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04 Dec 09

Palin Puts The Trig Question Back On The Table - The Daily Dish | By Andrew Sullivan

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



    But here's the critical sentence:




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





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

  • There were only a handful of photographs over eight months that showed Palin pregnant, none showed her as visibly pregnant as with her previous children, and at seven months, her entire staff and all of Alaska's political class disbelieved her:

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





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

  • 3 more annotations...

Chart Of The Day - The Daily Dish | By Andrew Sullivan

  • Racegap
  • Whereas 68 percent of white voters told Research 2000 they were
    definitely or probably planning to vote in 2010, just 33 percent of
    black voters did. Although whites have almost always turned out at
    greater rates than blacks, the racial gap has never been nearly that large, and indeed was at its smallest-ever levels in 2008 with Barack Obama on the ballot.

Obama's Surprising Afghanistan Surge - Jeffrey Goldberg

  • As president, I would pursue a new
    strategy, and begin by providing at least two additional combat
    brigades to support our effort in Afghanistan. We need more troops,
    more helicopters, better intelligence-gathering and more nonmilitary
    assistance to accomplish the mission there. I would not hold our
    military, our resources and our foreign policy hostage to a misguided
    desire to maintain permanent bases in Iraq.
30 Nov 09

Quote For The Day - The Daily Dish | By Andrew Sullivan

  • "The stimulus is doing what it was supposed to do—it is contributing to ending the recession. In my view, without the stimulus, G.D.P would still be negative and unemployment would be firmly over 11 percent,"
  • Mark Zandi, economics adviser to the McCain campaign. More on Zandi here.
24 Nov 09

Who Voted in 2008? - The Daily Dish | By Andrew Sullivan

  • The
    highlights: 64% of the 204 million voting-age Americans voted, up about
    6 million in number and 4 percentage points from 2004.  Historically
    underrepresented groups made gains in this election.  Non-whites made
    up more than 90% of the increase in the total number of voters.  The
    authors conclude that had non-whites voted at the same percentage as
    whites, more than 5 million more votes would have been cast in 2008. 
    The study, by Douglas Hess and Jody Herman, finds that had voters under
    30 voted at the same rates as their counterparts over 30, more than 7
    million additional ballots would have been cast.

Astonishing: Half of Republicans Believe ACORN Stole Election for Obama | ScoopDaily

  • A new national poll shows that 52 percent of Republicans believe the community organizing group ACORN fraudulently won Barack Obama the presidency.  He won by 9.5 million votes, a seven percent margin.
  • Among Republicans, however, only 27% say Obama actually won the race, with 52% — an outright majority — saying that ACORN stole it, and 21% are undecided. Among McCain voters, the breakdown is 31%-49%-20%. By comparison, independents weigh in at 72%-18%-10%, and Democrats are 86%-9%-4%.
16 Nov 09

Palin Wasn't Just Being a Diva | The New York Observer

  • Well … actually, concession (or victory) speeches from running mates are pretty standard. Here’s the history since 1988:
13 Nov 09

McCain Adviser Denies Palin’s Claim She Granted Couric Interview Because She Pitied Couric’s Low Self Esteem | The Plum Line

  • A McCain adviser I just spoke to adamantly denied the claim, and provided a counter story: Palin was repeatedly urged by McCain aides to prepare for the interview, but refused.
  • “It’s not true,” the McCain adviser I just reached said, laughing heartily at the claim. “It’s ridiculous.”
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29 Oct 09

Matthew Yglesias » Effective Leadership

  • And looking that over, it seems to me that a province-by-province study to “determine which regions are being managed effectively by local leaders and which require international help” would be a good idea right here in the USA. Someone can finally do something about, say, Mississippi. It persistently lags on human development indexes, its governor is dogged by corruption allegations, and election results simply break down along ethnic lines and re-enforce entrenched divisions.
  • Mississippi 2008 Presidential Exit Poll

While Aide Advised McCain, His Firm Lobbied for Georgia - washingtonpost.com

  • Sen. John McCain's top foreign policy adviser prepped his boss for an April 17 phone call with the president of Georgia and then helped the presumptive Republican presidential nominee prepare a strong statement of support for the fledgling republic.
  • The day of the call, a lobbying firm partly owned by the adviser, Randy Scheunemann, signed a $200,000 contract to continue providing strategic advice to the Georgian government in Washington.
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14 Sep 09

Matthew Yglesias » The Meaning of 9/12

  • There are about 300 million people in the United States of America of whom about 130 million voted last November. Of them, 60 million voted for John McCain, handing Barack Obama a solid though not overwhelming victory. Some of those people actually liked Obama, but just liked McCain more (both men had approval ratings over 50 percent on election day). But the median McCain voter really disliked Obama from the beginning. And some people disliked Obama even more than that median McCain voter. Indeed, about 60,000 people should have hated Obama three standard deviations more than the typical McCain voter. And apparently 30,000 people is a “generous” estimate of the tea party turnout.
  • If you want to know how people feel about Barack Obama, you can find out that a slight majority approve of the job he’s doing. But on the specific issue of the economy, he’s in slight negative territory.
10 Aug 09

The Daily Dish | By Andrew Sullivan

  • ‘Oh, God, what have I
    done?’
  • ‘Larry
    beware of the left because they will bankrupt you; beware of the right
    because they will kill you,’"
06 Aug 09

The Daily Dish | By Andrew Sullivan

  • finds that nearly six in 10
    white Southern evangelicals believe torture is justified, but their
    views can shift when they consider the Christian principle of the
    golden rule.
  • found that 57 percent of respondents said
    torture can be often or sometimes justified to gain important
    information from suspected terrorists. Thirty-eight percent said it was
    never or rarely justified.
  • 2 more annotations...
04 Aug 09

McCain's lament: There was so much pressure! - How the World Works - Salon.com

  • "You have no idea the pressure I was under," he says. "I remember being on the phone with President Bush, Vice President Cheney, the Treasury secretary and [Fed Chairman Ben] Bernanke. They assure me the world financial system is going to collapse if I don't vote for the bill. So I do the impetuous and rash thing by saying, look, I have got to go back to Washington and see how I can help. And by the way, so did Obama -- but it was McCain that was the impetuous one. Obama came back to Washington." Mr. McCain grumbles, "He was at the White House with me. But he wasn't impetuous." This is the only time in our interview he shows any bitterness about the campaign.
  • When McCain says "you have no idea the pressure I was under" -- he is demonstrating right there, in his own words, why he would have been a terrible choice as president. His lack of self-awareness is incredible.
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