Kathyn Jean Lopez, Girl Copy Editor

The encyclical is not the gift to the Left the media would have you believe. Once again, the Vatican lost the spin war. But what they're saying it is isn't quite it.

Was she promoted or was she pensioned off to a nice little home for the terminally inept?

Ethics

Megan McArdle chimes in with the news that David G. Bradley's practice of selling corporations, journalists and government officials access to each other is perfectly okay because she's been to the meetings and she says so. She grinds her utter lack of professionalism or ethics in her audience's faces by titling the post "Information Wants To Be Free." She has some sort of argument, but this is the same person who didn't see any conflict of interest in having a boyfriend who was a once and future employee of right-wing astroturf organizations and defending the same organizations, because she said so. She also defends off-the-record conversations, because releasing information might interfere with the interview subject's plans. Here's the relevant part, because I am really hoping I misinterpreted the passage.

Now, there are journalists that get carried away with the excitement of an
off-the-record conversation. Subjects can lie just as easily off the
record as on it. But it's absurd to say that the only worthwhile
conversations between journalists and the powerful are on the record. Off
the record conversations allow politicians to say things that they cannot say
publicly because the Fed Chairman or the Secretary of State or the Schools
Chancellor cannot be seen to say certain things as they are trying to affect
outcomes--they are, as the economists like to say, endogenous to the
system. Restricting their ability to explain things off the record would
restrict the supply of information available, not expand it.

Anatomy Of A Knee-Jerk Reaction

Our story begins with an innocent post on Sarah Palin. Everyone who was anyone was talking about Sarah Palin's sudden resignation that day, and little did we know that this one event would set off a chain reaction that would ricochet through the blogosphere for many, many minutes. For all we know the repercussions still echo through the series of tubes and their wooshing noises that we call The Internets.

At Angry Bear, cactus writes that Palin was wise to quit while she was ahead, and if only others had thought to do the same. Cactus mentioned Bush among other presidents, and somehow, somewhy, this dart pierced the armor over the heart of our heroine, Miss (soon to be Mrs.) Megan McArdle. She responds, in her own inimitable fashion:

Question Of The Day
What happens to the cottage industry among Democratic-leaning armchair
economists grinding out analyses proving that Democratic presidents are, like,
totally awesome for the economy? Presuming that we're stuck--as seem very
likely--in at least a couple of years of really grinding low-to-no growth, Obama
is going to destroy their figures. Are we in for a resurgence of belief in
exogenous growth factors?

Dishonest, vapid and spiteful in only two sentences. She's becoming quite succinct. Cactus, for the umpteenth time, says the facts speak for themselves. Matthew Yglesias seconds that post. McArdle responds to Yglesias and cactus by attempting to gum the latter's post to death. McArdle, from the comments:

All of these "studies" have the same problems: the number of data points is too
small, the start points are somewhat arbitrary, and the "D" label is very poorly
specified....Right, but he doesn't use appropriate tests. He uses tests designed
for independent distributions, and doesn't control for sample size.

She does not explain why these problems invalidate the data, or link to a post that does explain. That would be beside the point. The point is that you can never be sure and causation is not correlation and it's too difficult to predict and the plural of anecdote is not data. The point is obfuscation, and at that Megan McArdle is very successful indeed. The rocket scientists at Instapundit and The Corner will link and nod and McArdle will have earned her daily bread. It's a kind of rotten, day-old bread, but hey, it's a living.

UPDATE: Cactus responds to McArdle again, with better humor than I would have in the circumstances.

Less Modest Megan

Not-Shorter Megan McArdle:

I'm just to good to be true.
I'm much more moderate than you.
It'd be like heaven to rule
Over partisan creatures like you.
At long last I have arrived
To tell you how to survive.
I'm just too good to be true.
I'm much more moderate than you.

Pardon the way that I declare
You can't afford new health care
And that the stimulus plot
Is just some socialist rot.
So if you feel like I feel
Please let me know you're for real
'Cause I'm too good to be true
I'm much more moderate than you.

At long last love has arrived
And I thank God I'm alive
When wingnut welfare runs free
And people listen to me.
I'm David Brooks' favorite, see,
No one's more moderate than me.

I'm just too good to be true.
I'm much more moderate than you!

Poor, Stupid Ann Althouse

Ann Althouse sees Obama sit next to Russian Prime Minister Putin and assumes that Russia is making a fool of him, because that is how this immature, foolish woman thinks. The two chairs are identical, although President Obama's chair is pushed back a little further than Putin's.

The other factor is Obama's long legs. I noticed the same thing while wedged into an airplane recently. The women on either side of me were short and had some room to stretch out their legs. My knees extended several inches past theirs and I looked a bit big for my seat in comparison. I did not assume that the airline gave me a different, smaller seat, but I am not Ann Althouse.


From the British tv series Father Ted:

Father Ted: Now concentrate this time, Dougal. These [he points to some plastic cows on the table are very small; those [pointing at some cows out of the window] are far away...

Attack!

Megan McArdle is on a rampage the likes of which we have seldom seen. She has posted eight times since yesterday, a torrent of output for her, and almost every post attacks one blogger or another. Her eight posts also have an unusually high degree of snideness; McArdle usually tries to minimize having to deal with the repercussions of her wrongness and rudeness by using more oblique and passive-aggressive methods. But now she is on the attack and making it much harder for her targets to ignore her frequent pot-shots. My time is short so for most of the posts I can only hit some highlights.

The Politics of the Possible:

Paul Krugman asks why favoring a second stimulus, like opposing the Iraq War, has been written out of the public argument. Now, I seem to remember a very robust and lengthy public argument about the war, which couldn't have persisted without opponents. But leaving that aside, what about the stimulus?

McArdle famously wrote that if people who protested the war were hit in the head with 2x4s it would be no more than they should expect. Andrew Sullivan called people who argued against the war traitors. Condoleeza Rice warned of mushroom clouds. Colin Powell lied to Congress. Bush/Cheney twisted the arms of Britain to lie for them and tortured prisoners to get them to say Saddam was going to attack the US. McArdle is full of crap. She does not know this because anyone who disagrees with her is wrong and a hater, so there!

Well, it is starting to get some traction. But it probably won't get much, and here's why: Democrats aren't interested. They aren't interested because they are already facing political pressure over the debt. Doing another stimulus will--or so they think--make it much harder for them to do health care and climate change. Their initial thesis that a big, bold spending program would "prime the pump" for more big, bold spending programs has fallen flat. The stimulus is working too slowly, probably because little money has yet been dispensed, which has made further spending programs less, not more, popular.

She gives us no proof of these statements, as usual. It is based on her own fantasy straw man of Democrats who wants to use the current crises Bush inflicted on us to socialize our government. It's a stupid argument, but she clings to it for dear life because it permits her to think that she is smarter than Democrats, despite the fact that she supported Bush, his wars, and his economic policies. Her next two paragraphs are just feeble attempts to change the subject. She has to do that a lot. At no time and in no way does McArdle admit that the bad practices that brought down our economy and the bank bailout that further enriched a lucky few, are the actions of the most wealthy people in the financial and governmental circles, our elite.

A Public Plan And The Law Of Unintended Consequences:

Okay, this post just boggles my mind because it reiterates McArdle's argument that health care companies don't deny care to save money, and if they do you just need to yell at them and they will pay, no harm, no foul.

Here's the first time she says it.

Jon Cohn, who I respect greatly, spends a lot of time on the money and time that insurance companies put into denying claims. This is undoubtedly true. But I have two caveats. First, some of that effort is a good thing: without it, there would be fraud. No, not the automatic denials so many insurers are fond of, and I'm not defending. But Medicare should probably spend a lot more effort rooting out excessive billing. And I don't know what percentage of claims denial consists of refusing to line the pockets of doctors and labs.

But the more important point is that I doubt this is the majority of their administrative costs, or even the difference between their administrative costs and Medicare's. I'm not trying to justify the bullshit automatic claims denial, but that's not actually a very costly process: a hospital submits a bill, they deny it, you yell at them. Nor is refusing to cover people with pre-existing conditions, or any of the other multifarious complaints of single-payer advocates.

And the second time.

Since private systems have so far found it virtually impossible to deny many treatments for long, this will mean that millions of budget constrained people will find themselves with less available treatment than before.

Unbelievable. Just yell at them, and they'll do what you want. Ezra Klein and Hilzoy attempt to correct McArdle, but since McArdle either ignores corrections or returns them with excuses and insults, the attempts are, as usual, futile. McArdle's response to Klein:

SIGH
Ezra complains that I called him a communist, or ignored the TOTALLY AWESOME EXAMPLES OF NATIONAL HEALTH CARE in order to compare it to the Soviet Union, which we all agree sucks.

Uh, no.

I said that these arguments about administrative costs and rationalizing production and eliminating wasteful competition turn out not to be nearly as good arguments as
they initially sound. Maybe there are other good arguments about national health
care. But this particular set of belief systems was well developed about other
nationalized markets by the vast tradition of socialist literature, with which
today's young progressives are shockingly unfamiliar.

Because so many young leftists do not seem to know their own history, they are doomed to repeat it. Literally. They make arguments that were common in socialist circles a century and a half ago--for the popular version, try Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward.

In other words, Klein, shockingly!!!, doesn't even know that (pssst) he's really a socialist, just like the Fabian Society! Usually you have to go to Jonah Goldberg for that sort of argument, and evidently McArdle is doing just that.


Two attacks down, two to go. I'll post this and get back to the rest a little later.

Follow The Money

How did David G. Bradley, the owner of The Atlantic, make his money?

In 1979 while only 26 years old, Bradley founded the Research Council of Washington, later renamed the Advisory Board Company. The purpose of the company, at least initially, was to do research on any question for any industry. In 1986 the company began doing special research for the health care industry, which eventually became the main focus of the Advisory Board Company.[3]

In 1983, his company had begun advising other firms in the financial services industry. In 1997, this was completely spun off as the separate Corporate Executive Board.[4] Both companies are now publicly traded on the NASDAQ. Bradley reportedly earned over $300 million from their sale.[1]

In other words, he sold information.

Bradley now owns the Atlantic Media Company. He is running what he calls "salons."

Atlantic spokesperson Zachary Hooper told Talking Points Memo on Monday that "the corporate sponsor comes to us and says, 'We're interested in having a discussion on a certain topic.'" And some corporate sponsors, TPM reported, have included AstraZeneca ("Healthcare Access and Education”); Microsoft (“Global Trade”), G.E. ("Energy Sustainability and the Future of Nuclear Power"); Allstate

("The Future of the American City"); and Citi ("The Challenge of Global Markets").

When asked by TPM, Hooper declined to comment on how much a corporation pays to sponsor an event, so it is unclear if the Atlantic asks anywhere in the $25,000 to $250,000 range described in the Post's flier that advertised for underwriting opportunities.

Who attends?

If anything, The Post was a late entrant to what a number of publications, including the Wall Street Journal and the Economist, in addition to Atlantic Media, have found to be a lucrative source of income. Bradley described that revenue as a legitimate justification for the salons at a time when "the economic foundation beneath journalism is falling away."

"The imperative," he said, "is to rebuild journalism on different financial pillars. One of them, and not inconsequential to us, is events - of all types."

Atlantic has been particularly aggressive in staging events, the most famous of which, the Aspen Ideas Festival, was underway last week when the controversy over the Post's proposed dinners first began.

Some of the dinners he has hosted are, Bradley said, "for my own interest and my own account," a reference to a series of off-the-record evenings with newsmakers he has held for a select group of prominent Washington reporters. Those are different, he said, from the dinners that have corporate sponsors, which usually have about 30 participants, including members of Congress and administration officials, and follow a prescribed format.

The Atlantic is openly selling ideas, but also selling information to those it deems "newsmakers." It's an interesting concept; instead of newspapers and magazines gathering information and selling it to the public, they gather information and sell it to whoever buys access.

Bradley bought a magazine that was losing millions every year. His ad revenues have gone down 20% since then. The internet and recession have killed many newspapers and magazine. Bradley evidently has decided that the future of journalism--the gaining of knowledge and therefore power--is with those who could pay the most for it.

Reading Material

Via Megan McArdle, here is a very entertaining article about a former basketball player-turned-farmer named Will Allen. His love of growing things and teaching spills over from the article, and his passion is infectious. He sees many reasons for people to garden--money, healthy food, connection to nature, moral and physical development, safeguard from hunger. It's a fun read.

McArdle's reaction? Individuals growing food will never replace industrial agriculture because of economy of scale. She utterly, completely, misses the point. Almost nobody expects industrial farming to end, except perhaps peak oil followers, and they expect the end of cheap oil to make growing one's own food essential.

I'm tempted to wonder if today's column was sponsored by ConAgra.

Ross Douthat Died For Our Sins

Ross Douthat is angry with America, who has rejected his avatar Sarah Palin. They'll be sorry, oh yes, they will.

Here are lessons of the Sarah Palin experience, for any aspiring politicianwho shares her background and her sex. Your children will go through the tabloid wringer. Your religion will be mocked and misrepresented. Your political record will be distorted, to better parody your family and your faith. (And no, gentle reader, Palin did not insist on abstinence-only sex education, slash funds for special-needs children or inject creationism into public schools.)

Male commentators will attack you for parading your children. Female commentators will attack you for not staying home with them. You’ll be sneered at for how you talk and how many colleges you attended. You’ll endure gibes about your “slutty” looks and your “white trash concupiscence,” while a prominent female academic declares that your “greatest hypocrisy” is the “pretense” that you’re a woman. And eight months after the election, the professionals who pressed you into the service of a gimmicky, dreary, idea-free campaign will still be blaming you for their defeat.

All of this had something to do with ordinary partisan politics. But it had everything to do with Palin’s gender and her social class.

Sarah Palin is beloved by millions because her rise suggested, however temporarily, that the old American aphorism about how anyone can grow up to be president might actually be true.

But her unhappy sojourn on the national stage has had a different moral: Don’t even think about it.

Poor, poor Douthat. America rejected Sarah Palin a long time ago, preferring to vote for anyone but a Republican, but Douthat still feels the sting, for Palin was Douthat and Douthat was Palin. Palin was the only candidate in recent history that genuinely seemed to believe in the same things as Douthat. She is a fundamentalist and as long as she seemed to have political power, Douthat felt he had political power. She proved that you could believe in magic and witches and still become a national player. She proved that you could enforce your own religious beliefs on women and best of all--actually force them to carry their child to term, whether they wanted to or not. We won't know if Bristol wanted an abortion until the inevitable Mommy Dearest book comes out, but there is no question that Palin's career would be affected, if not ruined, if she let her daughter choose for herself and her daughter chose to have an abortion.

He was so close. So close to seeing his beliefs celebrated instead of mocked in the public sphere. So close to control, to power, to teaching those Pill-popping sluts to pay for their lack of godliness. Now it's gone, all gone. Sob!

Missing the Point

Bruce Bartlett says we don't need a second stimulus since the first hasn't affect the economy yet.

Paul Krugman says the stimulus has kept unemployment from being worse than it would have been, but we need more stimulus because the stimulus was never big enough to repair the economy.

Megan McArdle bats her eyelashes and says that Krugman is much smarter than she, but he is wrong, and the stimulus is a failure because unemployment is still rising.

It's like a game of telephone. The story becomes hopelessly muddled when McArdle gets her grimy fingers on it, and she ends up responding to the misinterpretation rattling around in her head instead of the real issue.

The Princess Bride

On this happy occasion, let's take a look back at an earlier post on marriage from Megan McArdle. Unfortunately, I seem to be blocked from accessing McArdle's Jane Galt archives, no doubt due to some kind of clerical error. Fortunately, there are other ways to access material on the internet. In "A really, really, really long post about gay marriage that does not, in the end, support one side or the other," McArdle warns that big decisions can have unintended consequences, while stating over and over and over that she doesn't care either way whether or not gays can marry.

Unlike most libertarians, I don't have an opinion on gay marriage, and I'm not going to have an opinion no matter how much you bait me. However, I had an interesting discussion last night with another libertarian about it, which devolved into an argument about a certain kind of liberal/libertarian argument about gay marriage that I find really unconvincing.

Social conservatives of a more moderate stripe are essentially saying that marriage is an ancient institution, which has been carefully selected for throughout human history. It is a bedrock of our society; if it is destroyed, we will all be much worse off. (See what happened to the inner cities between 1960 and 1990 if you do not believe this.) For some reason, marriage always and everywhere, in every culture we know about, is between a man and a woman; this seems to be an important feature of the institution. We should not go mucking around and changing this extremely important institution, because if we make a bad change, the institution will fall apart.

A very common response to this is essentially to mock this as ridiculous. "Why on earth would it make any difference to me whether gay people are getting married? Why would that change my behavior as a heterosexual"

To which social conservatives reply that institutions have a number of complex ways in which they fulfill their roles, and one of the very important ways in which the institution of marriage perpetuates itself is by creating a romantic vision of oneself in marriage that is intrinsically tied into expressing one's masculinity or femininity in relation to a person of the opposite sex; stepping into an explicitly gendered role. This may not be true of every single marriage, and indeed undoubtedly it is untrue in some cases. But it is true of the culture-wide institution. By changing the explicitly gendered nature of marriage we might be accidentally cutting away something that turns out to be a crucial underpinning.

To which, again, the other side replies "That's ridiculous! I would never change my willingness to get married based on whether or not gay people were getting married!"

Having said she has no opinion, McArdle immediately begins discussing opinions. She presents these views as belonging to others so she can't be criticized or rejected by anybody. From her safe "neutral" perch she can criticize both sides while belonging to neither. Yet McArdle does, of course, have an opinion, and has the urge to present it to the world, indeed, an obligation to tell others what to think, as a highly educated person and one of the elite.

Now, economists hear this sort of argument all the time. "That's ridiculous! I would never start working fewer hours because my taxes went up!" This ignores the fact that you may not be the marginal case. The marginal case may be some consultant who just can't justify sacrificing valuable leisure for a new project when he's only making 60 cents on the dollar. The result will nonetheless be the same: less economic activity. Similarly, you--highly educated, firmly socialised, upper middle class you--may not be the marginal marriage candidate; it may be some high school dropout in Tuscaloosa. That doesn't mean that the institution of marriage won't be weakened in America just the same.

And now we're deeply in the weeds, where a layperson would have a hard time following or countering McArdle's opinions. It's not that McArdle's feelings towards marriage will suffer, it's the economy. No, McArdle isn't a bigot here and neither are you, dear reader. It's Others, lowlifes in Tuscaloosa who will harm marriage through their bigotry. Not McArdle. But just in case you accidently thought McArdle had an opinion lurking under the verbiage, she rushes to disabuse you of that notion.

This should not be taken as an endorsement of the idea that gay marriage will weaken the current institution. I can tell a plausible story where it does; I can tell a plausible story where it doesn't. I have no idea which one is true. That is why I have no opinion on gay marriage, and am not planning to develop one. Marriage is a big institution; too big for me to feel I have a successful handle on it.

Eh, maybe it will, maybe it won't, who knows? But remember, McArdle has no opinion on the subject either way. Marriage won't be harmed by gays marrying, unless, you know, it will.

However, I am bothered by this specific argument, which I have heard over and over from the people I know who favor gay marriage laws. I mean, literally over and over; when they get into arguments, they just repeat it, again and again. "I will get married even if marriage is expanded to include gay people; I cannot imagine anyone up and deciding not to get married because gay people are getting married; therefore, the whole idea is ridiculous and bigoted."

They may well be right. Nonetheless, libertarians should know better. The limits of your imagination are not the limits of reality. Every government programme that libertarians have argued against has been defended at its inception with exactly this argument.

So just in case you thought opposition to gay marriage was silly and bigoted, remember that it might not be, because someone, somewhere might make a negative economic decision, and hurt the free markets.

So what does this mean? That we shouldn't enact gay marriage because of some sort of social Precautionary Principle [sic]

No. I have no such grand advice.

My only request is that people try to be a leeetle more humble about their ability to imagine the subtle results of big policy changes. The argument that gay marriage will not change the institution of marriage because you can't imagine it changing your personal reaction is pretty arrogant. It imagines, first of all, that your behavior is a guide for the behavior of everyone else in society, when in fact, as you may have noticed, all sorts of different people react to all sorts of different things in all sorts of different ways, which is why we have to have elections and stuff. And second, the unwavering belief that the only reason that marriage, always and everywhere, is a male-female institution (I exclude rare ritual behaviors), is just some sort of bizarre historical coincidence, and that you know better, needs examining. If you think you know why marriage is male-female, and why that's either outdated because of all the ways in which reproduction has lately changed, or was a bad reason to start with, then you are in a good place to advocate reform. If you think that marriage is just that way because our ancestors were all a bunch of repressed bastards with dark Freudian complexes that made them homophobic bigots, I'm a little leery of letting you muck around with it.

Be humble little thinkers, who do not have McArdle's education and deep thoughts. Listen to your betters, which is why we have elections and stuff. Our ancestors knew what they were doing and did it for a good reason. (After all, it's not like the marriage contract started out as a bill of sale for the exchange of property.) Listen to your Authorities. They know what they are doing.

Is this post going to convince anyone? I doubt it; everyone but me seems to already know all the answers, so why listen to such a hedging, doubting bore? I myself am trying to draw a very fine line between being humble about making big changes to big social institutions, and telling people (which I am not trying to do) that they can't make those changes because other people have been wrong in the past. In the end, our judgement is all we have; everyone will have to rely on their judgement of whether gay marriage is, on net, a good or a bad idea. All I'm asking for is for people to think more deeply than a quick consultation of their imaginations to make that decision. I realise that this probably falls on the side of supporting the anti-gay-marriage forces, and I'm sorry, but I can't help that. This humility is what I want from liberals when approaching market changes; now I'm asking it from my side too, in approaching social ones. I think the approach is consistent, if not exactly popular.

Learn from my humility, little people. Deny civil rights to our fellow human beings. They might be miffed at that, but I'm sorry, I just can't help that.

McArdle is afraid of rejection from socially liberal people if she states what she really feels--gays shouldn't marry. If gay marriage hurts McArdle's marriage in any way, shape or form, she cannot allow it. Marriage is for her, happily born heterosexual and therefore good enough to marry. Not for gays, who are not good enough. McArdle has spoken. Be humble and accept her wisdom.

You go and have a very special day, Princess, and rest happy knowing that some people aren't allowed to marry at all, making your Happy Day even more exclusive and therefore better than before. It's the Libertarian Way, after all.

Why We Fight

Jonathan Schwartz at A Tiny Revolution gives us a brilliant Michael Palin quote (from the commentary on The Life of Brian) that perfectly explains the reason for this blog.

PALIN: This was an interesting scene because I had this whole big crowd out there. I tell you it's very very strange to be up there. You feel superior to everybody, literally because you're up above them, but also because you're surrounded by the army, you've got the best costume, you've got the lead role. And once people start laughing, you do get—it is a brilliant form of subversion. And it's something I think modern revolutionaries should remember. If you can make fun of somebody, it's often very much better and far more effective than shooting them or making a martyr of them. And that's what works so well here. And it was really very very unsettling to play Pilate to this lot, and find them in end literally rolling over, in huge numbers of people just jeering at you. There's nothing more guaranteed to put you back in your place. And there's nothing you can do against it, really. I suppose you can kill people for laughing, but...

Nothing is more effective than mocking because it is a form of rejection that cuts straight to the heart. It is an immediate, collective decision by one's peers, a thumbs up/thumbs down, a roar of acceptance and pleasure or of rejection and scorn. Acceptance and love are what all of us seek, in all we do and in every person we meet. If we do not get this from our parents, we will continue to seek it out for the rest of our lives. It is an overwhelmingly powerful force and because it is based on shame and pain, it is usually disguised as a more acceptable force: religion, politics, ideology, even personal likes and dislikes.

We tend to divide ourselves into right and left because we understand that the left accepts people who tend to define themselves, while the right tends to let others define them. It's safe and reassuring to be given all the answers and a guidebook on exactly how to think, dress and feel. But because the right doesn't choose its own rules, or even likes and dislikes, they are never sure if they are "right." They need constant reassurance that what they are being told is correct, since they are not allowed to decide for themselves. And that makes them vulnerable to the left, since the left is open to, and therefore the source of, that which is new and trendy. After the right accepts something new the followers finally are able to accept it, but it leaves them seeming terminally unhip and eminently mockable.

Mocking is so powerful that the right is trying to get David Letterman fired for a tacky joke they embellished for effect. The right knows they are vulnerable, and dimly know they are incapable of using laughter for effect themselves. To laugh at others you have to be able to laugh at yourself, to see yourself in others and others in yourself. This empathy lets you understand and therefore forgive others and yourself. You don't fear judgement, from your fellow man or from God*, since you are able to love yourself as well as others. And what more could God ask from us?



*Still don't believe in gods, but he's a useful rhetorical device.

The Happy Couple

What a surprise. After making posts on proposals, rings and babies, Megan McArdle announces she is getting married. She might as well have a head of glass, since everything that passes through it is laid bare for the public to see.

It's why she's such a good example of how conservatives base political decisions on personal issues. It's not ideology or Libertarianism or an elite education or even God. It's Mom and Dad, and growing up listening to complaints about dishonest unions and those nasty people who are holding back their betters.

McArdle and Suderman will have a child they can't afford and spend every penny they can borrow to give him or her an elite education. They will live on the fringes of an elite society, both part of it and outside it, hanging on through sheer will and cunning. They will be very happy, except when they are not.

UDATE: The blogging about wedding purchases has begun. And there's a tiara.

No, there really is.

We Are All Victims Now

The little shop of horrors we call The Corner is obsessively discussing how Palin's abrupt quitting will benefit her in her future presidential run. These geniuses are utterly incapable of seeing the truth because the truth would reflect badly on them. They cheered and praised and supported a woman who was patently under qualified, and through sheer determination, they force the facts to support their prejudices and vanities.

Victor/Victoria Davis Hanson:

Conventional wisdom suggests that short-term the Palin decision was unwise— e.g., "quitter," unpredictable, sulking, etc.

[snip]

In other words, it doesn't matter that much what critics say, but — should she pursue politics — only what she does with her newfound time, especially if she travels widely, studies foreign policy, and helps galvanize the party base.

In the long run, she can lecture, earn a good income through speaking, develop a coterie of advisers and supporters, take care of her family, not have the constant political warring on all flanks, and invest time in reflecting and studying issues, visit the country, meet leaders, etc. She's not looking at 2012; but in eight years by 2016 she will be far more savvy, still young, and far more experienced. It matters not all that the Left writes her off as daffy, since they were going to do that whatever she did; the key is whether she convinces conservatives in eight year of travel and reflection that she's a charismatic Margaret Thatcher type heavyweight.

Kathryn "Prime of Miss Jean" Lopez:

Rather than just be a celebrity, this could be a real opportunity for her to show us her stuff — what's important to her, what she wants people to know about her, why we should pay attention to her, why we should consider her for the highest office in the land (after already gone with the cool dude with little national electoral experience — though in his case it was little experience, period). To get people to know her for something more than being Sarah!

I wouldn't be shocked though, if Palin on the National Scene, Act II, starts out low key, with some downtime. She needs to figure out what her voice is, where and how she can shine, and, most importantly, how she and her family can survive it and even flourish in the brutal world of politics. There's no question she has a gift. Now's the time to figure out how to be prudent with it.

Steve Hayward:

This could be, as Bill Kristol suggests, part of a risky but shrewd long game, not for a run in 2012, but way off in 2016 or 2020. Some folks have mentioned Nixon, rehabilitating himself in the 1960s, and skipping the 1964 election. She may have the self-awareness that she's taken big hits below the waterline, and that her best course is the patient rebuilding of her political life over a decade rather than the next two election cycles. Now she'll have the time to read and study and cultivate wider portfolio as Jonah and others have suggested. But even if she wants to run in 2012, it is certainly the case that it is hard to be a player on the national stage while being governor of Alaska since it is so remote, even in the jet age. (It take longer to get to Alaska than Europe from the east coast and midwest.) If so, she should say this openly. Make a virtue out of it.

Then, too, I wonder, and am slightly hopeful in fact, that she is indeed doing this for authentic family reasons. Political life is hell on decent family life. I have a hard time thinking of a single politician, at any level, who has a happy family life. Kids are usually a mess; non-messed up kids are the rare exception. Whenever I talk to someone about whether to run for any office, that's the first and last aspect I bring up. You shouldn't do it until your kids are grown or off to college is my opinion. This might really be a case of where she has reckoned the cost to her family of near-term political ambition, and chosen her family. Good for her if so.

Other members of the corner are less confident but still see Palin's move as advantageous to her eventually. They pay very little attention to rumors of ethics investigations and seem perfectly happy to accept any reason Palin gives them, no matter how illogical or rambling. Any leader will do for an authoritarian, and Palin can be easily replaced with somebody--anybody--else. Palin might be even more useful as a martyr than as an actual candidate. Mark Steyn:

Then suddenly you get the call from Washington. You know it'll mean Secret Service, and speechwriters, and minders vetting your wardrobe. But nobody said it would mean a mainstream network comedy host doing statutory rape gags about your 14-year old daughter. You've got a special-needs kid and a son in Iraq and a daughter who's given you your first grandchild in less than ideal circumstances. That would be enough for most of us. But the special-needs kid and the daughter and most everyone else you love are a national joke, and the PC enforcers are entirely cool with it.

Most of those who sneer at Sarah Palin have no desire to live her life. But why not try to - what's the word? - "empathize"? If you like Wasilla and hunting and snowmachining and moose stew and politics, is the last worth giving up everything else in the hopes that one day David Letterman and Maureen Dowd might decide Trig and Bristol and the rest are sufficiently non-risible to enable you to prosper in their world? And, putting aside the odds, would you really like to be the person you'd have to turn into under that scenario?

Poor, poor Palin, forced to parade her pregnant daughter and special-needs baby before the public as instant, photographic proof of her fundamentalist bona fides. How could the public do that to her? She's a victim, just as they are all victims, under constant attack by society. Helpless and weak, needing guns and police and armies to save them from the bad men who live in the shadows.

Frightened children, who would do or say anything to keep lying their comfortable, soothing lies.

Shill vs. Shill

It's Shill for the Rich versus Shill for the Rich at The Atlantic today. Megan McArdle attacks liberals for "breathlessly celebrating Wal-Mart's "capitulation" on national health" and suspiciously intelligent and forceful commenters attack her in return. Here's one:

This reads like a comment on a blog entry. The context has to be sought out--you don't really include it. Why not begin your article with the substance of the story you're referencing? If you really think that "liberal" commentators have missed the point, you've hardly done your theory justice. You begin by summarizing your 3 examples' points, then you briefly mention several opposing points of view. Cryptically, you label the final one "on the other side..." as if it were in opposition to your previous point, which it is not.
I find this all somewhat interesting, but if you can't bother to write a complete story, I can't be bothered to follow your byline in the future. Reporting and analysis is difficult. That must be why so few of you are good at it.

McArdle's sorrowful announcement that business might have bad motives at times is a welcome break from her usual routine, but is old news to the rest of us. When you check her links, the "breathlessly celebrating liberals" turn out to be a little less than breathless. Or celebrating.

Strange as it sounds, a key pro-reform player in the healthcare battle is...Wal-Mart. America's largest employer -- known heretofore as destroyer of small business, crusher of unions, denier of decent benefits and force for global wage reduction -- signed on yesterday to the concept of an employer mandate for healthcare.

Yesterday, Wal-Mart, along with SEIU and the Center for American Progress released a letter articulating shared principles for health reform. And it went a ways toward ending my skepticism. I figured whatever SEIU and Wal-Mart produced would be a bland set of principles offered at a safe and uncontroversial moment. This is the opposite.

The throws its weight behind two primary policies. The first is the so-called "employer mandate." This is, essentially, a tax on employers that don't provide health care. It both helps pay for health care and helps get more people covered. It's a top priority for Organized Labor. The business community, however, loathes it and has spent the past year organizing aggressively against it.

Yes, Wal-Mart--the company famous for finding new and creative ways to squeeze
employee health benefits--has today endorsed, in principle, an employer mandate.
It did so in a letter issued jointly with the Center for American Progress and Service Employees International Union (SEIU):[snipped quote]
It's a broad statement and, as always, the meaning of the commitment depends a great deal upon the details. But this is not a small thing. By endorsing the idea of a
employer mandate, Wal-Mart has made the idea more difficult to demonize. It has
also--and I can't stress this enough--given some political cover to members of
Congress who might be sympathetic to the idea of employer mandate but hesitate
to take a vote that might be perceived as anti-business.

My goodness, that sure is a lot of breathless celebrating. You can just hear the jubilant triumphalism.

I sometimes think McArdle writes her blog not just for money and social advancement but also to continue her favorite practice of catty insults towards her enemies that so enlivened her high school days. Let's take a peek into Mr. Peabody's Wayback Machine and visit a few of her attacks on liberals.

I see a lot of liberal blogs crowing that Obama's really taking it to the hedge funds who are holding out on the Chrysler bankruptcy. Hedge fund managers, you see, have a civic duty to lose large amounts of other peoples' money in order to ensure that the UAW makes as few sacrifices as possible in a bankruptcy.

I don't understand why these articles keep getting written. Moreover, I don't understand why they can keep getting written. Did progressives really think they'd woken up in Sweden on November 5th?

Liberals got made [sic] when this question was asked about them four years ago. But
I'll admit it--in my opinion, the conservatarian coalition is basically out of ammo.

Several liberal blogs are chortling over this statement I made early in the year:
"Will the economy decline in 2008? Paul Krugman is voting for doom. It's worth keeping in mind, however, that Paul Krugman has predicted eight of the last none recessions under the Bush administration."
I think it's obvious we're in a slowdown, and a recession seems likely-ish, but Britain's skirted recession for over a decade now, so I can't be too fatalistic. This is obviously hilarious--if you have an incredibly shaky understanding of statistics, and also, no knowledge of decision science.

I read liberal blogs defending Spitzer and spinning conspiracy theories about his downfall, and all I can think is "Really? You really want to hitch your wagon to this fallen star?" Why on earth?

What is with the liberal economists suddenly discovering, in wide-eyed shock, that economists who are attached to political campaigns spin things to favor their candidates?...Welcome to politics. I am skeptical that Brad De Long and Paul Krugman have never noticed the phenomenon before.

How many people who seem to pushing policy are merely stuck in adolescence, endlessly replaying a nightmare scenario of sucking up to petty powers and pushing down the "interlopers"?

Requiem

Megan McArdle mourns the death of Billy Mays, twice. It's not very surprising that her patron saint would peddle useless crap on tv to people who measure their worth by their purchasing power.

Ross Douthat Is A Sexist Moron Again

Oh dear. Ross Douthat is thinking again, and that never ends well.

As [Cristina] Nehring observes, our hyper-educated, socially-liberal elite is considerably more romantically conservative than its blasé attitude toward pornography or premarital sex would lead you to expect. The difficult scramble up the meritocratic ladder tends to discourage wild passions and death-defying flings. For bright young overachievers, there’s often a definite tameness to the way that collegiate “safe sex” segues into the upwardly-mobile security of “companionate marriages” — or, if you’re feeling more cynical, “consumption partnerships.”

[yap yap]

Better, perhaps, if this dynamic were reversed. Our meritocrats could stand to leaven their careerism with a little more romantic excess. (Though such excess is more appropriate in the young, it should be emphasized, than in middle-aged essayists and parents.) But most Americans, particularly those of modest means, would benefit from greater caution and stability in their romantic entanglements.

You see, ambitious women control their libidos, because sex leads to babies and babies lead to the end of careers, or at least their derailing. But the poor masses don't have those checks on their sex lives and therefore are more likely to have sex and therefore babies. The moral of the story is that Ross Douthat wants America to stop all the immoral screwing. It never seems to occur to him that the people he's chastising don't care what he thinks, but who can blame him when he has received so much praise and money for being a shallow, sex-obsessed, puritanical busy-body?

h/t to Downpuppy

Our Work Here Is Done

Digby notes our pullout from Iraq.

Iraq still faces extreme challenges, exemplified by the spate of bombings and attacks last week leading up to this pullout, which killed at least 200. And the opening of oil fields to international corporations could signal a decline for the Iraqi people and an increase in, basically,kleptocracy.

(my bolding)

Everything else is just noise.

You Only Think You're Equal

Our leaders are trying to decide if a woman's uterus belongs to women or to their rightful owners, men in power. (via here and here)

Many abortion rights advocates and some Democrats who want to dial down the culture wars want the White House to package the two parts of the plan together, as a single piece of legislation. The plan would seek to reduce unwanted pregnancies by funding comprehensive sex education and contraception and to reduce the need for abortion by bolstering federal support for pregnant women. Supporters of the approach say it would force senators and members of Congress on both sides of the abortion battle to compromise their traditional positions, creating true common ground that mirrors what President Obama has called for.

But more conservative religious groups working with the White House Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships say they would be forced to oppose such a plan—even though they support the abortion reduction part—because they oppose federal dollars for contraception and comprehensive sex education. This camp, which includes such formidable organizations as the U.S. Council of Catholic Bishops and the Southern Baptist Convention, is pressuring the White House to decouple the two parts of the plan into separate bills. One bill would focus entirely on preventing unwanted pregnancy, while the other would focus on supporting
pregnant women.

It would behoove the U.S. Council of Catholic Bishops to spend the rest of their existence paying penance for their culpability in their priests' rape and molestation of children by trying to stop child abuse, but they would rather try to control The Other Group Of Children, which is how they see women. You won't need to have an abortion if you don't get pregnant in the first place, but these men still don't want women to have birth control because they don't want women to have control over their own lives.

It was never about the dead babies. We kill babies all the time, with neglect and abuse, war and cold, harmful policies. It was about control, because if you control reproduction you control women, and some people can never have too much control. Also, just as many males think gays are icky, many males think women are icky, and they will never, ever see them as equals. Anti-abortion battles are a means to an end. The elimination of contraception will be next, with the enormous loss of personal power and opportunity being seen as a positive consequence.

For men.

Vacation

I'll be on vacation until Monday and probably won't be able to post.

Have a good weekend.