What kind of insulated, sheltered, non-reality reality do you have to be swimming around in that you can sit there and say that the killing of an ENTIRE OCEAN and the destruction of an ENTIRE THIRD OF THE DAMN COUNTRY’S ECONOMY would be okay because hey, then everybody will realize that Nixon was right and fuck Cambodia anyway and hippies smell?
Obama‘s problem is he doesn‘t seem like a guy who can go into an Applebee‘s salad bar and people think he fits in naturally there. He has to change to be more like that Applebee‘s guy and as he‘s done that he‘s become much more transactional. Much more, I‘m going to deliver this and this and this to you on policy.
I'm tired of self-hating liberal elites lecturing other liberals about how out of touch we are with real America. Lots of real American voters may well like Sarah Palin, admire her moxie or her mothering, and still know she'd be a terrible president.
In fact it's the Beltway anointed who underestimate the American people. Does Joe Klein honestly think "real Americans" admire the way Palin's gone after 19-year-old Levi Johnston? I don't see that, unless you think real Americans are petty and stupid and believe it's a good idea to pick public fights with the teenage father of their grandchild. Then there's Pat Buchanan: We were set to debate Palin's appeal on "Hardball" Thursday (until we got bumped by the Clinton news). Pat loves her. Apparently it doesn't bother him that, in her charming interview with Chris Wallace, she confused the anti-interventionist Buchanan with the neocon world conquerer Daniel Pipes. Palin cited a Buchanan column as suggesting Obama could get out of his current political fix if he decided to "declare war on Iran or decided to do whatever he can to support Israel, which I would like him to do." In fact, that was Pipes' point of view, which Buchanan was criticizing in the column.
But I guess our next president doesn't need to know the difference between neocons and anti-interventionists. Buchanan told Talking Points Memo that critics were misunderstanding Palin's misunderstanding him, but his answer made no sense. On "Hardball" I wanted to ask Buchanan, one of the nation's foremost Israel critics, what he thought of Palin's blind support for Israel, or her wearing the Israeli flag on her lapel Saturday night. Maybe issues like that don't really matter. Boy, conservatives must be desperate.
Or at least Beltway conservatives. That same Washington Post poll showed that only 45 percent of conservatives believe Palin is qualified to be president, down from 66 percent at the end of 2008. A majority of Republicans say she'd make a bad president. Of course Palin has plenty of time before 2012, but so far time has not been on her side. The more time Americans get to know her, the more they see her as divisive and poorly informed. And her poll numbers look worse when you compare her to other outsider candidates: A year before they ran in 1988, Pat Robertson and Jesse Jackson were judged more qualified by their respective parties than Palin is today. And back in 1996, during Buchanan's second run for the Republican nomination, "only" 47 percent of Americans said they thought he would not make an "effective" president -- way better than the 71 percent who say Palin's not qualified.
It's still entirely possible Palin can surprise us. FiveThirtyEight.com's Nate Silver looked at the electoral map today and hacked out a state by state path for her to get the Republican nomination in 2012. But as Silver acknowledged, it was predicated on the primary and caucus schedule remaining in the same order it was in 2008, which isn't likely. And it also presupposed no more major gaffes or career-ending stumbles by the former Alaska governor.
But at this point, given Palin's abysmal standing with American voters, I think Beltway insiders anointing Palin the candidate of real America are the ones showing contempt for real Americans.
John Derbyshire, a British-American conservative author and columnist for the National Review, has written a new book titled We Are Doomed: Reclaiming Conservative Pessimism. The book contains a section called “The Case Against Female Suffrage.” Yesterday on his radio show, Alan Colmes asked Derbyshire to articulate his argument.“What is the case against female suffrage?” Colmes asked. “The conservative case against it is that women lean hard to the left,” Derbyshire responded nonsensically. “They want someone to nurture, they want someone to help raise their kids, and if men aren’t inclined to do it — and in the present days, they’re not much — then they’d like the state to do it for them.”
Colmes then pressed Derbyshire on whether women should have the right to vote. “Ah…” Derbyshire sighed, attempting to dodge the question initially. “I’m not putting forward a political program here,” he said. But then Derbyshire slowly began to open up:
DERBYSHIRE: Among the hopes that I do not realistically nurse is the hope that female suffrage will be repealed. But I’ll say this – if it were to be, I wouldn’t lose a minute’s sleep.
COLMES: We’d be a better country if women didn’t vote?
DERBYSHIRE: Probably. Don’t you think so?
COLMES: No, I do not think so whatsoever.
DERBYSHIRE: Come on Alan. Come clean here [laughing].
COLMES: We would be a better country? John Derbyshire making the statement, we would be a better country if women did not vote.
DERBYSHIRE: Yeah, probably.
The decline of the two-parent family, for instance, is almost certainly depressing life satisfaction for the women stuck raising kids alone. But this can’t be the only explanation, since the trend toward greater female discontent cuts across lines of class and race. A working-class Hispanic woman is far more likely to be a single mother than her white and wealthy counterpart, yet the male-female happiness gap holds in East Hampton and East L.A. alike.
Again, maybe the happiness numbers are being tipped downward by a mounting female workload — the famous “second shift,” in which women continue to do the lion’s share of household chores even as they’re handed more and more workplace responsibility. It’s certainly possible — but as Wolfers and Stevenson point out, recent surveys actually show similar workload patterns for men and women over all.
Or perhaps the problem is political — maybe women prefer egalitarian, low-risk societies, and the cowboy capitalism of the Reagan era had an anxiety-inducing effect on the American female. But even in the warm, nurturing, egalitarian European Union, female happiness has fallen relative to men’s across the last three decades.
All this ambiguity lends itself to broad-brush readings. A strict feminist and a stringent gender-role traditionalist alike will probably find vindication of their premises between the lines of Wolfers and Stevenson’s careful prose. The feminist will see evidence of a revolution interrupted, in which rising expectations are bumping against glass ceilings, breeding entirely justified resentments. The traditionalist will see evidence of a revolution gone awry, in which women have been pressured into lifestyles that run counter to their biological imperatives, and men have been liberated to embrace a piggish irresponsibility.
There’s evidence to fit each of these narratives. But there’s also room for both.
[snip]
They should also be able to agree that the steady advance of single motherhood threatens the interests and happiness of women. Here the public-policy options are limited; some kind of social stigma is a necessity. But a new-model stigma shouldn’t (and couldn’t) look like the old sexism. There’s no necessary reason why feminists and cultural conservatives can’t join forces — in the same way that they made common cause during the pornography wars of the 1980s — behind a social revolution that ostracizes serial baby-daddies and trophy-wife collectors as thoroughly as the “fallen women” of a more patriarchal age.
No reason, of course, save the fact that contemporary America doesn’t seem willing to accept sexual stigma, period. We simply don’t have the stomach for permanently ostracizing the sexually irresponsible — be they a pregnant starlet, a thrice-divorced tycoon, or even a prostitute-hiring politician.
Economists say this recession is reshaping the financial roles of millions of women whose husbands have lost jobs. Since the recession began in December 2007, about 5.7 million jobs have disappeared in the United States. About 4 out of 5 of those jobs were held by men. That's because the heaviest employment cuts have been concentrated in construction, manufacturing and financial services, where male workers predominate.
The uneven impact of the recession shows up in the unemployment data. On Friday, the Labor Department said the overall jobless rate in April was 8.9 percent. But for adult men, the rate was 9.4 percent; for adult women, it was just 7.1 percent.
[snip]
To help their families through the recession, more working women are taking second jobs, according to CareerBuilder's annual Mother's Day survey taken by among women who work full time and have children under 18. The job-search company found that 14 percent of working mothers have taken on second jobs in the last year to beef up household income
Since its enactment, the G.I. Bill has been lauded as the law that "made modern America," rewarding veterans, democratizing higher education, expanding home ownership and laying the foundation for the economic growth of the 1950s and 1960s. The bill relieved pressure on the labor market by sending former soldiers, mostly men, to college or vocational training, and by allowing them to start businesses. Moreover, by expanding home ownership, the bill fueled a boom in home construction, infrastructure spending and consumer purchases.
But the bill also had other, less positive effects: Women, most of whom were not veterans and who entered the labor market during the war to fill jobs vacated by mobilizing men, found their postwar prospects limited. By law, they had to relinquish their jobs to the returning veterans.
[snip]
But the bailouts and other stimulus measures aim to bolster the economy by bolstering men. This is perhaps unsurprising. Those most imperiled by the recent economic downturn have been men, who have lost their jobs as the markets plunged. The two flagging industries targeted for bailouts are ones in which men play an outsize role - the automotive and financial services industries. The slump in construction has directly affected men, who make up the bulk of workers in this sector.
Women, who tend to be employed in education and health care, have weathered the downturn better. Indeed, statistics show that, because of the crisis and its effects on men and "male" industries, women will likely surpass men in the workforce, becoming the majority of workers for the first time in our history. If these trends continue, there may be more women working (although they continue to earn less than men) and more families dependent on a female breadwinner.
"Before government rushes to overhaul health care, listen to those who already have government-run health care," intones Rick Scott, founder of a group called Conservatives for Patients' Rights. "Tell Congress to listen, too."
Scott, a multimillionaire investor and controversial former hospital chief executive, has become an unlikely and prominent leader of the opposition to health-care reform plans that Congress is expected to take up later this year. While disorganized Republicans and major health-care companies wait for President Obama and Democratic leaders to reveal the details of their plan before criticizing it, Scott is using $5 million of his own money and up to $15 million more from supporters to try to build resistance to any government-run program.
The campaign is being coordinated by CRC Public Relations, the group that masterminded the "Swift boat" attacks against 2004 Democratic presidential candidate John F. Kerry, and is inspired by the "Harry and Louise" ads that helped torpedo health-care reform during the Clinton administration.
"Everybody wants to say I'm against Obama's plan, but I'm not necessarily," Scott said in an interview last week. "The bottom line is that this is happening fast, and there is not much of a debate going on about what will happen if we go down this path."
But in ads, media appearances and other venues, Scott argues that whatever effort Obama is likely to put forth, it will put the country on a slippery slope toward a bureaucratic, British-style national health service.
The effort has alarmed many Democrats and liberal health-care advocates, who are pushing back with attacks highlighting Scott's ouster as head of the Columbia/HCA health-care company amid a fraud investigation in the 1990s. The firm eventually pleaded guilty to charges that it overbilled state and federal health plans, paying a record $1.7 billion in fines.
Writer Daniel Akst has noticed and has had a constructive conniption. He should be given the Presidential Medal of Freedom. He has earned it by identifying an obnoxious misuse of freedom. Writing in the Wall Street Journal, he has denounced denim, summoning Americans to soul-searching and repentance about the plague of that ubiquitous fabric, which is symptomatic of deep disorders in the national psyche.
It is, he says, a manifestation of "the modern trend toward undifferentiated dressing, in which we all strive to look equally shabby." Denim reflects "our most nostalgic and destructive agrarian longings -- the ones that prompted all those exurban McMansions now sliding off their manicured lawns and into foreclosure." Jeans come prewashed and acid-treated to make them look like what they are not -- authentic work clothes for horny-handed sons of toil and the soil. Denim on the bourgeoisie is, Akst says, the wardrobe equivalent of driving a Hummer to a Whole Foods store -- discordant.
[snip]
Denim is the carefully calculated costume of people eager to communicate indifference to appearances. But the appearances that people choose to present in public are cues from which we make inferences about their maturity and respect for those to whom they are presenting themselves.
Do not blame Levi Strauss for the misuse of Levi's. When the Gold Rush began, Strauss moved to San Francisco planning to sell strong fabric for the 49ers' tents and wagon covers. Eventually, however, he made tough pants, reinforced by copper rivets, for the tough men who knelt on the muddy, stony banks of Northern California creeks, panning for gold. Today it is silly for Americans whose closest approximation of physical labor consists of loading their bags of clubs into golf carts to go around in public dressed for driving steers up the Chisholm Trail to the railhead in Abilene.
This is not complicated. For men, sartorial good taste can be reduced to one rule: If Fred Astaire would not have worn it, don't wear it. For women, substitute Grace Kelly.
