Chaos, control; chaos, control. You like? You like?
However based on the sage advice I recently received from the Heads of the Blogosphere Mafia (and the fact that there no are Liberal equivalents to wingnut homunculi like Mary Matalin dug in like ticks at Major Publishing Houses and eager to forcibly animate into Best Sellerdom any offal scraped from the Conservative blogger midden pile) I have come to understand that if my as-yet nonexistent and wholly theoretical book is to stand any chance of being anything other than a labor-intensive, money-losing timesuck, it absolutely, positively has to include vampires.
Well, OK...
As they do every Sunday:
Sunday papers don't ask no questions,
Sunday papers don't dead no lies;
Sunday papers don't raise objections,
Sunday papers ain't got no eyes.
Brother's hearing that way now, I guess--
He just read something made his face turn blue.
Well I got nothing against the press:
They wouldn't print it if it wasn't true.
-- from Sunday Papers by Joe Jackson
The former University of Tennessee student faced as much as 50 years for breaking into Palin's e-mail while the former Alaska governor was the Republican vice presidential candidate in 2008. [...]
Palin and her daughter Bristol testified during the trial, which lasted just a few days. Bristol Palin said she was distressed to find pictures of her newborn son in the public eye after her mother's e-mail was hacked. Defense attorneys argued Kernall, the son of a Democratic state lawmaker, was just committing a college prank.
I thought I’d skip anything news-driven and instead whip out a little skeptical posting. Sadly, I’ve been avoiding this somewhat out of cowardice, but frankly, that’s no excuse. Most people are in the “ignore them and they’ll go away camp” when it comes to conspiracy theorists, but I’m not, so I’m a perfect person to try to push back against them.
1) That Bristol took some time off school in 2008. This is the least interesting evidence to the theorists, from what I can tell. The reason is that focusing on Bristol is rhetorically unwise of them, because if you believe the theory, you have to accept Bristol conceived a second time while still pregnant. So they shy away from this one.
(Photo stills from a 2008 FOX News program, "Sarah Palin, An American Woman",The reason is that focusing on Bristol is rhetorically unwise of them, because if you believe the theory, you have to accept Bristol conceived a second time while still pregnant. So they shy away from this one.I have not seen people "shy away" at all. Rather, I have read numerous times that it would be very easy for a case of "Irish Twins" to have occurred (forgive the regrettably insulting term), wherein a mother has another baby within a year of giving birth. Remember, Palin did not make Bristol's pregnancy public until the rumors that had been swirling in Alaska were now all over the country, the Internet, and even in Canadian media. By throwing her pregnant teenage daughter under the bus--embarrassing her by putting her on the world stage and dragging her boyfriend along too, and declaring she was about five months along--Palin believed she could put those rumors to bed and protect her own political ambitions (as well as those of John McCain, I'd add--one wonders how on earth he and his campaign could have missed such a thing as a potential VP selection having a teenage daughter pregnant out of wedlock when he was actively trying to reclaim the fundamentalist Christian vote for the Republican Party?) However, if you think Palin is capable of lying, and lying big--and I happen to think she is definitely capable of that, as she has done just that, and far too many times to count--it's not that much of a leap to question whether Trig's birth was in April after all, but rather, took place earlier in the year, and Palin simply took a page from the script of the prior season's Desperate Housewives series and pretended to be pregnant. It would not be the first time a prominent and purportedly religious family engaged in that very kind of deception.
Based on an (undocumented) birth date of December 27th, Tripp was conceived no earlier than April 2008, and arguably later as he was not presented to the world until mid-February (exactly as I predicted). So even Bristol could not have been aware of the pregnancy until late-April 2008, at the earliest.(Note: The Reddit article Audrey references, wherein numerous Alaska residents discuss their governor's just-announced pregnancy and the rumors she was faking it to cover for her eldest daughter, was posted on April 8th, 2008, long before Palin was selected by McCain; long before she, and the pregnancy rumors, would be known outside Alaska. This strange and unbelievable story did not originate after Palin's selection, but rather, upon Palin's surprise announcement that she was seven months pregnant, and well before Trig's birth was even announced.)
Yet we know that rumors of the pregnancy preceded this time frame, so much so that Sarah herself tried to dispel the rumors prior to March 2008. The Anchorage Daily New wrote a story about the rumors on August 31, 2008 and as we now know, they pursued the story about the rumors again in the fall. We also know that, almost a year ago, a poster on reddit reported on the Bristol pregnancy rumor and said she was going to high school in Anchorage.
2) That Bristol cuddles Trig a lot. [...] theorists enjoy putting up pictures of Trig being cuddled in public by Bristol, implying that she, as the mother, cannot resist this.I have never said that. Nor, to my knowledge, has Andrew Sullivan. Nor have any bloggers or journalists, to my knowledge, asserted that Bristol's affectionate behavior toward Trig is proof that she is his mother. Humans who happen to like little babies tend to hold them affectionately, period. People will of course point out that Bristol always appeared affectionate toward, and natural with, the little boy, and commenters at any and all blogs are going to speculate on what this or that might mean, in matters Palin as well as every other story of interest. But making the jump from that, to calling Sullivan, me, and others "conspiracy theorists" because of it, is baseless and unnecessarily accusatory.
3) Palin didn’t show very much. It’s interesting to me that the theorists focus most of their energy on the Sarah Palin half of the equation, because focusing on the Bristol part would actually produce better evidence, if this deceit actually occurred. Even though I’d imagine it’s harder to prove that someone wasn’t pregnant than that someone was, they find way more emotional satisfaction going after Sarah Palin, so they do that.
4) Sarah Palin got on a plane while having contractions and flew all the way to Alaska from Texas. I’ve never understood why this is supposed to be proof of anything. [...]
Litbrit claims it would be impossible to fly during labor, because it’s so painful. But there’s no reason to think she was in heavy labor during the flight.( Amanda has mistakenly reversed the departure and destination here.)
Because we have been amazed by the widespread and enduring quality of these rumors. I finally decided, after watching this go on unabated for months, to let a reporter try to do a story about the "conspiracy theory that would not die" and, possibly, report the facts of Trig's birth thoroughly enough to kill the nonsense once and for all.
Lisa Demer started reporting. I don't believe she received any cooperation in her efforts from the parties who, in my judgment, stood to benefit most from the story, namely you and your family. Even so, we reported the matter as thoroughly as we could. Several weeks ago, when we considered the information Lisa had gathered, we decided we didn't have enough of a story to accomplish what we had hoped. Lisa moved on to other topics and we haven't decided whether the idea is worth any further effort.
Even the birth of your grandson may not dissuade the Trig conspiracy theorists from their beliefs. It strikes me that if there is never a clear, contemporaneous public record of what transpired with Trig's birth that may actually ensure that the conspiracy theory never dies. [...]
I cannot address your concerns if I do not hear them. Perhaps after reading this you will conclude that the facts are not exactly as you thought, or that there was more to these issues than you knew. I hope you see that we have tried hard to practice sound journalism. We may have trusted the accuracy of the AP too much, but I won't know that for sure until you confirm that Levi will graduate from high school.
When we heard that you were upset about Lisa's inquiries, we immediately extended an invitation to your office for you to meet with me and other editors so we could explain our interest in the Trig matter, and answer any other questions you might have. As far as I know, that invitation was never acknowledged.
We remain willing and available to meet with you to discuss these or any other issues. I would be happy to meet with you one on one, as would Pat Doyle, or as part of any group of editors and publisher you would like.
Fireworks over the City of St. Petersburg, Florida; July 4th, 2009
Sarah Palin, with Lt. Gov. Sean Parnell and Sandy Parnell, March 14 2008
Today, Andrew Sullivan of the Atlantic posted the above photograph, taken on March 26, 2008, of then-Governor Sarah Palin, just three weeks before she supposedly gave birth to a six-pound infant. I would like to add my voice to the growing chorus of people demanding that the reporters who work for our various national media commit some actual journalism with regard to Palin's countless lies and fabrications, most saliently, the unbelievable story from which she subsequently derived her power as a pro-life politician and likely candidate for the Republican nomination for president next year: the story of Trig Palin.
Because, like Andrew Sullivan, that's exactly what I think it was: a story. A tall tale. And it is unbelievable because the facts simply do not support it.
Sullivan writes:
I have never claimed I know the truth. I don't. I only know that none of us does. We all have to rely on the word of Sarah Palin - something about as reliable as a credit default swap. I want to know the truth. Because if I am loony, I deserve the pushback and criticism for suspecting a story that turned out to be true. And because if Palin has lied about this, it's the most staggering, appalling deception in the history of American politics. Not knowing which is true for real - and allowing this person to continue to dominate one half of the political divide - is something I think is intolerable. In the end, this story is not about Palin. It's about the collapse of the press and the corrupt cynicism of a political system that foisted this farce upon us without performing any minimal due diligence.
When Senator John McCain chose Mrs. Palin as his VP running mate, within minutes, everyone with a television had heard the heartwarming tale of this forty-something mother so stalwart in her pro-life beliefs, she carried to term a Down Syndrome baby despite being barely a year into her governorship. (And so discreet was she, we were told, no-one in her office knew until the final weeks of the pregnancy, either. There was no giveaway signs: no bouts of morning sickness; no backaches or food cravings; no maternity outfits; no apparent weight gain or baby bump, despite this being baby number five for the then-43-year-old. And her staff, according to the Alaska media, were completely surprised, nay, dumbfounded when she told them.)
The selection of Palin as McCain's VP candidate, and the unique and, at the time, admittedly compelling narrative associated therewith, knocked then-candidate Obama's historic nomination of the previous night completely off the t.v. screen. Shortly thereafter, we heard the details of said fifth child's birth, told by Palin herself, in her own voice, even.
As readers know, I am a mother of three. Upon hearing those details, I recall shaking my head in amazement, knowing right then that what Palin was saying was an enormous fabrication. A lie.
Yet no media would go near it--no reporter would entertain the possibility that the Governor of Alaska--the VP nominee who, if elected, would be a 73-year-old cancer-survivor's heartbeat away from the presidency of the United States--would tell the world such an enormous, shocking, and appallingly self-serving lie. No-one, with the exception of fellow Brit, Andrew Sullivan.
Why was this so? The particulars of the story of the pregnancy which resulted in the child that Palin herself has made central to her pro-life politics--that Palin herself has used as both political prop and sales tool--do not add up. Where were, where are the investigative reporters, and why do they continue to give this dishonest and dangerous woman a pass even as they report on the tiniest details of the foibles and personal failures of other, far less significant politicians? Why, when the evidence all points to a political hoax of staggering dimensions?
As any woman who’s had any number of babies will tell you, when you’re 43 and in labor—having broken your water, no less!—there is no way in hell you could or would skip going to a hospital (or at least a doctors’ office) and instead, stand at a podium, deliver a speech (complete with jokes!), not have anyone notice, then fly across the continent on two separate flights (with no flight attendants noticing that you’re that far along, either, much less in labor), then drive through the state—still in labor, mind you, and about to give birth to a premature, special-needs infant who will undoubtedly need emergency care upon birth—bypass not one but two large hospitals with specially-equipped Neonatal Intensive Care Units, go to a small regional hospital in a small town, and have a general practitioner (not a high-risk OB/gyn, as would be required) deliver your premature, special-needs baby with jaundice and a heart defect. There is no way.
Still not convinced? Consider this: being in labor is painful. Not hangover-headache painful, such that one could still stagger onto a plane and make it home. Seriously painful.
At first, in the early stages, you simply cringe a little and double over. For intervals, you are not able to speak, much less give a speech. People would definitely notice something was wrong.
Then, the pain gets unbearable—drawn-and-quartered unbearable. You beg for drugs; you might even ask to be killed (with my third child, I had no anaesthesia, and I requested exactly that. Other mothers who’ve delivered sans drugs, please weigh in.) You scream like a banshee. People would definitely notice that something was wrong.
Instinct takes over, and as the labor progresses to delivery, and your screams reach the wild-assed, paint-peeling, scare-your-partner-out-the-door point, you assume whatever physical position you need to and begin pushing the baby out. It is unspeakably, shockingly messy and primal, to use delicate terms. (Mothers reading this are all nodding, aren’t you?)
Now imagine the sitting governor of Alaska, a woman who places high value on her appearance, risking such a thing taking place on an airline—twice in one day—in full view of passengers.
So. Here we are. For nearly two years, the media has been inexplicably squeamish and hands-off about reporting the truth of this lying woman’s fifth child—which would not be anyone’s business if (a) she were a private citizen and/or (b) she had not made said child’s existence the center—indeed, the be-all and end-all—of her pro-life cred, thus “energizing the base”, as they say.
Bravo to Mr. Sullivan, I say. And bravo to all and sundry who, like him, like me, are capable of looking at the evidence already in front of us--who well understand why it matters so much and will thus continue to call for someone in the press to please say something. Do something.
-----
(Big H/T to Sully and to Palingates)
A cat that had its back feet severed by a combine harvester has been given two prosthetic limbs in a pioneering operation by a UK vet.Ahem. You might want to have your Kleenex ready when you watch the video. Oscar looks so much like my Marley. What a lovely, brave boy!
The new feet are custom-made implants that "peg" the ankle to the foot. They are bioengineered to mimic the way deer antler bone grows through the skin.
The operation - a world first - was carried out by Noel Fitzpatrick, a veterinary surgeon based in Surrey.
His work is explored in a BBC documentary called The Bionic Vet.
The cat, named Oscar, was referred to Mr Fitzpatrick by his local vet in Jersey, following the accident last October. Oscar was struck by the combine harvester whilst dozing in the sun.
The prosthetic pegs, called intraosseous transcutaneous amputation prosthetics (Itaps) were developed by a team from University College London led by Professor Gordon Blunn, who is head of UCL's Centre for Biomedical Engineering.
Professor Blunn and his team have worked in partnership with Mr Fitzpatrick to develop these weight-bearing implants, combining engineering mechanics with biology.
Mr Fitzpatrick explained: "The real revolution with Oscar is [that] we have put a piece of metal and a flange into which skin grows into an extremely tight bone."
Yoann Gourcuff of France
Eric Abidal of France
Glen Johnson of England
Diego Benaglio of Switzerland
Ján Ďurica of Slovakia
Oguchi Onyewu of the United States
Benny Feilhaber of the United States
Fernando Torres of Spain
Kaká of Brazil
Fabio Cannavaro of Italy
Michael Ballack of Germany
Atsuto Uchida of Japan
Georgios Samaras of Greece
Didier Drogba of Côte d'Ivoire
Alessandro Nesta of Italy, 2006Tony Hayward will walk away from BP with a £10.8m (USD $16.03m) pension pot if he steps down from his position in the wake of the Gulf of Mexico oil spill.
The chief executive of the oil giant is likely to receive an annual pension north of £500,000 (USD $742,322), according to experts from Hargreaves Landsdowne. US politicians suggested the BP boss should step down during an eight-hour cross-examination on the causes of the oil spill on Thursday.
"It's time for heads to roll at BP," Kathy Castor, a Florida Democrat, added over the weekend.
BP's stricken well is still leaking up to 60,000 barrels a day into the ocean, and the company is only managing to capture a third of it. The company's clean-up bill has now hit $2bn and it has paid out $105m in damages to those affected by the disaster.
At last week's hearing, Mr Hayward declined to say whether he would leave the company, simply repeating that his "highest priority" was to stop the flow of oil.
The BP boss, who lives in a manor house in Sevenoaks, took home £1m (USD $1.48m) in pay and a £2m (USD $2.96m) bonus last year, after success in cutting costs during the recession.
Dear Deborah,
In the New York Times for June 13th, the Pentagon proclaimed that Afghanistan holds almost one trillion lira - no, sorry, that's one trillion dollars - in hitherto-unknown mineral wealth.
Allow me to offer these revelations:
(1) Paris Hilton actually is Albert Einstein, with a wig. Think about it - you've never seen them together, have you?
(2) The Moon is made of green cheese. Specifically, a lovely Camembert, slightly fruity, that goes very well with cabernet.
(3) While you were at work today, someone broke into your house, stole everything, and replaced it with an exact duplicate (apologies to Steven Wright).
$1 trillion dollars in mineral wealth in Afghanistan. What a lame excuse for a lame excuse.
But the interesting thing is that the Pentagon felt it necessary to serve up this fevered imagining. Why? Because they say that they need another $33 billion for the war by July 4th, or, or, or, I don't know - they just say that they need it. And for once, Congress isn't falling all over itself to give the generals whatever they want. So get ready to hear about lithium in Afghanistan, oil in Iraq, and diamonds in your bathtub.
With 14 million Americans out of work, support for endless war is crumbling. People want an America that is #1 in health, #1 in education, #1 in quality of life, not #1 in number of foreign countries occupied.
Send an e-mail to your Member of Congress. Ask him or her to oppose the "emergency supplemental" for more and more war.
Hope. Change. How about some peace, for a change?
Courage,
Alan Grayson
P.S. I am the first Democrat to represent my district in 34 years. I depend on ordinary people like you to support my campaign. If you'd like to make a contribution, please do so here.
[UPDATE: BREAKING: BP agrees to place $20B in an escrow account to handle claims of Gulf coast families and businesspeople.]
My sense was that President Obama delivered a very general overview in his speech last night. But there are good reasons for this.
We still don't know enough specifics about a) what took place and who bears what level of responsibility--in other words, I think some serious criminal investigations are likely being drawn up as we speak, but the pressure to "say something, do something!" does not afford the President the luxury of a Scotland Yard or an FBI in taking the necessary time to do all the investigations before coming to the public; he did have to at least say something. And b) what, exactly, the extent of the damage to the environment and economy will be, because the damned oil geyser is still spewing, full-force, in the Gulf, making it impossible to state the kind of firm numbers lay people are calling for--and let's face it, most of the country (including you and I, Dear Reader, to a fair extent) are lay people when it comes to calculating projected damage figures. Hell, the damned oceanographers, economists, and environmental engineers, even, are scratching their heads, as this disaster truly is unprecedented in a number of ways.
So, no, President Obama did not--could not--go big last night.
Sure, he could've spouted a bunch of platitudes to make everyone feel better--to make us feel as though vengeance would surely be ours, and soon. To a certain degree, he did attempt to inject some positivity into the speech in terms of our country meeting the challenge of developing alternative energy sources like wind and solar. But the politics of that process are extremely complex, and I promise you, had he gotten more detailed about them, people's eyes would have glazed over. That much I am getting a sense of, as Mr. Litbrit is, right now, busy writing up a grant proposal for some state funding for his alternative energy (wind and solar) program that he's installing at his farm, a state program that is part of the President's immense push, at the federal level, to get the country off fossil fuel dependency.
Trust me, it is happening, just not on the front pages of the newspapers and blogs. Yet. It is happening, but the mechanics are complicated in the extreme; it's deeply un-sexy copy, and sadly, it would fly high over the heads of the very people who most need to be convinced that oil=bad, wind and solar = good.
Once there are more flagship projects, like Mr. Litbrit's, to which our government can point and say, See, here's how it works..., you'll hear and see more in the media, and more from the President.
Let's not forget the fact that as much as we hate BP right now--and no-one hates them more than I--President Obama could not and would not have come out with the cowboy swagger, threatening to "smoke 'em out". Nor would he invoke empty, meaningless rhetoric, lumping this dreadful, criminal company into a general category of evildoers and calling it the Axis of Oil. His chief responsibility is to us, the people of this country, and I believe he sees the best way to serve our interests is to make sure the environment along the Gulf states' shores gets thoroughly restored, and that the people and towns whose jobs and economies were destroyed are, as he says, "made whole".
Toward that end, empty, warmongering rhetoric that demonizes a company everyone already loathes and resents will not make it any easier to force them to cooperate and pay in full.
Atheists and agnostics as some of us are, we ought to be a lot more comfortable than we would seem to be with the notion that sometimes, there are no readily available explanations or solutions, certainly not immediately, and certainly not while the data is still coming in (or, as it were, gushing out).
Bear this in mind, too: the media are always interested in the bleeding lead, because in the news, as in the summer box office lineup, *boom-boom* and flying glass stuff sells--how many headlines did the President's "ass-kicking" comment make, again? Whereas thoughtful, complex solutions laced through with a we-still-need-to-wait-and-see attitude piss them off. They all wanted fireworks last night, and they were denied that explosive denouement. Poor babies.
I want criminal charges brought, and I've made my case for same. As for the cleanup and payment of damages, I, too, need to wait and see exactly how much worse the oil mess and the money mess will get. And when that information is in, I want the President to go after every last penny.
My take, for what it's worth.
D.N.T. 6/16/2010
