Let’s perform a little thought experiment. Let’s pretend that, instead of the statement that Sarah Palin released Wednesday morning, she released a completely different one, a statement that made no mention of a “blood libel”, a statement in which she humbly apologized for using over-the-top rhetoric and violent imagery and promised never to do it again — in other words, the groveling statement her liberal critics say she should have made. How do you suppose it would have been received?

I can tell you how it would have been received. MSNBCs smugly self-righteous Keith Olbermann, his voice an octave lower than usual (as it always is whenever he pronounces his judgments on evil right-wingers), would have called it “unconvincing, insincere and manipulative”. Chris Matthews would whine, “too little, too late. She should have made that statement long before last Saturday.” The New York Times‘s Paul Krugman would denounce Palin for using the word “tragedy” instead of “atrocity” — no, wait, he already did that, after she offered her condolences on her Facebook page Saturday.

Let’s be honest. It doesn’t matter what Sarah Palin says or does. She’s going to be viciously attacked for it.

Yes, Palin is polarizing, and her statements are inflammatory. But this is not an indictment of Palin, because the people who get inflamed by her words are the ones who already hate and fear her. They’ll find anything she says to be inflammatory. If her famous (or infamous, depending on which side of the divide you’re on) Facebook map had daisies instead of crosshairs on it, Palin-haters still would have denounced her. They would have claimed she was implying that the Democrats in the targeted Congressional districts should be pushing up daisies. Read more »

I love Fox News anchorwoman Megyn Kelly, and not just because she’s a delectable piece of eye candy. She is one of the most effective interviewers in television news today, and I suspect that her background as a litigator has a lot to do with it.

As a young reporter I once covered a high-profile medical malpractice trial, and after the plaintiff’s expert witness had testified, I was sure the jury was going to find for the plaintiff. Then the defense attorney went to work, not in the manner of Tom Cruise in A Few Good Men, where he kept hammering Jack Nicholson over and over again with the same question, “Did you order a Code Red?”, but by gently encouraging the witness to go beyond his earlier testimony, until what had once seemed plausible started sounding absurd. The attorney had obviously studied the witness thoroughly — had read articles he had written, speeches he had given, and testimony he had given in other trials — and knew he could count on an enormous ego to lead the witness to places a man who thought more humbly of himself would never go. And he won his case.

On Sunday Kelly interviewed Pima County Sheriff Clarence Dupnik right after charges were filed against Jared Loughner, the prime suspect in Saturday’s shooting in Tucson, Arizona. Dupnik, as you may know if you read my Sunday post on the subject (or if you’ve been following the news), decided to interject his personal political opinions and tried to tie the shooting to “the vitriol that comes out of certain people’s mouths about tearing down the government, the anger, the hatred, the bigotry that goes on in this country [which is] is getting to be outrageous”. Read more »

Thanks to CBS News, MSNBC, the Associated Press, Mark Potok, Paul Krugman, Markos Moulitsas and Jane Fonda — yes, that Jane Fonda — we now know who is responsible for the tragic shooting outside a Safeway in Tucson, Arizona, Saturday. It’s Sarah Palin!  With some help from Glenn Beck, the Tea Party, Rush Limbaugh and Fox News. I haven’t heard Bill O’Reilly’s name mentioned yet, but I’m sure we will soon enough.

Keith Olbermann anchored MSNBC’s evening coverage of the shooting, and he spent practically the entire evening trying to tie the shooting to Sarah Palin. You see, early last year Palin posted a map of the United States with little targets identifying the Congressional districts where the seats were held by politically vulnerable Democrats. One of the target districts was that of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, the Congresswoman who was shot Saturday. (Giffords survived the shooting, but six people, including a Federal judge who was apparently there just to do some grocery shopping, were killed and a dozen others were wounded.)

For good measure, he had Mark Potok of the Southern Poverty Law Center on to verify that talk of “death panels” and such inspires unstable people to go out and commit violence. The SPLC, by the way, considers people like Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans, Ron Paul supporters and pro-lifers to be dangerous potential terrorists. In fact, it even considers Judge Andrew Napolitano, the most consistent supporter of civil liberties on television, to be a dangerous enabler of terrorists. Read more »

I don’t agree with Alec Baldwin, the oldest and most liberal of the Baldwin brothers, about much of anything. But there is one opinion we do share: we both love Wegmans. Or, I should say, his mother and I both love Wegmans. Back in May Baldwin told David Letterman that his mother loves Wegmans so much she refuses to leave her home in frigid upstate New York to move in with brother Billy in sunny southern California.

Wegmans is a regional supermarket chain based in Rochester, New York. Several years ago they arrived in Maryland, where they built a large store in the then-declining Hunt Valley Town Center.

It has become my favorite place to shop. The selection is huge, fresh meats, produce, cheeses and baked goods are consistently of the highest quality, the house brands are first rate, employees are always helpful and friendly, the store is clean, checkout lines are short, and prices are competitive.

About the only thing I’ve ever found annoying about the store is that sometimes I have trouble finding a parking space. That’s because many customers drive 30 or more miles just to shop there.

People all over Maryland literally pray that a Wegmans will open in their community. Which might make you kind of wonder why some Anne Arundel County residents are opposing the opening of a new Wegmans near Crofton.

Ostensibly, the opposition is due to the fact that the shopping center that will house the store is being built atop a site where Constellation Energy once dumped fly ash from coal-fired electricity generating plants. Two years ago the energy utility agreed to clean up the waste and pay damages to residents who found carcinogens in their wells. Read more »

It’s Christmas morning and my thoughts are on giving. And about who gives and who doesn’t.

It might surprise you — though it doesn’t surprise me — to learn that those who are loudest in trumpeting their compassion toward their fellow-man, namely liberals, “progressives”, social democrats or whatever you want to call them, turn out to be regular Scrooges in their personal giving to charity. Conservatives who, liberals claim, want to give tax cuts to the rich and care nothing about the poor and disadvantaged, give far more per capita than liberals, both absolutely and as a percentage of income.

This is actually old news, but I was reminded of it by Arthur C. Brooks’ op-ed in yesterday’s Wall Street Journal. Brooks was the author of a 2006 study relating people’s giving habits to their ideologies. In his op-ed, he reports,

The most recent year that a large, nonpartisan survey asked people about both redistributive beliefs and charitable giving was 1996. That year, the General Social Survey (GSS) found that those who were against higher levels of government redistribution privately gave four times as much money, on average, as people who were in favor of redistribution. This is not all church-related giving; they also gave about 3.5 times as much to nonreligious causes. Anti-redistributionists gave more even after correcting for differences in income, age, religion and education.

And it goes beyond just giving money. Brooks reports that the 2002 GSS found that anti-redistributionists were more likely to give blood, and also “to give someone directions on the street, return change mistakenly handed them by a cashier, and give food (or money) to a homeless person”. Read more »