OPINION

David Frum at National Review, in making a point about how Palin screwed up by trying to bluff her way through answers she really wasn't sure of, tells a funny story about LBJ. You should read his entire post to see how this pertains to Palin, but it's such a great story I'll post it here:

In his autobiography, John Kenneth Galbraith tells this story about Lyndon Johnson. I'm repeating from memory, so please excuse any inaccuracies in the retelling.

It's 1967. The Greek military has overthrown the elected left-wing government, headed by George Papandreou.

The military arrested Papandreou and was preparing to execute him. Papandreou's many friends and supporters in the United States organized to try to save his life. Immense pressure was brought to bear on the White House. Finally, Galbraith placed the call to find out how things stood. Joseph Califano, then a White House aide, took the call.

"Don't worry Ken. It's taken care of."

"Joe please. I have to know exactly what the president said."

"Exactly?"

"Exactly."

Long pause.

"Okaaaay ... The president said: 'Tell those Greek bastards not to shoot that son of a bitch, what's his name.'"

There's a Palin point in that, but you have to read Frum to find out what it is. Trust me, it's worth it.

Reader Pamela reports seeing this sign on Interstate 45, urging fleeing Houstonites to tune into 820 AM to get traffic reports related to hurricane evacuations. It is, afterall, a hurrican evacuation route sign.

Here's what she reports: "I did as the signs directed & both times it was Rush. I continued to listen (OK - I had to turn it off occasionally to regain my sanity) & never heard anything except Rush, news, commercials & their regular traffic report which differs in no way from any of the other stations'. I don't know about you but I'm appalled that my tax dollars are being used to direct people to listen to Rush Limbaugh!! I think anyone (except maybe Hash & possibly Rodger) would have a problem with this."

What do you think? Is it fair to designate a station to offer this service or is it hurrican panic profiteering? I think it's the latter. How do we become "the official newspaper of evacuees" I wonder? Is Whataburger the official restaurant of evacuees? And do we really need an official commercial station for this info, or can we assume that drivers know how to scan for traffic information on their radios?

As someone who likes Sarah Palin, I was disappointed by her performance last night in the interviews. She didn't mess up, but she seemed like a fembot rattling off GOP boilerplate talking points. Some freaked out over her willingness to risk war with Russia to get Georgia and Ukraine into NATO -- a terrible idea, I think -- but unfortunately it's the same position that Obama and Biden take. Anyway, she wasn't bad, but she wasn't good, either. She was so programmed that I don't know who the real Sarah Palin is.

I agree with my fellow Palin fan Ross Douthat: the McCain campaign is being foolish to overmanage her, and for better or for worse, should get the hell out of the way and let Palin be Palin. We need to see the real Sarah. A friend in Anchorage writes to say how frustrating it was to see her last night being so tightly wound; that's not the Sarah we know, she said.

First, DISD had a teacher shortage. Now the district is up to its neck in teachers they can't afford. And they're getting back one they didn't want.

Texas Ed commish Robert Scott has ordered a fired Kimball High School math teacher back on the DISD payroll.

Why? The commish says Kimball is a tough teaching assignment, which suggests that this teacher could not be held responsible for poor student performance.

DISD used something called the "Classroom Effectiveness Index" to measure her performance and ultimately to fire her---- this despite years of good evaluations and a hearing officer's decison that she keep her job.

This ruling doesn't address the validity of the CEI or whether employment should be linked it. However, Scott's decison affirms a point teachers have made for a long, long time --- every classroom "failure" is not the fault of the classroom teacher.

It's not clear when and how this measurement can used. In the meantime, DISD will be getting another person back on its payroll.

The candidates' forum last night in New York was notable for its extreme lack of fizz and fireworks. The candidates sat down comfortably and chatted. They praised each other. They agreed with each other. Yes, they also had differences, but they were able to express negative thoughts without including nasty barbs aimed at demeaning and degrading the other side. As I watched McCain, I thought to myself, "I really wouldn't mind having this guy as my president." And I thought the same thing when Obama came on.

I wish both of them would dismiss their speech writers, who seem particularly devoted to the cause of sniping. I wish some pollster would do a quick poll, asking voters whether they prefer calm, relaxed discourse to "gotcha" gutter politics. I'm convinced American voters are sick of lipstick, sexist innuendo, racial undertones, suspicion, nastiness and going-for-the-jugular politicking.

Enough already.

Maybe tonight's portion of the interview with Charlie Gibson will go better, but I think last night was less than impressive.



First, I thought her answer on Israel was terrible. By signaling that Israel can do anything, inculding a strike on Iran, as long as it feels threatened is irresponsible. The lack of nuance in her answer is a clear sign of inexperience. Three times she said we should never second-guess Israel. Really?

Second, her explanition for why terrorists attacked us was a fish-tailing mess. "The only option for them is to become a suicide bomber to get caught up in this terror in this evil they need to be provided the hope that all American have instilled in them because we are a democratic we are a free-thinking society." She delievered it that way. Honestly, I don't know where the punctuation goes. But I am not sure what that means. "Whatever it takes" and "never again" ... lots of tough sounding phrases, but no specifics.

Third, she didn't know what the Bush Doctrine was. Now, some people debate that that may not be a term most American know, but I think anyone in poltiical circles, and certainly someone who wants to be vice-president, would know what it means.

These are the results of an online test I took -- you can take it here -- that graphs your political orientation around what the University of Virginia psychiatrist who devised it calls the Five Psychological Bases of Morality. My results are in green (average liberals in blue, average conservatives in red). Interestingly, my scores were all more in line with liberals than conservatives on three measures, but off the charts to the right on Authority and Sanctity. The site explains why these measures are important in explaining the difference between liberal and conservative orientations, and why that matters in the culture wars. From the site:

Three moving images from today's 9/11 ceremonies:

1. The Pentagon park's dedication, with benches set aside for each victim. Seeing the family members on the grounds reminds you that the wounds of that day don't disappear for them. They live with them every day in a way I can't even begin to imagine.

2. Seeing Obama and McCain side by side at Ground Zero, thanking officers and laying roses. They go back out on the stump tomorrow, so this appearance may look hollow to some. But a side of me wants to make sure the rest of the world sees that image of them together. When it gets down to it, we are Americans more than Republicans or Democrats. Corny and cliche-ish, but true.

3. Seeing stoic Laura Bush well up with tears, lips quivering, and I mean really quivering, during moment of silence on the White House lawn. While I can't be in her mind, my hunch is that some of those emotions were her letting down after eight years, reflecting back on what had happened to her husband's presidency, the central day of which was 9/11.

Barack Obama, it seems, is heeding the increasing drumbeat of friendly advice that he re-focus his campaign away from its apparent obsession with GOP vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin.

Mark Brown had a sample in one of Obama's hometown papers, the Sun-Times:

At some point, the Obama campaign ought to take my advice concerning Palin and, repeat after me, leave her alone. At the very least, leave her alone until the dust clears and they figure out a better way to go after her.

Sounds like good advice to me. For the Obama campaign, no good can come of this relentless Palinsanity. It only raises her profile, diminishes his and lets John McCain skate.

That said, the WSJ had an interesting piece today that indicates he's moving in that very direction.

Reading deep into the piece, however, was this gem of irony:

At campaign headquarters in Chicago, the Palin phenomenon is clearly getting under the skin of some aides, who complain she is getting "celebrity" treatment. "The McCain campaign attacks Obama as a celebrity, but they are completely managing Palin's celebrity -- with only handpicked interviews and magazine covers in People and Us," one Obama adviser said. "We're not running for American Idol here -- ultimately we believe the country is smarter than this."

Not just irony. Rich irony.

How do we know this? Has her gynecologist given an interview to the National Enquirer? Nope. That's the considered opinion of Wendy Doniger, a University of Chicago divinity school professor, who has apparently been driven out of her mind by Sarah Palin. Here's what she wrote on the WaPo's "On Faith" blog:

Her greatest hypocrisy is in her pretense that she is a woman. The Republican party's cynical calculation that because she has a womb and makes lots and lots of babies (and drives them to school! wow!) she speaks for the women of America, and will capture their hearts and their votes, has driven thousands of real women to take to their computers in outrage. She does not speak for women; she has no sympathy for the problems of other women, particularly working class women.

What would working class women do without divinity school professors telling them what their problems are? Nota bene: any women who identify with the life and values of Sarah Palin should probably schedule an appointment with their gynecologists. I have it on professorial authority that you may actually be a man.

According to these guys, John McCain picked the wrong Palin. This is very funny:

That's the view of Megan McArdle, an Obama voter who doesn't blame Democratic politicians like Obama for sending their kids to private schools -- but she does resent them for denying to other parents the right to opt out of failing public schools. Excerpt:

Vouchers, Democrats say, are no substitute for fixing the schools. This would be true if anyone had anything other than nice-sounding phrases with which to fix them. Giving money to failing urban school districts is like giving money to failing third-world economies; the entrenched interests siphon it off for their own uses. Teacher salaries go up, janitorial pensions get fatter, more administrators are hired. But the kids don't get any smarter.

Obama's plan to fix the schools: more money. More money for teachers, more teachers, more after school programs. Absent are any specifics about what the new teachers will do that is any different from what the current teachers are doing that isn't working. John McCain doesn't either, but at least he's planning to shake up the educational architecture that gets worse every year.

One of the central insights of economics is that exit matters. Markets don't do better, over the long run, because people in the private sector are smarter or well meaning. They do better because they can be fired. ... But the school itself keeps going no matter how bad a job it is doing.

Here's an essay I did for the new Culture11.com site, reflecting on the kind of country we lived in that dreadful autumn of 2001, and what it said about the kind of people we are, and are not. Excerpt:

Let me tell you a story about another country, one that used to be my own - and, in a way, yours too.

I lived there on September 11, 2001, and in the days and weeks that followed. In this country, people didn't hate each other for political or cultural reasons. People didn't hate each other, period. Everyday spite seemed a luxury we couldn't afford in New York City in those dark and anxious days. I remember standing shoulder to shoulder with all my Brooklyn neighbors on the Promenade, staring across the East River at the pyre, silent, grieving and praying.

We'd see each other at the local firehouse. We kept going back, all of us in our part of New York, to take food and donations to the guys there, who'd lost eight of their own when the towers came down. The things you'd see, and hear!

Read more below

Optimists about DISD remind me of that old line about second marriages representing "the triumph of hope over experience." It just got a lot harder to be optimistic about that mess on Ross Avenue. As TDMN reports today, the DISD administration lost $64 million of taxpayer dollars through breathtaking administrative incompetence. This is not from a problem Superintendent Michael Hinojosa inherited. This is on him.

I'm feeling awfully good about my "no" vote on the school bond package earlier this year. Once more, DISD shows it cannot be trusted with taxpayer dollars. My question to the room: What next? Should Hinojosa be fired? If not that, what? Heads should roll here. If DISD were a private business, there would be swift and severe accountability. How many excuses for DISD's performance are members of the public prepared to accept?

Like so many Americans, I've got my TV tuned to today's coverage of the anniversary of the 9/11 attacks.

I'm struggling with two emotions -- wanting to remember and wanting to forget. There is such a fine line between grief/respect and morbid interest.

I remember where I was when the first plane hit. I was in the office finishing up an editorial and briefly noticed a news alert about a plane striking the World Trade Center. With no further details, I immediately assumed it was a small private plane.

A few minutes later, Bill McKenzie called me from home with the news that another plane had struck the other tower. And both were commercial flights. At that point, I turned on the TV, and like the rest of the world, was numbed by the surrealism of the moment.

We asked our Sounding Off mailing list members: Should kids play many sports or focus on just one? At what age should kids specialize or become involved in elite programs? A few major themes from their responses:

This video is shocking to Republicans, who are forwarding it and posting it with glee. OMG! Biden said Hillary might have been a better choice than him for VP!

Here's the thing, though. Some people aren't dogmatic. Some people are humble. Some people don't insist that their way is the only way. I know, that seems funny and worth mocking to some Republicans who forget the self-deprecating Reagan and the humility of a Bob Dole. But there's nothing wrong with this:

All the talk about Sarah Palin and feminism is focusing on the intangibles, on what she represents, on what hidden code words her critics are using to attack her and so on. Let's look at the issues. Where do the major party candidates stand on the major issues that affect women? One good way to judge is Project Vote Smart's objective look at how they match up against recognized special-interest groups.

To hear our more conservative male board members praise the strengths and merits of Sarah Palin, you'd think they were ga-ga with sincerity about elevating women to an equal rank with men in American politics. But think again and read again -- closely. You'll see the words they write in their blog postings, but then take a closer look at the fine print.

Below some blog postings, you'll see what else is on their minds. The internet "tags" they attach to Sarah Palin postings, which are designed to attract people from outside, read like something off a porno site:

alaska , blog , dominatrix , drudge , feminism , fox news , hannity , huff , hot, hockey mom, kos , Madonna , mccain , polls , salon , sex , stupid, sympathy, unfair, vote , women, lipstick on a pig, Palin , sexism, xxx

Madonna? Dominatrix? XXX?

Isn't this just slightly demeaning? Why didn't you attach any of these words to postings about Hillary Clinton (or Barack Obama, for that matter)? What's even worse is the amount of filth now circulating around the Internet under Sarah Palin's name. I'm all for attracting more readers to our site, but not this way.

The WaPo's Chris Cillizza explains why the "politics of perception" is so important this year. He recalls how Hillary Clinton's innocent comment to an editorial board about how Bobby Kennedy's assasination shook up the Democratic primary got perceived as suggesting that someone might wish to kill Obama. Writes Cillizza:

As we said at the time, it's nearly impossible to believe that Clinton was purposely raising the specter of assassination as it related to her race against Obama. But, as we also noted, it really didn't matter what Clinton intended to do. The massive uproar that followed eclipsed the original event within minutes and turned into a debate on whether the Clintons would do anything to win the race.

In this modern world of politics -- the 24 hour cable news channels combined with the power and the reach of the Drudge Report, which is heavily promoting the lipstick story -- perception often matters more than reality.

In a shocking display of eptitude, the Republicans have just put out a TV (not Internet) ad designed to take the sting out of any future attacks the Dems make on Palin. Why is this smart? Because if she makes any mistakes from here on out -- and she will -- the Republicans have done advance work pre-framing criticism of her as an attempt to "destroy" her. Here's the ad:

Does anybody really believe Barack Obama was talking about Sarah Palin's looks when he used the "lipstick on a pig" phrase? Does anybody really believe Barack Obama is a sexist? Come on. Still, it was a foolish mistake for Obama to have made, given that not one week ago, Palin uttered one of the most quoted lines from her much-watched speech, comparing herself to a pit bull in lipstick. Obama shouldn't have gone anywhere near that phrase.

Nevertheless, it is unfair and unseemly for the McCain campaign to be seizing on this gaffe to whine about sexism (as they do in this new Internet commercial). Though it's a distortion of what Obama meant -- a distortion to the point of being a smear, I think -- it's likely to be effective. But is this really where John McCain wants to go? Because what he's doing, by conflating a maladroit use of a common phrase into the sin of sexism is opening the door for anything he says on the stump that might remotely be construed as racially insensitive to be set upon by Obama backers as evidence that McCain's a racist.

Has there been sexism in some of the criticism of Sarah Palin? Absolutely. But I've not seen any of that come from Obama, and I'm sorry that McCain's going there to exploit the dramatic advantage Palin has given him over Obama with the women vote. One thing we have seen in the past few days is that the Palin pick has thrown Obama off his game. McCain-Palin have them on the run; they oughtn't resort to this kind of whiny, unfair commercial.

That's what McCain's veep choice brings to the campaign, according to writer Camille Paglia -- feminist and Obama supporter -- in an article for Salon. She observed:

At her startling debut ... she was combining male and female qualities in ways that I have never seen before. And she was somehow able to seem simultaneously reassuringly traditional and gung-ho futurist. In terms of redefining the persona for female authority and leadership, Palin has made the biggest step forward in feminism since Madonna channeled the dominatrix persona of high-glam Marlene Dietrich and rammed pro-sex, pro-beauty feminism down the throats of the prissy, victim-mongering, philistine feminist establishment.

Whew!

It's clear from polling that Palin is making inroads in the white female vote, at Obama's expense.

Question of the day: What appealing message does Palin bring to these voters? And what is the profile of this part of the public?

War, peace, Palin, Obama, we have it all on Texas Faith. Come on over to this week's discussion.

The question of the week we put to our panelists is what do their respective faith traditions have to say about the ultimate decision a president must make, and that is whether to send soldiers into war.

What I like about this week's discussion is that we have clear outlines from Buddhism, Taoism, Catholicism, Islam, Judaism and Protestantism. With some exceptions, most have some form of a just war theory. Terms like "necessary evil" kept coming up when the panelists talked about the selected use of war.

It's also interesting to see how much emphasis each of these traditions puts on 'waging peace" long before you get to the question of war. (Sorry, Hash, lots of talk about diplomacy!) I came away from reading these comments thinking Bush failed the just war theory in Iraq, but followed it in Afghanistan.

The Atlantic's Megan McArdle, a DC-based libertarian who says she's depressed by the idea that John McCain might be our next president, says media and other elites conduct class warfare without even realizing they're doing it. Excerpt:

I'm surprised--though I shouldn't be, of course--that any number of liberals who are (presumably) comfortable with concepts like unconscious discrimination and privilege when it comes to race, have not even stopped to consider that the same sort of thing might be operating here.

Let's be honest, coastal folks: when you meet someone with a thick southern accent who likes NASCAR and attends a bible church, do you think, "hey, maybe this is a cool person"? And when you encounter someone who went to Eastern Iowa State, do you accord them the same respect you give your friends from Williams? It's okay--there's no one here but us chickens. You don't.
[snip]
People from a handful of schools, most of them hailing from a handful of major metropolitan areas, dominate academia, journalism, and the entertainment industry. Our subtle (or not-so-subtle) distaste for everything from their entertainment to their decorating choices to the vast swathes of the country in which they choose to live permeate almost everything they read, watch, or hear. Of course we don't hear it--to us, that's simply the way the world is.

In American politics, "class warfare" is supposed to be taboo. In reality, it isn't -- every society has classes, and engages in its own form of class warfare. For whatever reason, it's not kosher to attack politicians on the grounds of their moneyed class. But class means something different in our egalitarian democracy. Crispin Sartwell, a Ron Paul libertarian who says he'll probably vote Obama, explains how this works in the anti-Palin campaign.Excerpt:

you've got to understand that "class" is not income-level. class is a semiotic system. it's affect, diction, alma mater, what you drink. it's how your house is decorated, no matter how big it is. it's hair style, musical preferences. those are the ways that sarah palin is wrong and barack obama is right, even though they both emerged from "humble beginnings." she just signs wrong, and what the hostility really shows is a very familiar liberal death-knell: we are supposedly in this to help people like you. but we despise people like you, from your head to your toes, coiffure to pedicure. we will help you if you put us where we ought to be: in charge of your life. but the idea that you could have power over us is not only scary and strange, it's some kind of cosmic misapprehension. it's on its face absurd and incomprehensible. this, boys and girls, is how you keep losing elections, and it's the way you'll chuck this one.