went to the Hill to do policy work for Senator Chris Dodd, and later made a fortune in telecommunications and ran Douglas Wilder's successful, and ground-breaking, campaign for Governor of Virginia. He himself became governor in 2002 and left office extremely popular. He's widely credited with turning red Virginia purple again (though, obviously, George Bush gets a lot of credit as well). Virginia is a prime pickup target for Obama in '08. There's no doubt that he would be a solid addition to the ticket -- although at a large cost, as he is almost certain to win the Senate seat being vacated by Republic John Warner, while a replacement Dem. would have a tough race against Republican Jim Gilmore, another former governor, although far less popular than Warner.

From a policy perspective, Warner says he wants "to build a bipartisan, radical centrist coalition". Whatever. I guess that could be read as similar to the Obama message, but I take Obama as a bit different. Obama's approach is to say if I really listen to you and you really listen to me, we'll realize both sides have some good points. But -- and this is important -- Obama also believes that the result of that dialogue is that he will adjust this or that, but mostly you (Republicans) will realize just how right he is. Warner really seems to be talking about meeting in the middle -- as reflected by his overall positions. Sure, he came out for withdrawal from Iraq after it was clear things were going badly, but I can't find any evidence he spoke out in 2002. He's (mostly) pro-choice, but also seems to define his pro-choice position as somehow distinct from that of actual pro-choice leaders:

INSKEEP: You've said previously that you would rather be talking when it comes to abortion in terms of women's health-care choices. What does that mean and how is it any different from what the debate has been?

WARNER: I am pro-choice. I think a woman should have the ability to make that decision. I feel that unfortunately that debate has been waylaid a little bit as advocates and detractors in the debate spend more time focusing on late-term abortions or the so-called partial-birth abortions, which trouble me greatly. I wish we could find a way to prevent those in a constitutional manner. But my sense is, at times, is that the abortion debate, I think the vast majority of Americans are pro-choice but with appropriate restrictions. They don't want to see a third-trimester abortion. They want to make sure that a parent is notified and I supported, for example, a parental-notification bill in Virginia that had appropriate judicial bypass. My hope is that we can move beyond that debate to the real, more important issues of how do we actually look at a woman's health-care issues, how can we increase the use of contraceptive -- new, scientifically based -- contraceptive devices, so that the need for abortions actually decrease in this country? How we truly can make abortions safe, legal and rare?

INSKEEP: You just used a phrase that Bill Clinton made famous in the '90s.

WARNER: Unfortunately, there are some in the debate who I don't think want to get to a resolution where we actually… decrease the number of abortions. They want to continue to use this as a way to churn the political waters. And that's unfortunate to women across this country, it's unfortunate that it prevents us from, I think, moving forward not only on broader health-care issues but it prevents us from moving forward on a host of the issues that I believe are honestly just more important. (Emphasis added.)

Yeah, it's the pro-choice advocates who want to "focus[] on late-term abortions" (though at least he uses "so-called"). And he may be right about what most Americans "want to see", but that doesn't mean banning procedures that are necessary for women's lives and health is good policy.

In short, Warner strikes me as someone who's good at sensing where the political wind is blowing. Not a bad thing for winning elections, but not inspiring either.

In the unlikely event this one happens, I'll say, Meh. B.

Teasers

2008-06-08T22:27:00.003-04:00

Teasers are common in TV news, and not necessarily wrong. But they are wrong when they become disinformation.

On CNN Politics right now, they are running a string of teasers about myths about Barack Obama. The most recent was (and I paraphrase), "Barack Obama, sworn in the U.S. Senate on the Koran. Is there any truth to it?" This followed other ones about his being a Muslim, refusing to salute the flag, etc.

Presumably, CNN will accurately debunk this nonsense when the report actually comes on, but it's already 10:30 and we haven't gotten to the report yet. People are going to bed, flipping channels, whatever, and getting a misleading impression. At the very least, CNN is conveying that these are serious rumors deserving serious consideration, and at most they are leading people to believe things that are not true.

Not responsible journalism.

UPDATE: OK, at 10:40 they do debunk the rumors, and even have David Sirota on to call out the "right wing spin machine". But. In debunking the claim that Obama was sworn in on the Koran, they say that that "dubious honor" goes to Minnesota Congressman Keith Ellison, who is a Muslim. Why is that a dubious honor? Does CNN really believe Ellison was not rightly proud of being the first Muslim Congressman?

A League Not of Her Own, or I Did Not Know That, Part II

2008-06-06T10:54:00.003-04:00

Kudos to Major League Baseball, which at Dave Winfield's suggestion honored living Negro Leagues players in this week's amateur draft, and brought attention to athletes who were unfairly deprived of it in their time. Though all of the players drafted represent important stories, I was particularly interested in Mamie "Peanut" Johnson, who pitched (and played infield) successfully for three seasons:

... Mamie "Peanut'' Johnson of the Indianapolis Clowns, a rare female pitcher and utility second baseman for the Indianapolis Clowns from 1953 to '55, where she played with a teen-aged Hank Aaron before he was signed by the Boston Braves.
"I did pretty good for a girl,'' recalled Johnson Goodman. She said she was 33-7 in those three years but always understood that she wasn't about to follow her teammate Aaron to the big leagues.

"I had two strikes against me,'' said Johnson Goodman without bitterness. "First, I was a girl. And second, I was black.''

Now, she'll finally have her day.

The quality of professional baseball was not the same in the 1950s as it is now, and (as Bill James has documented), despite having top-level stars, Negro Leagues baseball was not overall as competitive as Major League Baseball, and the Negro Leagues had certainly declined by the early 1950s, when black stars like Jackie Robinson, Roy Campanella, Willie Mays, and Larry Doby were playing in the Majors. But still. You don't go 33-7 unless you can pitch. It's unfortunate that girls are pushed so much into softball, soccer, whatever, that we never really get a chance to see what they can do in baseball.

I've ordered Johnson's biography, A Strong Right Arm.

Related Post: I Did Not Know That

Sebelius

2008-06-05T08:46:00.003-04:00

Many Democrats had an unfavorable first impression of Kansas Governor Kathleen Sebelius. Tasked with giving the Democratic response to the 2008 State of the Union, she turned in an incredibly weak effort that was poorly delivered (she was clearly reading and almost without affect) and, what's worse, despite responding to one of the most unpopular Presidents in modern history, acted as if it was she who needed to apologize for being a Democrat. (Her second sentence began, "I'm a Democrat, but...", and she later takes pains to distinguish a "partisan response" from an "American response", when the right message, especially with Republicans so out of favor, was that a Democratic response was an American response.) Contrast that with the powerful response given the year before by Jim Webb, who hammered the Republicans on their core weaknesses of Iraq and of caring only for the wealthy.

Despite Sebelius's terrible blown opportunity, it's worth giving her a chance to make a second impression. I've spent some time watching her speak on You Tube, and it's fair to say that the SOTU response was an outlier. She's not a great speaker, but she is an adequate one -- conveying competence, maturity, and a sense of humor -- someone, in short, whom one could imagine taking over in a time of crisis. And she's not afraid to sound partisan in the right context.

Sebelius is the highly popular Democratic Governor of deep red Kansas. While there have undoubtedly been political compromises, as for any red-state Democrat, the core of her popularity comes from her widely recognized competence, first as state insurance commissioner -- where she took progressive/feminist positions such as "advocat[ing] better coverage for childbirth issues, including mandated coverage for 48-hour hospital stays following childbirth, ... crack[ing] down on gender discrimination in insurance coverage ... [and] instituting a successful 'Babies to Work' program for new moms and dads in her own agency" -- and then as governor. In 2006, Time profiled her as one of the nation's five best governors.

At the same time that she's demonstrated competence and an ability to work with Republicans, she has not hesitated to take strong Democratic positions. She has provoked GOP ire for complaining that the Iraq War was draining resources for the National Guard and leaving Kansas unprepared for emergencies. Despite governing at Operation Rescue's ground zero, she is strongly pro-choice (though, like John Kerry (and Nancy Keenan), taking the standard position of many Catholic Dems that she considers abortion morally wrong but legally and constitutionally protected). She has repeatedly used her veto power to reject anti-choicers' efforts to incrementally restrict women's rights in this area. For example, she vetoed a bill that would have "order[ed] the state to set minimum standards for abortion clinics". Similarly, "[c]iting academic freedom, [she] struck a provision from a budget bill that would have cut off money for state university departments that buy or show videos deemed obscene for undergraduate classes on sexuality".

Her personal and family biography is also appealing. Her father, Jack Gilligan, was the Democratic governor of Ohio from 1971 to 1975, and remains politically active in the key swing state state, serving on the Cincinnati Board of Education through 2007 (when he was 86). She owns a vacation home in Michigan, another swing state. She and her husband Gary (a federal magistrate judge, who was appointed as a district judge by President Clinton but was not confirmed) come across as likeable, "regular folks" whom voters will have no trouble connecting with. Her husband, who self-depricatingly calls himself "first dude", is the son of a Kansas Republican Congressman. Sebelius jokes, "I'm converting Republicans one at a time. First my husband, Gary...." The one cloud on the horizon is her then 23-year-old son's creating and selling a game (possibly from his home at the governor's mansion) called "Don't Drop the Soap", which apparently makes light of homosexual rape in prison, which might just manage to offend both the right (because it deals with gay sex at all) and the left (because it pathologizes it). That said, I'm not sure that "you stood by your son when he did something stupid" is necessarily the strongest line of attack.

Finally, while I don't think it's essential that Obama select a woman, there's no doubt that given the context of the rancorous primary -- not to mention that women are by far the largest identifiable demographic group in the Democratic party (outnumbering men almost 3:2 if I recall) -- it would be a strong plus. Moreover, Sibelius was reportedly on Kerry's short list for VP, which would help defuse criticism that she was selected merely because she was a woman who was not Hillary. Being Catholic is also probably a net demographic plus.

The only significant concern I have -- and it's more an unknown than a concern -- is that there's not enough in her record to judge her intellectual heft. She went to fine, but not elite universities, earning "a degree in political science from Trinity College in Washington, D.C. [and a] master's degree in public administration ... from the University of Kansas", and has no particular record of professional accomplishment prior to becoming a state legislator in 1987 (when she was almost 40). She is clearly a skilled politician, but between her selection and the VP debate, she will need to make herself enough of an expert in foreign policy (a subject that she has no particular experience with) that voters will feel comfortable with her taking over if need be. That's a challenging but doable task for someone with the intellect of, say, Bill or Hillary Clinton, but I honestly have no way of judging whether Sebelius is up to it. My hunch is that she is, but this is an area where the Obama team really needs to drill down and evaluate the quality of Sebelius's mind.

Despite that concern, it appears that Sebelius is a strong pick. And one that strikes me as quite likely to actually happen (despite the fact that, bizarrely, she's not trading on Intrade). I give her an A-.

Webb

2008-06-04T09:47:00.002-04:00

"There are always alternatives." -- Spock

With all the attention focused on the possibility of Hillary Clinton becoming Barack Obama's running mate, I think it's worth taking a step back to consider the other likely candidates for the VP slot. This is the first in an occasional series that seeks to do that.

Senator Jim Webb of Virginia has been getting the most non-Clinton buzz recently. Intrade has his as Obama's second most likely chocie (18.9%), trailing only Clinton (25%).

It's easy to see the appeal. Webb is a graduate of the Naval Academy and Georgetown Law, a Vietnam veteran who earned the Navy Cross for heroism as well as five other medals, a writer and intellectual, and was Ronald Reagan's Secretary of Defense. Webb split with the Republican party over Iraq -- presciently predicting in September 2002 the terrible risk of invading Iraq ("The issue before us is not simply whether the United States should end the regime of Saddam Hussein, but whether we as a nation are prepared to physically occupy territory in the Middle East for the next 30 to 50 years. Those who are pushing for a unilateral war in Iraq know full well that there is no exit strategy if we invade and stay.") -- and is not just a Democrat on foreign policy but has showed himself to be a leading voice for economic equality and has been solidly pro-choice (which not all Virginia Dems are (see Kaine, Tim)). And in 2006 he managed to defeat incumbent Senator George Allen, then a frontrunner for the GOP Presidential nomination, in red Virginia. Virginia is a key, if not an essential, state in Obama's road to victory.

So, yes, the heart thrills.

But.

There is an awful lot of baggage. On this, I am indebted to Kathy G, who has written a persuasive debunking of the Webb bubble. Bottom line: Webb has left a paper trail of extreme, right-wing statements going back until the 1970s and continuing into the 2000s. The worst include a 1979 article "called 'Women Can't Fight,' [in which] Webb argued that women were biologically unsuited to combat and didn't belong in the military academies [and] said that the mere presence of women was 'poisoning' the environment for male cadets", and continuing with calling the 1990s Tailhook investigation a "witch hunt". He'll clearly distance himself from that if he's nominated, and to some extent he already has, but it's surely not the way to bring the party together, and it raises serious questions about what he would do on feminist (and other) issues if he became President. He's an indifferent campaigner (or at least a poor fundraiser), he didn't actually do particularly well with the white male Virginians to whom he would allegedly appeal, he's not comfortable in a subordinate role, and he would have to vacate a Senate seat that could then easily flip back to the GOP.

So, while I'm quite pleased to have Webb in the Senate, the VP hype just doesn't -- and won't -- stand the scrutiny. Based on serious doubts as to his ability to help the ticket win and his fitness for the Presidency, as well as a preference not to choose a red-state Senator, the best I can give this choice would be a C+.

Obama!

2008-06-04T08:51:00.002-04:00

Candidates I've supported in contested primaries who've failed to win the nomination:

Hart,* Gore (1988), Tsongas, Dean

Candidates I've supported in contested primaries who've won the nomination:

Gore (2000), Obama

Candidates I've supported in contested primaries who've gone on to be President:

???

Barack Obama is not without his flaws, and Hillary Clinton is not without her virtues.

But this is exciting.

*I turned 18 after the primary, so while I voted in the general I was not able to vote in the primary.

Self-Hating Jew

2008-06-02T10:25:00.000-04:00

Joe Lieberman.

Fashion, Style & Grace.... Or Lack Thereof?

2008-05-21T09:47:00.006-04:00

It turns out that others who read the Lisa Belkin piece on women leaving science & engineering were annoyed, as I was, by its placement in the Fashion and Style section of the Times. The issue came up on a feminist sociology listserve to which I subscribe, and one of the sociologists in question wrote to Belkin about it. Here is Belkin's reply (which, as you'll see, she invited distribution of) with emphasis added and a few reactions interspersed:

You certainly are not the first person to ask this question. And I really am touched by the number of outraged women jumping to my defense. But this really isn't a matter of big-bad-sexist New York Times so much as its a matter of how-newspapers-work and how the internet has unexpected side effects.

The "big-bad-sexist New York Times" is just a figment of your over-heated, hysterical imagination, in spite of what you might read in your rabid radical bra-burning publications. It's about "how newspapers work," which you, as a person with a PhD in sociology, couldn't possibly understand.

I write a column. It appears in the same place every other week. The general topic of the column is Life and Work (hence its title, Life's Work) and it is a good fit for Thursday Styles if you think of the word, as I do, in terms of LifeStyle (and yes, I completely agree with Trip Gabriel's description of the section in his original response to you.)

If you turn yourself inside out, and look at it cross-eyed and backwards, the way I do, there's nothing at all trivializing about the Styles section... Indeed, I just pretend that it's something that it's not, and then it doesn't seem bad at all.

The content of the column varies, but often involves the role of women in the workplace. And the location of said column doesn't change depending on the topic, and certainly no one tells me that I cant cover meaty and newsy topics because I'm in section likely read mostly by women (now THAT would be sexist...)

See, I can recognize what sexism really is. So don't you worry your silly, radical, hysterical self.

So periodically there is a bit of a disconnect. It is more jarring, I think, if you come to the column from the internet, where all you see is the section title "Fashion and Style" than if you come to it through the physical paper, where it looks very much like a column. And I do think that maybe there is a lesson for the Times to learn there, that we should find a way to place stories on the web-page by content, rather than section, in circumstances like these.

But the outrage out there whenever this has happened in the case of my particular column is interesting. Do you really think that the powers-that-be sat around and said, "oooh, this is about girls, lets put it in the girl section"? It saddens me that the conclusion jumped to so quickly by so many is that this is a disservice to women, rather than just one woman writing one article that happens to run in one spot.

Um, yeah. Maybe not in this particular case, but I do actually think that the powers-that-be very often sit around and say, "ooh, this is about girls, let's put it in the girls section." Have you noticed what happens to fiction written by women these days? It's now all marketed as "chick lit," regardless of its actual content. See again the piece in Bitch if you want to be reminded how systematic this kind of thing is. And it "saddens" her that we "jump" to these conclusions? She sounds like a classic concern troll...

By the way, I should mention that this same column ran in the Business section for nine years. I suspect (but of course have no way of measuring conclusively) that the letters I get like this one are from people whose attention I never managed to catch when I was in that very serious location.
I asked for the move to Style because it meant twice the number of words and about twice the number of readers. I figure if I am going to write about these subjects -- and I plan to do so often -- I want to reach all the people I can...

By the way, I think you're a stupid, trivial, frivilous twit who would never have read the business section of the New York Times, and since I really want a readership of stupid, trivial, frivilous twits, I switched to the Fashion and Style section... Gee, Lisa, maybe you never got letters complaining about where your column was located when it was in the business section because it was in the business section and people didn't think that was a trivializing place for articles on women and work to be.

Thanks for caring so much about this. And please feel free to distribute to your list-serve. I'd love to continue this conversation with whoever there might be interested.

Thanks for caring, but I don't really need your concern, because you see, I don't really have your silly second-wave issues, and I'm just fine here with my good buds at the NYT, who aren't the least bit sexist, ever.

I take back anything nice I said about Belkin in my previous post.

Maybe I'm just an over-sensitive, rabid, bra-burning old-school radical type (as Belkin seems to imply the readers who objected to the story's placement all are), but to me, Belkin's reply was about as dismissive as if she'd just come out and said, "settle down, now, ladies."

Fred didn't see it that way at all. He read her reply as thoughtful and respectful. Go figure.

Change the Men, You Idiots

2008-05-16T10:52:00.003-04:00

I'm sorry I couldn't come up with a snappier title for this post... But honestly.

Lisa Belkin had a piece in the Times* yesterday reporting on what looks like a good, new study by Sylvia Hewlitt's** organization about the attrociously sexist culture in many branches of the sciences, particularly engineering & computer science, and how it contributes to women's exits from those fields. As she notes, the proportion of women getting trained in those areas has increased substantially over the past 20 years, but women also leave in greater numbers than they do from law or investment banking.

The reasons for women's exodus that are emphasized in the article have to do entirely with the behavior of the men in these fields--men who engage in crude, locker-room humor, withhold valuable work-related information from female colleagues, and fail to act as mentors for junior women.

But when a company that desperately needs these smart, talented women decides to institute a retention program, what is the nature of that program?

The program at Johnson & Johnson, called “Crossing the Finish Line,” tutors
women in leadership skills.

It's a program to change the women, as if they're the problem. That's it--they're leaving because they don't have enough "leadership skills," not because they're being harassed, hounded, left out of the loop...

God forbid that anyone should ever try to change men.

*Note that the article is in the Fashion and Style section, for lord's sake.

**See? I'm willing to be gracious. I may ream Hewlitt for Creating a Life, but if her organization publishes something worthwhile, I'm willing to give her credit...

Buyer's Remorse, Part II

2008-05-15T16:08:00.001-04:00

Sweetie?

Related Post: Buyer's Remorse

NARAL Endorses Obama

2008-05-14T15:07:00.004-04:00

UPDATE: Following discussion with Mary and further reflection, I'm not convinced the analysis in this post is entirely right. Rather than delete or revise it, I'll just note that as to NARAL, Ann at Feministing makes a similar point, but more clearly:

...If NARAL truly believed Obama to be the superior candidate on choice, they could have made this endorsement months ago. (Such a move would have been far more damaging to Clinton.) I do have to ask, though, why NARAL chose to endorse now rather than, say, after one of the candidate has officially dropped out?
I wonder if NARAL is going to lose donor support over this move. I've gotta believe that a lot of NARAL's core donors are Clinton supporters. Also, is this a bad move in general because it's likely to be spun, in the media, as a "catfight" between pro-choice organizations? Other groups, such as the National Women's Political Caucus, have chastised NARAL's endorsement because they "believe that this announcement at this time will divide the choice community at a time when we need to stand united." Similar themes are popping up in this comment thread over at Blog for Choice.

As to Emily's List, I think I should have made my point more personal -- EL's endorsement of Clinton has made me less likely to donate to the group for this election cycle -- but I'm not sure whether other potential EL donors have reacted similarly (although a minute on Google led to an Open Left post on which at least two commenters did). I'd also note that according to Open Secrets, Emily's List has spent over 35% of it money on Hillary Clinton, while the next highest candidate (Niki Tsongas) received about 7%, and it does seem reasonable to conclude that there are many, many people who would like more pro-choice women in Congress but don't support Clinton and would be deterred from contributing if 35 cents of every dollar went to Clinton. Of course, there are probably also many potential contributors who are energized by the Clinton campaign, so for all I know EL made the right move for building its institution (even setting aside the consideration that, when EL endorsed, Clinton seemed likely to win).

NARAL Pro-Choice America today endorsed Barack Obama. I wish they hadn't.

My reasons are both similar and different than my disappointment with Emily's List's endorsement of Hillary Clinton (which they did even before she announced her candidacy). In that case, my disappointment was based on the fact that supporting Clinton (which Emily's List has invested a great deal in) undercut Emily's List's core competency, which is mobilizing the support of pro-choice voters who want to support pro-choice female candidates, but who may not necessarily have the information to determine where their campaign contributions are best spent, both in terms of the candidates' records and their ability to win. If I contribute to Emily's List, I may not know the name of the candidate who's getting the money, but I know she's someone who shares my values and has a legitimate chance of winning. Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign is in an entirely different category. Not only did she instantly become Emily's List's most prominent endorsee, by far, but she was undoubtedly not the choice of many -- maybe even most -- Emily's List contributors (for reasons relating both to the Iraq War and also to some of her rhetoric on abortion*). By mobilizing for Clinton, Emily's List risks causing donors to question whether Emily's List is really the best place to entrust their contributions.

NARAL's endorsement of Barack Obama raises similar issues -- and unlike Emily's List, NARAL (under President Nancy Keenan) doesn't have the credibility to make me comfortable with the selection of one pro-choice Democrat over another. Again, many or most of NARAL's supporters are not supporting Obama.

But the problems are deeper in the case of NARAL because of the timing of the endorsement. Emily's List at least made an endorsement when it could make a difference. NARAL made its endorsement when it was too late to affect the primary (which, as a practical matter, Obama has won) but too soon to be seen as a move against John McCain (although Keenan tries to cast it as such). The timing makes clear that it is intended as a "message" to Clinton. Keenan recognizes, but fails to really address the timing concern:

I know that most of you are probably thinking, "Why did you decide to endorse Obama, and why are you doing it now?" ...

Further, I believe Sen. Obama is going to be the Democratic nominee. He leads in pledged delegates, superdelegates, the popular vote, and cash-on-hand. As a former elected official, I know that having the three "m's" of a campaign - money, message and manpower (or womanpower!) - are how we win elections. Sen. Obama will be our next president....

Finally, NARAL Pro-Choice America, as the political leader of the pro-choice movement, felt it was time to take a leadership role. We have been so fortunate to have two fully pro-choice candidates running for the Democratic nomination and to that end, we've consistently praised both Sen. Clinton and Sen. Obama for their leadership in standing up for women's reproductive rights. We continue to look forward to working with them in the future. But, for the sake of the reproductive-rights movement, we need to put any perceived differences behind us, and get to work putting Sen. Obama in the White House. We want to let women know that, no doubt about it, we have trust and confidence in Obama's ability and willingness to fight for a woman's right to choose. He's already proven himself in that regard.

Got it? Because NARAL is a "leader", they have to "take a leadership role" by following the outcome of the primary. Oh, and "womanpower" -- how cute.

I do look forward to NARAL working for Barack Obama in the general election. I do not view this as a flub on par with NARAL's endorsements of Joe Lieberman and Lincoln Chafee. There may even be a time, after the last primaries in early June, when issues organizations (and the party) have to begin treating Obama as de facto nominee. But the timing of this one was not right.

* I mostly defended Clinton's "common ground" speech (a phrase also accepted by Obama), but there is no doubt it was controversial within the pro-choice community.

Related Posts: Seriously, Is Nancy Keenan Even Pro-Choice; Letter to NARAL; ... Not A Lincoln.

You Gotta Lotta Bawls, Softbawls, That Is, Edition

2008-05-14T13:25:00.004-04:00

Unfortunately, my hope that the "what a girl" insult would go away has been promptly dashed.

Apparently, New York Mets journeyman Nelson Figueroa thinks insulting the Washington Nationals as "girls" somehow justifies his own poor performance:

"They were cheerleading in the dugout like a bunch of softball girls," Figueroa said. "I'm a professional, just like anybody else. I take huge offense to that. If that's what a last-place team needs to do to fire themselves up, so be it. I think you need to show a little bit more class, a little bit more professionalism. They won tonight, but again, in the long run, they are who they are."

Figueroa couldn't pinpoint the culprits, but suggested the serenading peaked during the third inning, when the Nats loaded the bases and he forced in a run by walking Nick Johnson.

"Don't care," Figueroa said about learning the names of the perpetrators. "Truly unprofessional. "That's why they are who they are."

So, the Nats are unprofessional "girls" because they razzed Figueroa from the bench, but Figueroa is a true professional -- and, equally important, a man -- even though he let the razzing upset him and walked in the go-ahead run? Got it. Kind of like Alex Rodriguez being a "girl" for nearly passing out while his wife, an actual woman, was in labor.

Ironically, it seems that Figueroa was the one who forgot he wasn't playing beer league softball:

Figueroa (2-3) didn't help his cause. He loaded the bases in the third by plunking Ryan Zimmerman, then forced in a run by walking Johnson as the Nats tied the score at 2.

An inning later, ... Figueroa committed a costly throwing error. After knocking down Felipe Lopez's comebacker with two runners in scoring position, Figueroa recovered the ball and seemingly had Rob Mackowiak nailed at the plate. But Figueroa's throw went well wide of catcher Brian Schneider as Washington again tied the score, this time at 3.

"I couldn't see anything," said Figueroa, who is expected to be skipped this weekend at Yankee Stadium. "The combination of spinning quickly and the wind blowing in my face, my eyes were blurry and I just tried to throw the ball softly, so I hoped that Schneider could get to it. I need to take my time. I panicked, thinking I knocked it down and I had a chance to get this guy out at home. I wanted to stop the bleeding right there but made it worse." ...

"At times it seemed like every pitch wouldn't work," Figueroa said. "I literally tried to throw balls down the middle just to let them hit it. When they did, they fouled off six or seven pitches in a row."

A consummate professional. No way around it.

Related Post: You Gotta Lotta Bawls, Enough Bawls to Not Have a Lotta Bawls When You Should Have a Lotta Bawls, or Something Like That, Edition

You Gotta Lotta Bawls, Repeat Offender Edition

2008-05-08T16:10:00.002-04:00

I understand that Major League Baseball is not a bastion of feminism.

But still. White Sox manager Ozzie Guillen has a problem.

Two years ago, he was forced to apologize (in a very limited, if I offended kind of way) for calling a reporter a "fucking fag".

Now, his Sox are trying to break their slump by "placing a female blow-up doll in the clubhouse with strategically placed bats around it".

Waiting for the President to Die

2008-05-08T11:16:00.002-04:00

Josh Marshall speculates that Hillary Clinton doesn't (or at least shouldn't) want to be Barack Obama's running mate, arguing that becoming Vice President would actually reduce her chances for winning the Presidency in 2016, as well as reducing the prestige and power she can enjoy as an influential Senator in the party that controls the Senate. Both of those rationales are actually somewhat dubious -- recognizing that it depends a great deal on what Obama and Clinton might negotiate concerning her role -- but Marshall leaves out one critical consideration. As Lynne Cheney memorably put it in Body Politic, the Vice President's job is waiting for the President to die.*

I give little credence to breathless speculation that Obama would be somehow especially likely to be assassinated because of his race -- the Secret Service is quite good at protecting Presidents these days -- but the fact is, people die. Obama will be 47 when he's sworn in. Using standard life tables, a 47-year-old man has approximately a 95% chance of making it to 55. While this is somewhat sobering news for me (as I am not much younger than Obama), it is good news for Clinton, who would have a 5% chance of becoming President. (While Clinton herself has only a 91% chance, actuarially, of making it through eight years in the Obama Administration, the odds that they will both die, and that Clinton will die first, is only about .2%, so her own mortality does not materially reduce the likelihood she would succeed Obama.)

Five percent. Is it worth it for Hillary Clinton to take a job that offers her a 5% chance at the Presidency? The question answers itself. According to Intrade, her current odds of winning the 2008 general election are 6%. And she fights on.

Whether Clinton would accept the VP slot may depend on how it is offered. A grudging offer, with no assurances of influence, will probably be rejected. But a genuine offer by Obama, which includes a promise of real authority in at least some areas, is something that will be very tempting.

*The full quote is: "Under the Constitution, the only thing the job calls for is waiting: for the president to die or be impeached, waiting for the Senate to wind up in a tie vote so the vice president can break it."

You Gotta Lotta Bawls, Enough Bawls to Not Have a Lotta Bawls When You Should Have a Lotta Bawls, or Something Like That, Edition

2008-05-06T15:26:00.005-04:00

Is it two years already? I hope long time readers remember Stone Court's You Gotta Lotta Bawls series, where I cover the intersection of baseball with law, politics, and society. The last in the series, from May 2006, praised Yankees third baseman Alex Rodriguez (or at least condemned his critics) when he used a pink bat to raise money to fight breast cancer. This edition, not so much.

Apparently, A-Rod is beyond pathetic as a labor partner. Last month, it was reported that he not only showed up for his second daughter's birth after the event, but that he said that was "perfect timing":

"The timing came from God," Rodriguez said. "The first time I was there for 2 1/2 hours of pushing. This time it was 10 minutes after the delivery. It was perfect timing. That was great."

Well, okaaaaay. I wondered what Cynthia Rodriguez thought about the timing. But I thought, maybe, just maybe, he was trying to put a positive spin on an unfortunate situation caused by the Yankees' travel schedule, and that he just put his foot in his mouth.

Apparently not. According to Pete Abraham, the first delivery was worse. Here's Cynthia Rodriguez:

“As tough and big as he seems, he is real wimpy around doctors or any type of medical situation. I don’t know why I thought the birth of our child would be different. In the middle of the night, I realized that I needed to go to the hospital. I wake him up. The first thing that comes out of his mouth, ‘Can we call your mother?’ And I started, ‘No. Let’s wait and make sure that I am in labor, and make sure that, you know, it’s the middle of the night.’ And go to the hospital and everything. And finally, a few hours later, I said, ‘I think you can call my mom now.’

“Uh, and the color came back to his face when I told him he could call my mom. And then forget it. I was like not even having a baby; he was the one. The one nurse had a cold cloth on his head. The other nurse had the blood pressure on his arm. And my mother was like rubbing his back. And he is passed out on a couch. And I am there, in the middle of labor. And really, I am not being paid much attention to besides the doctor and a couple of nurses. And he is there moaning. In between pushing, I am going, ‘Honey, are you OK?’ And are you breathing? Are you OK?’"

Mary referred me to the comments to that post, which she fairly described as disheartening from a gender perspective. But this one is priceless:

hah the dude can hit a homerun 540 feet but can’t handle his son’s birth when his wife is going thru a lot of pain. haha wat a girl.

What a girl? A-Rod's weakness as a labor partner is because he's a girl? If there were justice in the world, the What A Girl Insult would be so embarrassed that he would go away and hide, never to be seen again.

Krugman v. Obama

2008-05-02T10:40:00.004-04:00

Paul Krugman today condemns Barack Obama's crediting Republicans with "the idea that regulation can be flexible rather than a matter of 'top-down command and control,' and in particular for the idea of controlling pollution with a system of tradable emission permits rather than rigid regulations". Krugman's critique is that Obama shouldn't be giving Republicans credit for an "idea of markets in emission permits [that] had long been accepted by economists of all political stripes".

Krugman's critique is mostly fair on the history (though Obama actually credits not just Republicans but also "people who thought about the markets", i.e., the economists Krugman refers to), but not necessarily on the politics of the moment.

As to the history, as Krugman acknowledges, President George H.W. Bush signed the 1990 Clear Air Act Amendments, which included the cap-and-trade protocol that is generally considered to have been successful in reducing emissions. The bill passed with broad bipartisan support, garnering 89 votes in the Senate (including John McCain's). More generally, as documented in Derthick and Quirk, The Politics of Deregulation (Brookings 1985), the idea of deregulation was one that gained currency on both the left and the right (although, as the book documents, Democrats and Republicans often meant different things by the ambiguous word "deregulation"). For example, Senator Edward Kennedy -- often used as a caricature of a "big government liberal" -- took up the issue of airline deregulation in the mid-1970s at the urging of staffer (now Justice) Stephen Breyer.

That said, while Krugman is right on his history, it's less clear that he's right about the politics of Obama's answer. Here's the context of the answer discussed by Krugman:

WALLACE: ... As a president, can you name a hot-button issue where you would be willing to buck the Democratic Party line and say, "You know what? Republicans have a better idea here?"

OBAMA: Well, I think there are a whole host of areas where Republicans in some cases may have a better idea.

WALLACE: Such as?

OBAMA: Well, on issues of regulation. I think that back in the '60s and '70s a lot of the way we regulated industry was top-down command and control, we're going to tell businesses exactly how to do things.

And you know, I think that the Republican Party and people who thought about the markets came up with the notion that, "You know what? If you simply set some guidelines, some rules and incentives, for businesses — let them figure out how they're going to, for example, reduce pollution," and a cap and trade system, for example is a smarter way of doing it, controlling pollution, than dictating every single rule that a company has to abide by, which creates a lot of bureaucracy and red tape and oftentimes is less efficient.

Now, we can debate Obama's whole post-partisan posturing. On the downside, the Republicans really have run the country into a ditch, so why should our candidate be taking their ideas seriously? On the other, Obama's approach is arguably Bush (circa 2000) in reverse, giving lip service to bipartisanship while taking positions consistent with party orthodoxy -- and whatever Bush's flaws, failing to push the goals of his party's base is not one of them. It's a viable strategy, but it can require some fast footwork.

Wallace's question essentially called Obama on the disconnect between his centrist rhetoric and his liberal policy positions. That's actually a fair attack -- but Obama can't let it succeed, because it goes to the core of his candidacy. He had to offer up something. That's why, to my mind, the response on regulation was actually quite deft. He offered an intentionally exaggerated description ("command and control") of an approach that was taken 30 or 40 years ago, but that no Democrat is urging now, and gives Republicans partial credit for coming up with a better idea, which by the way, we can use now to promote Democratic goals such as reducing pollution. Not a single modern Democrat gets thrown under the bus, and the overall message -- we're smarter now and can regulate effectively -- actually undercuts the Republican message that regulation is inherently counterproductive. It's actually a version of the "new Democrat" approach used successfully by Bill Clinton in 1992.

(Somewhat similarly, Obama's next suggestion purports to buck the teachers' unions by "experimenting with different ways of compensating teachers", but he goes on to distinguish between a simplistic "merit pay", which he opposes, and "having assessment tools" that allow us to "pay excellence more", a more nuanced view that is actually gaining traction among teachers.)

Superstition 1, Healthy Babies 0

2008-04-25T09:01:00.005-04:00

Mary sent me this article about the Texas polygamy case. Apparently, the mothers can see their children to pray with them, but not to breastfeed them:

The Texas judge overseeing the polygamous FLDS sect's case has rebuffed pleas to allow breast-feeding mothers to remain with their children in state custody.

Judge Barbara Walther did rule that the women and children currently staying at the San Angelo Coliseum could meet twice a day to pray without being monitored by state workers.

I'll admit that the title of this post is a bit unfair, as I do not doubt that a mother praying with a child can have real psychological benefits in a time of stress, but so can breastfeeding, which promotes the physical and psychological health of babies.

Beyond the obvious inconsistency, the judge's reasoning shows a lack of understanding of the basics of breastfeeding:

Walther acknowledged the nutritional and bonding benefits of breast-feeding.

"But every day in this country, we have mothers who go back to work after six weeks of maternity leave," she said....

Apparently, Judge Walthers has never seen one of these:
In fact, through the use of breast pumps and other strategies, 23% of U.S. mothers who work full time outside their home (and 33% of those who work part time) are still breastfeeding at six months, which is not that different from the 35% of mothers who are not employed.

UPDATE: A website set up to monitor the situation reports that the judge has reversed herself. Good news.

Strategy Is For Girls

2008-04-21T10:44:00.004-04:00

Shorter Bob Margolis:

Sure Danica Patrick won the Japan 300, but it doesn't count because she used strategy to take advantage of a favorable opportunity and looks good in a swimming suit.

No, seriously, he really said that:

Danica Patrick’s first IndyCar win in the Japan 300 was more a triumph in public relations than auto racing.

It didn’t happen as the result of a final lap, wheel-to-wheel battle, one that many close observers of the sport feel she will never win.

It instead was more a battle between the race engineer’s computers on the Andretti Green team and that of her rival Helio Castroneves’ Penske Racing team. It was a matter of who would get the best fuel mileage in the final handful of laps of the 200-lap race.

Both drivers had made their final pit stop on Lap 148, and when race leader Scott Dixon was forced onto pit road for a final splash of fuel, it became an opportunity for both Patrick and Castroneves to win – in a fuel mileage battle....

The win was the result of a well-calculated move – pure and simple....
Despite her having only won in go-karts and not while driving in a professional auto race, Patrick has been able to command a legion of fans, perhaps for no reason other than she is a woman participating in what most regard as a man’s sport.

And after tiring of fending off questions about when she would win, she distracted her detractors by posing in swimsuits and making suggestive ads for her sponsors.

I don't know anything about auto racing, but -- big surprise -- using strategy is not generally considered a bad thing, at least when a man does it:

Michael Schumacher is just as happy to outsmart the field as he is to dominate it.

He won the Canadian Grand Prix on Sunday for his seventh victory in eight races, using a two-pit-stop strategy to perfection to overcome a season-worst sixth-place start.

UPDATE: I really wasn't trying to channel Melissa McEwan this morning, so I'll take refuge in the "great minds think alike" defense....

UPDATE 2: Via Feministing, they're changing the rules to make it harder for women to win.

Buyer's Remorse

2008-04-21T10:26:00.005-04:00

What is it with Barack Obama's foot-in-mouth disease?

"You have a real choice in this election. Either Democrat would be better than John McCain. And all three of us would be better than George Bush," Obama told a town hall event in Pennsylvania. "But what you have to ask yourself is, who has the chance to actually, really change things in a fundamental way?" (Emphasis added.)

If the electorate thinks voting for McCain is voting for four more years of Bush, we win. If it doesn't, we don't.

Does Obama really not get that?

UPDATE: Hillary Clinton would be right about this ("We need a nominee who will take on John McCain, not cheer on John McCain."), if she hadn't spent last month trumpeting John McCain's wonderful commander-in-chief credentials.

Blood Libel

2008-04-15T14:39:00.001-04:00

OK, it's not quite that bad, but it's close:

Q: ...It's been suggested that the President, who has met so often with Catholic leaders and reached out so aggressively to Catholic groups, and whose social views very closely reflect Catholic Orthodoxy, is actually America's first Catholic President. What do you think of that? (Laughter.)

MS. PERINO: He's also been called America's -- or, the first Jewish President, is what the Israelis call him, too.

And What Positions Are Those, Exactly?

2008-04-15T10:32:00.003-04:00

Joe Lieberman's remarks suggesting that Barack Obama is perilously close to being a Marxist are getting a lot of attention:

[ANDREW] NAPOLITANO: Hey Sen. Lieberman, you know Barack Obama, is he a Marxist as Bill Kristol says might be the case in today’s New York Times? Is he an elitist like your colleague Hillary Clinton says he is?

LIEBERMAN: Well, you know, I must say that’s a good question. I know him now for a little more than three years since he came into the Senate and he’s obviously very smart and he’s a good guy. I will tell ya that during this campaign, I’ve learned some things about him, about the kind of environment from which he came ideologically. And I wouldn’t…I’d hesitate to say he’s a Marxist, but he’s got some positions that are far to the left of me and I think mainstream America. (Emphasis added.)

While it's the first part of Lieberman's answer that's gotten the most attention, the last part is also worthy of attention.

Mary's response, on reading this, was to ask, "And what positions are those, exactly?" To quote Joe Lieberman, I must say that’s a good question.

It can't be about the Iraq War. Lieberman and Obama may disagree about that, but Obama's opposition to the war has never been a secret, and cannot be something Lieberman learned about Obama "during this campaign". It's hard to imagine what domestic issue it could be. Lieberman's stated positions on domestic policy remain relatively liberal -- for example, he's still nominally pro-choice, he's co-sponsored the Wyden-Bennett universal healthcare bill that's probably more "liberal" than the Obama plan, and even as late as 2007 he continues to receive moderate to liberal voting scores from National Journal on economic and social issues (although, to be sure, less liberal than Obama). I could be forgetting something, but I am hard pressed to think of a domestic policy "position" (far less a prominent one) that Obama has taken during this campaign that is "far to the left" of Joe Lieberman.

The key to understanding Lieberman's statement is that he's not talking about Obama's "positions" at all. What he means actually comes out earlier in the passage -- he's talking about "the kind of environment from which he came ideologically". He's talking about Rev. Jeremiah Wright. And that, I think, is pretty clearly about race, not positions.

Dream Team?

2008-04-11T11:29:00.005-04:00

Fred and I got talking again this morning of the possibility of Obama and Clinton ending up on a ticket together.

Even now, however much animosity the most active of their supporters may be feeling, I suspect that many, many rank & file Democrats would respond as the audience at the debate in Texas (was it Texas? my mind is going) did and be ecstatic.

I had previously been pretty skeptical of the idea of the combination with Obama at the top, just because the age and experience issues (and, admittedly, Clinton's somewhat overinflated view of herself) seemed to make it unworkable.

But Fred points out that she really is young enough to be v.p. for 2 terms and still serve 2 of her own.

And more importantly, from my perspective, it occurred to me that bringing Clinton onto his ticket would offer Obama a very important "out" of some of the stupider things he's said so far in the campaign.

One of the real challenges of supporting Obama, for me, has been that I simultaneously agree with almost everything Paul Krugman has said about his shortcomings on domestic policy and his use of Republican talking points--particularly his ridiculousness on health care mandates and the stupid stuff he said about a social security crisis.

So here's the thing. If Clinton ran as Obama's Vice President, it would give him a second chance on those issues. He gets to say that in order to unify the party, they've met in the middle, or made some accommodations to each other, and that gets him off the hook for having to defend those indefensible positions in the general election. He could even, as Fred suggested, spin it even more positively, saying how "blessed" he is to be running with someone who has her experience on the health care issue...

Imagine it as Kennedy-Johnson. They didn't love each other beforehand, but each brought something important to the ticket. The only difference would be that instead of giving Clinton the mushroom treatment* (I have to credit Fred for putting it that way), as Johnson was, you would actually (as Fred has blogged before) give her a portfolio of important domestic issues to be in charge of.

Also, during the general election, we have him floating along with his feet not quite touching the ground, inspiring people, while she takes out the opposition with her sharp left hook... She'd be a much better attack dog V.P. candidate than Edwards was (which isn't actually saying much, much as I am fond of Edwards for his poverty positions). I don't care who McCain picks as a running mate--I think we could count on Clinton to demolish him or her in the debates.

Also... I never liked the people Clinton surrounded herself with (the Penns and Wolfsons and the rest), with the exception (most of the time) of Bill, but at the same time, I've never stopped liking her. If she's the running mate, her people don't really get to decide the direction or tone of the campaign, presumably. So we get to ditch the overpaid blowhard consultants with terrible judgement that she seems determined to surround herself with, but we still get Clinton herself.

* I assume everyone knows what this is, but just in case not... Kept in the dark and fed shit.

Brand Awareness

2008-04-07T09:15:00.002-04:00

Baby Girl Garth turned eleven months old this weekend. Now that she's a big girl, she won't eat baby cereal anymore ... unless she sees it poured out of the box with a baby on it.

Retail Politics

2008-03-20T12:34:00.002-04:00

New New York Governor David Paterson has an interesting definition of "constituent services":

Gov. Paterson admitted Wednesday he may have improperly billed his campaign for at least one hotel tryst with a girlfriend.

The hotel tryst was apparently listed as "constituent services."

Even more ambiguous is this one:

A campaign payment to Lila Kirton, a high-ranking state employee who was one of his paramours, was listed as "professional services" - which is supposed to refer to legal advice, accounting or speechwriting.

The article doesn't reveal whether Kirton was in fact providing legitimate services to the campaign. Under the circumstances, I hope so.

Yes

2008-03-18T13:33:00.003-04:00

I've been meaning to post since Friday on the fact that Barack Obama's defensiveness about Jeremiah Wright -- that he was like a "crazy uncle" and that Obama had not personally heard him say exactly the things he was recorded saying -- was not working, and that he needed to change the dynamic by giving a serious, thoughtful speech about race in America. The kind of "JFK" speech Mitt Romney promised, but failed to deliver, about religion. It couldn't just be a speech denouncing what Wright said, as Obama had been doing already in response to questions, or even denouncing Wright himself, which would hardly have been credible given their close personal relationship. Obama needed to give a speech that acknowledged America's racist past, and continuing racism today -- i.e., he needed to honestly acknowledge that Wright's statements, however objectionable to most Americans, were born of frustration with true injustice, because to do otherwise would not have been credible -- but at the same time he needed to explain why, even with that acknowledgment, his views were not Wright's. The explanation, quite naturally, and in keeping with the theme of the campaign, would be generational -- that there has been progress, progress that Barack Obama has quite obviously been a beneficiary of. (That does not mean, of course, that we can pat ourselves on the back and say racism is gone, but it does mean that Barack Obama can credibly say he approaches the issue of race from a perspective that is very different than that of black men and women of Jeremiah Wright's generation, even as he honors their experience.)

Well, it's been nearly a month in blog years since Friday, so fortunately the Obama campaign didn't wait for me. Obama gave the speech he had to give today.

... And Now Jane Won't Wear Anything But Pink ...

2008-03-14T11:11:00.003-04:00

Baby Girl Garth doesn't wear a lot of pink. There's nothing wrong with pink in the abstract -- I have a pink shirt that I'm rather fond of -- but in my view there is no doubt that in our society pink is used to put girls (and sometimes men) "in their place". It's not an outright boycott, mind you, but Mary and I do prefer that Baby be able to live even a few months without being aggressively gendered by society.

And that bugs people.

Yesterday, the owner of Baby's day care, with whom we have become very friendly, bought Baby some clothes and shoes. This was very kind and appreciated. But everything was pink, a circumstance she mentioned. (I think she even said, "pretty in pink".) Implication: That baby doesn't wear enough pink.

I have heard literally hundreds of times the following story. Baby girl's parents didn't dress her in pink. Now she's old enough to decide for herself and wants to wear nothing but pink. I've heard it as a parable in reference to our baby. I've heard it independently of our baby, from bemused or disappointed parents of the child in question, or from self-satisfied friends of the aforementioned parents. (I've also heard variations of the same tale involving Barbies, princesses, etc.)

In all cases, the moral is: You will get your comeuppance for daring to challenge gender orthodoxy. Your daughter will "act like a girl" no matter what you do, because that is her true nature, and it is only your own hubris that makes you act otherwise. The moral, of course, makes no sense. People can argue nature vs. nurture about a lot of things. But choice of clothing is clearly socially constructed, and the custom of dressing girls in pink is less than a century old and, apparently, used to be reversed (pink for boys).

It may be that Baby Girl Garth decides some day she loves pink, but if she does, it will not be because she suddenly discovers her "true nature", but rather because a lot of people are very threatened by the idea that one might treat a baby girl the same as one would treat a baby boy.

Related Posts: Pink; You Gotta Lotta Bawls, Pink Edition

Bed Rest and Authority

2008-03-13T09:31:00.004-04:00

David Cohen has up an interesting post on bed rest, which is widely prescribed for a variety of pregnancy ailments.

Cohen's wife, who is 33 weeks pregnant, has been prescribed bed rest for preeclampsia, even though, he notes, "studies indicate that bedrest for preeclampsia does not actually improve pregnancy outcomes". Cohen rightly identifies an important feminist issue here:

So why do doctors put women through the dreadful and draining experience of bed rest? Medical intuition, risk aversion, the intransigence of inertia — all these are certainly factors here. But, behind all of this, is there something else going on? Are doctors subconsciously acting on age-old stereotypes about what women should be doing during pregnancy? Are they putting women on bed rest because, when anything in life presents a difficulty to a pregnancy, the response is to make women stop whatever it is that they are doing in their lives and focus solely on being the babymakers that they biologically should be?

I am certainly not saying that my wife’s doctor has this motivation or that any particular doctor does. But, when research shows that bed rest does not have benefits but the recommendation still persists, background assumptions about women and pregnancy have to be analyzed.

I would state the case even more strongly. To direct a women to stop working, or doing whatever else she wants to do with her time, when there is no evidence of a resulting medical benefit, shows a reprehensible contempt for the value of women's time. If anything, Cohen is going too easy on the doctor. Did the doctor (a specialist in obstetrics, I assume) tell Cohen's wife that empirical studies don't support the advice being given? Did he or she seriously think through the costs and benefits of following that advice, and counsel Cohen's wife so that she could make an informed decision? Even if the answer is yes, would he or she have done the same for a patient with less income or education? These are exactly the kinds of issues that obstetricians should be expected to give serious thought to, if they are going to properly serve their patients.

Despite all of that, Cohen and his wife have chosen to follow the doctor's advice, even though they are presumably sophisticated people who appreciate the value of controlled empirical studies. That is completely understandable. As expectant parents, we want to protect our children. It is very hard to disregard authority, even in the face of clear empirical evidence, as in the case of alcohol or caffeine consumption by pregnant women. Mary and I knew that Bendectin, which is an effective anti-morning-sickness drug that can be replicated at home with a combination of Vitamin B-6 and Unisom, poses no risk to the fetus, but subjectively it is still a bit scary to take because of past pronouncements as to its dangers. That is why it is incumbent on those in positions of authority, both individual obstetricians and the relevant medical academies, to think rigorously about these issues, and in doing so to recognize that a woman's time does not become valueless merely because she is pregnant.

Related Posts: Throwing Up Is Good For You (Bendectin); Cheers to the New Baby! (Alcohol); Cheers to the New Baby! Part II

Despicable

2008-03-07T10:35:00.006-05:00

Matthew Yglesias is rightly disgusted that Anti-Defamation League head Abe Foxman is giving a pass to anti-Semite minister John Hagee because Hagee is, in Foxman's view, "an advocate of Israel". (Yglegias points out that being "pro-Israel" is a dubious description of Hagee, as his theology imagines that present support for Israel will lead to Armageddon.)

While it's bad enough that Foxman says Hagee is alright with him, what's worse is that Foxman actually says Hagee is "opposed to antisemitism". How can Foxman square that with this?

It was the disobedience and rebellion of the Jews, God's chosen people, to their covenantal responsibility to serve only the one true God, Jehovah, that gave rise to the opposition and persecution that they experienced beginning in Canaan and continuing to this very day....

Doesn't that say that anti-Semitism was the divinely approved response to what Jews have done? Isn't that the opposite of being "opposed to anti-Semitism"?

It is, frankly, despicable that the head of a leading organization charged with fighting anti-Semitism -- an organization whose charter honorably undertakes "to stop, by appeals to reason and conscience and, if necessary, by appeals to law, the defamation of the Jewish people" (emphasis added) -- should so abandon reason and principle in favor of what he supposes (wrongly, but that's another matter) to be in Israel's short-term interest.

Where We Are

2008-03-05T10:21:00.002-05:00

The market still sees Obama as a 3:1 favorite. If you feel like making a few bucks, I have a hunch it will be more like 60:40 within the week, as the market digests the new dynamics of the race. Despite recent emphasis on "delegate math" -- which shows that Obama will almost certainly finish with more pledged delegates -- the working assumption that superdelegates are trending Obama is no longer operative. They could go either way. Especially if Clinton can pull ahead in the popular vote, there will be ample cover for superdelegates to put Clinton over the top if they so choose.

The bad news is that Clinton has already gone on the attack against Obama, and Obama will have to do the same toward Clinton. (Yes, that's the "old politics" Obama derides, but he'll just have to say that new politics doesn't require one to be a punching bag, etc.) In other words, the enthusiasm of Democratic voters, which is giving us record fundraising, will lead to Clinton and Obama together spending something like $75 million -- more than 25% of what John Kerry spent on his entire presidential campaign -- over the next 6 weeks to make the other one look bad, with the principal focus of that activity being in Pennsylvania, a leaning-Dem swing state that the Dems almost certainly cannot win without. Meanwhile, the Bush money machine is going to start cranking for McCain, meaning a window of opportunity where the money is all on our side may be closing. A huge lost opportunity.

The good news, of course, is that if Clinton can win, she will, almost by definition, have established that Obama was not, in fact, ready for prime time. My guess is that doesn't happen -- that he stops playing frontrunner, hits Clinton hard, and gets back on track -- but if he doesn't, that probably tells us he wasn't the right candidate for the general election.

The blame, I am afraid, lies with neither Clinton nor Obama, but with Howard Dean (it pains me to say) and the rest of the party establishment, for creating a primary system that was poorly designed to deal with a contested primary. How, after 2000, could Dems have failed to consider the possibility that an election could be close?

The intrigue, and maybe the solution, is that both Clinton-Obama and an Obama-Clinton tickets are beginning to look like real possibilities. The former has long been considered a possibility, and seemed the more natural fit due to Clinton's seniority, while the assumption has generally been that the reverse wouldn't happen because (a) Clinton wouldn't be interested; and (b) Obama, as the upstart, could lose untarnished, but a loss by Clinton as the early frontrunner would leave her tarnished. But right now neither of those reasons looks so compelling. McCain's nomination makes the possibility of Clinton running again in 2016, at age 68, seem a lot more plausible, and eight years as VP would clearly help her odds of getting the nomination. Moreover, with her latest comeback, Clinton can lose without tarnish (or, of course, she could win). Most important, a Clinton-Obama or Obama-Clinton ticket could stop the bleeding, and help us focus on defeating McCain. Perhaps the skids will be greased with some kind of power-sharing arrangement where the VP gets a Cheney-like portfolio to act as almost co-President (an arrangement not all that different from the sort of coalition building that happens in parliamentary systems), though of course they'll have to be careful how they sell that. However it happens, Clinton this morning seemed to inch closer to a combined ticket, and left open both versions:

Asked on CBS's "The Early Show" whether she and Obama should be on the same ticket, Clinton said:
"That may be where this is headed, but of course we have to decide who is on the top of ticket. I think the people of Ohio very clearly said that it should be me."

Neither candidate is my first choice -- my dream VP would be Wes Clark -- but a ticket-sharing deal some time after Pennsylvania may be the way to go.

On Second Thought, It's the Fickle, Stupid

2008-03-04T10:00:00.002-05:00

Ann Bartow points me to Linda Hirshman's op-ed that appeared on the same page with Charlotte Allen's ridiculous op-ed Sunday.

Google Blog Search (as of this morning around 10 EST) reveals 27 blog entries referring to Hirshman since her piece appeared versus 1,495 for Allen. While not all of the 1,495 references have been negative -- Kathryn Jean Lopez at the Corner has a five-word post (seven with the title) that reads, "Charlotte Allen eviscerates women. I love it." (Seriously, Lopez really wrote that.) -- the vast majority have been throughly and rightly critical.

Perhaps because of the attention received by Allen, Hirshman's op-ed has received little attention. Hirshman purports to explain why Hillary Clinton -- who has received strong support from female primary voters (a 7-point edge according to Hirshman) -- has not received strong enough support from women to be the frontrunner. The title and some of the text suggest that she views the explanation as relating to class (although she also addresses, and then puts aside, the role of race). She suggests that perhaps less educated women (by which she means less educated white women) lean Clinton because they care more about "Clinton's early stand on family leave or her slightly more generous health-care plan" or that more educated (again white) women prefer Obama's "less bellicose" foreign policy. Whether true or not, those seem like plausible, policy-based explanations -- so why does Hirshman turn that into a critique of feminists turning on their "working-class" "sisters" in favor of "solidarity with their own class"? (She acknowledges that there are prominent feminists on both sides of the Clinton-Obama race, but dismisses feminist support of Clinton as "man bites dog".) Betraying working-class women is a pretty strong charge to base on nothing more than voting for the candidate with a better approach to foreign policy approach because he's offering a "slightly [less] generous health-care plan".

If that weren't enough, Hirshman then, without any evidence, turns to explanations that trivialize women (especially, highly-educated women) who support Obama:

Or it could just be that women with more education (and more money) relate on a subconscious level to the young and handsome Barack and Michelle Obama, with their white-porticoed mansion in one of the cooler Chicago neighborhoods and her Jimmy Choo shoes.

Or it's something less analyzable....

Has this rhetorical firestorm had an effect on the political decisions of college-educated white women? I don't know. But I do know that many of these women have succeeded by meeting or exceeding society's expectations. And the movement quality of the Obama campaign has certainly raised expectations of commitment to its candidate well beyond those of a normal political campaign. This has to be generating powerful peer pressure.

So it's undue susceptibility to peer pressure, or just falling for the hunky dude with a nice house.

And in case that weren't trivializing enough, Hirshman says explicitly that it's just because women -- again, here she means "college-educated white women" -- are "fickle":

I can imagine the strategists for the senator from Illinois thinking, "What's that song in Verdi's 'Rigoletto'?" Women are fickle.

Turns out it's true.....

Whatever the explanation, the Clinton campaign could now be stuttering to its close, and Mark Penn has been criticized for everything from short-sightedness about the primary schedule to overspending on sandwich platters. But those failures pale beside the biggest one of all: not recognizing the fickleness of the female voter.

While the editorial decision to publish Allen's piece was dubious on its own, I find it extraordinary that that the Post decided to publish two simultaneous Sunday op-eds devoted to the theme that women's voting -- and only women's voting -- is governed by some unsubstantiated mental failing.

Related Post: It's The Stupidity, Stupid

It's The Stupidity, Stupid

2008-03-03T10:10:00.003-05:00

As virtually everyone has already condemned Charlotte Allen's pathetic WaPo op-ed arguing that women are "the stupid sex", I'll highlight two particularly appropriate responses. Ezra Klein responds that the op-ed's problem is not its ridiculous premise, but its execrable execution:

[I]t's shameful, and the Post owes its readers an apology. Not, I hasten to add, because the thesis was so daring and our tender sensibilities must be soothed. But because the work was so shoddy and the author so poorly chosen.

That's an important point, because it seems that every time the left condemns a conservative columnist, it is accused of intolerance toward opposing viewpoints -- I mean you, Andy Rosenthal -- rather than intolerance for intellectual bankruptcy.

Jill at Feministe makes a similar point even more succinctly:

Shorter Charlotte Allen: I am a paste-eating moron, and so therefore all other women are as shockingly stupid as I am.

Someone Who Looks Like...

2008-02-28T09:10:00.003-05:00

Yesterday, I stuck an Obama sticker on my lapel and signed up to knock on doors on Saturday. I started out with Edwards because of poverty, and it's been a slow and painful adjustment since Edwards left the race. I still prefer Clinton on several aspects of domestic policy, which is usually more important to me, so that has made it particularly hard.

I'm going to vote for Obama--and if I'm going to vote for someone, I'll work for him or her as well--but I take no glee in watching Clinton go down. Indeed, the past few weeks have been extraordinarily painful.

This morning on NPR, they were interviewing voters in Texas. One woman said, about Obama, that she was excited about him because she thought it would just be so wonderful for kids to grow up in a world in which the president looked like that (paraphrase).

Can someone remind me, please, which one of our last 43 presidents was the woman? Because when I look them over, they're all looking pretty XY to me (although I suppose Millard Filmore could be a chick in drag). Doesn't anyone think there might be some ways in which it would be wonderful for kids to grow up in a world in which the president was a woman?

I know it's not a contest, who's more oppressed. I'm not trying to go there. And obviously, given my decision, I believe there are serious problems with this particular woman candidate. But I still feel as if it's almost as if people are acting as if (is that enough as ifs?) there's already been a woman, as if (there's another) that's no big deal anymore.

After interviewing the Obama supporter, NPR went on to the other side of Houston to talk to conservatives in a bible group. They were Huckabee fans, some of whom were reluctantly supporting McCain. One woman in the group said she admired how far Clinton had gone, but that she couldn't support her because she believed women need to submit to men, and that only a man should be a leader. The pastor of the group agreed and re-confirmed the idea that only men should be leaders.

We haven't really come such a long way, baby.

He Said, "He Said."

2008-02-27T10:47:00.008-05:00

Jessica at Feministing takes David Gelernter to task for his unhinged screed against feminists' efforts to make English more gender neutral. "He or she", "chairperson", and we "language rapists" generally are the objects of Gelernter's rage.

Gelernter begins with the axiom, "The prime rule of writing is to keep it simple, concrete, concise." I can't quibble with those virtues, but Gelernter omits one critical virtue: Good writing should be precise. It's easy to be simple and concise when taking liberties with accuracy, but it's hardly commendable. Gelernter's English surrenders precision -- or rather simply wishes away its own imprecision:

When the style-smashers first announced, decades ago, that the neutral "he" meant "male" and excluded "female," they were lying and knew it....
In the third edition [of the Elements of Style] (1979), [E.B.] White lays down the law on the he-or-she epidemic that was sweeping the country like a bad flu (or a bad joke).

The use of he as a pronoun for nouns embracing both genders is a simple, practical convention rooted in the beginnings of the English language. He has lost all suggestion of maleness in these circumstances. The word was unquestionably biased to begin with (the dominant male), but after hundreds of years it has become seemingly indispensable. It has no pejorative connotations; it is never incorrect.

As someone who was deeply influenced by White -- including, for quite a long time, by the passage Gelernter quotes -- I have to say that White got this one wrong, and wrong on his own terms (which valued precision, even if Gelernter does not). We can't simply waive our hands and say (as Gelernter does) that "he" really means "he or she" or that "fireman" does not imply gender. It is Gelernter who is lying when he accepts the pretense that the supposed equivalence between "he" and "he or she" is purely a linguistic convention, rather than an affirmation of a patriarchal history. Gelernter is welcome to use the neutral "he", but he is making a political statement by doing so. I choose not to, and I stand by my political statement as well. (I do agree that "he or she" can be awkward, but the phrase can usually be avoided in favor of some other, non-sexist construction -- Mary and I have used "he or she" exactly three times in 651 posts on this blog.)

I do have to praise Gelernter for one thing. He provides us his own reductio ad absurdum, so I don't have to, essentially blaming gender-neutral language for an alleged decline in "civilization":

The depressing trail continues one last mile. What happens to a nation's thinking when you ban such phrases as "great men"? The alternatives are so bad--"great person" sounds silly; "great human being" is a casual tribute to a friend--that it's hard to know where to turn. "Hero" doesn't work; "Wittgenstein was a great man" is a self-sufficient assertion, but "Wittgenstein was a hero" is not. Was he a war hero, a philosophical hero? (Yes and yes.) "Wittgenstein was a great heart" (also true) can't be rephrased in hero-speak, and can't substitute for "great man" either.

We happen to know also that the idea of "great men" has been bounced right out of education at every level. Nowadays students are taught to admire celebrities and money instead. We might well have misplaced the "great man" idea anyway, but losing the phrase didn't help. Civilization copes poorly with ideas that have no names.

"Wittgenstein was a great person" "sounds silly". But "Joan of Arc was a great man" sounds just nifty.

Related Post: Dad and Man at Yale (UPDATE: Cross-reference included before I learned of William Buckley's death today.)

UPDATE: Jess McCabe has a similar reaction.

Not A Winning Argument

2008-02-26T10:07:00.003-05:00

This is not an argument that Hillary Clinton should be making:

Mrs. Clinton delivered a blistering speech on Monday that compared Mr. Obama’s lack of foreign policy experience to that of the candidate George W. Bush.

“We’ve seen the tragic result of having a president who had neither the experience nor the wisdom to manage our foreign policy and safeguard our national security,” Mrs. Clinton said in a speech on foreign policy at George Washington University. “We can’t let that happen again.” (Emphasis added.)

Remind me. Who "let that happen" the first time? Who gave warmaking power to the guy with no experience or wisdom? Oh yeah:

The President has begun to make the case for why the use of force may be necessary, and it is important that he do that. I look forward to hearing what he will say this evening and what Secretary Powell will have to say in the following days. -- Hillary Clinton, 1/28/2003

And the candidate she says lacks experience and wisdom:

But I also know that Saddam poses no imminent and direct threat to the United States, or to his neighbors, that the Iraqi economy is in shambles, that the Iraqi military a fraction of its former strength, and that in concert with the international community he can be contained until, in the way of all petty dictators, he falls away into the dustbin of history. I know that even a successful war against Iraq will require a US occupation of undetermined length, at undetermined cost, with undetermined consequences. I know that an invasion of Iraq without a clear rationale and without strong international support will only fan the flames of the Middle East, and encourage the worst, rather than best, impulses of the Arab world, and strengthen the recruitment arm of Al Qaeda. I am not opposed to all wars. I'm opposed to dumb wars. -- Barack Obama, 10/2/2002

"Meet Me In Ohio"

2008-02-25T10:09:00.003-05:00

Hillary Clinton has gotten terrible reviews for calling out Barack Obama on his campaign's NAFTA and health care mailers. Maybe that's inevitable. As Howard Dean learned, in contemporary American politics, being right doesn't justify being angry.

Except, of course, that it does.

"Since when do Democrats attack one another on universal healthcare."

I'm voting for Obama, but it's very, very unfortunate that he's dug himself this healthcare hole ... and that he's decided the best response is to keep digging.

UPDATE: Seems that Obama's is not the only campaign sending out mailers the candidate should be ashamed of.

It's The War, Stupid

2008-02-22T09:57:00.002-05:00

Harvard's Implicit Association Test says I love Hillary Clinton, loathe Mike Huckabee, and like Barack Obama slightly more than John McCain, but am pretty neutral about both of them.

So, why am I going to vote for Obama? It's not for the "universal" healthcare that's not universal, and it's certainly not for the dubious putdowns. I do think it's partly the phenomenon that many others have noted -- even if you like Hillary, it's hard to like her campaign or the people she's surrounded herself with. And it's partly electability -- a fool's game, to be sure, but I don't see how one can ignore the dramatic difference (currently a 10-point swing) in how Clinton and Obama poll against McCain, not to mention the seemingly very real progressive movement that Obama seems to be mobilizing.

But, ultimately, I think it's that I've never forgiven Clinton for her vote for the Iraq War. (John Edwards, either, by the way.) All politicians make compromises. But the justification for that has to be that the compromise is necessary for a greater good, whether maintaining a coalition (Lincoln's mollification of the Border States, for example) or even maintaining the politician's own position as a platform for other accomplishments. There has been no bigger vote than the Iraq War resolution since Clinton has been in the Senate. It was obvious at the time that thousands or hundreds of thousands of lives, and billions or trillions of dollars -- in short, the future of the Nation and the world -- were at stake. It was obvious that attacking Iraq was reckless, self-destructive, and immoral. It was, quite literally, a defining moment. There was no other fight that Clinton had to save her credibility for -- as a prominent opposition party Senator (in the Senate majority at the time) and as former First Lady -- Clinton was in a unique position to lead the fight against the war, and instead opted to for what she (incorrectly) viewed as necessary for her political viability. That was wrong on the merits, and wrong strategically.

Obama is right that judgment matters. And on that count, he wins hands down.

Yes, They Can

2008-02-12T10:06:00.000-05:00

Mary reminded me this week of the 2007 Gallup poll reporting that some Americans would not vote for a woman or a black person for President. (Complete results at bottom of post.)

These kinds of polls can seem pretty dire. How can Barack Obama win in a world where the last two presidential elections have been incredibly close, and he starts out 5 points behind? Same for Hillary Clinton, but she's 11 points down?

Leaving aside the unreliability of the answers as predictors of voting behavior -- after all, 21% said they wouldn't vote for a Catholic right before JFK was elected (and, guess what, only 13% said so right after, as many of the 21% apparently changed their minds) -- what bugs me about this poll is that it doesn't ask whether the respondent would vote for a man or for a white person. It simply assumes that no one could possibly say "no" to such a question. But, how do we know that? Yes, we know that white men are "electable". What we don't know is that every voter would say that he or she would consider voting for one. In fact, I'm pretty sure that some percentage -- probably 2, 3, 4% -- would say "no", especially now that it is clear there will be an alternative.

Without those questions for context, the Gallup poll tells us very little about who can win. My view is that either Dem can.

Yes, would vote for	No, would not vote for
	%	%
Catholic	95	4
Black	94	5
Jewish	92	7
A woman	88	11
Hispanic	87	12
Mormon	72	24
Married for the third time	67	30
72 years of age	57	42
A homosexual	55	43
An atheist	45	53

Girls' Night Out? Puhleeze!

2008-02-10T19:36:00.000-05:00

In the current post on her New York Times blog, Judith Warner describes a conversation in which two married male friends, middle aged & older, discuss in her presence the "kinds of women they’d go out with if they were single."

It turns out both men say they'd like to date "babes" who are much younger and childless. When she suggests they might be happier with women with whom they have more in common (age and interest-wise), the men are incredulous and start mocking her. She then describes how, when she told her husband of the exchange, he said he didn't understand what she was getting "all worked up about."

Warner then goes on to describe the rage she finds herself in. But instead of presenting this as a perfectly justifiable rage, instead of telling her male friends that married men who talk about the kind of women they'd like to date (regardless of the age of the imagined babes) are assholes, and that those who talk about wanting to date much younger women are revealing themselves to be not just assholes but immature, shallow assholes, she goes on to mock her own rage and assume that we readers will be mocking it, too, like her husband:

Perhaps you’ve already laughed yourself into red-eyed delirium....

And then, after talking self-deprecatingly about how she started identifying with bumper-sticker feminism of the "a woman needs a man..." variety, her solution to this rage is:

I need a Girls’ Night Out.

A girls' night out? She earlier says that her denial of the existence of bra-burning was a lame rejoinder, but this is seriously lame. What exactly does she think gets accomplished by going out with other women--forgive me, girls--and complaining about men?

I'm starting to notice that Warner often comes right up to the edge of being right about things, but (as here) she chickens out.

It seems to me that the appropriate response to a conversation like this--particularly for someone like Warner who is lucky enough to have such a platform as a NYT blog--would be to publish her male friends' names in this post. Such attitudes deserve to be outed and shamed and ridiculed. Her friends' wives should know that this is what they sit around talking about when they're away from home. Any men in their social circle who are closer to being decent human beings than Warner's husband (whom she does out in the piece, note...) should let them know that they think they're idiots.

The Process

2008-02-06T11:14:00.000-05:00

Was it really unforeseeable to the DNC that there might be a contested primary between two strong candidates?

Josh Marshall explains that the Democratic Party's proportional allocation of delegates creates a high likelihood that neither Clinton nor Obama will be able secure the nomination before the convention (where superdelegates will have to cast their formal, and possibly decisive, votes). And, while not mentioned in those posts, we will likely face a contentious dispute over whether Michigan and Florida delegates count before we even reach the superdelegate vote.

If a primary process has one irreducible purpose, it would seem to be to select a clear winner in a two-person race, allowing the party to unite behind the winner without acrimony -- i.e., to avoid what happened at the 1972 convention. (Trivia: I must admit that I did not know that none other than the third remaining Democratic candidate, Mike Gravel, placed third in the VP voting at the '72 convention.)

I could, perhaps, understand if a system wasn't geared for a race between three or four candidates, but the Democratic primary process seems to have been constructed on the assumption that there would be a clear winner and that process wouldn't matter. Proportional representation is almost guaranteed to create a tight race when there are two closely matched candidates. Perhaps that is defensible in itself, but adding the ruling that Michigan and Florida delegates would not count was surely a foreseeable recipe for a disputed nomination.

The party seems to have planned on the assumption that none of this would matter, because, as in years past, we would have an obvious winner. Of course, in that case, virtually any plausible system of delegate allocation will work. In other words, they failed to make rules for the most obvious situation where rules would matter.

Kumbaya? My Lord!

2008-02-05T09:56:00.000-05:00

Have you noticed that, all of a sudden, "kumbaya" is in common parlance? And that it seems always to be associated with Barack Obama?

The chart at right uses Google Blog Search to track the explosion of blogs posts referring to "kumbaya" and "kumbaya and Obama", respectively, on a quarterly basis. (The first quarter of '08 is projected, but even in absolute terms "kumbaya and Obama" has appeared over 25% more in the first 35 days of this quarter than in all previous quarters combined.)

I had assumed this was another successful Republican meme -- simultaneously advancing the ideas that Obama is weak on national security, and that he's black.

And that may well be part of what's going on. But it appears that the origin of the "kumbaya" virus is on our side. One of the earliest kumbaya critiques of Obama is from Talk Left. And usage appears to have really taken off after John Edwards used the term about Obama in September 2007.

Cheers to the New Baby! Part II

2008-02-02T13:29:00.000-05:00

Kudos to ABC News for a good segment on drinking alcohol while pregnant. Instead of buying into the usual moral panic about fetal alcohol syndrome, ABC instead emphasizes the social stigma that pregnant women face if they have a drink in public and finishes with an expert explaining that moderate drinking is not a risk to the fetus. The best part is when the correspondent says that American College of Obstetricians & Gynecologists refused to appear on the show because their official policy is zero tolerance -- presumably because they couldn't defend a position for which there is no scientific support.

I do hope this signals a shift in public attitudes on this issue.

Related Post: Cheers to the New Baby!

There He Goes Again

2008-01-31T10:08:00.001-05:00

Because there are still people out there who believe that Ralph Nader has some goal other than electing Republican presidents, I thought I'd highlight the three "News Updates" linked at the head of the Nader for President Exploratory Committee website:

Big Business Loves Hillary

Dems May Provide Pretext for Nader

Eight More Years?

The first two, I suppose, speak for themselves, but "Eight More Years?" has to be about the Republicans, no? No. It's a Nader-written article (I guess that passes for "news" on Nader's site) excoriating the Clintons. I'll leave most of the deconstruction of Nader's piece to the reader, but I do have to point out this whopper:

Bragging about millions of jobs his Administration created, [Bill Clinton] neglected to note that incomes stagnated for 80% of the workers in the country and ended in 2000, under the level of 1973, adjusted for inflation.

Did I miss something? Was Bill Clinton President in 1973? What Nader omits is that Clinton was the only Presidents since 1973 who has presided over a decrease in inequality. According to Princeton's Larry Bartels (at 7-8):

Despite these long-term forces, distinguishing between Democratic and Republican administrations ... reveals the regularity with which Democratic presidents reduced and Republican presidents increased the prevailing level of economic inequality, irrespective of the long-term trend.... The 80/20 income ratio increased under each of the five Republican presidents in this period – Eisenhower, Nixon, Ford, Reagan, and the elder Bush. On the other hand, four of five Democratic presidents – all except Jimmy Carter – presided over declines in income inequality.... Even in the highly inegalitarian economic climate of the 1990s, Bill Clinton managed to produce slightly stronger income growth for families at the 20th percentile (2.0%) than at the 80th percentile (1.9%), though families at the very top of the income distribution did even better.

So, not perfect, but a whole lot better than any Republican. But what are facts when Republican control of the White House is threatened?

Making the Call

2008-01-29T10:25:00.000-05:00

I agree with Ann and the commenters at Feministing that NOW-NYS's press release calling Ted Kennedy's endorsement of Barack Obama an "Ultimate Betrayal Felt by Women Everywhere" is "completely unhinged".

Still, Mary and I were wondering why, when Kennedy made his decision, he felt he should deliver the news not to his Senate colleague herself, but to her husband:

Mr. Kennedy called Mr. Clinton Sunday to tell him of his decision.

I Remember Reagan

2007-10-01T08:52:00.000-04:00

And so, probably, do you -- though Maureen Dowd doesn't realize it:

[A]s Nancy Benac of The Associated Press wrote on Friday, 116 million Americans — nearly 40 percent of the nation — “have never lived when there wasn’t a Bush or a Clinton in the White House.”

A person born on the date of G.H.W. Bush's Inauguration would be 18 years, 8 months (and some days) old.

Readily available population data shows that the percentage of Americans under 20 as of July 1, 2005,* is actually 27.6%. Linear interpolation puts the percentage under 18 years, 8 months around 25.7%. In other words, Dowd was off by more than the population of California.

This matters because the nepotism talking point is part of the Republican campaign to defeat Hillary Clinton if, as expected,** she is the nominee. Having already had their second Bush, the GOP now wants Americans to think that there's something wrong with electing a relative of a former President. Dowd's (and the AP's) innumeracy help that effort.

Related Posts: Is Maureen Dowd Glazed ... or Just Powdered?; Something Must Be Wrong ...

*This figure is generally stable but declining slightly over time, so the current figure is, if anything, likely slightly lower.

**Not an endorsement, or even a prediction.

Distressing?

2007-09-24T23:29:00.000-04:00

There are distressingly few men willing to donate their bone marrow for experiments that may someday yield cures for cancer.

There are distressingly few people willing to undergo spinal taps for experimental research.

There are distressingly few women willing to donate their eggs for experiments at the frontiers of this promising science.

One of these three statements appeared in a New York Times editorial. Can you guess which one, and why it honks me off?

Policy and Perception

2007-08-28T09:09:00.000-04:00

Which of the following would you want your child to drink with his or her school lunch?

A: 11 cal., 3g sugar (per fl. oz.).
B: 10 cal., 2g sugar.
C: 15 cal., 3g sugar.

The answer, I think is obvious. It's D, none of the above.

A is cola. B is sports drink. C is unsweetened apple juice.

So, while Mississippi, the state with the nation's worst obesity problem, may mean well, this policy doesn't make a lot of sense:

All public schools are currently banned from selling full-calorie soft drinks to students. Next academic year, elementary and middle schools will allow only water, juice and milk, while high schools will allow only water, juice, sports drinks and diet soft drinks.

But at least legislators can say they're doing something....

I Guess Those Poll Numbers Are Getting Him Down

2007-06-08T06:31:00.000-04:00

What bubbly amber liquid is our famously abstemious President drinking in this picture ... in Germany?

The AP caption reads slyly: " U.S. President George Bush enjoys a cold drink in historic Heiligendamm, Germany, Thursday, June 7, 2007."

And is it a coincidence that the AP chose this picture to illustrate this story:

Stricken with a stomach ailment that confined him to his hotel room, President Bush still met Friday with France's new president and prepared for talks in Poland on a new missile defense system.

The president was already dressed when he began feeling ill in the morning, White House counselor Dan Bartlett said. He said doctors are keeping an eye on him but that Bush's illness — whether a stomach virus, a light touch of food poisoning or something else — is "not serious."

He stayed in bed to try to rest and recuperate, missing the morning session of the summit being held here of eight industrialized democracies.

In Partial Explanation of the Recent Lack of Posting

2007-05-10T09:39:00.000-04:00

Baby Girl Garth was born on Saturday. Below is her first picture ever.

The last time Mary and I had a child, we had never heard of Monica Lewinksy or al Qaeda. The first time, the Democrats had still controlled the House for our entire lives. It's a very different world this one is coming into, but despite all reason I'm feeling very optimistic today.

The Health of the Woman

2007-04-19T06:17:00.000-04:00

Alas and others have a number of excellent posts on yesterday's terrible (and intellectually dishonest) decision in Gonzales v. Carhart. The bottom line is that, while the upholding of the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act of 2003, in itself, will harm a relatively small number of women -- indeed, the majority's opinion indicates that even intact D&E "likely" remains permissible so long as physicians take the additional step of first using "an injection that kills the fetus" -- the Court's reasoning in approving a ban that does not take into account the health of the woman invites a new wave of state legislation designed, as a practical matter, to so burden the right to abortion that it becomes (more) practically unavailable.

To some extent, the fight going forward will be fought in 2008, but that will mostly be a defensive fight. Even what remains of Roe will not survive another Republican administration. John Paul Stevens would be 92 by the end of the next administration. Ginsburg, a cancer survivor, would be 79. (In contrast, the oldest Justice in the conservative wing is Scalia, who would be 76.)

One thing to do now, therefore, is to pass Congressional legislation. There's little point in trying to reverse the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act of 2003. Bush would veto it and fighting over the intact D&E procedure simply buys into the Republican frame. Instead, we should make our own frame. I suggest a federal statute that provides that any state statute that regulates abortion must contain a provision protecting the life and health of the woman. Bush would probably still veto it, but the veto -- and the veto override vote -- then becomes a politically painful decision for Republicans by taking the focus off of this or that medical procedure and putting it back where it belongs, on the harm caused to real women when abortion is made unavailable. And, unlike waiting for Scalia to die, it offers a campaign promise of what we can do positively in our first 100 hours of the new Clinton/Obama/Edwards/Richardson administration.

Credit Where Credit Is Due

2007-04-10T10:52:00.000-04:00

Since I've harshly criticized Juan Williams in the past, I want to mention that he deserves credit for his coverage this morning of the Don Imus controversy. While most of the mainstream coverage has focused on racism (which is certainly unmistakable in Imus's remarks), Williams this morning made of point of connecting Imus's pattern of "racially charged" remarks with his pattern of making "sexually charged" and "homophobic" remarks. While I would have preferred the more direct "racist" and "sexist", kudos to Williams for making the connection.

More on Those Email Addresses and Waiver of the Executive Privilege

2007-03-28T17:46:00.000-04:00

As is being widely discussed, Karl Rove and others involved in the U.S. attorney firings seem to have compromised their boss's claim to executive privilege by sending emails from their RNC accounts, rather than from government accounts.

Acting Press Secretary Dana Perino put a further nail in the executive privilege coffin today when she explained the reason for the use of the RNC account:

Q. ... In some of those documents that have been released, there have been non-White House addresses, email addresses, that people have written from. Is there a policy from the White House that tells employees that if they're doing White House business, it should be with their White House email? Or are people always free to use an outside address for business?

MS. PERINO: No -- and I talked a little bit about this yesterday, that there are certain individuals, limited individuals, that have responsibilities that may straddle both worlds, both White House and then have interface with political organizations. And so in those cases, they've been given these emails in which -- in order to avoid any possible potential violations of the Hatch Act, they use those emails. Of course, people are encouraged, on official White House business, to use their official White House accounts. Sometimes there might be a gray area and people have to make a judgment call.

In other words, the use of the RNC email addresses was not illegal because in the judgment of the senders the emails did not relate to White House business. The applicability of the privilege, of course, depends on the emails being related to White House business. See United States v. Nixon, 418 U.S. 683, 711 (1974) ("Nowhere in the Constitution, as we have noted earlier, is there any explicit reference to a privilege of confidentiality, yet to the extent this interest relates to the effective discharge of a President's powers, it is constitutionally based.")

I can only imagine what Karl Rove may have written in RNC emails. With the stakes that high, it's almost hard to imagine this issue not going to the Supreme Court.

Gonzales Redux

2007-03-26T06:37:00.000-04:00

One of the self-indulgent vanities of blogging is being able to say "I was right". From my opposition to the nomination of Alberto Gonzales as Attorney General:

1. The reason that has gotten the most attention, and rightly so, is Gonzales's advocacy of torture and, in particular, his strong advocacy for the Bybee memo (and subsequent support for promotion of Bybee to the Ninth Circuit).... As in the case of Elliot Richardson [who, of course, resigned rather than follow Richard Nixon's order that he fire Watergate Special Prosecutor Archibald Cox--FV], the character to reach independent conclusions when necessary is part of the Attorney General's job. We know that this President is not interested in honest advice on subjects as to which he has already made up his mind, but that is all the more reason that we need an Attorney General who will give it.

2. The Bybee memo endorsed the position that the President has the legal authority to unilaterally nullify criminal statutes. To my knowledge, Gonzales has not disavowed that conclusion. This suggests a fundamental lack of regard for core values (rule of law, separation of powers, etc.) that is inconsistent with holding the office of Attorney General....

4 ... I do credit the idea that the President is entitled to greater deference in cabinet appointments than in judiciary appointments and, therefore, I do not urge a fillibuster. However, Gonzales has not established that, if his legal opinion were that the President intended to pursue a course of dubious legality, he would advise the President accordingly -- far less that he would refuse to participate in that illegality. If that is not disqualifying for the office, what is? (Emphasis added.)

Lack of respect for the rule of law and separation of powers. Lack of character. Alberto Gonzales in a nutshell.

Obstruction

2007-03-08T11:03:00.000-05:00

Things may be getting worse than uncomfortable for Senator Pete Domenici (R-NM) and Representative Heather Wilson (R-NM) over their role in the pressuring and firing of U.S. Attorney David Iglesias.

The federal obstruction of justice statute, 18 U.S.C. 1503(a), is broadly worded:

Whoever corruptly, or by threats or force, or by any threatening letter or communication, endeavors to influence, intimidate, or impede any grand or petit juror, or officer in or of any court of the United States, or officer who may be serving at any examination or other proceeding before any United States magistrate judge or other committing magistrate, in the discharge of his duty, or injures any such grand or petit juror in his person or property on account of any verdict or indictment assented to by him, or on account of his being or having been such juror, or injures any such officer, magistrate judge, or other committing magistrate in his person or property on account of the performance of his official duties, or corruptly or by threats or force, or by any threatening letter or communication, influences, obstructs, or impedes, or endeavors to influence, obstruct, or impede, the due administration of justice, shall be punished as provided in subsection (b) [up to ten years in prison--FV]. (Emphasis added.)

A U.S. Attorney is clearly an "officer of the court". See, e.g., U.S. v. Polakoff, 112 F.2d 888 (2d Cir. 1940) (L. Hand, J.). Less clearly, but I think quite likely, there was an implicit attempt at improper influence based on Wilson's and Domenici's positions in Congress and relationship with Iglesias, even if they did not make any explicit threats. For example, in U.S. v. Fasolino, 449 F. Supp. 586 (W.D.N.Y), aff'd, 586 F.2d 939 (2d Cir. 1978), defendant was convicted of obstruction for seeking to have an acquaintance of the judge speak to the judge about sentencing when the acquaintance had no knowledge relevant to sentencing and, therefore, the attempt was corrupt because based on the acquaintance's relationship with the judge.

To make matters worse for Wilson, she's already admitted a big part of the obstruction case -- that she was attempting to influence Iglesias's conduct:

Wilson also said she was trying to help Iglesias: "If the purpose of my call has somehow been misperceived, I am sorry for any confusion. I thought it was important for Mr. Iglesias to receive this information and, if necessary, have the opportunity to clear his name."

It's too soon to know if there really was a crime committed, but there very well may have been.

Memo to John Edwards

2007-02-21T11:52:00.000-05:00

This is how you respond when someone tries to manufacture a controversy and demands resignations over something someone on your campaign said:

“We aren’t going to get in the middle of a disagreement between the Clintons and someone who was once one of their biggest supporters. It is ironic that the Clintons had no problem with David Geffen when was raising them $18 million and sleeping at their invitation in the Lincoln bedroom. It is also ironic that Senator Clinton lavished praise on Monday and is fully willing to accept today the support of South Carolina State Sen. Robert Ford, who said if Barack Obama were to win the nomination, he would drag down the rest of the Democratic Party because he's black." -- Robert Gibbs, Barack Obama's Communications Director

Diversity

2007-02-20T12:43:00.000-05:00

Today, the AP reports this:

Bush urges diversity in spy recruitment

WASHINGTON - President Bush instructed the nation's new spy chief to focus on finding more recruits with the language skills and cultural background to collect information on al-Qaida and other terrorist groups....

The president — and later [new Director of National Intelligence Mike] McConnell — also focused on a persistent weakness in American intelligence-gathering: a dearth of operatives who speak critical languages, such as Arabic or Farsi.

"The old policies have hampered some common-sense reforms, such as hiring first- and second-generation Americans who possess native language skills, cultural insights and a keen understanding of the threats we face," McConnell said. (Emphasis added.)

Of course, I'm all for cultural diversity -- it's actually rather shocking that it took more than five years after 9/11 to say, hey, maybe we should be recruiting translators with native Arabic skills -- but what about this kind of diversity:

The number of Arabic linguists discharged from the military for violating its “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy is higher than previously reported, according to records obtained by a research group....

Between 1998 and 2004, the military discharged 20 Arabic and six Farsi speakers, according to Department of Defense data obtained by the Center for the Study of Sexual Minorities in the Military under a Freedom of Information Act request.

Obviously, as the dates attest, this is not purely a partisan concern -- Bill Clinton shares the blame. But if 9/11 really changed everything, if George Bush really made fighting terrorism the priority that his rhetoric claims, those 26 translators would be busy protecting us.

Shopping for Baby

2007-02-16T10:09:00.001-05:00

I went to Old Navy to look for some gender neutral babywear, and found instead that biology is clearly destiny at Old Navy, which gives girls three choices in its newborn size onesies:

Adorable bodysuits offer playful glimpses at baby's destiny! Embroidered or sparkly stars, mortar board, or crown graphic is accompanied by "Future Cheerleader," "Future Valedictorian" or "Future Prom Queen" text. Two snaps at back of neck and along bottom make for easy dressing and diaper changes.

"Future Cheerleader," "Future Valedictorian" or "Future Prom Queen"? Are those the only options? And which one of these things is not like the others?

Hillary Must Be So Proud

2007-02-13T18:33:00.000-05:00

She scored a couple of big endorsements today from two South Carolina legislators. Seems one of them, State Senator Robert Ford, might have wanted to support Obama, but chose Clinton because, you know, Obama's black:

State Sens. Robert Ford and Darrell Jackson told The Associated Press they believe Clinton is the only Democrat who can win the presidency.... Ford said Obama winning the primary would drag down the rest of the party.

"Then everybody else on the ballot is doomed," Ford said. "Every Democratic candidate running on that ticket would lose because he's black and he's at the top of the ticket — we'd lose the House, the Senate and the governors and everything."

"I'm a gambling man. I love Obama," Ford said. "But I'm not going to kill myself." ...

Clinton's campaign spokesman Mo Elleithee said they were happy to have Ford and Jackson's support.

What is it about Barack Obama that seems to make everybody want to say something stupid?

Dad and Man at Yale

2007-02-09T10:13:00.000-05:00

Seems like George Bush may not be the only Yalie with Oedipal issues.

Mary sent me this amusing piece about the habit of co-recreational showering at Yale, which prompted an email from an administrator admonishing students that, while "this may be pleasureable and exciting for you, ... it is a violation of community standards. Please stop." What caught my eye was the supercharged rhetoric that followed from campus conservatives:

Dan Gelernter, class of 2009, is co-editor of Critical Mass, aimed at "collegiate conservatives," and called the episode "a new chapter in the story of Yale’s continuing descent into the depths of moral degradation."

"I can first of all confirm that this is a real memo, not a prank," Gelernter wrote. "It is not merely unfortunate, but pathetic and disgusting that the Master needed to send such a note to us … but in the moral vacuum that has been created by Yale intellectuals, students seem to be left without even the most basic guidelines for proper and decent behavior." (Emphasis added.)

Hmmmm. The moral vacuum that has been created by Yale intellectuals? What Yale intellectuals could Dan Gelernter be referring to? Perhaps he means his father, Yale professor David Gelernter, whose principal claim to fame (other than being a victim of the Unabomber) is having created a computer language, "Linda", named after porn star Linda Lovelace?

Joe Me The Money

2007-02-07T08:00:00.000-05:00

In his own way, Joe Lieberman is onto something here:

"I think we have to start thinking about a war on terrorism tax," the independent Connecticut lawmaker said. "I mean people keep saying we're not asking a sacrifice of anybody but our military in this war and some civilians who are working on it."

"When you put together the (Pentagon) budget and the Homeland Security budgets, we need to ask people to help us in a way that they know when they pay more it will go for their security," he said during a Senate panel hearing on the defense budget request.

Since the November elections, I have thought that an answer to the Democrats' conundrum over how to oppose Bush's conduct of the Iraq War without endangering the troops in the field lay in Congress's tax power. Bush wants $245 billion this year for Iraq and Afghanistan? Fine, let's pay for that by repealing the Bush tax cuts -- or even the 40% or so of those cuts that goes to the top 1% in terms of income -- rather than passing that cost down into the future. (I haven't had a chance to run down exact numbers, but 2004 figures suggest that repealing the Bush tax cuts on the top 1% could pay for at least half of Bush's war budget -- more than that if we focus just on Iraq). If Bush vetoes a bill that approves his war budget to protect tax cuts for the very rich (and you know he would veto it), then who's not supporting the troops? Undoubtedly, he would accuse Dems. of class warfare, blah, blah, blah, but how would he avoid the stark fact that when push comes to shove he'd choose Joe Millionaire over G.I. Joe?

Now, obviously, I don't agree with Lieberman's facile equation of Iraq with a "war on terrorism", and his tone suggests that he wants to use more fear-mongering to increase taxes across the board, rather than focusing on the repeal of the top-heavy Bush tax cuts.

But it's a start.

Questions I Don't Like Answering

2007-02-05T13:50:00.001-05:00

"Dad, are you addicted to coffee?"

Pudding, Meet Proof. Proof, Meet Pudding.

2007-02-02T11:13:00.000-05:00

Ann Bartow deconstructs Linda Hirschman's bizarre and unscientific critique of women's political participation, where Hirschman condemns women as less politically well informed than men:

Most of the women [in her non-representative sample] read People and Real Simple magazines. They all listen to news on the car radio, mostly National Public Radio. And almost all their full-time working husbands consume immeasurably more political information than they do (”He reads 10 times what I do,” one told me)....
As a 2006 study by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press put it, American adults live in “A World of His and Hers.” Two million more men than women read either Time or Newsweek; more men listen to radio news and talk radio, read the paper and get news online. (Emphasis added.)

So much for quality over quantity, as Hirschman seems to be saying, yeah, you may listen to NPR, but you'd be a better person if you spent ten times as long listening to Rush Limbaugh. (As Sean Hannity might say, "three hours a day every day is all we ask".)

Of course, if women were so poorly informed, we'd expect to see it in the results. As Ann points out, women actually vote in greater numbers than do men. And then of course there's the fact if women were the only voters, we wouldn't have had a Republican elected President since 1988* -- and even the Bush-Dukakis and Reagan-Carter landslides would have been 1-point squeakers.**

*Based on popular vote. I haven't looked at state-level data.

**Thus awarding Walter Mondale the dubious distinction of being the only Democrat to lose in a landslide (56-44) among women since the emergence of the "gender gap".

Political Statement? We Don't Need No Stinkin' Political Statements!

2007-02-01T18:16:00.000-05:00

Mary Cheney is not making a political statement:

Cheney ... defended her decision to have a baby with her partner and called it a "blessing from God" and "not a political statement." ...

"We have a loving, stable relationship, a loving, stable home," Cheney added. "We can give a child a good home, and we want to have a child."

That about says it all, doesn't it? Reminds me of another well-known, and definitely not political, statement:

“My feet are tired, but my soul is rested.”

Turning Paper Into Gold

2007-02-01T12:16:00.000-05:00

"Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows" will be released July 21.

It will have a suggested retail price of $34.99 (more for two fancier versions, less from some retailers). The first six books have sold 325 million copies.

If this one sells just as well as the average of the first six (which would probably make it something of a flop), that's $1.9 billion.

Part of me wants to cheer -- Deathly Hallows should surpass every movie ever made, and books are, after all, better than movies.

Part of me wants to groan -- while I like Harry Potter (and will be on line to buy ~~one~~ five on July 21), the books' financial success obviously far outstrips their quality.

Either way, Rowling's most appropriate title was clearly her first one: Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone.

Juan Williams Plays The Race Card

2007-01-22T13:40:00.000-05:00

Even by the rather low standards Juan Williams has set for himself since joining Fox, this is particularly noxious:

And I think in terms of Obama and race, I still think that there's -- and don't forget the idea that, you know, he comes from a father who was a Muslim and all that. I mean, I think that, given that we're at war with Muslim extremists, that presents a problem. And I think there's a lot of -- for all the openness to Obama and the whole idea of a fresh new start, I think race continues to be an issue.

Let's deconstruct that. What does Williams mean when says that "race continues to be an issue". In context, it seems that he means the claim that Obama's father was a Muslim. (In fact, Obama says he was an agnostic.) But that doesn't really make sense. At least as it is understood in contemporary America, Islam is not a race, and Muslims can be of any race. And Williams, who has authored several books about the American civil rights movement, certainly knows it. (For comparison's sake, John Kerry's having a Jewish grandfather was a minor news story in 2004, and no one seriously suggested it would be an issue in his being elected President.)

What Williams is clearly referring to, I think, is that Obama is defined as black in our culture (though he in fact has parents of different races). No doubt, that's a consideration in this election. One would have to be impossibly naive to assume that Obama's parentage won't affect how his campaign is portrayed in the media and who ultimately will vote for him. But what does Obama's absent father's religious beliefs have to do with that? As far as I can tell, it doesn't -- at least not in terms of "race" as commonly defined.

What I think is going on, then, is that this is the equivalent of the infamous Harold Ford "call me" advertisement. Overt racism is no longer acceptable in public discourse. The right's problem, then, is how to insinuate race without doing it expressly. The "call me" ad worked because it used the cover of sexual irresponsibility (barely plausible, as Ford is unmarried) to trigger deeper racial distrust (white discomfort with interracial sex). Likewise, Williams' bizarre reasoning uses the cover of another (again, barely plausible) rationale for considering Obama's parentage to trigger other racial distrusts (a sense, perhaps, that blacks are not "true" Americans who can be trusted to lead the Nation).

Maybe that's all paranoia. Maybe Williams just fumbled how he expressed himself. But we know that Fox not only leans right but makes a concerted effort to make sure that certain right-wing talking points are repeated on air. And I don't put it past Fox for a moment to choose a black correspondent to stir up racial animus. Williams was there four years ago to ask Carol Mosely Braun a question designed to undermine Howard Dean among black voters, and he's here now to undermine Obama among white voters.

Blogging For Choice 2007

2007-01-22T01:19:00.000-05:00

On Blog for Choice, we are asked to tell why we're pro-choice.

I'm afraid I don't have a moving or enlightening personal story. As best I can recall, the principle that a pregnant women should have the freedom to have an abortion if she so chose has always seemed self evident to me. But when I was younger, I was more interested in engaging the arguments of those who disagreed on subjects like whether abortion was wrong after viability or whether Roe was well grounded in constitutional law.

If I had to pick a single moment when the light went on, however, it was when I focused on the anti-abortion movement's widely-held belief (at least it was widely held back in the the '80s) that abortion could still be allowed in the case of rape or incest (by which they meant, essentially, in-family rape of teenage girls). All at once, I realized that the anti-abortion movement, with its superficially appealing rhetoric about protecting life and despising killing, was really about punishing women for having sex.

In short, it was a lie.

Since then, we have been exposed to one lie after another. Fronts pretending to be abortion clinics, murderers pretending to be "pro life", legislators pretending to care about the wellbeing of young girls, Supreme Court nominees pretending they have open minds.

And just yesterday, New York Times Magazine devoted an 8000-word cover story to a non-existent "post-abortion syndrome", which it dignifies by asking on the cover, "Is There a Post-Abortion Syndrome?". The Times itself admits this is absolute nonsense:

When Arias talks about the effects of abortion, she’s so fervent that it’s hard to maintain her gaze. But the idea that abortion is at the root of women’s psychological ills is not supported by the bulk of the research. Instead, the scientific evidence strongly shows that abortion does not increase the risk of depression, drug abuse or any other psychological problem any more than having an unwanted pregnancy or giving birth. (Emphasis added.)

Another anti-abortion lie.

Because Filibusters Are Only For Important Things

2007-01-20T11:45:00.000-05:00

Not that this tells us anything we didn't already know, but yet another outrage from Senator Lieberman:

Lieberman, 1/19/07:

MS. BLOCK: Can you imagine a scenario where you would join in with a Republican filibuster to stop the resolution [against escalation in Iraq], if it comes to that?

SEN. LIEBERMAN: I can because I think that it – this is this important.

Lieberman, 2/10/06:

I did vote against the [Alito] filibuster cause I thought that, you know, it was time to move on.

Support the Well-Timed Period

2007-01-05T20:06:00.000-05:00

Go vote for ema of The Welltimed Period in the Medical Blog Awards. She's up for best medical blog and best ethics/health policy blog.

The Price of Prudery

2006-12-22T19:54:00.000-05:00

Because they're too prudish to give an accurate account, the NPR All Things Considered reporting on the decision to drop the first-degree rape charges in the Duke case is creating a very misleading impression. They're saying things like that the plaintiff is now saying she's "unsure of some details" of what happened, which is why the rape charge was dropped. Naturally, the defendants' attorney was jumping all over this to say how unreliable she was and how all of the charges should be dropped. But why is she unsure? Well, because

the accuser told an investigator Thursday that she is no longer certain whether she was penetrated vaginally with the men's penises

... because she was penetrated from behind while facing the floor and could not be sure whether the guys were using penises or something else to penetrate her, as was reported in an earlier version of this story.

So, because NPR won't say penis, or won't talk about how and with what she might have been penetrated and the very good reason she might not know what the guys were using, they make it sound as if she's totally unreliable. Thanks guys.