Crunchy Con

A shocker. No word about whether she intends to run for president in 2012, but it seems unlikely now, don't you think? But on second thought, perhaps she's thinking that the time she needs to spend traveling the lower 48 building a political base will take away from the time she ought to spend governing Alaska -- that is, that she can't be an effective governor of a state as far away as Alaska is (I was startled to discover that it takes about as long to fly from Dallas to London as it does to fly from Dallas to Anchorage) and an effective 2012 presidential candidate. In fact, reading the Anchorage Daily News story, I'm betting that's exactly what she's going to do.

Well, that's too bad. She probably could have been a good governor. I doubt she will ever have the gravitas to be president. Charles Krauthammer said on Fox the other night:

She is -- she has star power without any doubt. She has an extremely devoted following. But she is not a serious candidate for the presidency.

She had to go home and study and spend a lot of time on issues in which she was not adept last year, and she hasn't. She has to stop speaking in clichés and platitudes. It won't work.

It could work for eight weeks if you're the number two candidate, as she was last year. But even so, she got singed a lot in that campaign. You cannot sustain a campaign of platitudes and clichés over a year and a half if you're running for the presidency.

Perhaps she's been convinced to spend the next two years studying hard. I doubt it can work. How do you get up to speed in two years on issues you really haven't thought about until now? Do you think she could pull off mounting a credible, successful bid for the GOP presidential nomination? (Which is not the same question as asking whether she ought to be president).

Sally Rogers sends along this marvelous story about an elderly Scottish Catholic priest who lives and serves in the Outer Hebrides. Excerpt:

He still grows his own crops - carrots, onions, early potatoes, main crop.

"The potatoes we like best are something like Maris Piper for a main crop. The people in England they like wet potatoes. The people in the highlands of Scotland only eat dry potatoes. We were quite surprised when that war was on and people came to build airport runways here on the bigger islands. We thought we would sell them potatoes and we grew potatoes for them but they didn't like them because they were dry. Now, our idea of a potato is something that throws off its jacket once it's boiled, and is dry and you eat it with your fingers by preference. Those of us who are very old, we eat all our fish with our fingers. We forgive Queen Margaret of Scotland, God rest her soul, for bringing knives and forks from France."

On the fish front, herring and mackerel are obvious favourites: "We cure our own herrings and mackerel with rough fishing salt" and Dover sole would be a "very ordinary working-class man's dish". The island has a large fish processing plant which exports three days a week all over Europe and attracts labour from different Eastern European countries including Poland, Latvia, Estonia - "do you know there are more Masses said in Polish in the Catholic churches in Scotland than there are Masses said in Gaelic?" he said. "Our language, of course, is Gaelic." The men work on the boats, the women on the factory floor processing jumbo prawns and scallops.

Canon MacQueen does all his own cooking using old-fashioned iron pots, frying pans and griddles. "Good Hebridean food, it's so easy because we have the best ingredients." His six hens keep him supplied in eggs for his scones. "I do a lot of baking. The fish factory is just down the road. We have the largest red crabs you ever saw, we have lobsters, crayfish sometimes weighing up to six to seven pounds. I can wander along the shore and knowing the fishermen I can always find a fish to eat or a bit of lamb. During the hard time of the winter, we have barrels of herring and mackerel with potatoes. We are potato people. We eat potatoes every day... Kerr's Pink, Golden Wonder..."

Every morning after he has fed his animals, he sets off, visiting the small hospital and old people's home "just talking to people, wandering about".

Sounds heavenly. How remote are the Outer Hebrides? A pretty far piece. Father MacQueen lives on the isle of Barra. Learn more about Barra here. I want to go!

Terry Mattingly has some pointed questions for the media in its coverage of the Frank Lombard child molestation scandal. Excerpt:

The sins and alleged crimes of one gay parent say as much about the motivations and beliefs of those who advocate legal adoptions by gays and lesbians as, well, the sins and crimes of one anti-abortion activist who shoots an abortionist say something valid about the motivations and beliefs of people in the mainstream pro-life movement. In other words -- next to nothing. We are not going to be discussing that issue here. Trust me.

So why, pray tell, do I mention this story at GetReligion?

As it turns out, Lombard was -- until just a few days ago -- a veteran member of the vestry at the Episcopal Church of the Advocate in Chapel Hill, N.C., a progressive, activist congregation on gay issues that has been actively scrubbing most signs of his existence from its website [Note: the church appears to have restored Lombard's name to its website, now listing him as "inactive" on the vestry -- RD] . For those not familiar with Episcopal polity, the vestry is the church's controlling board. Being on the vestry is similar to being on the parish council, in a Catholic or Orthodox context, or on the board of deacons, in a Baptist context.

Now, here's the journalistic question that we will discuss: Do you think that journalists would be interested if you had a similar criminal case and the accused was a deacon or board member in an evangelical or Catholic congregation that takes strong stands on these kinds of hot-button social issues?

If this kind of sexy story broke in the mainstream press, would this deacon be called a "devout" Southern Baptist or a "devout," "practicing" Roman Catholic? I would imagine so.

If so, should Lombard be called a "devout" Episcopalian?

If the religion would be relevant in the case of a Christian conservative, should the religion be relevant in the case of the Christian liberal?

Just asking.

UPDATE: TMatt adds this clarification in the combox below:

Note: I said the church had scrubbed MOST signs of his existence from the website, because they left him on the vestry but added (inactive). It appears that other information about him on the website vanished. See this conservative Anglican post on all of that.

Jason Zweig of the Wall Street Journal writes about how America Online is trying to screw him out of $103. It's a pretty outrageous story. I've been on AOL since 1994, when it was a cool new thing to have. It seems like eons ago that AOL ceased to be cool, and in fact having an AOL address was considered the height of uncool. I never changed, simply because I didn't want to deal with the hassle of having to inform everybody I'd given my e-mail address to over the years that I had a new one. When AOL ceased charging for an e-mail account, that seemed like a smart thing to have done.

I'm wondering, though, if AOL stuck me with a hidden $103 charge as they did Zweig. Julie pays our bills, and she hasn't had an AOL account in ages, so she probably wouldn't have thought to have questioned an AOL charge on the credit card last year. I'll have to check my credit-card bills from the last few months of 2008 to see. If AOL did pull something like this, then whether or not I can get them to refund my money, that's going to be the thing that causes me to leave AOL, whatever the hassle. And I will do whatever I can to make this a public relations nightmare for the company. Nothing gets me wound up like corporate mistreatment of customers, as you may recall.

David Brooks writes today about the future of US-China relations -- this, from a heated debate about whether the US and China face a future of competition, or cooperation. Brooks concludes:

I came to the debate agreeing more with Fallows and left the same way, but I was impressed by how powerfully Ferguson made his case. And I was struck by their agreement about what to do. This conversation, like many conversations these days, gets back to America's debt. Until the U.S. gets its fiscal house in order, relations with countries like China will be fundamentally insecure.

The first thought I had after reading this piece was: we will never, ever get our debt situation settled. Unfortunately, I'm still waiting for the next thought, but it won't come. I really cannot imagine a situation in which we will embrace national austerity for the sake of paying down our insane and immoral levels of debt. We'll just have to crash, and crash hard. Unless, of course, our new ant overlords take over first.

Seriously, can you imagine the US paying down its debt? If so, give me the politically and culturally plausible scenario. Honestly, I want to be convinced.