"Althouse is shrewder."

Says Andrew Sullivan. Thanks. He's saying I'm shrewder than Byron York, referring to this post, earlier today, which is up to 249 comments (on the Friday afternoon before the long holiday weekend.) Of course, the topic is Sarah Palin. Sullivan connects my post, which tweaked the "serious people," with something Rush Limbaugh said:

'The Inside the Beltway’ ruling class — the elite — they’re more oriented toward candidates they can attach the word ‘serious’ to — which is another way of saying someone who is boring, who doesn’t ruffle feathers, someone who exudes an air of formal education and sophistication — she doesn’t exude that, and I think it’s going to shake a lot of people up ... You know the effect that she has on establishment Republican people.

Later, Sullivan put up another post on the Sarah Palin/seriousness theme. Asking "Does this sound like someone not running?," he posted Palin's bus tour ad:



Wow.

"The bottom line is Sarah Palin is not going to run for president... She's making money, she's moved on..."

"... she's kind of an entertainer rather than a politician. She still has some sway with the grass roots, but she is not going to run."

So says somebody close to Romney, according to Byron York. Somebody close to Pawlenty says something similar: "I don't think she's going to run... She has faded a lot in the last few months. I look at what she's doing now and say that she's found a way to get back in the story."

These people are in the middle of raising money and attracting attention to their candidate, so it's in their strong interest to diminish the rise of Palin. York acknowledges that his unnamed confidantes may be "just spinning." But he says, these are "serious people," and they point at her "lack of a campaign operation."

"Watch what she has done," says the Republican close to Romney. "Has she contacted one major donor across the country about putting together an organization? Has she talked to one member of the Republican National Committee about working for a campaign, or one governor, or one former governor about working for a campaign? The answer is no."

Maybe these "serious people" should be called conventional people. What did these "serious people" say when Palin was doing most of her communication via Facebook? Did the serious people say that serious people do not talk to the press and the public by writing Facebook updates? Because that would be conventional. Conventional people saying you're not serious because you're not conventional. But what if Palin is out ahead of them, and they can't see it? I wonder what these serious people thought about the Tea Party as it emerged?

York sees this, sort of:

It's possible Palin is in fact running and believes she can do so in a way that's never been done before. Maybe she can. It's certainly been tried; in 2007, former Sen. Fred Thompson and a small group of aides conceived of a campaign that would rely on Internet videos, social media and lots of buzz to gain support, with less reliance on old-fashioned things like shaking hands, begging for money and courting state party chairmen. It didn't work.

Strange contradiction there: "never been done before"... it's been done before and it didn't work. If Palin has a another new way, then it hasn't been done before, and you can't say it didn't work, based on the fact that "it" didn't work. We'll have to see what Palin's new way would be. But suppose it is essentially the same as what Thompson tried. The fact that it didn't work the first time it was tried doesn't mean it won't work the second time. And, obviously Sarah is not Fred.

York sees that:

Of course, Palin is a far more ambitious politician than Thompson. 

Yet the whole point of Fred was that he was the serious person. He was the adult in the room. Palin is the one so many people like to think of as a lightweight. Fred had an old-fashioned sort of gravitas, melded, perhaps, with some new ideas about how to campaign for President. It's 4 years later and Palin is a different person, with a different relationship to new (and old) media.

The serious, old-fashioned people are saying that there's a conventional, old-fashioned way to finance a campaign, and if Sarah Palin isn't using it, then she must not be running. And York is adding: If she is running, she will fail. But there may be a new way, despite what happened to Fred, and she may be doing it, and it may very well work. The Tea Party worked.

Things have changed since the days of Fred Thompson.

How Pelosi handed the gavel to Boehner compared to how Boehner handed the gavel to Pelosi.

Byron York points out the difference.

One thing I noticed (and York doesn't mention) is that Pelosi made a snide remark about the size of the gavel Boehner picked out for the gavel-passing ritual:

I now pass this gavel, which is larger than most gavels here but the gavel of choice of Mr. Speaker Boehner…

Now, my ears have been tuned by decades of immersion in feminism and Freudianism, and I say that's an intentional reference to the phallus and the will toward domination it symbolizes. Nancy Pelosi intended to provoke disrespectful titters, I think — with deniability, of course.

Instead of calling Pelosi on her disrespect, comedian Jimmy Kimmel runs with the feminism and visualizes domestic* violence:



_________

* It's the House, so domestic is apt.

"If we learned anything tonight it's that New Yorkers are as mad as hell and we're not going to take it anymore."

Said Carl Paladino. And if they don't feel quite so mad, they can have good old Andrew Cuomo as their governor.

Regardless of whether Paladino can pull off another upset, his victory Tuesday night served as a wakeup call to the state's Republican establishment.

"The old party leaders can do one of two things," he told reporters after his victory speech. "They can do what the people want - or they can quit."

Meanwhile, in Delaware, Christine O'Donnell is hearing that the National Republican Senatorial Committee isn't going to fund her campaign, because she's not sufficiently competitive with the Democrat, even though she just smashed Republican Party regular Mike Castle.

The story today is the complacency of established Republicans who imagined they could waltz in and take over after people got horrifically sick of Democrats. As if there were nowhere else to go. And maybe there isn't. (Are Paladino and O'Donnell suitable heirs to the immense power Democrats have been abusing?) But that doesn't make the Republicans any more enticing.

When you have to break up with your abusive, hot boyfriend, it's not as if you want to go out with the dweeb you wouldn't be seen with before. Or... no. That's a terrible analogy, because politics should not be that emotional or that big a part of our lives. The Tea Party seems to embody anger at government, but its candidates need to be serious and competent now.

Al Franken responds.

A bhtv commenter notices something:

What word frequently found in profusion in Obama's speeches is entirely absent from his Fort Hood speech?

I.

Also missing: me, my, mine.

I heard the criticism — from my husband Meade who is reading the speech alongside me — that the Fort Hood speech needed another draft, because there was too much use of the passive voice. I suspected that a special effort had been made to eliminate the first person singular. Obama is often criticized for using the word "I" too much. There are Obama critics who will count the word "I" in speeches and triumphantly announce the number. This criticism is a bit superficial. More significant is the way Obama speaks as if everything is all about him. Just this morning, I just knocked him for exactly that. Whoever wrote the Fort Hood speech must have been hyperfocused on protecting Obama from the usual criticisms. Appropriately so. It was a memorial for the dead. It would have been especially embarrassing for Obama's personal egotism to show on this occasion. But the intense effort to avoid it shows. He could afford to avoid it less conspicuously, and he ought to avoid it more consistently.

IN THE COMMENTS: With a fine eye for detail, Brian noted:

There was one self-referential moment. At Fort Hood he says: "You may remember the stories of a grandfather who marched across Europe..."

At 2004 Dem convention he said: "The day after Pearl Harbor my grandfather signed up for duty; joined Patton’s army, marched across Europe."

Ah! Truly, someone went over this speech very carefully to scrub it of the first-person singular.

When President George H.W. Bush gave a speech to school children, congressional Democrats denounced him...

"... they also ordered the General Accounting Office to investigate its production and later summoned top Bush administration officials to Capitol Hill for an extensive hearing on the issue."

Was Obama's only education accomplishment "legislation to teach 'comprehensive sex education' to kindergartners"?

Byron York says yes, defending this McCain ad (which is probably one of the ads Obama called "sleaziest"). York says:

The legislation in question, a bill in the Illinois State Senate that was supported but not sponsored by Obama, was, according to Obama campaign spokesman Bill Burton, “written to protect young children from sexual predators” and had nothing to do with comprehensive sex education for kindergartners....

The bill in question was Senate Bill 99, introduced in the Senate in February 2003. Its broad purpose was to change and update portions of Illinois’s existing laws concerning sex education....

When the bill was introduced, a coalition of groups including the Illinois Public Health Association, the Illinois State Medical Society, the Cook County Department of Public Health, the Chicago Department of Public Health, the Illinois Planned Parenthood Council and others issued a press release headlined “Coalition of Legislators, Physicians and Organizations Bring Illinois Into the 21st Century with Omnibus Healthcare Package.” It was a three-part campaign; Senate Bill 99, covering “medically accurate sex education,” was the first part, with two other bills addressing “funding for family planning services for women in need” and “contraceptive equity in health insurance.”

According to the press release, Senate Bill 99 required that “if a public school teaches sex education, family life education, and comprehensive health education courses, all materials and instruction must be medically and factually accurate.” The bill’s main sponsor, Sen. Carol Ronen, was quoted saying, “It teaches students about the advantages of abstinence, while also giving them the realistic information they need about the prevention of an unintended pregnancy and sexually transmitted infections.” The release contained no mention of sexual predators or inappropriate touching....

Among other things, the bill removed what York calls "value-laden language" that in the old law, such as:

"Course material and instruction shall teach honor and respect for monogamous heterosexual marriage.

"Course material and instruction shall stress that pupils should abstain from sexual intercourse until they are ready for marriage…

"[Classes] shall emphasize that abstinence is the expected norm in that abstinence from sexual intercourse is the only protection that is 100 percent effective against unwanted teenage pregnancy [and] sexually transmitted diseases…"

In key language that Obama must now depend upon heavily, the bill provided that "all sex education courses that discuss sexual activity or behavior…be age and developmentally appropriate."

The bill does also have a provision about unwanted touching:

"Course material and instruction shall teach pupils to not make unwanted physical and verbal sexual advances and how to say no to unwanted sexual advances and shall include information about verbal, physical, and visual sexual harassment, including without limitation nonconsensual sexual advances, nonconsensual physical sexual contact, and rape by an acquaintance. The course material and instruction shall contain methods of preventing sexual assault by an acquaintance, including exercising good judgment and avoiding behavior that impairs one’s judgment. The course material and instruction shall emphasize personal accountability and respect for others and shall also encourage youth to resist negative peer pressure. The course material and instruction shall inform pupils of the potential legal consequences of sexual assault by an acquaintance. Specifically, pupils shall be advised that it is unlawful to touch an intimate part of another person as specified in the Criminal Code of 1961."

York thinks that provision doesn't seem to be about teaching the youngest kids to avoid sexual predators:

The wording of that provision suggests lawmakers were at least as concerned with protecting children from each other as from adults, and it doesn’t seem directed toward the youngest children, as Obama maintained. But there is no doubt that the bill did address the question of inappropriate touching. On the other hand, there is also no doubt that, looking at the overall bill, the “touching” provision did not have the prominence that Team Obama has suggested it had, and it certainly wasn’t the bill’s main purpose.

York describes his efforts to interview Illinois legislators who could give an account of what the legislation was intended to do.

“We know that young children, very, very young, have things happen to them that they don’t speak about,” [state senator Iris] Martinez told me. “It’s important that we teach our young kids very, very young to speak up.”

When I asked Martinez the rationale for changing grade six to kindergarten, she said that groups like Planned Parenthood and the Cook County Department of Health — both major contributors to the bill — “were finding that there were children younger than the sixth grade that were being inappropriately touched or molested.” When I asked about the elimination of references to marriage and the contraception passages, Martinez said that the changes were “based on some of the information we got from Planned Parenthood.”

After we discussed other aspects of the bill, I told Martinez that reading the bill, I just didn’t see it as being exclusively, or even mostly, about inappropriate touching. “I didn’t see it that way, either,” Martinez said. “It’s just more information about a whole variety of things that have to go into a sex education class, the things that are outdated that you want to amend with things that are much more current.”

So, I asked, you didn’t see it specifically as being about inappropriate touching?

“Absolutely not.”

York notes that "nearly all commentators" have accepted Obama's assertion that he voted for the bill because he was concerned about protecting young children from sexual predators, but:

The fact is, the bill’s intention was to mandate sex education, especially concerning contraception and the prevention of sexually-transmitted diseases, for children before the sixth grade and as early as kindergarten. Obama’s defenders may howl, but the bill is what it is.

If you still think the McCain ad lies about Obama, please explain why, using the text of the ad.

It seems to me that all the McCain ad does is decline to accept Obama's self-serving characterization of the reason why he voted for the bill. But study the text and the legislative history of the bill, as York has, and try to explain how it can possibly be considered a lie to say that he voted for comprehensive sex education for kindergartners.

"I find this very much akin to what we did with C-SPAN about 25-30 years ago."

HuffPo has a piece about Bloggingheads.tv — including the news that C-SPAN founding chairman Bob Rosencrans is putting money into it:

Rosencrans said he was instantly charmed by Bloggingheads TV when longtime friend Wright introduced him to it last November. "It got better and better as I watched it, and seemed like something really unique," said Rosencrans...

Though contributors will continue to vlog for free, [Bob] Wright says he hopes to someday be able to pay them (and points out that he himself draws no salary, and has invested his own capital.) So far Heads like Matthew Yglesias, Ezra Klein, our own Arianna Huffington, Spencer Ackerman, Jonathan Chait, Joshua Marshall, Glenn Reynolds and the Alts — Eric Alterman, Ann Althouse and Jonathan Alter — don't seem to mind, nor does the still-ubiquitous and generously-browed [Mickey] Kaus.

The Alts!

Though obviously enthusiastic about the venture, Rosencrans said he has no plans to meddle in its success. "Bob has control - it's important that it's done based on his integrity and his vision," he said. "I find this very much akin to what we did with C-SPAN about 25-30 years ago — let it run, let it develop and the right people will take it on. Their integrity is the key to developing a very solid business." Also reminiscent of C-SPAN is its emphasis on substance over flash: "I love the civility of the discussion," he said. "That's unique on television." (That could just be because it's very difficult to imagine yelling at the mild-mannered and highly-respected Wright.)

I guess he didn't see the one with Byron York and David Corn. And I think Mickey kind of yells at Bob sometimes, doesn't he? It's not all that mild-mannered -- at least not all the time, isn't it? And there's some flash. Like that time Bob put a pencil in his ear.

When journalists express an opinion.

The NYT's "Public Editor," Byron Calame, writes about the dispute that arose when Linda Greenhouse -- the NYT's Supreme Court reporters -- gave a speech that revealed some of her personal political opinions.

[She opined that the government] “had turned its energy and attention away from upholding the rule of law and toward creating law-free zones at Guantánamo Bay, Abu Ghraib, Haditha, other places around the world, the U.S. Congress, whatever. And let’s not forget the sustained assault on women’s reproductive freedom and the hijacking of public policy by religious fundamentalism.” She later added, “I feel a growing obligation to reach out across the ridiculous actual barrier that we seem about to build on the Mexican border. ...”

The Times’s ethical guideline states that news staffers appearing on radio or television “should avoid expressing views that go beyond what they would be allowed to say in the paper.” It is obvious, I think, that the guideline also applies to other venues. And Bill Keller, the executive editor, made clear in an e-mail message to me that the standard applies to all Times journalists “when they speak in public.”

It seems clear to me that Ms. Greenhouse stepped across that line during her speech. Times news articles are not supposed to contain opinion. A news article containing the phrase “the hijacking of public policy by religious fundamentalism” would get into the paper only as a direct quote from a source. The same would go for any news article reference to “the ridiculous actual barrier” on the Mexican border.

Calame notes the "muted" reaction from the management of the NYT and says that Greenhouse told him that "she considers her remarks at Harvard to be 'statements of fact' — not opinion — that would be allowed to appear in a Times news article." Statements of fact? With words like "assault" and "hijacking"? The contention that these are "statements of fact" bothers me more than the disclosure of personal opinion.

The Times has its policy constraining the speech of journalists, and as Calame notes, an interest in avoiding "giving the paper’s critics fresh opportunities to snipe at its public policy coverage." If the management of the Times has decided to let the incident pass, he says, it has accepted this risk. Then maybe the question is whether the policy should be reframed, so that it explicitly permits journalists to speak more freely. Calame thinks not.

[J]ournalism [is] a calling ... that requires sacrifices and special obligations. Keeping personal opinions out of the public realm is simply one of the obligations for those who remain committed to the importance of impartial news coverage.

Here's NPR's coverage of the story, which includes links to the audio and the text of the Greenhouse speech. She speaks with fervor and conveys a sense of personal expression, and the audience responds to that. It's an extremely well-done speech, and the problem is only about the Times's specific policy and journalistic ethics more generally. The NPR webpage quotes Daniel Okrent, the first NYT public editor:

He says he is amazed by Greenhouse's remarks.

"It's been a basic tenet of journalism ... that the reporter's ideology [has] to be suppressed and submerged, so the reader has absolute confidence that what he or she is reading is not colored by previous views," Okrent says.

Charges of media bias are routinely thrown at the Times and other media outlets, from both the left and the right. Okrent says he never received a single complaint about bias in Greenhouse's coverage. He wonders whether journalists really need to smother their private beliefs to be fair in their articles.

Greenhouse's speech didn't seem that out of line to me, because I am so used to hearing law professors express all kinds of personal and political opinions about the Supreme Court, and, obviously, I do it all the time myself. I'm trying to imagine a law school where the professors felt they needed to make sacrifices and suppress and submerge their opinions. Actually, it's a scary place! Do you really want us to become more devious? (Recall the discussion here a few months ago about an op-ed by Stanley Fish about whether teachers need to exclude their political opinions from classroom teaching.)

When I read journalistic writing, I always assume the reporter has political opinions, and I try to figure out what they are. Both Okrent and Calame make a point of praising Greenhouse for reaching a high standard of neutrality in her journalistic writing. But that shouldn't make anyone think she doesn't actually have opinions. It just means you'd have to do a very sophisticated analysis to figure out if any of her opinion finds its way into her presentation of the complicated statements of Supreme Court justices (which are themselves carefully written to exclude the appearance of personal opinion).

So I'm not disturbed by what Greenhouse said in her speech, and I think Okrent is right that reporters can have a little more freedom than the official NYT policy seems to require.

IN THE COMMENTS: A reader reminds us of the longstanding term "Greenhouse effect," referring to the tendency of judges to become liberal over time as they frame opinions intended to please the NYT. Here's a recent use of the term:

"The Greenhouse Effect" is the name of a phenomenon popularized by D.C. Appeals Court Judge Laurence Silberman referring to federal judges whose rulings are guided solely by their need for adulation from legal reporters such as Linda Greenhouse of the New York Times. The idea is that once confirmed, justices become desperate to be invited to the right cocktail parties and conform their views to those of the liberal intelligentsia....

The problem with this theory is that it accepts a great conservative fiction: that there is vast, hegemonic liberal control over the media and academia. This may have been somewhat true once, but it's patently untrue today. Jurists desperate for sweet media love can hop into bed with the Limbaugh/Coulter/FOX News crowd. Clarence Thomas has made a career of it. There is a significant and powerful conservative presence in the media, inside the Beltway, and in academia. And my own guess is that Federalist cocktail parties in D.C. are vastly more fun than their no-smoking/vegan/no-topless-dancing counterparts on the left.

That last bit fits with this thing I said yesterday. Most women don't find topless dancing to be vastly fun, though, and the way of thinking about fun that is so thoroughly from the male point of view that it doesn't even notice that it's forgetting about how women feel really doesn't seem likely to produce more fun for women. Or is that the point? Conservative men have more fun at parties because they don't worry so much about what women think.

Another Unplayable 45, this time: vlogged!

Oh, my friends, are you in for a treat. Today's Unplayable 45 is vlogged.



And what a very vloggy vlog it is:



Some links to help you with that vlog. Here are the lyrics to "Here Comes the Night." And here are the lyrics to "Brown Eyed Girl," the song that came on the 60s channel as I emerged from the parking garage this evening and made contact once again with the satellite. Here's the episode of BloggingHeads.tv with David Corn and Byron York arguing about "Hubris" that somehow has something to do with this. And here you can find and explanation of what "snowball sampling" is. Hey, it all fits together in the vlog.

Anyway, back to the 45. Since I can't play it, I wanted to buy it on iTunes to relive the experience of listening to it, but all they had was a karaoke version of the Them recording. That was disappointing but enough to make me remember why I liked this enough to buy it. The guitar hook is quite profound. But I remember regretting spending my money on this, because I didn't like the sound of Van Morrison's voice. I never learned to like it later. I don't doubt that he's an excellent singer. There's just a tone to it that I find unappealing.

And I especially didn't like it back when I was a teenager. He sounded too much like an adult, like those soul singers with their heavy voices who were always singing about way too serious adult relationships. The ultimate example of a song of that kind for me was Percy Sledge singing "When a Man Loves a Woman." I could tell it was good, but I could not identify with what was going on there, with people deeply emotionally distraught about love problems. The adult quality was -- judged by the hippie ethic of my generation -- square. Love, love, love -- it should bring joy and universal good will -- none of this grasping and suffering.

"And so I know now I'm on a different plane."

Byron York quotes Markos Moulitsas. Mickey Kaus piles on (amusingly). But let's look at the quote:

This week has been a very interesting week for me. And I know I have sort of arrived in a scary way, because now I'm not being attacked for what I've said and done. People are making stuff up about me now. They're inventing things. And so I know now I'm on a different plane.

This does have an awfully strange kooky tone to it. I'm on a different plane... No one I think is in my tree... Amerika hates her crazies.

But this is the world we live in. There are people who have a vested interest in the status quo. There are people who don't want to see things change because they're not used to things changing. They know the world. It's comfortable. It's cozy. If they read the media, the media's not going to tell them what we're all about. Howard Dean thought we were all young. I'm not sure where he got that, because he should have known better. Hillary Clinton came up and she quoted the netroots based on something a conservative said. They need to live it for themselves. They need to become part of it, because this is an integral part of American politics now, and that's not going to change.

We are forces of chaos and anarchy/Everything they say we are we are/And we are very/Proud of ourselves....

And the beauty of it is at the end of the day, they can take me down. They can take Jerome Armstrong down. They can take down Atrios. They can take down any of the so-called leaders in the movement and it doesn't matter, because this is not a leaderless movement. I used to say this was a leaderless movement, and I was wrong. It's not a leaderless movement; it's a everybody-who's-part-of-it-is-a-leader. And so you can take any single individual down, and it will continue to live on.

A fellow ain't got a soul of his own, just little piece of a big soul, the one big soul that belongs to everybody, then... Then it don't matter. I'll be all around in the dark - I'll be everywhere. Wherever you can look - wherever there's a fight, so hungry people can eat, I'll be there. Wherever there's a cop beatin' up a guy, I'll be there. I'll be in the way guys yell when they're mad. I'll be in the way kids laugh when they're hungry and they know supper's ready, and when the people are eatin' the stuff they raise and livin' in the houses they build - I'll be there, too.

I write in our book, I write, basically, the establishment Democrats have three choices. One, they can join us, and a lot of people have, people like Simon Rosenberg. They can get out of the way. Or we're going to roll them. Because quite frankly we're tired of losing, and we're not going to do that anymore. And so there is a lot of energy, there's a lot of passion out in the rest of the country and we're going to be working hard with those who want to work with us to take this country forward to what it really needs to be, not what it has become.

Come senators, congressmen/Please heed the call/Don't stand in the doorway/Don't block up the hall/For he that gets hurt/Will be he who has stalled/There's a battle outside/And it is ragin'.

IN THE COMMENTS: Lots of stuff, but my LOL favorite is -- re "And so I know now I'm on a different plane":

Are there any motherf***ing snakes on that plane?

AND ELSEWHERE: Rand Simberg felt a similar vibe.